A poll of more than two thousand executives finds that 36% have issued a formal warning, and 6% have actually fired an employee for using foul language in the work place. According to the survey conducted by TheLadders.com, the five most egregious violations of workplace etiquette…?
1. Bad language (38.4%)
2. Excessive workplace gossip (36.5%)
3. Drinking on the job (35.2%)
4. Leaving the office without telling anyone (33.6%)
5. Too many personal calls (28%)
Jesus… that pretty much describes the average workday of the typical blogger.
Speaking of bloggers, Karl Rove’s response to Scott McClellan’s book was:
Yes, Karl. He sounds like a left-wing blogger, because he’s telling the truth!
Joe @ 1: I’m not ready to baptise McClellan as having “seen the light” and converted to the truth. Why did he wait so long? I think he’s another rat trying to desert a sinking ship, it’s just that he took too long to write a “tell-all” book. Perhaps he waited too long to see which way the wind was blowing?
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t really telling the truth now, regardless of his motives.
I’ve always said these rats would fink on each other when the chips are down. Just wait until Laura’s book comes out!
Goldy: how do you gossip at your workplace? Do you and the dog talk about the cat behind it’s back?
It’s not even 10 a.m. yet, and I’ve already made $300 in the stock market! And I can indulge in all the bad language, gossip, drinking, unexcused absences, and personal calls I want to — and nobody will say anything and I won’t get in any trouble! Why the hell you folks pay capitalists like me so much for doing nothing and producing nothing — and give me tax breaks to boot — is a fucking mystery! I never got away with this shit when I was an employee. Either I’m somehow indispensable to the economy, or the people running this crazy system are insane. I think I know which.
@4: rhp
hehe – that must be some nasty cat!
@5 I don’t have a cat, but I have Mrs. Rabbit to keep me company … =:-O
LMAO
@6 See #7.
$425 now … I made another $125 while typing this stuff. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the system pays me to sit here picking my nose and scratching my ass while typing comments on HorsesAss … but they do. It’s weird. Doesn’t it give you a warm glow knowing that our economic system values owning little electronic blips stored in a server farm in India more than all the skills, efforts, and dedication you bring to your job? I think capitalism’s values are upside down — they should value labor more and owning stuff less.
Does Goldy’s cat get upset about the language he uses? Does it spoil the cat dinner?
Well – Goldy has to put up with the fur balls and clawing – so I would call it even.
Wonder what the dog has to say? Dogs usually vote republican anyways – they are really good at following their masters and fetching – but not so good at analytical thought.
Anyone ever watch a dog dream? One wonders what they are thinking sometimes….probably dreaming of catching a rabbit and chewing it….uhh, sorry Roger.
The banks are getting the right idea. They now value your cash savings at about 1% a year — roughly 1/4th of the official (i.e., liar’s) rate of inflation and perhaps 1/10th of the actual rate of inflation. In other words, you’re paying them to lend them your money at 1% a year so they can lend it out again to their credit card customers at 28% a year. That’s a hell of a business they’ve got going there. They have no respect for owners of capital at all! This means you’ll have to keep working until you drop dead! I think this is what they call Mike McGavick socialism … you do all the work, and they get all the money!
Funny how all the bank stocks are in the crapper despite spreads like that … it must be lousy management. Nowadays, under capitalist system, which is touted as the most efficient and productive economic system ever invented, the more money CEOs lose for their shareholders the bigger their bonuses and stock options, and they get the biggest payoff of all when they sell the company to a hedge fund for pennies on the dollar and the shareholders get chopped off at the knees!
It’s fucking insane. I’m moving all my money out of banks to nonprofit credit unions, who pay 3 times as much interest, and they’re a hell of a lot more solvent because they don’t turn perfectly good cash into worthless pieces of paper like banks do. This is Mr. Cynical’s washing machine in reverse — they insert $100 bills and it comes out as toilet paper on the other side. Well, that’s free markets and private enterprise for ya.
Roger;
Ever think of publishing an e-mail stock alert newsleter? I really don’t have the time to do the research, I’d be willing to pay a few bucks a month to have someone do it for me. I know there are no guarantees, but your advice has to be at least as good, if not better, than that of the average broker.
My wife worked at a major brokerage firm for several years. She discovered that they are really 90% salesmen (getting clients to hand over their money), 9% money changers (getting paid by some fund or another to talk you into investing in their fund over another), and 1% stock analysts.
rhp @ 2
I’ve reached no conclusions about McClellan’s motives. I’m just amused that Karl Rove would equate telling the truth to sounding like a left-wing blogger. Has it really been that long since Rove has known what the truth sounds like?
