Coffee heat rising

Big Brother in action

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Have you seen the CriminalSearch site? It’s free. You can enter a person’s name and state of residence, click a button, and up will come what purports to be his or her rap sheet. w00t! You, too, can get the straight skinny on all your neighbors. And on that sketchy dude your daughter has been dating! And oh, heck…while you’re at it, why not check up on your daughter, too?

You also can enter an address and get a report showing which of your neighbors in the surrounding area have criminal records, with their names, addresses, and a map showing how to find their homes. And…uhm…yours, if you happen ever to have been caught in the act of turning right at a stop sign without coming to a full stop or failing to yield the right of way.

Problem is, the results seem to be less than significant and less than accurate. A neighborhood search, for example, shows my area rife with desperados: all of them flagrant violators of the traffic laws. Nary a violent criminal or a sex offender appears in the district that includes my neighborhood, the scary slum to the north, and the tenements to the west. Ditto the Investment House’s neighborhood and the bordering crime-ridden area to the west, which is infested with gangs. Well, not quite ditto: one person arrested for theft lives in the general vicinity. Some of the traffic arrests include such heinous crimes as not carrying one’s car registration in the vehicle and not wearing your seatbelt. Now, recently I read that to protect yourself from car theft you should not keep the registration in the car. And when I was pregnant, my gynecologist told me absolutely not to wear a seatbelt in the last trimester, because it would inflict more damage in a minor accident than the collision would.

From the looks of CriminalSearch’s maps, it looks like all is quiet around here.

However, the Sheriff’s office posts maps with the names, addresses, and specific rap sheet details of all registered sex offenders in the county. When you call that up, it’s a whole ‘nother story. The area to the north of me has a half-dozen offenders. The tenements to the west also house several sex offenders. The area to the west of the Investment House, which surrounds a middle school, is awash in sex offenders.

Then there’s what we personally know. Here in the mid- to high-rent district, a state legislator just had to resign after he was arrested for walloping his wife. He lives about six blocks up the road. Right across the street, there’s Carlos the Knife. I know Carlos was arrested the time he cut up his daughter with a kitchen knife when she got between him and her mother. I know he was arrested again more recently, when he went after his wife again. A block north and west, where I used to live, I know the delinquent who lived across the street from me was arrested when he got violent and his grandparents called the police. In Arizona, the police are required to make an arrest in every domestic violence case, even if the victim refuses to press charges. None of those incidents appears in CriminalSearch.

I know that one bright morning 18 months ago the gentleman who rented the house across the street from me was pursued by a small army of cops and brought to ground in his driveway, where it took the occupants of several cruisers and two motorcycle officers to subdue him and carry him off to jail. Okay, so that place is a rental and he’s gone; so maybe the records are up to date and don’t include him. But the current tenant gussies himself up like a Hell’s Angel and rides an unmuffled Harley; somehow I doubt the guy is the Angel Gabriel in disguise. Chances that he has a criminal record are very high.

This freebie, advertiser-supported service comes from PeopleSearch, an outfit used by employers and landlords to do background checks on job applicants. Could your credit rating, your shot at a job, or your ability to rent a home be harmed because you dared to flout some bureaucratic rule that makes no sense? Or because of a minor traffic violation? Meanwhile, the real perps, people who might be inclined to embezzle from the till or bring a street-sweeper to work, they don’t show up.

Invasion of privacy is real. It can get you in your pocketbook and it can get you in other ways, and you may never know why. Fairly or unfairly, it can keep you from getting a job, jack up your interest rates, and even bar you from renting a desirable place to live. Americans need to wake up to this. You should care.

Comments left on the iWeb site:

BeThisWay

You are very right.

Still, I admit to getting titillated by the discovery of an assault case on the record of someone I know very well.Someone who is quite holier than thou in general, and looks down his nose at someone else we both know who got arrested for something shockingly similar.

Heh.

