Good Afternoon

Cruikshank, The Headache

Good Afternoon

I am going to pick up my car this afternoon. Today has been interesting.... It was a two car alarm night outside last night. It made me a little groggy. Combined with the car thing, I felt a bit disoriented this morning.

I got a notice in the mail requesting me to disband a corporation in New York State. I have to do it by August 28, 2008, or they will charge me an approximated tax. There is a sixty dollar fee for disbanding the corporation plus I have to fill out some corporate tax forms. I haven't done anything with it for several years. I am going to see an accountant, because it looks like it could be deadly if I make a mistake...

I formed the corporation in 2002 to see if I could show a business card and get a few part time jobs. Someone offered me some consulting work searching the internet for company information, people, and other things. Fortunately, I got my job at my current position. It is very easy to from a sole proprietorship and get a business card. I got my last batch of business cards at Vistaprint for the cost of shipping. Now, I find it costs as much to dissolve a corporation as found a sole propietorship. It is pretty ironic. It looks like a way for the government to generate cash like parking tickets.

I have done this kind of thing before. I did a little bit of human resource sourcing for someone. I can't say who because of disclosure problems. I also have done searching for information over the internet and magazine databases searching on a contract basis once or twice. It really is not that exciting looking for people or searching databases. I can do it, but it is not something I would want to do on a permanent basis. Books and graphic novels are far more interesting.

Anyways, I am trying to rest my brain a bit this morning. I am feeling a tiny bit under the weather, combined with the latest stressful events, I want to make sure I don't get very sick. This nursery rhyme from Mother Goose reminds me a bit of how I feel.

The Ten O'Clock Scholar

A diller, a dollar, a ten o'clock scholar!

What makes you come so soon?

You used to come at ten o'clock,

But now you come at noon.

I was looking around the internet a bit when I came across an interesting announcement, apparently Acacia Book One: the War With the Mein which I reviewed on this website earlier is going to be made into a movie.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117989641.html?categoryid=13&cs=1

I had an interesting afternoon. I went and picked up my car. They told me that I had to drive the car a lot more then return on Saturday to have them do another inspection. I spent four hours driving around the neighborhood. I drove to the Barnes and Noble bookstore in the mall. I stopped for a minute but didn't find anything I wanted. I noted down a few graphic novels. Then I drove to Target in another mall. Then I drove down to the supermarket and back. Then I drove down to chinatown. I had some noodles. I like to have specific places to go when I drive...

I would rather be at home reading than driving.

Sometimes, you want to figure out what happened. Apparently when you replace the battery in a car it resets the sensors for smog and other conditions. The battery was replaced before the New York state car inspection. This effectively set most of the sensors to zero. Now, in order for the sensors to test things properly, the car has to be driven under a variety of conditions. This includes hghway and city conditions. My understanding after reading various things on the internet, this might take a few days.

Today was an example of human folly.

Tax Day, Morning Thoughts

Today is tax day. Off I go to H&R Block. I have been using the same tax accountant for the last three years. I am not very good at figuring out taxes and investments. This is why I go. Maybe, it is because numbers don't agree with me completely on tax forms.

I will be making some posts later today on books, but first I have to have my taxes done. This is like a visit to the dentists office for me. I would like to avoid it at all costs. A lot of people have been coming into our library to have their taxes done. The AARP offers free tax help to seniors. You can search for tax help by zipcode. https://locator.aarp.org/vmis/sites/tax_aide_locator.jsp

A lot of people have been coming in for the tax rebate offered to people who file in the United States, $1200 as a stimulus for people who earn less than $72,000 a year for a couple. This is adjusted downwards for people who earn more.

We have a community room in the libary where the AARP-- American Association of Retired People helps people with taxes. A lot of senior citizens have been calling for this who are on social security who haven't filed for taxes for years. Also a lot of people who have not been part of the tax roles for a while. I think the government will suddenly have a much larger tax roll in the future and will make money from this down the line. They are casting out their net to catch the fish (taxpayers).

We also leave free tax forms in the lobby for people to pick up. This gets replenished in the morning for people to pick up state and local tax forms. Tax season ends soon, so if you are an American go do your taxes...

My tax man asked me how come I always made a small amount of money in stocks. My advice was that I could not give advice on individual stocks, but that there were two really excellent books which should go into anyones investment library. They are Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor, and Philip A. Fisher, Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. Benjamin Graham is considered the father of value investing, and Philip Fisher is considered the father of growth investing. Warren Buffett claims that The Intelligent Investor is the best book ever written for lay investors.

I tried to read The Long Emergency Surviving The Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler. However, when I started reading his thesis, I found huge holes in it. First off, our industrial transportation sector does not rely on gasoline, it relies on diesel for trains and trucking. Diesel is virtually interchangeable with biodiesel. This also applies to the public transportation systems like subways and buses. These will not be hit as hard with a gasoline crisis, because it is much easier to run the public transportation system on alternative fuels. Private transportation like small cars and air transportation will be hit a lot harder than public transportation.

The other thing to consider is that most of the utilities and industrial energy is not produced from gasoline, it is produced from coal, and other energy sources. Slowly wind is gaining traction as well as biomass.

I see a very different future than James Kunstler sees. I see the future being supplied by biorefineries, companies that use biological feedstocks to create multiple products, much like an oil refinery does. MGP Ingredients is an excellent example of this. In fact, I see this as a potential future replacement for oil refineries.

Patricia Woertz vice president of Chevron recently became the CEO of ADM in 2006. We are being fed an ethanol future by the oil companies under the table. We need to have more of a say in the future which is coming to us.

There are other developments which make me see a very different future than the one James Howard Kunstler describes. I had to put the book down before page 50. I simply could not believe what he was telling me. Some parts of it might be true. There will be a long period of conflict before oil is replaced as a transportation fuei, but it is inevitable.