STAR WARS ONE TWO AND THREE

There are continuing complaints about the "first three" Star Wars movies. Someone says they are too digital. Someone else says they are not focused enough on the people. I have problems with a child queen who becomes an ambassador.

I am fairly certain that none of these reasons are why you do not LOVE the movies. The "first three" are not a hero's quest. They are about how a person becomes a villain. As such, they are not really fun.

Starting with Yoda saying that Anakin is too old, we are left to wonder if a child that young can already be too scarred by slavery to train as a Jedi. We watch while the soon to be Emperor arranges for Anakin to hold his dying mother. We watch Anakin's horrible reaction. We watch Anakin decide that HIS child is more important than all other children.

These are movies meant to cause discomfort.

Perhaps you are missing the lesson. Someone once said, "Give me a child until he is six and he will be mine forever."

Personally, I think the world would have a lot fewer villains if EVERY child was greeted by parents with great joy. Each child deserves loving parents, a home, enough food, an education, an opportunity to earn a living.

THANK YOU MOM FOR LETTING ME RIDE

I LOVED to ride horses. There is nothing like the empathy you can sometimes get with a horse that you ride often.

My grandmother did not want me to ride horses, as she was afraid that I would fall off and be dragged to death. (I guess that happened once to someone my grandmother knew.) But Mom said, "Let her ride. She could be killed crossing the street."

I have always been grateful.

When I was grown, I rode a motorcycle. (I sold my super beetle to finance my first law office.) I made the mistake of telling my children about the motorcycle.

Now, I am telling you, NO CHILD OF MINE IS GOING TO RIDE A MOTORCYCLE. Yah, right.

To quote my favorite Masterpiece theater movie, "If you can control your children, you are doing something wrong."

Please encourage your children to ride, swim, play outside, climb, explore. Risks are a part of life. You can be killed crossing the street. That is no reason not to live life to its fullest, while you can.

DO YOU OWN YOUR HOUSE OR DOES YOUR HOUSE OWN YOU?

Many people believe owning a big, huge, expensive home is an indication of their social status. They will do anything to own an impressive home, including getting an "interest only" loan to buy the home. Everything they make goes into paying for the home. There is no money left over for trips, dinner out, movies, plays, or shopping.

In an "interest only" loan, you only pay the interest, you never actually pay any money toward eventually owning the home. Most home loans in the US are designed so that, if you stay in your home, you will pay off the mortgage completely after 30 years. Then you can live in the home without paying anything but repairs, insurance, and property taxes. Retirement becomes much easier.

People who believe a house is a statement of their success, often do not get to enjoy the house. If every cent of your income is going into paying for your house, you can not go out to dinner, throw parties or travel. You have no money to do anything but feed your home loan.

When housing prices are going up, sometimes the owner of the huge home can refinance. But when housing prices are stable or going down, the home actually owns you, you do not own the home.

Often, the people who are owned by a home use credit card debt to get at least some of the things they can not otherwise afford. Soon they are owned by both the home and the credit card companies.

Just because you can do something, does not mean that you should do something.

SIMPLE TAXES CAN BECOME UNFAIR TAXES

Many in California are PROUD of Proposition 13, which stopped the counties from raising property taxes on property unless there was a sale of that property.

It is a relatively simple tax measure which has all of the usual problems of a simple tax change. Lawyers are really smart and usually able to come up with a way around paying taxes.

Just look at the fact that corporations are paying WAY less property taxes than individuals (at least in California). Any reasonably bright attorney will suggest to their clients that they form a wholly owned subsidiary corporation to hold each piece of property. Then they can buy and sell the corporation rather than the property and never have an increase in their property taxes.

If you want to help "play the tax game" with the new congressional committee, you will need a tax guide. The best that I have ever found is the U.S. Master Tax Guide published by CCH. It is less than $100.00, and can be bought online. It is a one volume paperback. If you need in depth analysis of a particular problem, the Tax Guide will give you the IRS publication numbers, which is a good place to start.

Please remember that there is almost never a simple solution to a complex problem.

WEBSITE RESPONSIBILITY

Too many people are starting websites, which include people's personal information, without hiring a technical expert to insure that the website does not get hacked.

Is is extremely possible that having a website with personal information and little security could get you sued for any damages caused by the inadvertent release of personal information. Damages could include the emotional turmoil caused by release of personal information.

For instance, hotels with sloppy security have been held responsible for the emotional and physical damages caused by a rapist. Similarly, a website owner could be held responsible for the release of information which causes a robbery. Some people NEED privacy as they are being stalked.

The courts will not allow the website to blame the hacker for the loss of information if the website did not even have the minimal security necessary to protect the information.

For instance, the families of BART policemen could sue the union's website for the emotional distress caused by the posting of the BART policemen's addresses. This is because the union did not have the kind of security that is necessary to protect the privacy of the police officers.

Yes, the hackers may not be nice people. Or the hackers may have been making a political point. It makes no difference why hackers hack. Website owners know that there are hackers out there. They know that the police officers need to keep their home addresses private. Yet websites store the addresses of police officers without the security necessary to keep a bright teenager from hacking the websites.

The attorneys that handle these matters often take the case for a percentage of what they win (called a contingency fee). You may not have to pay them ANYTHING to take the case. They are called PERSONAL INJURY ATTORNEYS. You can get these attorneys even more interested if a group of you get together as the more people the greater the damages. There has to be a certain amount of money on the table for it to be worth while bringing a lawsuit.

It is unfortunate that people have to get sued before they will take the trouble to protect your personal information.

PEOPLE WHO DO NOT KNOW MATH MAY BE CONDEMNED TO BE VICTIMS

This week people kept telling me how many points the stock market was down.

During the debt crises, people kept telling me the amount of the nation debt.

Neither piece of information actually helps me make a decision.

We should be ALWAYS looking at the up and downs of the stock market in terms of PERCENTAGE. National debt should be discussed in terms of PERCENTAGE of the gross domestic product of the country being discussed.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. If you owe someone $1000.00, and your yearly pay is $1000.00, you will have difficulty paying the debt. This is because you owe someone 100% of your yearly income.

If you owe someone $1000.00 and your yearly pay is $10,000.00, you will probably have little difficulty in paying the debt. This is because you owe someone 10% of your yearly income.

If you have trouble figuring out what percentage means, always think of it in terms of cents on the dollar. 5% of a dollar is five cents. Fifty percent of a dollar is fifty cents. See how easy it is?

It is impressive to say the stock market is down 500 points. It is not impressive to say the stock market is down 5%.

You can really get upset if a nation's debt is over a trillion dollars. But if that nation's GNP is $10 trillion, then the numbers are WAY less upsetting as it is only 10% of the yearly "gross income" of that country.

One of the ways people get frightened into making stupid decisions is because they are reacting to the number of zeros because no one gives them the percentages.

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW BASIC MATH, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE VULNERABLE.

PANIC SELLING

The people who set up this fake financial crises are laughing at you as they wheel their roomful of monies to the offshore banks they use to avoid income tax.

You are selling your stock at a huge loss. They have bet on your selling. In fact, they were prepared to do this when the US Congress failed to approve a raise in the US debt ceiling. When that did not happen, they started using S & P to cause panic so that you lose money and they make money.

It is ludicrous to think that the US will not keep being one of the top economies in the world. Yes, I know that outsiders have a huge problem understanding our politics.

To quote my father, "It is a terrible system, but it is the best one that anyone has come up with yet."

WE WILL WORK THIS OUT. Meanwhile, if you panic, you will be VERY SORRY when those who did not sell get all their equity back in a month or so.

THE US STOCK MARKET

"The only thing you have to fear is fear itself." Winston Churchill.

Right now, the stock market seems to be reacting to the fact that things used to be scary. People held it together during the 2008 financial crisis, which is now pretty much solved. The Tea Party People are reacting to this delayed fear, which is why there was so much fussing over the national debt.

But it seems to me that the stock market is now facing all of its normal problems of whether or not the information on a stock is reliable, etc. If you can not cope with that kind of uncertainty, you are in the wrong business.

If you want to be afraid, be afraid of flying in the US. The Federal Aviation Administration, the people who make sure your plane is safe, is out of funds due to more Tea Party machinations. Rural airports are especially affected, so be careful on your vacation.

SUMMER VACATION FOR US & EUROPE

At least in the US and Europe, August is the month that NOTHING gets done. ALMOST EVERYBODY goes on vacation.

Vacations are really important. Your brain needs exercise, rest and relaxation. Those people who work 24/7 are actually psychologically ill. (24/7 was a term used during the dot com era. It means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.)

Almost all of us push beyond a 40 hour week when we are meeting a deadline, finishing a movie, presenting the design, whatever. But some people have begun to equate working all of the time to being a good employee. Often, the person is working that hard so no one else discovers that (s)he makes too many mistakes or is stealing money.

If you are forcing your employees to work over 40 hours, you are setting yourself up for the mistakes that come from being too close to something to see the fatal flaw.

SO GO PLAY. If you can not play internationally, play locally. BUT GO PLAY.

AMAZON AND STATE SALES TAX

Amazon, the huge internet marketplace for books and other useful things, does not want to pay sales or use tax. Amazon wants to be treated like a paper catalog company, which only charges sales tax to the people in its own state.

Amazon would not exist without BILLIONS of dollars of taxpayer money spent on developing and engineering what we now call the internet. The US generally allows such research to go into the public domain, which means that it is available for anyone to use at no charge.

So the taxpayers paid for most of the research used to build this neat-o thing called the internet.

You would thing that good corporate citizens would embrace the payment of sales tax as a way to repay us all for the opportunities that now exist to make money on the internet.

BUT NO. Amazon is going to amazing and rather shabby lengths to avoid paying sales tax.

I CAN NOT BRING MYSELF to order anything new from Amazon. Luckily there are A LOT of other internet companies to buy from.

BTW, historically, companies did not pay use taxes in large part because the accounting was such a pain. However, computers can now do such accounting in less than the blink of an eye. Again, most of the intellectual foundation for computers was paid for by us all and is owned by us all.