Letter to Reporter

During the period of negotiations between Mercury Marine and their employees, we’ve heard continuously of Mercury Marine’s dire financial straits. Out of curiosity, I viewed Brunswick’s quarterly report and what I found was surprising.

Mercury Marine did indeed have sales decrease over 40% from a year ago quarter and lost $7.8 million. While that sounds pretty serious, it doesn’t tell the whole picture. That loss of $7.8 million included restructuring charges of $9.6 million. Restructuring charges are one-time charges related to layoffs and worker buyouts. Often quarterly results are reported in financial media excluding one-time charges; since the charges happen once they don’t tell you much about the state of a business. If we take the very reasonable action of ignoring these $9.6 million one-time losses, Mercury Marine had a quarterly profit of $1.8 million. Let me reiterate, Mercury Marine had a PROFIT of $1.8 million in the second quarter. Mr. Schwabero didn’t mention to the media, community and the workers that Mercury Marine actually was profitable based on its operations. Did Mr. Schwabero do this to extract more painful concessions out of its workers and more generous government incentives? Mr. Schwabero, I challenge you to explain your reasoning for making your company’s financial situation seem worse than it really is.

Mercury Marine is proposing permanent wage and benefit reductions to cover a loss caused by one-time expenses. Additionally, the current financial situation is caused by a 43% downturn in outboard business versus a year ago. The market will improve substantially over the next few years. If Brunswick isn’t satisfied with Mercury’s quarterly profit $1.8 million, they can wait a few years; it’ll get better. A more equitable method of restructuring would have Mercury offer generous early retirement packages to their workers in order to reduce manufacturing capacity.

Gee that's not misleading...

I figured since I'm starting a blog I might as well try to make a few bucks with it (yeah right). The best way to monetize (ooooooooh) traffic for small web sites is Google's AdSense program. AdSense allows you to add those little ads that you see on a Google search page and in the right column of this here site.  Anytime someone clicks on one of those ads I get a portion of the fee Google charges for the ad. Google doesn't just put a random ad there though. They look at the content of a page and put in an ad that they believe would interest the visitors of that page. And that's how this entry has come about.

It seems that Google thinks my visitors would be interested in sex offender registries. That's somewhat reasonable as my largest entry was about sex offenders. Now I want you to remember that sex offender registry information is available for free from every state and is online. Knowing that this information is free and that state budgets don't exactly have the money to fund this I started wondering and I checked it out. Seems the site is run by an outfit called National Alert Registry. I assume they are a corporation but its unclear as they don't actual add it their name (cuz you know then we might realize they're just a bunch of people making money off of sex offenders) They are registered with the Florida Department of State and are from DeLand, FL. They are a FOR-PROFIT corporation. But that's far from clear from their web site. Like I mentioned before at no time do they indicate that they are a company and in fact they mislead people into thinking they are an official government organization. Here's their "official site":

 

Now doesn't that look official? The seal on the side and the crest on the top ( I think its a crest, I don't know what its called) both make this look like it's part of the federal government. However again this is just some scam outfit from Florida trying to make a buck off of concerned parents who don't know better. National Alert Registry charges $4.95 per month to email you a list of sex offenders who have moved into your area. However all this information is free from your state and in the coming months a national sex offender registry will go online for FREE.

While I disagree with the concept of the sex offender registry, I can see someone feeling this is a useful service. But there is no excuse for these scam artists pretending to be official while making a buck off people's fear and insecurities.

Revelation 22:20: "He who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!"