Lest you doubt me when I repeat, for the thousandth time, that our state’s honored legislators are craven lunatics, get this: the Arizona House has approved a bill allowing greedy lenders to charge 204% on consumer loans! Why? Ohhh, well…gee whiz, there’s just no other way a person can get fast cash. Is there?
Then we have this:
Maricopa County is as large as Los Angeles County. It’s the sixth-largest city in the nation. And now we have exactly 60 polling places in the whole damn county! Down from 200, thanks to our craven legislature.
The right-wing state legislators have been working for years to disenfranchise people who might vote Democratic. They’ve gerrymandered districts. They’ve moved voting places into areas where no one in their right mind would unlock the car door, much less get out and dodge bullets. They’ve engaged in active campaigns to disallow large numbers of mail-in ballots. They’ve worked to install complicated voter IDs to force you to prove you’re who you say you are — and no, a voter registration card won’t make it. By changing the name of this election from a “primary” to a “presidential preference” election, they’ve disenfranchised every registered independent voter. Previously, independents could vote for any candidate. Now if you’re a registered independent, you can’t vote at all!
They have tried strategies to disqualify…
• The elderly • Students • Disabled people (this year it’s a felony to take your disabled mother’s early ballot to the post office!) • Military members • Anybody who even vaguely looks Hispanic • The working poor • Naturalized citizens • Transient citizens • Residents of more affluent, educated districts who tend to vote Democratic
And now, they’ve closed the polling places. Lines are already upwards of an hour long. The point being, of course, that Democratic voters are likely to have blue-collar jobs or low-level office jobs, the kind of work where you’re not allowed to be late. Or where your pay will be docked if you’re late, no excuses.
I find it astonishing that Americans seem unable to recognize when they’re being lied to and unable to recognize maneuvers designed to rig elections in favor of a specific group.
You know, people who do this kind of thing turn into tyrants when they get into office. If people of good will don’t fight back, America as a democratic republic is essentially doomed.
Oh hell. Maybe it’s already doomed.
I can sing “O Canada.” Will that help me get permanent residency status?
Hey, the redoubtable Donna Freedman is GIVING AWAY acopy of her course on writing winning blog posts! That’s a $147 value. And really, the full price is a give-away of sorts: Donna has been a journalist for a lot of years, and she’s one of the most engaging writers in online personal-finance circles. You’ve seen her posts at MSN Money, Money Talks News, Get Rich Slowly, Wise Bread…and of course at her own site, Surviving and Thriving. It’s a 12-part course designed to help you make your writing great, and you also get coaching advice from now until the end of time.
All the Presidential candidates have descended on Arizona, anticipatory to the local primary. It’s quite a circus…especially with the Republican clowns in evidence.
Cruz was down at the border pandering to hatred of Mexicans and Indians. He hasn’t a clue to the real issues: only to the mentality of people who would vote for him.
The local right-wing crazies optimistically compare Trump with the craven Sheriff Joe Arpaio and suggest the similarity between the two opportunists’ political strategies points the way to the White House for Trump.
Meanwhile, Clinton campaigns at a high school in the decrepit low-SES district of South Phoenix (not to say “ghetto”), presumably hoping to get out the vote among the poor and to demonstrate her progressive creds among those who understand that the American middle class is going, going, almost gone.
Sanders is in Tucson, where a substantial educated, enlightened population has grown up around the University of Arizona, the state’s only reasonably decent institution of higher education. That would be, he no doubt figures, where his constituency clusters here in our backward fly-over state.
Meanwhile, no one seems to notice that our honored legislators are busy trying to draw a line around women’s right to decide what they will do with their bodies, that Arizona is distinguished by ranking at the top of the list for states whose college graduates move away (why might that be??), that the nitwit-infested legislature has defunded the largest community college system in the country (we need a lot of junior colleges because most of our high-school graduates are not well prepared for four-year universities), that the City of Phoenix is about to jack up property taxes in the face of a budget surplus, that utility companies are trying to raise their rates even higher while they work to quash rooftop solar power — this, in a state where electric bills are already among the highest in the nation — and the city’s wi-fi service is so. freaking. slow….that it’s taken almost 45 minutes to get into just these few links to write just these few words.
