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Bible.com Investor Sues Company For Lack Of Profit
The board of Bible.com claims that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than to make money on the domain name, but an angry shareholder disagrees. From the article: "James Solakian filed the lawsuit in Delaware's Chancery Court against the board of Bible.com for breaching their duty by refusing to sell the site or run the company in a profitable way. The lawsuit cites a valuation done by a potential purchaser that estimated bible.com could be worth more than dictionary.com, which recently sold for more than $100 million."
Every once in a while I'll google around for a quote that I know is Biblical, simply because I want the chapter and verse.
bible.cc is one site that comes up in Google when you do that. It has multiple translations and languages even!
Bible.cc has bookstore links and just a few small ads. Bible.com has an interstitial, and comes off as "megachurch Christian" rather than Bible-study oriented.
That they failed to capitalize seems likely; but if every board that failed to capitalize were liable, it'd be a different world, or would it? I've held a number of stocks where there were shareholder class actions, and have always marveled that anybody would want to essentially sue themselves. The only winners are the lawyers. Suits like this are usually just a sign that the company is circling the drain.
There's really "nothing to see here. Move on".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor his website.
Maybe if it was set up with little or no regard for profit (like Wikipedia,) it would have had God's blessing and succeeded?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
No they don't. They have a responsibility to do whatever they want to do. If they say shareholders be damned, then shareholders be damned.
You can't invest in an "environmentally friendly" company and sue them because they aren't being as profitable as you think they could be. They might have other priorities.
Once you drink the Free Market kool-aid Profit is your prophet and you shall have no other gods or prophets.
The translators of the bible got it wrong. What they were supposed to say is: "It is easier for a man to enter a camel if he stands upon a box."
In all seriousness, most biblical scholars believe this is a mistranslation from Greek where the word for rope (ka' mi los) was mistaken for camel (ka' me los) since they are very similar. The original biblical phrase was more likely:
"It is easier for a rope to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven."
... as brought to you by Supply Side Jesus?
Check your premises.
Yeah, "it can be" - except it ISN'T. If the laws were completely different, murder *could* be legal, too. But it's not, because we don't live in alternate-reality-bizarro-world where up is down, left is right, and the ASPCA and the ACLU and a host of other non-secular charities aren't eligible for tax-deductible status, but religious organizations are.
Publication 78 from the IRS is pretty clear on what criteria qualify donations as tax-deductible, and there is even a search utility so you can make sure your organization of choice is a tax-deductible one.
The list is FAR longer and FAR more comprehensive than "churches", and in fact it absolutely does include the ASPCA, the ACLU, and battered women's shelters of any kind (since one of the qualifying organizations is "A community chest, corporation, trust, fund, or foundation, organized or created in the United States or its possessions, or under the laws of the United States, any state, the District of Columbia or any possession of the United States, and organized and operated exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, scientific, or literary purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals." Hard to argue that battered womens' shelter wouldn't qualify as being "operated exclusively for charitable" purposes - I don't think there's a womens' shelter out there that would attempt to monetize their clientele, and if they did, I'd submit that it would be absolutely monstrous and inhuman to grant them any sort of 'favored' status under tax law.
So yeah, if the government allowed you a deduction only for "charity to religious organizations," then you'd have a point. Since the deduction is allowed for "charity" - full stop, the point is ridiculous.
Only semantically. There is worlds of difference in the practice & principles implied by those two statements. One describes government encouraging voluntary charity by private individuals, which implies the free exercise of conscience by citizens. The other describes forced 'charity' by the government, put in place by a group of people who will use their fellow citizens to support goals and organizations they might not agree with or value at all. I'd say that the distinction is pretty clear, and hugely important.