Small Business Advisor
Punctuation Is Important
When I was a schoolboy – quite a long time ago, I grant you – my teacher constantly drummed into me the importance of punctuation. The little marks that were introduced into text from ancient times and standardised when printing took off in the 14th century. Punctuation stops ambiguity and lets people know the real meaning of a sentence.
Compare the two sentences: “King Charles walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off” with “King Charles walked and talked; half an hour later, his head was cut off”. The punctuation does make a difference.
Or this one: “Let’s eat Mummy” vs. “Let’s eat, Mummy”
One of the other things that really gets on my goat is the correct use of the apostrophe. Knowing the difference between its and it’s (and, boy, a lot of people get that wrong). Why does no-one play in the Giant Kid’s Payground? Answer: because they’re frightened of the Giant Kid.
So I’m pleased to see that Google has at long last started to recognise the importance of the full stops, commas, semi colons et al. In
There’s a little pleasure in Sean Quinn’s bankruptcy (IrishCentral)
The sight of Ireland’s richest man just two years ago being declared bankrupt in a Dublin court is a very striking one.
Sean Quinn, worth $4 billion at his height, typifies and magnifies what happened to so many Irish people during the height of the boom years followed by the spectacular bust.
Quinn was a massive employer through his Quinn Insurance company located in one of Ireland’s poorest rural areas.
A self-made man with swagger, he typified the era of the Celtic Tiger, moving from deal to deal with seemingly unblemished success.
His downfall was as unexpected as it was dramatic. He essentially gambled on Anglo Irish Bank shares at a time when those shares were about to plummet to zero.
Quinn’s downfall has its tragic overtones too. For m
Woman takes Honda to small-claims court over hybrid’s mpg
A California woman is suing American Honda Motor Co. over its 2006 hybrid Civic, pictured here, which she says never got the gas mileage the company advertised. (Mark Elias, Bloomberg file )
TORRANCE, Calif. A Los Angeles woman who expected her hybrid Honda Civic to be a high-mileage machine wants the automaker to pay for not delivering the 50 mpg it promised. But rather than being one of thousands in a class-action lawsuit, she took her case Tuesday to small-claims court.
Experts said Heather Peters has a better chance of winning her case in a court with more relaxed standards and could get a payout many times higher than the few hundred dollars offered to class-action plaintiffs.
Peters said she has been contacted by hundreds of owners who also want to take their chances in small-claims court, where there are no attorney fees and cases are decided quickly.
“If I prevail and get $10,000, they have 200,000 of these cars out there,” Peters said.
Peters, a state employee and former lawyer, argued that Honda knew her car wouldn’t get the 50 mpg as advertised before a judge in Torrance, where American Honda Motor Co.
Dominance of Cards to be Eclipsed?
Even back in the 1990s when ecommerce was in its infancy, there were always other ways to pay. It’s just that they were rubbish – inconvenient, fraud prone and slow. You could mail a cheque or cash, wait for days and risk being defrauded by an unscrupulous merchant. It was no real surprise that with its universal deployment and its established dispute resolution system, the card payment system dominated payments in ecommerce. They simply were the best available method and rapidly they became the way in which trade on the internet was performed.
But let’s not fool ourselves that card payments are well adapted to usage online. Devised originally to operate in a paper environment, they were upgraded to work with a magnetic stripe and subsequently squeezed via mail order and telephone order processing into an online environment. It was always a bit difficult to use a card online. Typing in a 16 digit account number, a 4 digit expiry date and a 3 digit card verification value, none of which the user can possibly remember is a fairly long winded process. O
Ireland may require a referendum as part of Europe’s plans for fiscal union (IrishCentral)
Ireland seems likely to be heading for a referendum as 23 of the 27 EU leaders who are currently taking part in the EU summit in Brussels, have agreed to pursue tighter integration and stricter budget rules for the euro zone.
Ireland has a history of impeding European integration. This referendum could delay or even obstruct budgetary rules which would preserve the euro.
Britain, a key trading partner to Ireland, said it cannot accept the proposed amendments to the EU treaty. This creates the risk of a two-speed Europe as France and Germany plan to forge an intergovernmental treaty among the euro zone countries.
Glenn Grassi’s “micro-house” in Erie is big on efficiency
ERIE In a town where 2,400-square-foot houses with finished basements dominate the marketplace, Glenn Grassi is betting the other way.
Oh, sure, his home has all the basics you’d expect toilet, shower, bed, chair, table, stove, sink, even a hardwood floor.
But when all you’ve got is 84 square feet to work with, certain efficiencies must come into play. Grassi’s bed doubles as a shower, his chair doubles as a commode, and his wood-burning stove doubles as a furnace and cooking surface.
It’s spartan and spare, but the 41-year-old theater-set designer thinks such tight and cozy quarters are the wave of the future.
“You find what’s important and what’s not important,” Grassi said, as he slid open a refurbished and repurposed window on the side of his newly constructed mobile “micro-house,” which was parked in a quiet Erie neighborhood last month.
What Grassi who lived in an RV in Los Angeles after discovering that his rock-band neighbors liked practicing in the apartment over his head finds important is what an increasing number of Americans who have put their faith in the burgeoning “small house movement” find important. Read all…