Don’t answer that. I think we already know.
RR @ 12: I’ve kept my personal accounts in my credit union for the past ten years. Haven’t regretted it for a minute. Sure, I could get some better “teaser” rates on some loans or credit cards, but the credit union has been trustworthy in the long run.
When I buy a car (which I do rarely), I arrange the financing in advance with the credit union, before I negotiate with the dealer. Even so, they always try to get me to sign papers which say that they can switch to different financing, if my preferred bank doesn’t work out, or if they can get me a “better rate” elswhere. I always refuse. I’ve walked out of one dealership that wanted to argue about it. Those guys get a kick-back from finance companies, and they have every incentive to try to make your financing deal collapse so they can switch it to the lender who gives them the biggest kick-back – regardless of it’s impact to you.
14: A sound-bite from Rove I heard this morning blasted McClellan for not speaking up earlier, if he had a problem with the policies. True, but irrelevent to the issue of whether what McClellan is saying now is the truth or not.
I want to know what he had to say about Rove’s role in the Plame outing – that was the teaser McClellan’s publisher was leaking a few months back.
Back in December, Rove was blasting the Democrats for “not doing anything about the “Alternative Minimum Tax Crisis”, claiming that “they’ve had a WHOLE YEAR to fix the problem! Talk about bald-faced dishonesty – The Republicans had seven years of control of the Congress and the Presidency, and chose not to do anything about it, and then blocked all Democratic attempts in that last year to fix the problem unless the Democrats agreed to make the Bush tax cuts permanant. They finally caved early this year when they realized they were going to take the blame if they voted against the bill.
Damn, I bet it was that fucking bitch Madge in Accounting that got me fired. I was texting my home boy about meeting at Pounder’s to get a quick brew before lunch when she came over to talk. Everyone knows she’s a god damned snitch.
I swear, if that fuckin’ bitch secretary of mine bends over one more time to show me her gigantic boobs I am going to have to hit the Jack Daniel’s, call the wife and tell her I am coming home for a little afternoon nookie (sexual harassment is not on the list but I tossed it in). By the way, I hear the hot secretary is a lesbian.
@13 “1% stock analysts”
That much?
I’ve learned not to listen to broker recommendations. As you say, it’s all selling, no analysis. Plus, their priorities are different from yours and mine. Worse, they think you’re doing great if your portfolio goes up 5% a year. Bullshit to that! If that’s all you want to make for taking stock market risks, put your money in Treasuries or CDs.
Well, here’s what I think … crude prices are a bubble that’s gonna burst soon. This is not the time to buy oil patch stocks — I’m selling off mine because I think they’re gonna drop.
If you have some “mad money” to gamble with and have the cast-iron stomach for a speculative play, one stock that could jump on a large oil price drop is Jet Blue. There’s a huge short position in this stock, it’s trading at it’s all-time low, book value exceeds stock price, and this airline would become profitable if oil drops to about $80/bbl. Even if oil prices stay high through this summer, JBLU has enough cash to stay afloat for quite a while; I don’t think they’ll go bankrupt, so the main downside here is a further decline in the stock price but there has to be support simply based on its asset ownership somewhere awfully close to the current price. I haven’t taken a position in this stock yet, but I’m watching it.
A safer play is Cabela’s (CAB), which has been publicly traded for 4 years now. Every year, it’s stock price fluctuates between a low of 15 and a high of 28. They’re a retailer (about 60% mail order and 40% storefront) in the hunting/fishing/camping space. They have the same problem as every other retailer — cash-strapped consumers who are reining in discretionary purchases — but there’s a couple of things about their business model that give them a leg up in the retail space. First of all, most of the sales and profits in a business of this type are clothing items, which people will keep buying no matter what the economy does because clothing is a necessity, and the type of Cabela’s sells is often a lower-cost replacement for more formal wear. Second, when the economy sucks and unemployment goes up, that’s when people have time to go fishing, hunting, and camping — and head to Cabela’s to gear up for these activities. So, their business is somewhat recession-proof. Third, when they build new stores — like they just did in Lacey — they get sweetheart deals from local government jurisdictions: Property tax breaks, local development funds, and that sort of thing, in exchange for providing a slew of retail jobs. In other words, their cost of building new stores is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, they’ve aced that game. CAB is currently below $14, has been under $12 this year, which is an all-time low for this stock, and I’m just waiting to find a bottom and then I’m gonna load up with maybe 1,000 shares and look for a quick flip with a profit of $5 to $7 a share in 6 months or so. Of course, that’s not guaranteed, but this stock is a OK as a long-term hold because it’ll see mid-20s again. That’s what I always do — when I go into a stock for a short-term flip, I always give myself some insurance by buying only stocks that have good long-term upside in case the short-term gain I’m looking for doesn’t materialize. I feel you need this extra insurance because nothing is ever guaranteed in the stock market. Over the long run, a stock’s price will always be closely related to its sales and profits, so if I like a company’s fundamentals that gives me confidence in the stock even if the short-term market is going sideways. You just hold on through those periods of irrationality and everything will be OK.
