Bloomberg Businessweek: Small businesses are killing America

This week's Bloomberg Businessweek, page 10-11:

[T]he notion that small business is the force behind prosperity is not true. [...] So let's revisit the home-office tax deduction, which costs the IRS $9 billion in [annual] revenue.

And on 66-67:

U.S. multinationals like Pfizer, Cisco, and Apple have parked more than $1.3 trillion in profit overseas, avoiding federal income taxes.

You can't have it both ways, Bloomberg. Either small businesses are killing America, or transnational megacorps evading taxes by offshoring all their capital are starving the Treasury. I think I know which scenario is more plausible.

Friday jukebox: Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Welcoming 2012 inductees into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame:



Such a sweet thing
I wanna do everything
What a beautiful feeling

(0/3) Hurricane season is (nearly) dead; long live snowstorm season

Just one month left in this year's hurricane season -- how are you doing for emergency preparedness?

I've had a few ideas percolating since Hurricane Irene hit Philadelphia in late August. On Monday I'll start with the first of three entries discussing issues around getting ready for inevitables.

Thoughts? What kinds of topics should I cover? Are you expecting the big one any day now, or are you blasé about disasters, or are you somewhere in between? Please comment.

Mobile readers? Feed readers?

Are you reading this blog on a mobile device or a feed of some kind? Are there formatting issues? I am a ludditecheapskate and use an older BlackBerry, so I don't know what makes this blog look awesomehorrible on an Android or iPhone or other device. Sidekicks or whatever it is the young kids are using these days. And I have it set to give only a few "teaser" lines on my Google reader, but I don't know if (1) people hate that; or (2) if anybody else uses Google reader anyway.

How do you read this blog? If you're on a device, which one is it? Do you use some kind of feed aggregator? Please comment. Thanks!

Girls need sports. It's really not that hard a concept to grasp

Gah, my custody schedule changed, my daughter's school year and fall sports schedule began, and now I don't know where I'm going or what time I need to leave to get there. Thank christ for my desk calendar and my watch. Who needs Outlook and google calendars? Not this underemployed yet over-obligated lawyer. And don't get me started about this horrible kludgey third-party solution for my daughter's online school sports calendar.

And, no, she's not a cheerleader. But ooh, look, there's been some movement on the Title IX issue at Quinnipiac University. I'd given the school the benefit of the doubt when I wrote about the problem in July, 2010, but a trial court decided that I shouldn't have: the finding was that they really were trying to weasel out of Title IX requirements when they ditched their volleyball team in favor of a cheerleading squad.

Have you been following the case better than I have? Do you have a daughter (or niece or whatever) who plays a school sport? Public or private school? Please comment. Thanks!

The NYPD can take down a plane if it wants to

The NYPD's commissioner, Ray Kelly, told 60 Minutes that his counter-terrorism unit has the capability to take down an airplane if the issue ever comes up again (video 14:21, start at 5:30).

What?

Now I'm imagining the NYPD with all kinds of small-scale but highly advanced military technology. Pigeon-guided missiles launched from jet-powered, monkey-navigated, remote-controlled suicide helicopters. Laser guns mounted atop the Empire State Building. In the East River, sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads. New York City apparently has its own private army of 50,000 men and women protecting Gotham, with "the equipment and the training" to bring down an airplane.

What does make sense, even though it sounds silly at first, is the idea of starting up a cricket league for city kids. Cricket? I mean, what do I, a red-blooded American, know about cricket? But it's huge in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the India-Pakistan rivalry is pretty epic -- so I guess it's crazy like a fox to foster relationships between immigrant kids and the NYPD.

Thoughts? Is New York in 2011 too much like London in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Now that your every move through the city is monitored with video and radiation detectors, have the terrorists won? How credible do you find the claim that the NYPD can shoot down a plane? Please comment. Thanks!

