Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (33472)	4/20/2008 5:48:56 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 219890

CB, guild strength and toll gate power aside, one of the main factors in payment is the value of the thing being transacted. It takes a comparable effort to sell a divorce, an Airbus 380 or a beam for a house renovation. The people paying will pay a professional a certain proportion of the transaction. So the big deal is to sell an Airbus 380. A divorce is important to the couple and if they have a lot of loot to be looted, then they will pay a lot to somebody who can minimize their payment. The engineer designing the low value beam [necessary certainly and they don't want it to fall down but that's a gimmee] can't get much from the deal because it's so small anyway and there is plenty of competition to keep prices down. As I mentioned, we paid $900 an hour to a couple of 15th storey downtown lawyers, one a partner, in the tallest building of lawyers I could find, to handle our IRD situation. We were already paying a "professional", accountant to handle the situation, after decades of DIY tax affairs. The scale of the situation meant $900 an hour was cheap if the right outcome was achieved. Which, fortunately, it was, thanks to bright Raymond Yee who had previously worked for IRD and had gone to the client advice business instead. I didn't really use the height of the building as a key selection variable, but price per hour wasn't my dominant consideration. By the time people get to the lawyer stage of life, they are in trouble and the value of that trouble is high. So, they will pay more than for garden variety moments of inertia engineers. I could have hired cheaper lawyers out in the suburbs, but the chance of them knowing about the accounting profits method of calculating Grey List country taxation in FIFs [foreign investment funds] was low. The accountant was ignorant of the matter and she is supposed to be a tax expert and touted herself as such and was disparaging of lawyers until I flopped their legal opinion on her desk after she'd told us how doomed we were. She messed up on another significant matter too [which was another arcane matter; of foreign interest payments], but the IRD people didn't pick up on that either until they sent the case to their back-room geeks to look for points to attack. Few people in the country are complying with that tax law because nobody knows about it [though after some cases in Brisbane mortgages, more do]. But lawyers do have a good toll gate and run the government too, so they write laws while in government to benefit lawyers. Engineers are not in government and if they are, they don't write the countries' laws to say "You have to give lots of money to engineers". It's quite strange how the public is gulled by the whole government con game. They are seduced by the prospects of getting something for nothing. They see the government as a way for them to get something for nothing. They don't see that the government's purpose is to get something for nothing from THEM! The lawyers and government [the same thing essentially] are in cahoots with the other politicians to keep the whole game funded with as much as they can extract from the ignorant mob without causing riots. It's not really surprising that lawyers get a lot of money. Nor that the bewildered and ignorant local yokels live lives of impecunious quiet desperation = they go on voting for more of the same every election. Everything in the world makes sense if one can understand the engineering behind it = the causal relationships [which is what engineering is]. Mqurice