I have been spending the bulk of the last three days on a horrible assignment. All I needed to do was find about twelve articles from the last month or so about business announcements in Western North Carolina. They were not to be political, so that got rid of all the EDC options. Repugnantly, most of what was left was stories of businesses giving stuff away. Let’s get sumpsing straight. Business is trade. Giveaways are charity. Customers are perfectly capable of giving to the charities of their choice, but they may be priced out of your products if you impose a charitable surcharge for your pet charities. Of course, the thing to do these days is start a business, get government to tax the folks so it can give you a grant, do some corporate-gifting to overhead agencies for good press, and then say we’re not socialist.
After applying the filters alluded to above, there remained mostly stories of awards and reassignments, which do not fit my definition of value-added economic activity, either. Still scraping the bottom. I have found only three articles that aren’t exactly exciting enough to sell magazines. Hey! If you know of anybody out there who is doing something new to add value to resources, shoot me an email before I turn into a pumpkin.