About 10 days ago, I quadrupled my existing position in Dynamic Materials. Although you’ve now missed the low on this stock — it’s up about $5 in the last 2 weeks — I don’t think it’s too late to get into this stock. It’s about $41 right now, down from last year’s high of $62, and given that it’s a growth stock providing industrial material used in the construction of oil refineries and pipelines that has a controlling market share in its industry segment, this is a great long-term hold as a small-cap growth stock, with superb fundamentals in every respect, and I don’t think it’s undervalued even at $60. I bought the extra shares looking for a quick flip — maybe a $10 to $15 bounce in the 6-month time horizon — but I have absolutely no problem holding the extra shares for several years. I like this stock a ton.
About 12 to 18 months out, if you have the stomach for beaten-down-stock plays — these are always more difficult to make money on despite great numbers because the market has lost confidence in them and when that happens it takes longer for them to come back and they don’t come back up as much — keep an eye on quality newspaper stocks. They’ve probably been oversold and their revenues and profits will recover to some extent when the current macroeconomic difficulties subside and advertising revenue from the real estate and car markets come back. It’s too soon to get into these stocks, although they’re probably at their lows now, and obviously this is a risky industry to bet on because their business model is undergoing fundamental changes as advertising dollars move from print to the internet. However, I think there may be good opportunities in carefully selected newspaper stocks after most of the rest of the stock market has recovered and it has become difficult to find bargains. This is where I might want to be flipping the profits I’m making this year in, say, 2010.
If oil prices crash, as I suspect they will, prime energy stocks (which are pricey now) may get oversold. If that happens, I’d be a buyer of those stocks at beaten-down prices, because energy is a growth industry over the next 10 years. Stay away from high-fliers in the alternative energy space, especially ethanol, though. These stocks are going to be big money-losers for people who buy them at inflated P/Es hoping they’ll be the next Microsoft or Exxon. They won’t. Most of them aren’t profitable without government subsidies and tax breaks.
Anybody ever worked at boeingS? (The ‘s’ is for anybody over about 55, by the way.)
Some of the salaried positions are perfectly described here.
The hourly guys at least have an assigned amount of daily work that is easily tracked.
And one of the supervisors spends AT LEAST 5 hours per shift on eBay. He thinks he’s cute by pulling the shades near his desk but you can see perfectly well what’s on his screen.
Of course, you don’t need me to identify possible stocks; you can do this yourself, and I’d rather you did, so you won’t blame me if one that I mentioned turns out badly. (And some will.) Look for a company that makes a good product that’s in demand, has a leadership position in its industry (i.e., is a preferred supplier to that industry’s customer base), indicia of reliable growth (i.e., steady long-term increases in sales and profits), low debt, and a wide enough trading range in the stock’s price to enable you to profit from its price swings. Stay away from popular “hot” stocks as these are usually overpriced by the time you hear about them. I tend to prefer companies that sell to other businesses instead of consumers, and I tend to prefer industrial products over high-tech.
@15 Banking has changed. The banks of our youth, that took in savings at modest rates and lent them back out at slightly higher rates, don’t exist anymore. The big commercial banks are loan sharks now. They don’t give a shit about attracting savers because they get most of the money they lend from the Federal Reserve. Economists call this “M3” and it’s money created out of thin air, and inflationary as hell. They treat their customers so badly it’s amazing they still have any customers. Pretty soon they’re not gonna have any shareholders either. That’s deregulation for ya.
I like credit unions. It’s, ya know, socialism; but it seems to work pretty good anyway. I may be a fucking capitalist, but I’m also a pragmatist, and will never allow a stupid ideology to get between me and the almighty dollar. Anyway, everyone knows that most of what we have in this country is corporate socialism, which is capitalist in name only. Exhibit A: the farm bill that Congress just passed.
@16 The alternative minimum tax is like veterans benefits — Republicans pay lip service to it … then do the opposite.
