Here is the treasurer's report on Cyberspace Communications, Inc. finances
through December 31st, 2004.
Beginning Balance $3,235.52
Credits $420.00 Member contributions
$1.59 Interest on our savings account
------------
$421.59
Debits $84.43 Pumpkin Rent for January
$61.02 Electricity for December
$90.71 Phone Bill
$135.00 DSL December 15 through January 15
$5.85 Paypal fees (income = $122)
$38.31 Winter personal property taxes
$14.95 Renewal of grex.org
------------
$430.27
Ending Balance $3,226.84
Our current balance breaks down as follows:
$2,970.30 General Fund
$173.99 Silly Hat Fund
$60.00 Spare Parts Fund
$22.55 Infrastructure Fund
The money is distributed like this:
$338.57 Checking account
$2,888.27 Savings account earning 0.55% interest annually
We had two new members in December (blaise and nharmon). We are currently
at 70 members, 65 of whom are paid through at least January 15th. (The
others expired recently and are in a grace period.)
Notes:
- Grex pays personal property taxes on all the stuff it owns. About 2/3 of
the taxes are paid in the summer, and 1/3 in the winter.
- It's been my honor to be your treasurer for the last 4 years, and for 8 of
the last 9 years. This is my last report - I'll be handing over all the
data and the duties to whomever the board elects later this month.
My parting thoughts: Grex survives solely on good will. Grex can only exist
if people care enough about it, and feel positively enough toward it, to
contribute their time and their money. Since its inception, I think, there
has been a danger that Grex will descend into a whirlpool of self-loathing
and ennui.
It's survived largely because there has been a core group of people who
cared enough to try to make it something else. That means contributing
money and time, and it also means entering items and responses to counter
those that eat away at our community. And sometimes it means fighting the
good fight, when people have sought to destroy us.
There are more of us here who want Grex to survive than there are people who
want it destroyed. Sometimes it doesn't seem that way, if we measure the
balance of constructive versus destructive posts. But if you count people,
the positives win hands down.
My parting wish is that if you care about Grex, if you want it to survive,
you'll act, at least once in while, to help it be a healthy community. If
everyone who cares does a little bit (becomes a member, contributes ideas in
garage, becomes a staff member, or ignores a twit, for example), Grex should
have no problem staying alive and vibrant.
But, don't get me wrong, there is a real danger that the bastards will wear
us down. Our membership has eroded during the last 3 years, and we have
lost a lot of money over that time. That's *not* healthy. The board is
working to cut expenses, but don't count on that to be the end of the
matter. If our solution to shrinking income is to shrink what we do, then
that is the path toward decline. If everyone starts to feel like it's
someone else's job to keep Grex alive, then Grex will die.
I've done my time, and will take a break now, and try to write my thesis
this year. If it goes well, and I have a Ph.D. in a year, then maybe I'll
run for the board again. Who knows. I've put a lot of myself into this job
over the last 9 years, and it's time for someone else to have a turn.
So, let me say it again: if Grex is important to you, even a little,
consider doing something more to help it be healthy. Even (or especially)
if it's not exactly what you think it should be. Become a member,
contribute ideas, contribute time, contribute joy. All of these are needed
to make a community.
Thanks to everyone who contributed in December:
arabella, blaise, charcat, dpc, glenda, kd3hw, nharmon, robh, steve,
witling, wlevak, and one person who asked to remain anonymous.
If you or your institution would like to become a member of Grex, it
only costs $6/month or $60/year. Send money to:
Cyberspace Communications
P. O. Box 4432
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-4432
If you pay by cash or money order, please include a photocopy of some
form of ID. I can't add you to the rolls without ID. (If you pay
with a personal check that has your name pre-printed on it, we
consider that a good enough ID.) Type !support or see
http://www.cyberspace.org/member.html for more info.
56 responses total.
For me, it's people like Mark that make Grex special and worthwhile. Thank you, so much, Mark. Your comments are right on the mark. Grex is so much more than what is most obvious.
Hear, hear. Although I'm sure many people would say that not all of my posts are positive (including myself), I'm one of the people who wants Grex to endure.
Thank you, Mark - you are clear-minded, hard-working, and a true inspiration. As someone who is in the middle of his PhD thesis write-up, I wish you the very best during this mammoth task - but, I know you will succeed with your application and attention to detail. Thank you again :)
Thanks for all your hard work Mark, you will be hard to replace I'm sure.
Thanks, Mark.
Thanks, Mark. You have done a marvelous job. Big shoes to fill.
Thank you, aruba, and best of fortune with your thesis.
There can't be too many thanks given to aruba. And that goes for the rest of the baff, including janc, mary, gelinas, and many others. Thanks for all you have done, and continue to do to keep grex running. Whether or not it remains a place worth supporting is TBD and largely in the eye of the beholder. I think that most would still say YES! :-)
0.55% interest?? Sheesh! The Internet bank NetBank gives me 1.9% annually on my Money Market account! It may have just gone up in the last few months, but I know it's never been less than 1%, and you don't need a lot of money to get this rate, which is their lowest. Check out www.netbank.com for more details.
