Publishing My Writings and Enjoying an Afternoon at Home

I have to publish my About.com content for the month before the contract deadline later this week so I decided to stay home and get the new articles uploaded before this evening. The work needs to be moved from the Microsoft Word document I have saved in the cloud into html with cross links, which shouldn’t take much time. I’m still in the middle of a project to pre-write the next 12 months of content so I can set them to automatically publish. It would also create consistency so that people knew there would be a new article every, say, Monday and Wednesday or something.

After that is done, there are some things I need to do for the business, and then I might try to either finish some of the post drafts here at the blog and get them online this evening, or I’ll play Ni No Kuni depending on what I’m in the mood to do later.

That’s my day. Hanging out at home, working on one of the few business connections I still have to my youth by publishing on the site that first hired me when it was, itself, barely a start-up and I was only 18, and enjoying the perfect autumn panini sandwiches we created last year, along with a side of jalapeño chips and iced tea. (Yes, I know it is now winter, but they are so good and rich – the smoked applewood gouda cheese with the Swedish lingonberries is delicious!)

Joshua Kennon Perfect Panini and About Work

I ended up swapping my preferred berry from cranberries to imported Swedish lingonberries. The household is now evenly split among which is superior. (Psst … it’s lingonberries. They are magical. They only grow in a part of Sweden that has 24 hours of sunlight during the summers, and for a relatively short season. Their rarity in the United States is one of the reasons I didn’t know about them until my 20′s but now they are easily one of my favorite fruits. I like the Felix brand, personally.)

Maybe I should hire a secretary or assistant to upload all of this stuff for me. After all, I just need to write it … which I do, on multiple devices, in spare moments here and there, throughout the day. I mean, this blog alone now has 445 draft posts in various stages of development, most of which are between 500 and 2,000 words. They cover everything from signaling theory to portfolio management strategies.

Filed Under: My Life

Anon

Speaking of food, do you shop at Whole Foods? Even though I generally don’t cook at home, I highly recommend it! It’s not as expensive as people think (although some items are clearly specialty and command a hefty price).
FratMan

What’s your reaction to a story like this, Joshua?

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/bill-mcclellan/bill-mcclellan-miners-story-is-one-we-ve-seen-before/article_b0224c14-4756-5cca-a85a-2accd326740e.html
- http://www.joshuakennon.com/ Joshua Kennon
  
  This is really tough.
  
  Think about Nebraska Furniture Mart. It is a stand-alone Nebraska corporation that filed for corporate status on February 1st, 1957 when Rose Blumkin was running it. The firm has four directors of its Board of Directors – Irvin, Louie, and Ronald Blumkin and Warren Buffett. (Source filings.)
  
  It has its own outstanding stock, its own shareholder meeting, its own articles of incorporation, and its own bylaws. The directors set the dividend policy for when to distribute cash or invest in huge projects like this one.
  
  The only thing that makes it unique is that Berkshire Hathaway owns 80% of the shares of Nebraska Furniture Mart. Under long established tax rules in the United States, that means Berkshire can collect dividends from Nebraska Furniture Mart tax-free and treat them as regular earnings (which are then taxed when Berkshire does its filings). All of NFM’s financial statements are integrated with Berkshire’s, but the 20% belonging to the other stockholders gets backed out under the “minority interest” sections of the income statement and balance sheet.
  
  So imagine if NFM suddenly had an underfunded pension. In this alternate reality, it gets so bad that Buffett decides to spin off the holdings. Berkshire’s board takes a vote and the 80% of the stock held by the firm gets mailed to all of Berkshire’s stockholders.
  
  Suddenly you hold shares directly in Nebraska Furniture Mart. They are sitting there in your brokerage account.
  
  If 5 years go by, and the furniture mart failed, do they have a claim against Berkshire Hathaway?
  
  It’s complicated. In most cases, no. In some cases (such as draining the firm of equity and then purposely bankrupting), it might be yes if you could get a judge to consider the final dividends as a form of fraudulent transfer.
  
  If, on the other hand, Nebraska Furniture Mart had always been a part of Berkshire Hathaway, they were the same company, and then it was put in its own box and siphoned … or if the executives had been draining it of pay …
  
  I just don’t know. If you dismantel the current system, it could create chaos as investors didn’t know whether they would be on the hook for claims of now-non-related companies that were spun off years, or even decades, ago.
  
  I’d have to think about a solution. Solving it without causing more damage by your cure would be the key and with so many variables, you’d have to make sure to get it right the first time.