WhatEVER. My plan is to walk the dogs while it’s still cool enough and then stay out of the car and off the roads for the rest of the day.
So after the day before yesterday’s MS Word fiasco, which as of yesterday morning I thought would be relatively easy to clean up, I spent the entire day wrestling with the damn file!!!!
Copying the 325 pages out of the corrupted file and pasting it into an identical Wyrd template caused the copy to lose its styling. The format looked right: 20 point Alegreya bold level 2 heading, 0 points before, 30 points after…but Wyrd would not read it so! Word, in effect, could not “see” the styles for chapter headings, paragraphs, font format, etc.
It converted all the small-caps first-graf leaders into all caps. Normally you can search > format > all caps and replace with format > small caps. But in this file, Wyrd would not do that. Because, as it developed, the program “thought” the all-caps were small-caps. So I had to go through the entire file, paragraph by paragraph, and manually change every set of all caps to small caps. This took hours of mindless pointing and clicking and pointing and clicking and pointing and…. God DAMN but I hate it that Apple negated all of Word’s keyboard commands!!!!
The “format paintbrush” didn’t work for the purpose. So, no. There was no way out of the endless point-and-click torture.
Lines wrapped slightly differently in the new file, so I had to go through the entire document again (each of these stages happens one at a time) to fix a whole new raft of widows, orphans, and loose lines. Hours of farting around.
And of course, because rewrapped lines changed the pagination, I had to go through the entire document and replace every page break (each of which was placed where it worked) with a section break/odd page, with baleful ramifications.
Changing the page breaks to section breaks re-fucked up the pagination. So I had to wrestle with the program some more to persuade it to start the roman-numeral pagination on page one, not to put a page number on chapter and section opening pages, and not to give me two roman-numeral sections each starting on page i.
Because Wyrd blocks the view of a blank page after a section break/odd when you’re in View > Print Layout, I can’t get AT the verso side of those pages to hide the running header, so when the damn thing is printed, it will (once again) look like some lady with a typewriter on her kitchen table composed it. I In “Draft,” you can’t see the headers & footers, so obviously you can’t get into them to fool with covering up the ones you don’t want to print.
T0 fix this, I’ll have to go through every section and change the section breaks to page breaks, fix the headers, and change the page breaks back to section breaks. Then I’ll have to go through all 325 pages, one at a time, and reformat all the sections to the custom format I had to make to create a PDF that tells the printer to print it on 8.5 x 9.5 stock.
Because Wyrd couldn’t read the heading style, it wouldn’t generate a new table of contents. So I had to go through, identify page numbers for every chapter, and create a new TofC. That sounds easy, but it wasn’t, because of the native squirreliness of Word tables. It was, as a matter of fact, an endless effing nightmare.
So I’m not done with a project that should’ve been done a week ago. And I hate Word. I’m beginning to hate Word enough that it just might be worth trying, for the fourth time, to learn how to use InDesign.
No, wait: I see the workaround: Enter a page break before the section break. This will push the section break to the verso side, preserving the section’s formatting. Obscure the running header at the top of the blank page and then delete the page break.
Why should I have to dream up stuff like this? Why should I have to waste my time like this to get what ought to be a simple job done?
Yesterday was incredibly hectic, full of a staggering amount of work, all of which distracted 100% from paying projects. Wow!
Click on the image for Bigger & Better…
To start with, though, SDXB showed up here at 9 a.m. to go hiking in the nearby mountain preserve. This seemed OK, because I didn’t yet know how fantastically my little efforts to produce something salable were about to be obstructed. 😀
By the time I got home, the freshly washed and set hair was soaking wet…so there was a job that would have to be done again.
As long as I was already drenched in sweat, I figured I’d better finish the job of cleaning out and refurbishing the storage shed. Started the project several days ago. I knew it would be huge, and it was. By now I’d hauled the junk out, carted a lot to the trash, deconstructed the brick-and-board shelving and reconstituted it in the corner outside (this is all out of sight of the backyard and pool). Found that water had seeped in under the cinderblock supports and corroded the plywood floor Satan had put into the shed.