I love the smell of artificial deadlines in the morning

I do a lot of pro bono work, for a lot of reasons. I have to keep myself busy, so I don't leave the office feeling that I've done nothing but dick around on the Internet all day long. I need to continue training myself, so I do what I like to call self-CLE: any work product I generate for a pro bono client goes right into my personal library of forms I can adapt for a paying client later on. And of course it's good for networking, a term I don't like but can't very well ignore.

But to get work done for non-paying clients -- it's all well and good to call them pro bono, but at the end of the month they've done nothing for my bottom line, at best, and taken potential paid hours away from me, at worst -- I have to be disciplined. This week I've given myself until Wednesday to generate the first draft of by-laws for a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization where I serve on the board, which I'll chuck to the other lawyer on the board for revisions and input. In the end, I'll add another document to my library, and we'll both add another item to our resumés. The ABA advises newer lawyers against serving on non-profit boards, but fuck the ABA. They're not on the side of solo practitioners or small firms, anyway, especially those of us who graduated in the "bottom 90%" of our classes at a "bottom 90%" school.

Anyway, my ultimate deadline, if I have one, which I don't because nobody is paying me to do this work, would be the end of my term of service on this board. I guess. That doesn't come around for a few more months. But in the meantime, and while I'm still underemployed for paying work, I'm stuck making busy work for myself. Once I'm done my morning news reading.

What do you do when you've finished your paying work? Or the other side of the coin, do you wish you could do some lawyering work for a non-profit company or public-interest organization? Please comment. Thanks!

Mentorship? From my law office? It's more likely than I think

Number of paid hours worked this week: 0.8

Number of pro bono hours worked this week: 5.0

Number of suits worn this week: 3.0

Gah.

Two of these pro bono hours included an "informational interview" -- right out of What Color is Your Parachute? -- with a couple of 2L's from a local law school. I guess I'm flattered that the career office (I presume) sent them my way, but I didn't have much encouragement for them. My two main points were, one, if you want to open up your own law office, do you have experience running a business? Do you really understand that you have to make enough money to meet your monthly overhead before you can cut yourself a check? Do you know what's included in "overhead"? [1] Do you know that every three months you'll have to drop everything and do your taxes? And two, why are you still in law school? Why haven't you dropped out, cut your losses, and stopped the hemorrhaging by getting some kind of work instead? 'Cause, man, when I think of the opportunity cost of not working for the three years I was in law school, and the underemployment I'm dealing with now, the hit to my personal retirement funds and Social Security is kind of staggering.

---

[1] At the very least, Internet, phone, professional malpractice insurance, business cards, professional clothing, CLEs and licensure, bar membership(s), and some kind of access to LEXIS/Westlaw. (Some of these items are yearly costs. They're still monthly overhead. Divide by 12.) Add rent if you don't want to work at home, CPA fees if you don't want to do your own taxes (and arguably you shouldn't), and the cost of advertising and attending networking opportunities for marketing purposes. Never mind hiring a secretary to push paper for you.

Friday jukebox: Billy Joel

No video; live recording from April, 1972:



There ain't no place to go anyway
Except Philadelph-eye-ay

Markets plunge! And this affects me how, again?

Not having a decent, regular income is exhausting. Every single month I've been running out of money, for so many months I'm not even sure how long it's been since I had a cushion in my checking account. (Never mind that I had to give up the emergency funds in a money market account sometime in 2007 or so, because I couldn't keep the minimum balance the bank required before it would charge fees.) I would contribute to the economy if someone would kindly contribute to my own, first, and hire me to do some work for them.

I believe that's how the system works. Having been out of it, for all intents and purposes, since 2006, I may be a little unclear on the concept.

In other news, scientists in England may have come up with data that throws out the theory that dark matter comprises a fifth of the universe, while researchers at CERN believe they've found neutrinos traveling faster than light.

At least science gets funding in some other countries.

Back from a blogging vacay

So I took off for about a 5-week vacation from blogging. Anything happen while I was gone?