Bob Jensen's Additions to Tidbits on March 15

In 2017 my Website was migrated to the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me at rjensen@trinity.edu if you really need to file that is missing

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web.
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Entitlements are two-thirds of the federal budget. Entitlement spending has grown 100-fold over the past 50 years. Half of all American households now rely on government handouts. When we hear statistics like that, most of us shake our heads and mutter some sort of expletive. That’s because nobody thinks they’re the problem. Nobody ever wants to think they’re the problem. But that’s not the truth. The truth is, as long as we continue to think of the rising entitlement culture in America as someone else’s problem, someone else’s fault, we’ll never truly understand it and we’ll have absolutely zero chance...
Steve Tobak ---
http://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/2013/02/07/truth-behind-our-entitlement-culture/?intcmp=sem_outloud

The WWW was a initially a combination of two inventions. One was the 1989 HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) scripting of documents with HTML (hypertext markup language) invisible tags on hot words that linked to other parts of a document or to other documents around the world. The second was the 1990s invention of a "browser" that could read those tags. This was called Netscape . It was the brain child of Marc Andreessen ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

The next big invention for the WWW was the invention of Web crawlers that can be used to search the Web using key words contained in the billions upon billions of Web documents. These crawlers help find documents containing key words or reproductions of parts of documents after the original documents disappeared from the Web.- ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

The Internet itself was invented much earlier in in the 1960s. But it had only limited use among selected scientists until the Web was invented in the 1990s.

Jensen Comment
In my opinion, the main advantage of Amazon over Walmart is 30 million products versus 3 million products, including the tremendous Amazon deals on many used items like books. However, Walmart may be cheaper with free two-day shipping that's really free. I also love the Amazon Reward points that add up to real savings.

Jensen Comment
I wonder what the distribution is of trash (including porn) to treasure.

Khan Academy Test Prepartion Downloads (for various tests like the ACT, SAT, MCAT, LSAT, GRE, etc.) ---
https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep

Jensen Comment
Why don't we remove all the books from the electronic libraries (think millions of books now available free from Google) that the blind cannot read?

For on-campus students the university can invest in what it takes to accommodate students with disabilities. This can be very costly such as paying a signing expert to be in a seminar when there is one deaf student in the classroom. But for off-campus students it can be so costly as to make an online course too prohibitive to offer and requiring that all videos have captioning.

There are many technologies to help disabled students (including the blind, deaf, and learning-challenged). The issue becomes whether it's the university's responsibility to pay the tab in every instance ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Handicapped

In my estimation having to remove such a massive amount of learning material (much of it free) from pubic view punishes everybody for the special needs of a relatively few number of potential learners.

Jensen Comment
A instructor can create Camtasia videos that are captioned for the hearing impaired and describe movements on screen for the sight impaired. However, there's a huge problem in linking to videos and audios online that the instructor cannot revise for the disabled. For example, how does one use films like the historic Citizen Kane, Moby Dick, Twelve O'Clock High, or educational podcasts without captioning?

Jensen Comment
Literacy requirements for K-12 teachers will always be unfair until their college teachers are required to pass literacy tests.

Jensen Comment
Reserve estimates of lithium needed for Tesla batteries are highly uncertain. Most estimates are encouraging for electric car needs but not for powering the world. Especially troublesome will be the inevitable lithium production cartel that will form due to only a few nations having a serious amount of reserves. There's lithium in sea water, but methods of extraction are yet to be discovered ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
Unlike natural gas, where the USA has massive untapped reserves, most serious lithium reserves are in South America and China.

In my opinion, regions should not become overly dependent upon any one energy source. Some of my professor friends in various parts of the USA now have home solar panels and Tesla battery storage for nights and cloudy days. In theory theory homes powered in this way might eliminate the need for power transmission lines to homes. However, there's a risk in tearing these ugly power lines down. For example, if lithium becomes prohibitively costly homes will once again need a power grid to back up the solar shingles and panels until low-cost alternatives to lithium battery storage are available.

Biomass became more hype than hope mostly due to the fall in oil prices. Our regional hospital, for example, built a new biomass electric production plant that thus far is a an idle waste of money. It's designed to be fed by wood chips from our surrounding forests. However, propane prices became so cheap that it's just too costly for the hospital to run its biomass electric plant. Cutting down trees, chipping up those trees, and hauling the wood chips is more costly at the moment as well as being destructive of wild life habitats.

Jensen Comment
Buying your data may be easier for investigators than getting subpoenas.

Jensen Comment
Some don't make a whole lot of sense to such as why is "polio victim" banned and "polio survivor" allowed. The two phrases are not equivalent since not all polio victims survive. And "efficient" does not necessarily mean "workmanlike" since some quality products were not produced efficiently such as painstaking handmade crafts.

Jensen Comment
There's a lot more to fulfillment in life beyond business success. And there's a lot more to college than curriculum learning. Somehow I think that most successful entrepreneurial dropouts lost out on a lot of what college life has to offer.

But there's a big difference between short run fulfillment and long run fulfillment. It's a little like having had pre-school or kindergarten. Most of the impacts or pre-school and kindergarten are short-term at best and tend to wash out before high school.

Would the fulfillment of Bill Gate's life have really changed much had he not dropped out of college before forming the highly successful Microsoft? I doubt it. But not everybody is like Bill Gates apart from business success. For one thing, probably 99% of the people of the world are not as intense about reading as Bill Gates. Certainly not me!