Why would you put plywood flooring into a construct that sits outside in the rain? Even though he set it on top of some block paving he’d built, of course water is going to seep up out of the ground and get into your finely built floor. What possesses people? Why not use the stuff he build the deck out of: fake wood planks made of some sort of indestructible synthetic? I’ve lived here now for twelve years, perched plants on it, watered them every day throughout the summer, and the thing is as good as it was when I moved in.
Oh well. That was a mess.
So the shed flooring has been drying out for the past couple of days, with all the junk strewn around the yard waiting to be put back.
At Lowe’s, I found some flimsy but serviceable plastic shelving that snaps together like Tinker-Toys — about the limit of my handyperson skills. The bottom-most shelf sits on the ground, but it’s ventilated, and the only part that actually touches the ground is the outside rim of the thing. Air should be able to move through there and allow the plywood to dry out after the next rainstorm. They’re very deep, so they conveniently fit around the rotted spots in the floor.
Meanwhile I used the metal shelving Satan had left behind, which according to Home Depot has a carrying capacity of 250 pounds, to hold the leftover tiles Mike the Tile Dude and Satan himself had left on the floor in there. They groan under the burden, and it remains to be seen whether the weight will eventually break through the weakened plywood floor. If it does, then The Handyman from Heaven can be begged to replace it with something better.
After tapping the big new cheesey plastic shelves together with a rubber mallet, it was time to reload.
The things I actually need — pool gear, mostly — now occupy only a couple of shelves, right in front. The valuable old paint cans, the precious old mortar, the beloved old tile grout: all that went on the metal shelving, pushed all the way to the shed’s back end.
This left plenty of room for the priceless collection of rags to cover plants in wintertime.
Yeah. I’ve now got two gigantic, deep shelves jammed with old sheets and drape panels, lest Phoenix ever get another hard freeze. This hasn’t happened for the past several years. If we’re to believe the climate prophets, it may never happen again. But…it’s a symptom of my cheapskateness, I suppose: I can’t bring myself to throw out anything I just might need again someday. And they do have another use. Many are already spattered with paint: they make fine drop cloths. Just in case I should ever choose to paint the house again… 🙄
This project and its aftermath — scrubbing out the shop-vac, which ended up with mud inside it — consumed most of my energy.
But day was not done…not by a long shot.
Eventually I sit down in front of the MacBook. Go to switch from some program over to Word, aptly nicknamed Wyrd in these parts.
Word hangs on a file that contains data I need to use all the time. It won’t open, apparently because something in that file is awry.
Force-Quit Wyrd.
Try to reload. Wyrd hangs.
Force-Quit. Hangs.
Look up how to keep OSX from auto-reopening files after a crash. The system is already set that way. Look up how to keep Wyrd from reopening files after a crash. You have to get into Word’s Preferences, which means you have to open the program. The program won’t open.
Now I’m beginning to panic. Are the files I’ve been laboring over saved to Time Machine? Check external hard drive: the goddamn thing has somehow disconnected itself! Even though the cable is tightly connected and seems to be operative.
In a word, f-u-c-k.
Get into the iMac. The suspect file, which resides on DropBox, is functional there. Apparently the problem is not a corrupt Wyrd file.
Having force-quit Wyrd yet again, I now manually closed all the rest of the open programs, shut down the computer, and let it sit for a few minutes.
When the computer rebooted, Wyrd loaded normally.
All of which is to say, I suppose, that any file that’s under construction at any given time should be on DropBox, where Time Machine on the iMac will back it up…just in case the MacBook’s external drive mysteriously disconnects itself.
Just LOVELY.
Ah. But that was but the beginning.
The Wyrd file for the book I’ve been working on for the past several days has developed a strange little quirk: on every recto (odd-numbered) page, a little symbol that looks like a dwarfed, compressed paragraph (hard return) mark appears in the upper left-hand corner. The first two lines of copy wrap around this thing, creating an indent.
The book can’t go to print with the first two lines of every other page indented about 1/8 of an inch.
I did not put this character there. I cannot make it go away. It will not delete. There seems to be no way to insert such a thing and no way to get rid of such a thing. A search of the Web with several keyword strings brings up two (2) references to the issue, with no explanation as to what it is and, most to the point, no clue as to how to get rid of it.
