Tag Archives: Business

Oregon – 1 step forward & 2 steps back

Oregon is considering adding 2 items to the ballot this year.  1 is to allow non-heterosexual couples to marry, and the other is to allow bakers, florists, caterers, or any other business to discriminate against them under religious exemptions, in effect by stating that since their religious beliefs forbid gay & lesbian marriage, then they shouldn’t be forced to do business with them due to their religious beliefs.

If I were a retailer, couldn’t I use the same law to say that I don’t want gays & lesbians in my business?  If I were a developer or landlord, couldn’t I keep them out of my properties & neighborhoods?  And could a doctor refuse to treat them if they need emergency medical services?  What about keeping slaves, since the Bible, and therefore their religion condones slavery?  Acceptance of slavery is all over the Old Testaments & appears more than once in the New Testament as well.

If slavery is an antiquated Biblical idea that we’ve overcome, how about our negativity & discrimination toward gays & lesbians?

We can’t make laws to require everyone to come together as one in our society & care at least as much for each other as we do ourselves.  Besides being a hippie Utopian dream, we raise our young to be warlike, animalistic, reptilian-brained creatures who seem to have no compassion for anything but their own needs & desires, and we look at those ideas as being non-rewarding socialism unless we give it of our own volition in dribs & drabs of charity to make ourselves feel good, but we shouldn’t be making laws that continue to separate us from each other using standards applied unequally to segments within our society.  That is the definition of discrimination in a nutshell.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, we’re still fighting that battle.  Besides, I’ve always said that gays & lesbians have the right to get married & be as miserable as the rest of us married people.

Fight back — we can all be Matlock

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I was being harassed & legally extorted by a collection agency & their client, a cable TV company, but I beat them myself with no lawyer’s fees . . .

The cable company overcharged me almost $200 when I canceled my service toward the end of the month, yet they continued to bill me into the next month.  I wouldn’t pay it, so they gave it to the collection agent who, instead of contacting me about it & negotiating it or providing me with evidence of the debt, they instead held my credit history (and essentially my entire life) hostage by putting it on my credit report immediately & didn’t bother to contact me to try to collect it first.  I didn’t find out until I applied for credit some months later & was denied.  They wouldn’t remove it whether I paid or disputed it & they had no proof I owed it.

After arguing with them for a month, I paid it, then sued the cable company myself without a lawyer (“pro se” they call it) for the $200 I paid them.  I sued them in my state’s District Court/Small Claims Court (the lowest level, where I knew I could get a quick trial) & also asked for $10,000 in damages, which was the dollar limit of Small Claims.  I asked for punitive damages because I knew it would get their attention even though I knew that they don’t typically award punitive damages at this level.

It took me 4 months total, but the lawyer for the cable company was a contracted lawyer in my area & just wanted to get it settled & was real nice & polite; we never went to court.  I said “let’s make a deal — keep the $200, plus no reimbursement for my $150 lawsuit filing fee, and I’ll forget about the $10,000, but I want ALL evidence of the collection removed from my credit report (not just showing “paid”) at all 3 major credit bureaus, and my offer is firm”, which of course is only what I wanted all along.  He said no problem & it was done within a few weeks.  Cost me $350 & some time, but my credit is clean once again and it saved me thousands in interest costs as I was about to get a $300,000 mortgage.

I also beat a lawyer/collection agent who tried to collect an invalid debt against my dear old 85-yr old mom before she died, a debt that she didn’t owe for a contract for services that she never signed & never used.  There are a lot of companies that prey on old ladies, and this was one of them — a complete scam operation.

I beat them by simply citing the state law.  Collection agencies usually try to sue people to collect a debt that is over 3 years old (which is the limit for collecting it in our state) by claiming it’s a “breach of contract” lawsuit, which has a 6-year statute of limitations, but a bad debt is NOT a breach of contract under the laws of my state.

I first filed a Response to Complaint for my mom a soon as she got the notice, because if you don’t respond within the time frame required by the court (30 days in our case), we’d automatically lose.

I then followed it up 3 days later with a Motion to Dismiss With Prejudice (“with” prejudice means they can’t ever refile the case again, vs “without” prejudice) and requested the court dismiss the case due to the Bad Debt statute being only 3 years from the date of last activity — they call that the “DLA” in the credit/collection biz, and that this debt was older than 3 years & that they were trying to circumvent state law using the Breach of Contract statute.

Within 30 days, the lawyer filed its own Motion to Dismiss With Prejudice knowing they were beat.  I didn’t do this, but I should have filed a complaint with the State Bar in conjunction with it to put added pressure on them.  Of course, I’m not a lawyer and I’m not recommending anyone do this — I’m just sharing my own personal experiences an as anecdote on how I fought back & won.  Sadly, my mom died about a month before the case was settled & didn’t get a chance to see me win it for her, but she knew I would win anyway.

The unemployable

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The unemployment rate should always be at appx 7.5%, not 5% or less.  In regards to the “ideal” 5% figure, I believe that 4% of the public is unemployable in any capacity and/or won’t work, and 1% is employable but simply in-between jobs at the moment, but there’s another segment being left out, and they make all the difference in the world . . .

The people who should be working ARE working at 7.5%, and those who are entirely too stupid, incompetent or unemployable to find or keep a job are able to not only find work, they can bounce from job to job during a “boom” when unemployment rates are between 5% & 7.5% & continue screwing up life for everyone they come in contact with.

These people are the chronically unemployable, which means that sometimes they’re good employees & sometimes they’re bad.  This happens due to a number of reasons, e.g., poor work habits, poor personal decisions, addiction, personality disorders, you name it.

But if they get fired in a boom period, they’ll simply get hired on elsewhere due to a lack of qualified employees.  So there’s actually a segment of the population that will work, but they don’t do good work & you can’t work with them for long, or they’re just too damn stupid or lazy or shiftless to toe the line, and that figure is about 2.5% of the population in my opinion.

We may have 7.5 million people out there that we can’t keep employed and who cause trouble everywhere they go.  No, they’re not ALL your relatives or co-workers, though it may seem like that at times.

A boom period also brings in these same idiots who now think they that since they constantly clash with their employers & can’t hold a job for whatever reasons, they were meant to run a business, and many of them do so simply because they have no option otherwise.  They then proceed to screw over their customers because they aren’t smart enough to be in business and/or they’re perpetually under-capitalized & not tending to their business, and now they have no one to whom they can pass the buck.

Everybody I know who has a good brain & is a good person/businessman is making money right now.  At the current national unemployment rate of 7.3% as of Oct 2013, we have the perfect balance to keep the idiots “out of the loop” who don’t deserve to prosper & screw up the natural market balance.  It keeps out “loser” employees who are only working to fund a drug habit or simply pay whatever current debt they have that they can’t cover through their own normal, unscrupulous means (drug sales or the opportunity to steal is not good at this moment), plus it omits wannabe entrepreneurs who have no business being in business, including unscrupulous, inexperienced & low-capitalized employers/contractors, protecting those who know how to deliver goods & services properly, which protects consumers from shoddy business practices & horrible employees.

Be happy we’re where we’re at, as a buyer’s market is what we need to ensure not only that the few thriving experienced businesses are paid a proper profit margin, but mainly to protect consumers from unsound businesses that are riding the prosperity wave and trying to cash in to collect a dollar for a dime’s worth of service, who employ people who should be sitting on the sidelines until they get their act together.