NetBank has the following benefits:
No monthly service charge with an average monthly balance of
$500 or more
Interest compounds daily and is credited monthly
Free first box of personalized checks
Free online statements
Free ATM card available
No minimum balance is required to earn interest
Access your account via computer, telephone, wireless PDA or
WAP phone
Account may be used as overdraft protection on your NetBank
Checking account
----------
I know I'm new here (just a few hours), but when I saw how little
was earned on the savings, I had to speak up.
Shutting up now...
It is a pretty sucky rate we have, that's for sure. A while back Grex decided that we wanted to be conservative with our savings, and that money markets were just a bit too risky. Because, after all, a money market is an investment, and its value can potentially decrease. Perhaps it's time to revisit that decision. But we don't really have enough cash reserves for it to make much of a difference. Juan - thanks for contributing ideas! They are most certainly welcome here.
Grex also decided against a 5% CD - because it was not insured?
This response has been erased.
Right, but with a CD your money is locked up for a period of time, years worth of time usually. Grex's money needs to be safe and readily available.
This response has been erased.
I wouldn't the little money Grex has tied up at all. Not even for one month. That money should be available to keep Grex up and running. But I love how this discussion comes up from time to time. It's a little like thinking about what you'll do with all those lottery winnings you'll have, someday.
s/wouldn't for/wouldn't want
That's you, Mary. Personally, I'd like to see grex make a little money by putting $1000 or so into a CD.
Okay, let's think it through. That's about half the money we have. Say we sink $1,000 into a CD, 90 days, paying 3%. That's about the best deal I can find with my quick 30 second internet search. At the end of each ninety day period we'll be ahead (drum roll here)... $7.50. Wow, let me catch my breath. And for that $7.50 the treasurer will need to keep an eye on yet another account and we'll have to hope nothing goes wrong and we need that money to keep Grex online. If we did need to get at it sooner, well, I'm not sure what the penalty would be, but I'd bet it would eat away at our awesome profits pretty damn fast. Half our income, tied up for 90 days at a time, for $7.50. Are you really advocating we do this?
I guess I just don't see the problem. Have we really needed to get at our money *that quickly* in the past? What could happen that could possibly cost use $1000? We could buy a whole new Grex machine for what we'd have left in savings. Let's seriously evaluate the risk here: it's just not that great. Am I seriously advocating an account that earns more interest than the savings account we have now? No, not really. It would be nice, but our financial situation isn't so dire that I feel it necessary. But, on the other hand, I'm not willing to dismiss ideas out of hand.
Logistically it increases the burden on the treasurer to manage the CD investment, and when rollover time comes around to either allow it to roll over or not if we think we might need the money, with a penalty for not acting within a fairly narrow time window. I guess this would be up to whomever becomes treasurer but if we value his/her time at all it seems unlikely to be worth it.
This response has been erased.
What Marc says is correct. We did have a CD at TCF for a while, and it worked like this: you could buy a CD for any number of months. Most of the possible periods had pretty low rates. But there were a few periods which were "on sale" - they had a much better rate. We bought one of those. The thing was, the periods that were on sale changed once in a while; so 8 months might be on sale at one point, and then a while later it's not, but 6 months is on sale instead. However, if you bought an 8-month CD when it was on sale, it will automatically renew for another 8 months unless you go down to the bank within a certain one-week windo and tell them you don't want that. And if it renews, it will no longer be at the special high rate, but rather at the standard, sucky rate. So buying CDs requires the treasurer to keep on his toes. It's not a great hardship, but still, I feel like it's a big enough job already. But if someone wants to be Grex's CFO and do the legwork to move money around, then hey, it might be worth the extra $7.50 per quarter.
Couldn't the treasurer be reimbursed say $20 an hour for time and travel expenses to do the job. ;-)
(I'd love to see the personal finances of some of those advising Grex.) Yes, we could pay the treasurer for this time. Counting driving, parking, banking and return, that's about an hour a renewal. Four times a year. $80 to the treasurer. $28 for Grex.
re #25 (I'd love to see the personal finances of some of those advising Grex.) Who in particular?
A five-year CD paid about 5% at the time and the penalty for early withdrawal was not very high and after half a year or so you would be ahead even if you withdrew early. I thought the objection was to the lack of insurance but some people also felt it would be immoral to withdraw early.
I'm not sure about immoral, but I think maybe unethical. Some people will disagree. I certainly was afraid that withdrawing money early might not be as simple as saying we wanted to and paying the penalty. I suspected there might be hoops to jump through and other obstacles, and that we might ruin our credit rating (or some other statistic about us.) And that even if we understood the rules at the time we bought the CD, they might change by the end. But, I don't really know about any of that. If anyone has expeience with cashing in a CD early, I'd like to hear about it.
You pay tax on it and any penalty fees the bank has. That's the sum of it.
Regarding #25; You know, Mary, that was just a rude thing to say. And you seem to say rude things with surprising frequency. If someone has advice, even if you disagree with it, why not thank them for their opinion, and move on? Why the continual stream of snide comments?