Friedman’s Word guru suggests it indicates an anchored image or object in the line above it. I think not: there are no objects or images in the text.
I have done a phenomenal amount of work on this damn thing, and it now appears that if it is to be prepared for print, I’m going to have to type all 325 pages over, from beginning to end!
Along about 10 p.m. last night, it dawned on me that if Wyrd can’t highlight the thing, Word probably can’t copy the thing. So I created a new file in the desired template, highlighted a copied a chapter, and pasted it into the new template.
Hallelujah! It worked.
After a fashion.
This strategy lost a lot of the formatting I spent hours fixing: now I have to go through the whole damn thing and fix a whole new raft of widows, orphans, and loose lines. The small cap formatting reverted to all caps or lc/roman, only Word doesn’t recognize that. Where in the other file I could search all caps and replace with small caps, in this file it thinks the all caps are small caps. So I have to plod through 302 pages again and reapply the small-caps style. The pagination all has to be readjusted to make chapters appear on recto pages. Running headers/footers have to be redone. Word can no longer read the chapter title styles, so EVERY CHAPTER TITLE has to be restyled!
To wit: most of the three days’ worth of mind-numbing work I did on this thing now has to be done all over again. And then some. But at least I don’t have to retype it from beginning to end. I guess.
What do you know, really, about your financial adviser? Did you realize that America has more than 650,000 registered financial advisers, of whom 7% were disciplined for misconduct between 2005 and 2015, to the tune of a median repayment to customers of $40,000? About a third of these were repeat offenders, who are five times more prone to misconduct than average (Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos, and Amit Seru, “The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct“).
It’s hard to know how to assess a financial adviser, at least not without using the person’s services over a lengthy period. But you can check up on a prospective adviser’s track record: FINRA runs a website called BrokerCheck. The site reports on whether a broker or brokerage firm is registered with FINRA, information that has been disclosed to regulators, the person’s work history and the brokerage firm’s history, and what the broker or firm is qualified to do based on exams and state licenses.
As financial tools go, this one falls into the don’t-leave-home-without-it category.
Naturally, as soon as I found out about it, I looked my guy up. Squeaky clean. His firm: a congregation of saints. His boss: platinum-plated.
So that’s good.
Out of idle curiosity, I looked up a friend who’s a financial adviser. I don’t use his services because he’s paid by commission only and because he also sells insurance, both circumstances that invite conflicts of interest.
Lo! Up pops mention of bankruptcy proceedings. In the context it looks like a Black Blot. One wonders, though. There’s nothing like a divorce in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression to run you into the hole. So it hardly seems fair to assess the guy on that criterion.
Still: forewarned is forearmed. If you actually were in the market to do business with a financial adviser whose record included a bankruptcy or default, it would be worth asking about it.
Be sure to check the person’s employer or firm as well: My friend’s firm has had 22 “disclosure events” and 11 arbitrations. Some of these are very serious. Example:
WITHOUT ADMITTING OR DENYING THE FINDINGS, THE FIRM CONSENTED TO THE SANCTIONS AND TO THE ENTRY OF FINDINGS THAT SINCE AT LEAST JULY 1, 2009, IT HAS DISADVANTAGED CERTAIN RETIREMENT PLAN AND CHARITABLE ORGANIZATION CUSTOMERS WHO WERE ELIGIBLE TO PURCHASE CLASS A SHARES IN CERTAIN MUTUAL FUNDS WITHOUT A FRONT-END SALES CHARGE. THE FINDINGS STATED THAT NOTWITHSTANDING THE AVAILABILITY OF THE WAIVERS, THE FIRM FAILED TO APPLY THE WAIVERS TO MUTUAL FUND PURCHASES MADE BY ELIGIBLE CUSTOMERS AND INSTEAD SOLD TO THEM CLASS A SHARES WITH A FRONT-END SALES CHARGE OR CLASS B OR C SHARES WITH BACK-END SALES CHARGES AND HIGHER ONGOING FEES AND EXPENSES. THESE SALES DISADVANTAGED ELIGIBLE CUSTOMERS BY CAUSING SUCH CUSTOMERS TO PAY HIGHER FEES THAN THEY WERE ACTUALLY REQUIRED TO PAY….
