Bob Jensen's Tidbits

PBS: Congress passed a law that barred Chinese immigration to the United States. In addition, the law prevented Chinese nationals already living in the United States from becoming U.S. citizens. The Act was not repealed until 1943, following the advent of World War II.---
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/chinese-exclusion-act/#part01

The 100 Greatest YouTube Videos of All Time, Ranked ---
https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/best-youtube-videos-of-all-time
Jensen Comment
These probably say more about the YouTube viewing public than about the videos in particular. These certainly aren't my favorites, although I've liked The Evolution of Dance over the years. Susan Boyle's discovery is always a thrill.
One of my favorites on YouTube is MSNBC using polls predicting a Clinton landslide in the 2016. Yeah, so much for polling ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zerWCVpXTr8
This is Rachel Maddow predicting a blowout for Clinton ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm4_QGJGjPI
I did not vote for Trump and would regret it today if I had ever been a Trump cheerleader, but I sometimes cheer when overconfidence fails in most any setting. YouTube has a history of such entertaining videos.

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

Jensen Comment
Ignorance of personal finance leads to many (most?) divorces, vulnerability to scams, and inability to finance college for children and retirement for the elderly.

Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. —
Thomas Malthus, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter VII, p. 61[
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe#Thomas_Malthus
Jensen Comment
Famine, in turn, is heavily the result of draught such as the climate change that turned much of lush North Africa into a desert. Now it's the turn of South Africa as Johannesburg runs out of water.

Jensen Comment
Dropping the requirement in some ways is worse. Applicants with soaring ACT/SAT scores will still enhance their application forms just as minorities enhance their application forms by revealing race/ethnicity. The implication is that if race/ethnicity is not revealed the applicant is either white or (worse) Asian. The implication is that if an applicant does not reveal the ACT/SAT score the applicant would've otherwise had to reveal a lousy score.

There are lots of ways to admit applicants from poor families, and I view this is a lousy way of getting the job done in an era where virtually all applicants had A-grade averages in high school.

Chicago, Stanford, and the Ivy League universities years ago gave up largely on high school grades and ACT/SAT test scores unless those scores were outliers (high or low). Those elitist universities rely on evidence of outstanding extracurricular achievements in music, sports, theatre, and public service in addition to having family philanthropic donors as alumni of the university. It helps to have celebrity parents which probably played a big role when admitting Chelsea Clinton to Stanford.

Chicago, Stanford, the Ivy League, and most other wealthy universities now offer free tuition, room, and board to all low income and even lower middle class income (from families earning less than $125,000 annually) students who are admitted. The problem is that there are far more lower income applicants than those universities can afford assuming that admitting a poor student for free means baring a qualified applicant who can pay $100,000 per year for tuition, room, and board.

Jensen Comment
Darn --- just when Walmart commenced to pay for college majors in this discipline

Jensen Coimment
Confounding variables in spurious correlations have varying degrees of ambiguity. For example, Yates' discovery of correlation of Danish birthrates with the number of stork nests in Denmark probably has some confounding factors, but the confounding relationships are quite ambiguous. On the other hand, correlations of ice cream sales and swimming pool drowning deaths are more directly related to increased number of people (especially young children) swimming on hotter days.

We know how newborns are delivered, and this does not entail delivery by storks. However, there can be confounding variables that lead to Yates' classic example of spurious correlation. For example, Danish birth rates may be more closely related to the prosperity that comes with increased weekly rainfall. Likewise, the number of stork nests in Denmark may also be related to increased food supply resulting from increased weekly rainfall.

Jensen Comment
The "in aggregate" qualifier is important since anecdotal data for particular individuals can be especially misleading. And even "in aggregate" search outcomes may also be misleading. For example, what does it really tell us to learn (hypothetically speaking today) that nearly half the clergy (including priests) do a huge amount of searching of the Dark Web? This does not in and of itself tell us what they're "really thinking." Conversely, if we discover that over half the male bureaucrats versus female bureaucrats on the job spend over half of every working week at porn sites it may tell us more about that these addicts are "really thinking."

For my three blogs I spend hours each day searching all over the Web. Since the thousands of sites visited often are so many and varied I doubt that anybody can learn what I'm "really thinking" other than that I must be search for a variety of really interesting links to share with my readers..

An author might spend thousands of hours at literature sites. That author may be studying the crafts of other authors to help his or her own writing. Then again that author might simply be looking for passages that can be cleverly plagiarized.

Jensen Comment
These types of rankings can be misleading for various reasons. For example, majors in zoology have relatively high employment percentages. But this is misleading because there are so few majors in zoology, giving rise to a small denominator. In comparison psychology majors have relatively low employment percentages, but this is in part to having such a large denominator.