Newberry Library: Digital Collections for the Classroom (American History) --- http://dcc.newberry.org

Forwarded by Paula
Two robins were sitting in a tree. "I'm really hungry", complained the first one. "Me, too" consented the second. "Let's fly down and find some lunch." They flew to the ground and found a nice plot of plowed ground full of worms. They ate and ate and ate and ate 'til they could eat no more. "I'm so full I don't think I can fly back up to the tree," admitted the first one. "Me either. Let's just lay here and bask in the warm sun," suggested the second. "O.K." agreed the first. They plopped down, basking in the sun. No sooner than they had fallen asleep, when a big fat tomcat snuck up and gobbled them up! As he sat, washing his face after his meal, he thought to himself, "I just love baskin' robins."

The children of Israel wanted bread,
And the Lord sent them manna.
Clark Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil sent him Anna.

The following are called paraprosdokians, a derivative of a Greek word meaning beyond expectation.

I find it ironic that the colors red, white, and blue
stand for freedom, until they're flashing behind you.

Today a man knocked on my door and asked for a
small donation towards the local swimming pool,
so I gave him a glass of water.

I'm great at multi-tasking:
I can waste time, be unproductive,
and procrastinate all at once.

Hospitality is the art of making guests feel
like they're at home when you wish they were.

Accounting program news items for colleges are posted at http://www.accountingweb.com/news/college_news.html
Sometimes the news items provide links to teaching resources for accounting educators.
Any college may post a news item.

For an elaboration on the reasons you should join a ListServ (usually for free) go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

AECM (Educators) http://listserv.aaahq.org/cgi-bin/wa.exe?HOME
AECM is an email Listserv list which provides a forum for discussions of all hardware and software which can be useful in any way for accounting education at the college/university level. Hardware includes all platforms and peripherals. Software includes spreadsheets, practice sets, multimedia authoring and presentation packages, data base programs, tax packages, World Wide Web applications, etc.

Over the years the AECM has become the worldwide forum for accounting educators on all issues of accountancy and accounting education, including debates on accounting standards, managerial accounting, careers, fraud, forensic accounting, auditing, doctoral programs, and critical debates on academic (accountics) research, publication, replication, and validity testing.

~~CPAS-L (Practitioners) http://pacioli.loyola.edu/cpas-l/~~ (Closed Down)
CPAS-L provides a forum for discussions of all aspects of the practice of accounting. It provides an unmoderated environment where issues, questions, comments, ideas, etc. related to accounting can be freely discussed. Members are welcome to take an active role by posting to CPAS-L or an inactive role by just monitoring the list. You qualify for a free subscription if you are either a CPA or a professional accountant in public accounting, private industry, government or education. Others will be denied access.

Yahoo (Practitioners) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xyztalk
This forum is for CPAs to discuss the activities of the AICPA. This can be anything from the CPA2BIZ portal to the XYZ initiative or anything else that relates to the AICPA.

AccountantsWorld http://accountantsworld.com/forums/default.asp?scope=1
This site hosts various discussion groups on such topics as accounting software, consulting, financial planning, fixed assets, payroll, human resources, profit on the Internet, and taxation.

Business Valuation Group BusValGroup-subscribe@topica.com
This discussion group is headed by Randy Schostag [RSchostag@BUSVALGROUP.COM]

FEI's Financial Reporting Blog
Smart Stops on the Web, Journal of Accountancy, March 2008 --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/mar2008/smart_stops.htm

FINANCIAL REPORTING PORTAL
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Find news highlights from the SEC, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board on this financial reporting blog from Financial Executives International. The site, updated daily, compiles regulatory news, rulings and statements, comment letters on standards, and hot topics from the Web’s largest business and accounting publications and organizations. Look for continuing coverage of SOX requirements, fair value reporting and the Alternative Minimum Tax, plus emerging issues such as the subprime mortgage crisis, international convergence, and rules for tax return preparers.

The CAlCPA Tax Listserv

September 4, 2008 message from Scott Bonacker [lister@bonackers.com]
Scott has been a long-time contributor to the AECM listserv (he's a techie as well as a practicing CPA)

I found another listserve that is exceptional -

CalCPA maintains http://groups.yahoo.com/taxtalk/ and they let almost anyone join it.
Jim Counts, CPA is moderator.

There are several highly capable people that make frequent answers to tax questions posted there, and the answers are often in depth.

Scott

Scott forwarded the following message from Jim Counts

Yes you may mention info on your listserve about TaxTalk. As part of what you say please say [... any CPA or attorney or a member of the Calif Society of CPAs may join. It is possible to join without having a free Yahoo account but then they will not have access to the files and other items posted.

Once signed in on their Yahoo account go to http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxTalk/ and I believe in top right corner is Join Group. Click on it and answer the few questions and in the comment box say you are a CPA or attorney, whichever you are and I will get the request to join.

Be aware that we run on the average 30 or move emails per day. I encourage people to set up a folder for just the emails from this listserve and then via a rule or filter send them to that folder instead of having them be in your inbox. Thus you can read them when you want and it will not fill up the inbox when you are looking for client emails etc.

We currently have about 830 CPAs and attorneys nationwide but mainly in California.... ]

Please encourage your members to join our listserve.

If any questions let me know.

Jim Counts CPA.CITP CTFA
Hemet, CA
Moderator TaxTalk

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