THE FIRM WAS CENSURED AND REQUIRED TO PAY $602,322, INCLUDING INTEREST, IN RESTITUTION TO ELIGIBLE CUSTOMERS.
Holy sh!t. That’s just one of the 22 disclosures…
FINRA RULE 2010, NASD RULES 2110, 3010: THE FIRM FAILED REASONABLY TO SUPERVISE, A REGISTERED REPRESENTATIVE ASSOCIATED WITH THE FIRM. THE FIRM HAD PLACED THE REGISTERED REPRESENTATIVE ON HEIGHTENED SUPERVISION WHEN HE REGISTERED WITH THE FIRM. DURING THE TIME HE WAS ON HEIGHTENED SUPERVISION, THE REGISTERED REPRESENTATIVE MISAPPROPRIATED APPROXIMATELY $122,000 FROM A CUSTOMER ACCOUNT. THE FIRM FAILED TO CONDUCT A MEANINGFUL REVIEW OF THE REPRESENTATIVE’S ACTIVITIES IN CONNECTION WITH THIS CUSTOMER’S ACCOUNT…
CENSURE
MONETERY/FINE: $50,000
Wow!
And Great Galloping Poorhouse Residents, Batman! It gets better!
NASD RULES 2210, 2211, 2110 AND 3010: RESPONDENT FIRM OFFERED ITS CUSTOMERS A FEE-BASED BROKERAGE ACCOUNT, AND RATHER THAN PAYING A COMMISSION ON EVERY TRADE MADE IN THE ACCOUNT, CUSTOMERS PAID AN ANNUAL FEE BASED ON THE TOTAL VALUE OF ASSETS IN THE ACCOUNT. RESPONDENT FAILED TO ESTABLISH AND MAINTAIN A SUPERVISORY SYSTEM REASONABLY DESIGNED TO REVIEW AND MONITOR ITS FEE-BASED BROKERAGE BUSINESS. NEITHER RESPONDENT’S PRACTICES IN SUPERVISING ACCOUNT, NOR ITS WRITTEN PROCEDURES FOR A FEE-BASED BROKERAGE ACCOUNTS WERE ADEQUATE. AS A RESULT OF DEFICIENCIES IN THE FIRM’S SUPERVISORY SYSTEMS AND PROCEDURES, RESPONDENT ALLOWED CUSTOMERS TO OPEN AND CONTINUE IN A FEE-BASED ACCOUNTS EVEN IF THE ACCOUNTS WERE INAPPROPRIATE FOR THE INVESTORS IN LIGHT OF THE FEE-IN-LIEU OF COMMISSION STRUCTURE, THE $1,000 MINIMUM ANNUAL FEE, OR THE REQUIRED $50,000 MINIMUM IN ASSETS. AXA COLLECTED FEES FROM THOSE ACCOUNTS AFTER THE ACCOUNTS WENT A FULL YEAR WITH NO TRANSACTIONS, IMPOSED FEES EVEN IF THE ACCOUNT STAYED BELOW THE MINIMUM ASSET LEVEL FOR A YEAR, AND CHARGED ASSET-BASED FEES FOR THOSE ACCOUNTS BEFORE THE ACCOUNTS EVER REACHED THE MINIMUM VALUE THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO TRIGGER THE ASSET-BASED FEE. AXA DISTRIBUTED INACCURATE AND MISLEADING SALES LITERATURE, PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS, INSTITUTIONAL SALES MATERIAL, AND INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS IN VIOLATIONS OF NASD RULES 2210(D) AND 2211(D).
FIRM IS CENSURED, FINED $1,200,000, ORDERED TO PAY $1,391,427, PLUS INTEREST IN RESTITUTION AND REQUIRED: WITHIN 90 DAYS TO COMPLETE THE REMEDIATION PROCESS TO CUSTOMERS REQUIRING REFUNDS; WITHIN 120 DAYS FILE A REPORT PROVIDING A DETAILED LISTING OF ALL QUALIFYING CUSTOMERS; AND TO DISCONTINUE OF ALL OF ITS FEE-BASED BROKERAGE BUSINESS….
