November 2006 Archives
It's incredible to me that I only started bloggin' recently, and yet I've managed to find gainful employment at a company that just happens to manage RSS feeds for twenty of the world's best blog networks.
Not that the two are necessarily related, but hey, I like to talk myself up as much as any other self-centered blogger...
I'm heading down to Arizona this weekend after I catch a rip-roaring Primus show tonight. I'm spending Thanksgiving with the family and I can't wait...
Hope to have some photos and more as I take in some R & R and some zzz's...
One of the latest SNL Digital Shorts...
You may notice that the site looks a little stupid right now, so bear with me as I work through some Movable Type hackin'...
I'm working to integrate my links into the main flow of my blogging, much in the same fashion as the design and flow of kottke.org. I've always admired the way Jason links together what he's reading and other bookmarking services just don't really seem to do what I want them to...
At any rate, I should have the final touches put on in the next couple days so I'll update more once I have it put together all nice and stuff...
I caught the King Tut exhibit at the Field Museum a couple weeks back. Sue is not part of that exhibit, but I still needed to see her once and for all...
I haven't really written about it much here on this blog, but I actually used to be an Accountant. Yes, I know. An accountant...unfortunately...
When I was getting out of school and finishing up my degree down at Illinois State (in case you're curious, it was a Masters of Professional Accountancy -- whatever the hell that means...), one of my last classes I had to take was a 300-level course on corporate social responsibility. It was far and away one of the best classes I had ever been forced t to sit through -- mostly due to the fact that the professor was an actual professor. He challenged us. He gave us reading material that really challenged us. He never told you when the quizzes were. He truly taught the class how to work hard and enjoy the fact that you're working hard. My final group project was an epic research paper on Whole Foods. All in all, a great experience.
And one of the takeaways from the class centered around a famous book written by Ralph Estes called Tyranny of the Bottom Line: Why Corporations Make Good People Do Bad Things. If you've never read this, please do so ASAP. In a nutshell -- it's a history of corporations in America, why they were originally chartered, and why America made the tremendous mistake of granting corporations the same rights of individuals in the eyes of the courts...or something like that.
Interestingly enough, this class and the readings were timed nicely following the Enron debacle. All of my accounting professors were going nuts -- "this is going to be completely change the accounting industry" -- and boy were they right.
In comes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act -- "enhanced standards for all U.S. public company Boards, Management, and public accounting firms" -- and all public companies are now required to be super strict on their processes and internal controls, especially anything driving revenue for the company.
The jury's still out in my mind on how much of a good thing this is. One could argue that this does make doing business in the United States more of a pain the ass (which could lead to more outsourcing), but Ralph Estes would certainly argue that this is a check-and-balance necessary in order to hold public corporations more responsible for their actions, ethics, and controls to protect the stakeholders.
How does Alan Greenspan see it? (my emphasis added)
Despite the major financial scandals from a few years ago, embodied most famously by the collapse of Enron, there's good reason to think that the resulting Sarbanes-Oxley regulation was a poor response to the problem that ultimately had the effect of making the US a worse place to do business. Apparently, ex-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agrees, calling parts of the bill a "nightmare". He also said some interesting things about the nature of financial reporting, noting that it was something of an art form, which makes it hard to believe that we'll ever have real-time financial reporting.
I think that fact alone hit me the hardest when I got out of school -- "[financial reporting] was something of an art form..." -- despite the fact that I should known this already from my auditing class. Maybe that's why I had no interest in continuing on in that profession...
So Now He Tells Us: Alan Greenspan Doesn't Like Sarbanes-Oxley [Techdirt]
Sarbanes-Oxley Act [Wikipedia]
I'm sorry...but if this song doesn't get you moving and grooving, you've got some seriously lead feet...
Today is Midterm Election Day and you should go vote.
That is all.
This was my favorite photo taken during my vacation in Paris earlier this year...
Over at Ask MetaFilter, someone's looking for some direction to some great live music spots in the city for jazz and blues...
While these would have been my guesses -- the Green Mill for jazz and Buddy Guy's Legends for blues -- I've never been to either one of these places. I should check them out when I'm bored...