Holy shit! I made another $300 while typing this stuff. I’ve made $725 in the market this morning. No commute. No gas expense. No parking hassles. No job. No boss. No e-mail rules to comply with. No multi-tasking. No in-box. No meetings. No co-workers hitting me up for sex (always a dangerous business; they could be banging the boss at the same time, for all you know). Sure beats working! I don’t see why anyone would work or produce anything with a capitalist system like ours to suck on.
@17 Yeah, I’ll bet it was her, too! She’s the type.
@18 “By the way, I hear the hot secretary is a lesbian.”
Damn, that happened in my last office, too!
As I’ve always said, it’s better to get fucked by the stock market than to get fucked by a boss. Especially if she’s ugly and has tiny boobs.
I’ve made almost $15,000 in the stock market since April 1. As the total amount of money I originally put in the stock market is less than $20,000, that’s a fairly decent return on my capital. Sure beats the 1.25% that banks pay on their CDs! And beats the hell out of working for $2.13 an hour, which is what Mike McGavick thinks you’re worth. Honestly, I don’t see why anyone would work for Republicans. Make ’em sweep the floors and take out the garbage themselves! Honest work builds character, they tell us, and Republicans need all the character they can get as they don’t have any. There’s nothing wrong with capitalism when Democrats own all the stocks and Republicans do all the work! That’s my ultimate goal. It seems only fair, as they’ve had it the other way around for 150 years. It’s our turn now. And it’s their turn to kiss my furry ass — after all, I spent 45 years kissing theirs. Well, I don’t work anymore, I’m an Owner now, and now they work for me! As of 10 minutes ago, I’ve made $980 in the stock market this morning without lifting a finger, and it looks like I’m gonna break $1,000 today. Thank you Arabs! Thank you higher oil prices! One thing I’m not, is an ingrate.
P.S., Don’t forget to fill up your Hummer today, Redneck! And while you’re at it, you can give me a hummer too! I appreciate your business. Pay your gambling debt, fucking loser!
P.P.S., Just updated my portfolio screen (12:01 p.m.), and my take for today is now $1,075! Redneck must have hit the gas station 1 minute into his lunch break. I hope those cheap donuts he eats for lunch give him diabetes!
HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR
Hmmm, I got a nice little “pop” in the last 45 minutes of trading and made over $1,750 in the stock market today — without working it! And these stupid trolls think I’m a fucking commie? How stoopid can they get?! I (heart) capitalism — I’m a capitalist bunny! These crazy tax breaks for freeloaders like me don’t make any sense, though. I should pay the same taxes as people who work for money, otherwise there’s too much disincentive to work and everyone will become a lazy, good-for-nothing sloth like me.
Hey Rog–
Good for you…you Capitalist PIG (I mean Rabbit!)
I’m still keeping most of my powder dry outside my retirement funds.
Tied up a bunch in those 5.25% CD’s I took out last year that allowed me to add to the principal at any time. Tied up until November.
Also tax-free muni-bonds purchased years ago.
No debt.
Paid off rental houses with great tenants.
Life is good!
I think the market is consolidating for awhile..although there are always Gold Nuggets out there which you can attest to.
My risk assessment says wait for now and then average in.
Our lifestyle is fairly conservative although we do travel alot. I’m not into buying expensive cars & toys.
I’m an investor.
“I’m an investor.”
You’re also shallow and insipid.
RR: I’m going to stay away from the airline stocks. It’s too close to my “day job” industry, and what I really need is more diversification of my financial security.
I’ll take the other suggestions, and the general advice. But I still think you should be giving this advice as a subscription e-mail service, for a modest monthly fee. I’d pay for it.
Mr. Cynical,
Might want to think about some of those coal stocks. most of them bounced up about 7% today.
I think I’m buying in again tomorrow. Will let you know.
Damn near unloaded my TSL stock after it plunged. Thank goodness I wrote the June covered call and abosorbed the slide. Bumped up 5.20% today so I’m back to $1 per share to the good again. LOL.
It wasnt’ RR money, but at least it didnt’ get too sideways.
I’ve been all credit union for about a decade and I don’t have a credit card, thank you very much. If I do need any extra cash I use a line of credit from my credit union at about 8.75%
31. Steve spews:
“I’m an investor.”
You’re also shallow and insipid.
Steve–
Admit it…you are green with envy!
You need to actually have a job and invest your money Steve. Try it freeloader.
GBS–
Covered calls can be a great strategy.
Done it myself a number of times.
Minimize risk….at some potential cost.
How much of the Polar Ice Cap has to disappear before PuddyDick will believe in Global Warming? What a Moron asshole.
Ouch. I hope your wife doesn’t read this blog.