New business enterprise gets under way

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Well, the tiny newborn business my friend and I are starting has climbed to its little feet and is toddling around. Yesterday we got our first serious nibble, if you don’t count the client we already had when we began. The contract isn’t landed yet, but we were thrilled to attract a serious expression of interest.

Here’s what we did to get the business under way:

First, we wrote a business plan. We articulated a) what we wanted the business to do; b) how we would deliver on that; and c) how the business would be organized (as a partnership).

Next, we set an earnings goal. Since this is a side business and we both have day jobs, we decided we would each like to be grossing at least $1,000 a month within one year.

Then we established two marketing strategies: 1) join the Arizona Book Publishing Association (ABPA); and 2) create a blog in the enterprise’s name, The Copyeditor’s Desk. The ABPA turns out to be a gold mine: its meetings are frequented not only by publishers likely to need our copyediting, proofreading, and indexing services but also by writers who are either self-publishing or seeking publishers and very much need our services. It remains to be seen whether the blog will bring in much business, but it gets our name out there, and if it develops much readership, it can monetized to contribute a few dollars toward our earnings goal.

Finally, we obtained some business cards, free, off the Internet, and we designed a brochure that we will have printed through her brother-in-law’s Kwik-Kopy outlet.

It’s pretty rudimentary and at first blush doesn’t look very ambitious — until you consider that we both have jobs and she has a family to take care of. We think it will keep us busy, and if we’re lucky it will generate the fairly modest financial goal we’ve set for ourselves. Keeping it simple should at least keep it manageable.

Celebrate America: Shop Local

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Did you realize that for every two jobs a huge national retailer brings to your town, three jobs are lost? Yes. As local businesses, unable to compete with WalMarts and Home Depots and Applebees, close down, more jobs are lost than gained.

Have you ever noticed that megaretailers raise their bargain prices once most of the local competition has been driven out of business? Check prices at your nearest surviving Ace Hardware (you’ll have to drive a ways to find it)-you may be surprised to find Home Depot’s prices are actually higher on many products.

A study of the effect of chain stores on the economy of Andersonville, a suburb of Chicago, showed that for every $100 in consumer spending with a locally owned firm, $68 remained in the Chicago economy, but only $43 remained from $100 spent in a chain store. The same study showed that 70% of residents preferred to shop in local stores and 80% preferred shopping in traditional urban business districts to big boxes. Nationwide, experience has shown that chain stores drain tax revenues through ill-considered subsidies, leave shopping areas blighted, and actively work to drive local companies out of business. Meanwhile, the carbon cost of pointlessly hauling food and other goods around the world continues to skyrocket. And as we know, we no longer can trust that our food is safe, nor our pet food, nor our children’s toys…

It is past time to fight back.

Stalking the Local Merchant

I was pleased to find a fight-back weapon here in my state: a coalition of businesses has come into being to foster local commerce and to encourage people to shop locally. The retail landscape here has become so homogenized it’s hard to find local stores. Most of our wonderful independent bookstores were hounded out of business years ago, people mysteriously developed a penchant for taste-alike restaurants, our fine local hardware shops closed their doors within months of Home Depot’s arrival, and now Phoenix, like every other major American city, looks just like every other major American city. Cookie-cutter commerce has brought us cookie-cutter cities full of cookie-cutter people. And so, it is excellent to come across an organization that will tell you where to find local shopping.

So far, I haven’t located a national clearinghouse or umbrella organization for such groups, but a little googling suggests they’re all over the country. As you might expect, smaller municipalities, recognizing that chain stores threaten their job base and the very character of their towns, are resisting vigorously. Taylor, Texas, for example, has a lively shop-local movement; there’s one in central Illinois and another in Cape Cod.

But larger cities are also starting to join battle: Salt Lake City’s Vest Pocket Business Coalition complements Utah’s statewide organization. New Orleans urges citizens to patronize local businesses, and Brooklyn has an active shop-local movement.