[this, by the way, let me remind you, is because of the rude things mary said to cross that made him <s>resign</s> from staff, but it can only come out now, when he doesn't have anything PERSONAL riding on it.].
Play nice, everyone. ;-)
This response has been erased.
It does, as mary states, come down to one simple fact. We're staffed by volunteers. Just how much time and money do YOU think they should pay for the priveledge? It's MUCH easier to talk about what somebody ELSE should do, than do it yourself.
Regarding #32; Hey, please apply that advice to yourself!
Regarding #24; I hope no one thought I was serious, just my attempt at humor.
mary remmers is a kerl
This response has been erased.
They can't wrap their brains around the fact that supporting anti-restoration of the valerie and jep items was truly immoral and unethical. It's an Orwellian definition issue they need to work through.
This response has been erased.
I completely don't understand what jp2 is talking about. (1) Grex didn't crash. (2) If it had crashed, how would that have proved which empirical claim? Before I attempt to explain why people might think that "breaking a CD" would be immoral or inethical, I should note that I personally don't think that it would be. However, I like to think I have some capacity of under- standing points of view different from my own, so I'll try to help you out. Let's say two party's agree to a contract. Party A later invokes a clause in the contract the consequences of which are seriously detrimental to party B. Has party A acted in a manner immoral or inethical. Business logic says "no". Party B agreed to the contract, and has nothing to complain about so long as party A is within the terms of the contract. Personal logic isn't so clear. Whatever business logic says, party B is likely to stop regarding party A as a friend. Party B may feel stabbed in the back. The question of which kind of logic applies to which situation is frequently difficult. Personally, even in my business dealings, I do not care to push my own advantage too far at the expense of others. My concept of an ideal business deal is one where everyone wins. Some people, however, go much further than I in prefering to apply what I called "personal logic" to all their dealings. I think that end of the spectrum is where the idea that things like "breaking a CD" is immoral come from. Personally, I think in this particular instance, it just doesn't apply. The bank wrote the CD contract. I'd be astonished if there is any clause in it that isn't advantageous to them. Withdrawing early for some penalty is just exercising one of the options the bank offered you at the time you signed the contract. If they didn't offer that option, very likely they'd sell many fewer of them. So, I don't agree with this particular way of thinking, but I do, in a way, admire it.
Jan explained that better than I could have. I guess I apply personal ethics to all my dealings, for better or for worse.
I think the penalty was something like losing half a year's interest on the amount withdrawn. So if you got a 5 year CD and withdrew some money after a year, and it was paying 5%, and a savings account was paying 2.5%, you would be even. If the CD paid 3% and savings 0.5%, you would be way ahead. If a current CD pays 3% and a savings account 1%, withdrawal after 1 year instead of 5 would net you .5% more than leaving it in savings. (3% minus 1.5% = 1.5% as opposed to 1%). What are current rates and someone please correct me if the half year is wrong. I thought the major objection was lack of insurance on the investment. Or something of the sort - some escape clause that the bank tells me has never been using, in case of national emergencies.
Re. 41: If you had an capacity at all to understand other people's point(s), blunts, etc. of view, you would have realized that Jamie was just being silly and taking a cheap shot at empirical methods of producing/reducing evidence.
I guess Jamie and you are in my blindspot, because I understand neither his comment nor your explanation of it.
This response has been erased.
The best test of any theory is its predictive power.
I predict that the GreX CD will be a MuchMusic hit.
Why does anyone want to kill the CD? Isn't it an investment?
Yes, were we to own one, it would be an investment. But sometimes, investments have to be liquidated. In general, it is better to liquidate at maturity. However, that is not always possible. Still, you don't want to get a reputation for cashing out early.
What would happen if you "got a reputation for cashing out early"? At the next nonprofit organization dance, all the other nonprofits would gather around and make fun of you for your "premature withdrawal"?
Banks might be less willing to sell you a CD.
That is not my experience. They still get their dough. If it were such a bad thing, they wouldn't allow it.
In any case, if banks (strangely) became reluctant to sell us CD's then we'd be no worse off than we are now, when we aren't buying CD's for other reasons. I have two reservations about buying CD's. First, I don't think Grex should normally be sitting on a large amount of cash. Our money is donated to us by users, who would probably prefer to see it invested in the system than to see it deposited in the bank. So we should not be sitting on more than a short term cushion, which isn't really a lot of money and isn't going to earn a lot no matter how you invest it. If we have a big disaster and need a lot of money, then we should expect to have to raise it from our users. Grex's real financial cushion rests in the good will of our user community, not in our bank account. If we ever had enough money that we could confidently put a substantial sum away for a long period of time, then I think that money should be invested in Grex, not put away. Grex should invest in Grex. Second, it adds extra work for the treasurer, who already has plenty to do. For the limited amount of money it earns us, this may not be worth the bother.
I also believe there is some sort of income threshold where Grex would be expected to start making voluntary disclosures about its operations to the Michigan State tax enforcement squad of auditors. They kind of keep an eye on non-profits that start operating at a higher level of liquid capital than the previous year.
TROGG IS DAVID BLAINE
You have several choices: