Mama Carol

No, no. Jamaican, not Jamaica. If you're going to be importing illegally, you might as well import the best.

I prefer margaritas which means I like tequila better than rum. I hope you got plenty of assault weapons and high capacity magazines. They are running ads on TV asking for them at a local gun shop. Hard to beat a Cuba cigar. So, you're not doing anything immoral. You do know Jamaican is good, right?

In the corporation my husband and I dissolved at the end of 2011, I was the CFO, the payroll manager, the office manager, the administrative assistant, the bookkeeper, travel department, file clerk. I often traveled with my husband (and once with him and our employee to a corporate meeting which I organized and oversaw). As CFO **I** developed the budgets; as payroll manager *I* submitted payroll reports, computed payroll; well, you get the idea. I didn't "work with" the CFO. I WAS the CFO. It is VERY different when you are the person who has SOLE responsibility for those matters and you'

Hmmmm. Must be illegal or immoral. Otherwise, most people are happy to share what they do so no, I don't understand. I'm not asking for income amounts, just a general idea of what the business (or businesses) you own actually do. My husband and I were always more than happy to share what we did with our businesses. You can never tell when someone you share with may turn out to be your biggest customer, a valued employee or someone who comes in and buys you out so you can retire happy.

No offense taken Laurie. You're absolutely correct in everything. And I enjoy helping my clients keep as much of the money as possible that passes through their hands. I remember one day a couple of years ago when I went to make a deposit that quite frankly probably paid the salaries for all of the tellers in the bank as well as the manager FOR A YEAR. It was one check I was depositing, too. Unfortunately only a small portion of that "stuck" to us. About 75% went to our supplier, then a large portion of the remainder went to pay things like payroll taxes, utilities, travel expenses (

We always filed our returns by March 1. Corporate and personal. Then again, I did the bookkeeping and the personal return. Usually started the corporate return and then handed it to my boss for finalizing (corporate returns are not a specialty of mine). It's my job to know what needs to be done to stay in compliance and I have trouble keeping up with it!! I was like this after the continuing education courses I was required to take. Geez! My brain hurt. Really and truly. It was much easier when I just had to remember that payroll tax had to be submitted by the 15th, sales tax by

I would hope so. Any later than that and you might be looking at late filing of returns. But what do you DO?

You can't have much business if you don't discuss it outside of a very select personal set of friends.

Quite a different matter when it's YOUR money and YOUR business that you're running. Not to mention YOUR reputation on the line. YOU have to schedule the service calls, the work and make sure the worker can get there and do the job. Quite a heart-wrenching thing to get a bill for $80,000 for materials and you only have $2,000 in your business account. Very distressing to have rent on your business and mortgage on your home, utility bills for both places and a falling apart car all requiring your limited resources at the same time. It's very different when it's YOU and YOUR money and not y

I've always said I know few, if any, truly poor people who own their own businesses. Poor on paper perhaps, when it comes time to file taxes but truly poor to the point of needing government assistance in the form of food stamps or welfare, no. It's the "wealthy" who create the jobs through their businesses. The media really can't have it both ways--the wealthy are evil people but the small businesses create the overwhelming majority of new jobs. Which is it? Are these people evil? I work with small business owners every single day and have since 1995. I've owned my own small busin

I wasn't going there.

The President has little control over anything relating to the economy, unemployment, etc.

There must be a worker shortage. I saw white guys working construction today.

Wow. GEORGIA added 400 jobs in December. Fulton County alone had 4036 NEW unemployment claims in December. Doesn't really seem like that's making much headway in reducing unemployment.

Yep, my insurance which is an individual policy went from $470 a month to $533. That isn't a decrease (unless you do math like Go Blue). Between my health insurance and my husband's Medicare and prescription coverage, we saw a monthly INSURANCE COST increase of around 40%. His Social Security increased 1.7% and unless I raise my rates for my clients who can ill afford to pay me more, my income won't increase this year. Short of getting a full time job or increasing my fees, my income is about as high as it is going to get. I really don't want to get a full time job because I love what I d

We actually saw a house being built yesterday. Not in metro Atlanta, though. And it's about the first one we've seen in a long, long time.

But to state that the law protects workers is wrong. It is SUPPOSED to but it doesn't. Not doubt that was the original intent of the law. As long as a company does it in a legal manner, they can certainly discriminate against you in any way. Try being an average worker who has been discriminated against by a multi-national megacorporation and see how far you get in your claim that you were discriminated against. They have high priced, high power attorneys to tell them how to discriminate legally. Yes, it's wrong but to expect to be protected is naive at least. We did hire so

It might have been designed with that in mind but it really protects the employer and not the employee. When you have lost your job when someone younger was hired to replace you and an employment law attorney tells you there is NOTHING you can do about it because the company did it in a legal manner, then you can tell me how it protects workers. You are correct when you say "those laws were written to protect people". Those people are HR, CEOs, etc.

Obviously the law isn't working. It has flaws in it. In this case, I think it protects the employer and not the worker.

Discrimination is fine as long as you aren't obvious in your discrimination. Take age discrimination for example. You can certainly discriminate against an older worker by saying they are "overqualified" or they may be lacking in needed tech skills. Just don't say you aren't hiring them because they are 55. I've seen it 21 times. I've been on 21 interviews.

And so is murder, child abuse, rape and possession of firearms by those mentally incompetent or convicted felons yet ALL of these things, along with discrimination based on your genetic profile, occur every day in America. Just ask someone who has a genetic disorder. We will tell you.

Even building ONE house is an improvement over about 4 years ago.

Well, I for one am grateful for global warming. I'd be freezing my ass off MORE if we didn't have that warming.

A couple of years ago we were looking at a house that was pretty far out of town. We used directions from the real estate listing and had no problem whatsoever finding the house. We were to meet an agent at the house at a certain time. We waited and waited and waited. Finally, she came in from another direction because she used GPS directions. The road the GPS took you down was filled with potholes, ruts and would be pretty much impassable after a rain. You really needed a 4 wheel drive to go by that road. The way we came in, it was paved until the road before the house and even that wa

And there are both. I love the idea that my hematologist can get any report on any test I have at a Wellstar facility. I hate the idea that there is no standard method for correcting information in the record. At least when an MT transcribed the notes, there was a method for making corrections and they were easily made. As an MT in a former life, I have transcribed many addendums and corrections, primarily when tests proved a tentative diagnosis was incorrect. Now, it's just there.