Many of the majors with high employment percentages are often employed in dead end jobs in the sense that there are few advancement opportunities. For example, physical therapists and computer programmers can usually find work but chances are that they will be doing the same thing in year 20 that they did in year 1 without much change in compensation other than inflation adjustments.

Some jobs currently with high employment rates (think nuclear engineering) have poor long-term prospects such as the bleak future of nuclear energy plants.

Beware of the highest paying jobs right after graduation. These often entail living on sales commissions such as selling stocks and bonds on Wall Street. This is not so great year after year.

Some jobs with high employment rates also have high burn out rates such as special needs teachers. This is a tough career year after year in spite of the wonderful services provided. Many such teachers long to return to general education.

Choosing a major should be taken much more seriously than many students do take such a decision in the first two years of college. For example, one of the things to consider is how the job differs early on versus years later. Sometimes no change is a great thing. For instance, I loved the fact that I was doing pretty much the same thing in the last ten years of my college faculty career than I did in the first ten years as a professor. It was a tremendous career choice for me. On the other hand, if I was a tax accountant doing the same things at the end of my career as I did early on I might not have been so happy with all the intervening years of "same old same old."

I've mentioned before that the great ophthalmologist who gave me implants to correct my cataracts admitted to me that he's awfully bored with his life doing pretty much the same thing year in and year out. He's now in an online MBA program and is considering a career change. The general surgeon who performed both wife's gall bladder surgery burned out before 50 years of age, stopped performing surgeries, and went into drug counseling. He says he mainly grew bored and exhausted from doing stressful surgeries week in and week out.

We have a close friend at church who retired early from teaching the third grade for 32 years. He says he just wore out living this routine and was too old to track into something else like school administration. He was, by the way, a very popular teacher all those 32 years and often encountered parents who were his former students.

Military is often a better career than young people think when they are making career choices. Not far from where I live is a retired Coast Guard search and rescue helicopter pilot. He says this was a great, albeit stressful, career for 24 years. But he said he was growing tired of this life, and the military retirement deal (lifetime pension and family medical insurance) made it extremely opportunistic to change careers in the middle of his life. He and his family moved into Sugar Hill from Oregon. He's now got the freedom to try writing fiction while his wife has a good income at home as an online editor for the Booz Allen consulting firm. There aren't too many careers other than military that let you fully retire half way in life with a lifetime pension and full medical coverage (including long-term nursing care) for the remainder of your life.

Jensen Comment
During my 24 years at Trinity University my office was on the third floor of Chapman Hall. Some years back roofers did some repairs that that trapped bats in the building. I don't think anybody in Chapman even knew we had bats living somewhere in the top of the building. Suddenly we had bats flying up and down the halls on all floors of the building. I don't want to make this seem like there were lots of bats, but there were a few bats --- enough to frighten most of us in the building. This was summer when there's daylight in the early morning. I always arrived for work very early in the morning to beat the traffic and to get treasured parking in a parking garage (to keep the hot sun off the car). One morning there was a strange lump on a bulletin board outside my office. It was a bat sleeping upside down on that bulletin board. It seemed to be comatose while hanging upside down. It was totally oblivious to my presence even with my curious hand within inches of where it slept. Two campus police officers later arrived with a small net. The bat did not awaken until brushed from the bulletin board to the net.

I was told that San Antonio has more nearby bats than all the other states in the USA combined. Some people would go into the countryside to watch millions of bats coming out of caves clouding the sky.

San Antonio also has small critters like skunks, opossums, raccoons, snakes, and armadillos in all neighborhoods. One day I returned from class to find that the campus police had blocked off some of the Chapman hallways in an attempt to herd a skunk outdoors.

One summer I found a beautiful snake skin in our back yard. To get a rise out of Erika I left the skin on top of some shoes in her closet. It worked!

Some neighborhoods like mine also have occasional deer and ducks up from the banks of a creek. One of our neighbor's cats named Lucky spent most of his life in our yard --- possibly because he wanted more individualized attention. One night Lucky was beside me on our patio when a skunk literally walked across my feet to get to the cat's dish. Both lucky and I sat very still. The cat seemed to know it's best not to go after a skunk.

The funniest sights on occasion were the big Mexican ducks that would sit in our live-oak trees. In most parts of the USA people don't see web-footed ducks roosting in trees. Once we had a mother and her ducklings who wanted to live in our swimming pool. She would waddle up to the back door with her biddies and beg for handouts ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_duck

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

Shout-Out for Marc Bellemare