No doubt there are many more. Visits to just these few websites will show you the endless good reasons to buy on the local economy as much as you can, and most of them list locally owned businesses. Try googling “shop local” and the name of your city or state.

The Costs, the Benefits

Does shopping local cost more? Possibly, since megacorporations have no qualms about undercutting local competition-at least until the competition is gone. But we’ve already seen what abandoning our local economies for huge box stores has done to the quality of life in our cities: we have lost what makes our towns our towns, as every city in America has come to look alike. We’ve lost jobs and wages. We’ve lost nearby shopping and quality neighborhoods. As the cost of fuel has risen, the cost of flying and trucking food from far-away megasuppliers is making the most ordinary food items unaffordable. And now, in the era of globalization ushered in by vast corporate interests and their political allies, we are enjoying unsafe food and toys, engineered obsolescence of big-ticket items, less and less choice and variety in the products offered to us, longer drives to fewer stores…to say nothing of carefully orchestrated corporate invasion of our privacy.

Penny wise and pound foolish, with a vengeance! Some things are worth paying for. One of those things is our way of life.

I for one intend to start shopping local whenever I can reasonably do so. I hope you’ll all join me at your local merchants’ stores.
It’s simply good for America.

2 Comments left on iWeb site:

BeThisWay

Excellent article!We just discovered our local Ace Hardware, and it’s less than three miles away!Husband and I both enjoyed browsing their shelves, and the prices were sometimes lower, sometimes higher, and sometimes the same as the Big Boxes.The customer service blew the Big Boxes away…

I much prefer the local farmers market to the big grocery stores, even though they are pseudo-local.Local, neighborhood restaurants are often sooo much betterthan the chains.I think people like to eat at chains so they know what to expect.Levels of cleanliness and quality are assumed to be good.

Sometimes I have to choose price, but when they are comparable I’m going to make the effort to shop locally whenever possible.

Jeff

I agree!This is a great article and highlights the most important reason to shop local and support American businesses … because it keeps jobs, and our money, in the States where it belongs.

Moments of fame

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w00t! The 164th Carnival of Personal Finance is online at Squawkfox. It’s vast: a whole galaxy of PF articles. And it’s really beautiful, with many wonderful photos of bucolic scenes. And a cool dog. Funny’s jeremiad calling on readers to shop local appears among the many offerings. I see iWeb (or possibly user error on my part?) has struck again in transmitting the homepage URL rather than the link to the post itself. So, since the Archive’s links are very iffy in the new improved MobileMe environment, I’m moving the post’s date from July 6 to today, so it will appear near the top.

Meanwhile, you’ve got to visit some of the excellent sites in this week’s carnival. I like Financial Reflection’s rumination on the actual cost of one’s car, mostly because it pretty much agrees with my opinion. And in the great minds in the same path department, GLBL brilliantly (IMHO) reviews the ten least-expensive-to-own vehicles and reveals that (lo!) nary a one is a hybrid. Not Made of Money explains how to decide what documents to spare from the shredder while you’re in declutter mode. Two bloggers raise questions about 401(k) plans: Generation X Finance explains how to tell whether your plan sucks, and No Debt Plan raises the possibility of discontinuing his 401(k).

My partner in crime and I were pleased to see that Squawkfox accepted The Copyeditor’s Desk’s first contribution to any carnival, a rave on the ideal job for liberal arts majors. Yay!!!

The 71st Carnival of Money Stories is up at Value for Your Life. This also offers a large selection of interesting and lively pieces, along with a great selection of travel photos. Funny’s rant about health insurance and US healthcare in general made Editor’s Pick here. It’s three in the morning and I’ve already started reading some of the entries. Check out Free Money Finance’s piece on the outcome of some of Extreme Home Makeover‘s projects–this one generated quite a slew of commentary! And did you realize that more than a third of Brits have only about 11 days’ worth of emergency savings? Yipe! Dorian Gray at The Personal Financier reports a survey to that effect; no parallel survey of Americans, though he found one saying 71% claim they have enough to cover unexpected costs like a car repair…that’s a lot different from having enough to live on for a two or three months if you lose your job. And finally, we were delighted to see my business partner’s first contribution to the Carnival of Money Stories, an essay at The Copyeditor’s Desk on how well editorial work fits the needs of a working mom.

