| A.
R. Kakhsaz Company
an accountancy corporation
Member
American Institute of
Certified Public Accountants
International associates:
Tavana & Co.
Chartered Accountants
Toronto, Canada
Tel.416-229-2221
|
• H O L L Y W O O D
The iconic landmark sign was
officially dedicated in 1923. The
original sign was "HOLLYWOOD
LAND" until 1949.
• After years in the shadows,
medical marijuana in California is
aspiring to crack the commercial
mainstream. Sellers of marijuana
as a medicine here don't fret about
raids any more. Now their
concerns involve the state Board of
Equalization, which collects sales
tax and requires a retailer ID
number. Or city planning offices,
which insist that staircases
comply with the Americans With
Disabilities Act. Then there is
marketing strategy, which can
mean paying to be a "featured
dispensary" on a Web site for pot
smokers. "I want to do everything I
can to run this as a legitimate
business," says Jan Werner, 55
years old, who invested in a pot
store in a shopping mall after 36
years as a car salesman. Pot
possession remains illegal under
U.S. law.
• Immigration from Mexico
to the U.S. fell to the lowest level in
a decade in the past year. That's a
sign of the recession.
• How bad is the economy?
The economy is so bad that I
got a pre-declined credit card
in the mail.
• Workers don't quit like
before:
The number of workers who left
their jobs voluntarily slipped to 1.7
million in July, down from 2.6
million a year earlier. That's an
indication of how low confidence in
their ability to find a job has
become.
One of the clearest signs that the
labor market is improving is when
more people say, with no
apologies to the late Johnny
paycheck, "Take this job and
shove it."
•
For more of the Generalist,
please visit ARKCPA•COM.
|
• theGeneralist, a
one-page monthly
publication of the accounting firm of
A.R. Kakhsaz Company, is in its 15th
year of providing information, presented
fairly and accurately, from sources we
can depend upon and trust.
• Funding to liberate the Internet
in Tehran and Beijing:
Authoritarian regimes spend
fortunes censoring the Internet as
they fear the subversive potential
of digital communications. China
and Iran are world leaders in this
regard - models for other rogues
such as Syria and Saudi Arabia.
In countering the Green Revolution
last summer, Iran unveiled a new
high-tech apparatus for blocking
some Internet communications
outright, while monitoring others in
order to intimidate dissenters.
China uses more than 40,000
censors to limit Web content via
the so-called Great Firewall. The
Soviet Union felt similarly about
the Berlin Wall. U.S. Senate, in
last July, appropriated $30 million
to support digital tools for
undermining Internet censorship.
The Senate is funding groups with
"scalable, field tested
programs…for large numbers of
users living in closed societies."
The most important of these
groups is the Global Internet
Freedom Consortium (GIF),
whose software has been critical
in Iran. During protests of last
June 20 alone, more than one
million Iranians used GIF tools to
visit 390 million pages on the
uncensored Internet. The
programs allow users to bypass
censored domestic servers and
access the Internet via GIF's
foreign servers. Thereby users in
Damascus can make the same
Google searches as users in New
York, without leaving a trace.
Millions of would-be
cyber-dissidents are waiting.
• We see more in numbers
than just numbers...
Ali R. Kakhsaz, CPA, MAcc
www.arkcpa.com
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