A customer troubled me in multiple ways - he has almost created a template for identifying bad customers

1. He returned some of the delivered material. Probably didn't need it anymore or got it cheaper elsewhere. Returns are very costly for the sender. Normally you can't return unless there's some defect.
2. When counted, the actual quantity of material in the return was less than what was claimed by the customer. However, the credit note from me was supposed to be made for the claimed quantity and not the actual received.
3. He called me to tell me that after sending me the return, the balance material that he did keep turned out to be less in quantity than what I said I had sent [net of return]. Meaning he was going to issue me a debit note for the "shortfall". I of course knew that this was a lie, since I always send properly counted material to my customers.
4. When the debit note was received, its amount was higher than the worth of the claimed "shortfall".
5. When it came to getting payment cheques [after the agreed credit period had passed], the customer made me hang for another 15-20 days. Some day he would say that he wasn't at factory, while another day he would say that he forgot the cheques at his home, and so on. Creative excuses. Needed to make 20-25 calls.
6. The day he finally gave the cheques, he made by employee [who had gone to collect cheques] wait for a full 2 hours before giving him cheques.
7. The cheques that were received weren't current - one [smaller one] was dated 10 days hence while the other [larger one] 22 days. Awesome!
8. Icing on the cake - the cumulative amount of the cheques was [somewhat] less than what was supposed to be the final figure!

One should stay away from such black sheep.

Increasingly evident that Trump is Nikki Haley's sugar daddy, and she's his mistress [COMPACTIDEA]

She's blindly supporting him on every matter. She's defending his foreign policy positions, no matter how repulsive some of those might be. She's doing whatever he's asking for. Not too different from a mistress. What's she getting in return? Media coverage, limelight, news headlines, the privilege of being with Trump, most likely an upward political career, and some other stuff as well. How is this different from what an ambitious mistress does?

Turkey looks like a suitable country to which the United Nations headquarters should be relocated [COMPACTIDEA]

• UN headquarters should be relocated outside the US. US frequently refuses to issue visas to those who don't align with its foreign policy, and this is unacceptable for UN. US is also far for many countries.
• Turkey is at the center of the world, much like Dubai, thus easily accessible.
• It is a fairly developed nation.
• Turkey is everything at once - it's Asia, it's Europe, it's Middle East, it's East, it's West.
• Antalya [the city/province] is an ideal candidate to host the UN headquarters. It's beautiful, its weather is good, has a good airport, it is properly connected by international flights, it's already heavily visited by tourists, has top hotels and also roads, it has mountains and plains and sea and waterfalls, and it's also accessible by sea transport.
• UN members will thoroughly enjoy doing important work for the world in the beautiful and picturesque Antalya.

Someone should do a separate United Nations General Assembly resolution and vote condemning America's, Nikki Haley's, and Trump's threats to the world over today's Jerusalem vote [COMPACTIDEA]

It's outrageous that America was able to threaten the entire world with regards to today's UNGA vote on Jerusalem. It's important - and I hope someone gets this idea and does it - that a second resolution be floated for vote. One that vehemently condemns the threats that US, Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump gave to about 180 countries [to either vote in favor of America, or have aid from US cut off]. This is an outrageous and unprecedented threat given to the entire world by America, and America should be tightly slapped by the entire world for imagining that it's about the world.

Oil-producing countries should all rapidly sell their crude before the world switches to alternatives sources of energy [COMPACTIDEA]

Felt this while reading the following text in this FT article:

"Strikingly, the oil fund’s advice for it to be allowed to sell out of petroleum stocks was grounded not in climate change arguments but financial ones. The fund owns about NKr320bn ($38bn) of oil and gas stocks, compared with the NKr350bn value of Norway’s stake in Statoil and about NKr4,000bn in petroleum still in the ground."

So Norway has about 475 billion dollars worth of unsold crude. Add Russia, Saudi, Iran, Venezuela, US, Canada, Iraq, China, Kuwait, Mexico, Brazil, Syria, Libya, and others. There's so much unsold crude oil left in the world. And a change could be just on the horizon - a likely permanent shift of mankind to clean, environment-friendly, and renewable sources of energy to power our planet. Crude oil might become worthless then. Unsold hydrocarbons lurking beneath the ground are better sold today [at whatever price] or else it could be a junk stock tomorrow.

America could secretly be plotting the destruction of Japan and South Korea, under the guise of the threat to itself from North Korea

Whenever America destroys a country - and it has destroyed very many countries in the last several decades - it gets ahead relatively. America turned the flourishing, rich and sprawling nation of Libya into a ruined graveyard, and thus its own position, although constant in absolute terms, improved relatively.

Now. America is extremely jealous of the industrial success of Japan and South Korea. These two nations have posed major challenges to America is every area, from sophisticated electronics to semiconductor manufacturing to shipbuilding to steelmaking to automobiles to robotics. If not for these two powerhouses, American exports - and thus American income - would skyrocket. Forget that America calls these two Asian nations its allies. Bullshit. No one is America's ally. They're all "assets" and "resources" for America. The tension going on between North Korea and America these days seems to me like it has been meticulously designed by America to occur this way, leading eventually to annihilating American bombardment of North Korea, and North Korea's retaliatory destruction of Japan and the South. America's military-industrial complex would get a huge new war to earn billions or maybe trillions from, America itself wouldn't be touched as it sits thousands of kilometers away, and Japan and South Korea would be utterly destroyed by the North, without it looking like America did the destruction of its "allies" [and America would itself destroy North Korea, thus eliminating a threat to its imperial ambitions]. Several of America's objectives would be served. So it seems like it's in America's interest to provoke, tease and threaten North Korea, baiting the North into conducting more and more ICBM/missile and nuclear tests in order to create "sufficient" pretext for invading them [supported in no small measure by America's vast news media propaganda complex, which will "prepare public opinion" for this invasion], and in order to force the North to bombard Japan and South Korea, in order to destroy the factories, industries, institutions and people of these two rivals.

Turning North Korea into an anti-US nuclear state is a brilliant geopolitical win by Vladimir Putin and Russia [COMPACTIDEA]

Moscow has frequently stated that its response(s) to American military buildup near Russia's borders doesn't need to be symmetric, but will in fact usually be asymmetric [and won't necessarily be publicized]. North Korea has quickly turned into a full nuclear state with a credible nuclear deterrent, and this shows that Russia has indeed responded to America's threatening, destabilizing and provocative moves with a masterstroke of its own. It is most likely Russia which has helped North Korea get the ICBM range required to strike anywhere within the US.

Of course, Russia publicly condemns missile and nuclear tests by North Korea. Privately, both Chinese and Russians probably laugh loudly, comforted by the fact that they've successfully nurtured a new nuclear nation against the global hegemony of the United States. This is a major tactical and strategic win by Vladimir Putin, and a much-needed slap on the face of America.