Round-up: Hotter than a two-dollar cookstove edition

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We’re having a little heat wave here in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun. Night before last it was 105 at 8:00 p.m., sunset having brought the thermometer down from a bone-baking 114. Arizonans have a summertime equivalent of Michiganders’ snowbound: I am not sticking my nose outside my air-conditioned box today…no way, no how. Instead, let’s catch up with the blogosphere, an entertainment I’ve allowed to slide a bit over the past couple of weeks.

First, two really neat new-to-me sites: Correr es mi destino, despite the title an English-language production emanating from Canada, and SmallNotebook.org, featured on Get Rich Slowly for the proprietor’s “Month of No Spending” and blogging about a subject dear to my heart, simple living. I love the design on each of these things! Both authors write gracefully and engagingly; don’t miss them.

Speaking of GRS, J.D. is taking time off to deal with an illness in the family, and so some guest writers are filling in for him. Appropriately enough for a Sunday, today’s post comes from an Oregon pastor, Steve Ross, who contributes a thoughtful–even profound–essay on how his congregation is dealing with a financial crisis and what money and work really mean.

Mrs. Micah and the Mr. have taken off for Michigan. This week I really enjoyed her response to a remark a commenter posted at The Simple Dollar, which she crafted into a lively discussion about whether it is unethical for banks to charge interest.

Be This Way mourns the loss of an innocent child to the unholy combine of vicious parents and a craven child welfare system. We as taxpayers have a moral obligation to see that our state child protective services are fully funded to hire enough competent caseworkers to deal with the huge workload social workers face, and to eliminate the temptation to cut corners. Pay more taxes? Yup: if that’s what stands between a child and the forces of unbridled evil.

Speaking of taxes (and on a lighter note) this is extremely good: Plonkee figures out what her taxes would be if she lived in the U.S. and then compares U.K. vs. U.S. costs and services. Awesome!

Paid Twice recommends tracking the per unit price of goods in your price book. This is an excellent idea, since items are packaged differently by different retailers. It also allows you to get a better handle on prices advertised in the weekly flyers.

Five-Cent Nickel reflects on some of the hidden hooks in great deals. Be sure you read the fine print and understand all the details before grabbing a bargain.

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity won the free copy of Break Down Your Money in the Alpha Consumer challenge, edging out Funny by a percentage point. Because the contest was so close, he has graciously offered to share the book with me after he posts a review of it.

GLBL has posted a thoroughgoing discussion of how to create your own online store at Gather Little by Little. Looks suspiciously like work to me. Dang. Another source of “passive” income gone to seed.

Much, much more out there…my system has started to run with the speed of a stampeding snail, meaning the Mac wants me to close out Excel, Quicken, Word, Safari, iWeb, and the printer, shut down, and reboot. Time to stop. Enjoy all the great posts above!

1 comment left on iWeb site:

Rachel

Thank you so muchyfor including my site. I appreciate it.

Hank’s big giveaway at My Investment Blog

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Hey! Speaking of what we’d do if we came into a windfall (as we just were), Hank is giving away money at MiB Smarter Money. He wants to know what you’d do if you had $50,000. In exchange, you get a shot an American Express card worth $150, $100, or $50.

Check it out, and check out the whole blog. There’s a lot of interesting posts here, the one that jumps to my eye being a long and informative piece on how to publicize your blog. Currently, Hank is doing battle with Comcast, a story that’s developed some interesting ramifications. More than worth a visit!

1 comment left on iWeb site

hank

thanks for the props!And best of luck in the contest!