My apologies to anyone stopping by during the past few days expecting to see something new. On a personal note, I’ve been writing articles to promote my book and disputing with an online publisher about it. I ended up pulling my articles from their site with the intention of publishing them on my own site AMHavens.com. At least there I have complete and total control (evil laugh). The downside is traffic is not nearly as substantial. The reasoning that won out, other than the principle that I was absolutely in line with their TOS and still they whined, was if I that extra traffic cannot be at least introduced to my book, what good does it do me? That and I’m a pigheaded jerk, to keep things clean.
In other news, I’m working on my garden. This is not a new thing but I am determined to expand on the success I had last year – my best year yet. The timing of things doesn’t hurt either. While I’ve been attempting to green up my thumb for years, the fearmongering as of late is certainly an added incentive.
Finally, the progeny is descending on the homestead this week and thus preparations are being made. This will be the first time in a couple of years so other things must take a back seat.
All that said, I feel compelled to at least agree with Tucker Carlson on one point – these recent protests and attacks on the Supreme Court justices as well as those on churches and pro-life organizations is indeed an attack on Christianity. It is as if Christ is once again being displayed by Pilate and the crowd is screaming “crucify him!”. Strangely enough, I wrote something just yesterday (yet unpublished) about the word “crucify”. Metaphorically, some say the word means to utterly destroy something. This rings true to me. Also yesterday, I concluded Carlson does not claim Christ. It is an observation rather than an accusation, as I noticed he always refers to Christians as “them” instead of “us”. It is a shame. Hopefully he will see the light.
On Twitter, I’ve had some revelations and some thoughts.
They released their earnings a week or so ago. They are bleeding money. So far it is a relatively small wound but they are not making a profit nonetheless.
As I purchased too late, I did not qualify for a dividend, had they actually turned a profit. Should I hold on to my stock AND they actually make a profit AND declare a dividend, I would then qualify. Then again, I’m didn’t buy the stock for the dividends. Even so, I DO expect them to be profitable as they are in business and not charity.
In the proxy info, I also learned I do not yet have a vote in the upcoming annual stockholder’s meeting. Again, I bought too late.
In addition I found out I have far less say than I thought I might. For instance one must own 1% of the company to recommend a board member. From what I was able to ascertain, it was a cursory glance so I need to verify this, I can band together with other stockholders so together, we can put up someone for the board, even if none of us has that magical 1%. Let’s run some numbers for the fun of it. First…
Musk owns 73,486,938 shares of Twitter, which represents a 9.2% passive stake in the company, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission 13G filing released Monday. The stake is worth $2.89 billion, based Twitter’s closing price Friday April 4, 2022
source: cnbc (I know… right?)
Okay so the price fluctuates meaning any calculations depend on settling on a stable price. Thus let’s fudge a bit. There are about 764 million Twitter shares outstanding. So 1% would be 7,640,000 million shares. I have ten shares. so I’m about 7,639,990 shares short of 1%. Put another way, from the figures in the cnbc story, 10% was worth about oh, let’s say, $3 billion give or take. Ten percent of $3 billion is $300 million. Either way you look at it, I’m a few dollars short.
Now if Twitter stock dropped to a penny per share, it would still cost me $80,000 to buy my 1%. It would take some doing. I may or may not make that but why in the world would I sink that kind of money into Twitter at that point?
Long story short, ain’t no way I’m owning enough Twitter to have a real voice. I haven’t looked into other aspects yet but I’m pretty sure I could still be a thorn in the corporate side. Once again, my idea of a shareholder group looms large. My voice might still be tiny but at least I’d have a chance to be heard, as would anyone else. But there’s another rub.
I’d also have to own the stock for three years. Yup. Can they do that? I’d say they can. Granted, this could be challenged in court but chances are, only the lawyers would win that one. In a way, this obstacle actually makes some sense. Considering my lowly stock holdings would have to work to be a drop in the capital bucket, imagine thousands of us stockholders all making countless demands and such. Stretch that imagination to include the idea that anyone could buy a single share and immediately start making demands. Such may be the ruin of any business. So, I can see the point of it and I don’t necessarily disagree.
Considering all of the above, I’d say the larger lesson is such adventures require much planning and some serious scouting. Now I did not have to prove I was a stockholder to gain access to the above information. I’m reasonably certain this would be true in most, if not all cases concerning public corporations. Additionally, the sheer scale of any corporation raising money should be taken into context.
While I am not ready to abandon the ideas of influencing corporate policies from the shareholder perspective, the stark reality of such an attempt tends to be a bit daunting. To be sure, such a reality exists for our constitutional aspects as well.
WE the People are the massive obstacle the authoritarians must face in order to have their way. To an extent, their outlook is far darker as WE CITZENS are limited to a single vote each. Thus it becomes obvious why the controllers are so intent on stuffing our ranks with illegals and then giving them voting “rights”. They cannot tip the scales in their favor otherwise.
The point we should all take on this is none of us can do this by ourselves. We need each other. We need to stick together as citizens, sovereign or corporate, and stand strong in the face of those who would grind us down.