Originally published at: Oregon newspaper lays off staff and ends print edition after embezzler drains funds - Boing Boing
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It’s only news because it’s an employee destroying the paper by looting it, not the boss.
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This is semi local to me, and it’s one of those weird papers that lay between news daily and supermarket stuffer. My suspicion is, like with all these little local free papers that rely on advertising that their money problems vastly predates COVID, and the embezzling employees arrival. They almost shut down a few times already, but found an owner who seemingly is okay dumping a a few hundred grand a year into it. It’s likely this embezzler did damage them, but sadly your local free weeklies have been in trouble for a long time and not all of them find owners dumping hundreds of thousands in them a year.
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Based on that statement alone I’ll throw some money at their GoFundMe, and hopefully they’ll keep it gone.
Carl Sagan from Cosmos, Harmony of the Worlds:
Virtually every newspaper in America has a daily column on astrology, almost none of them have even a weekly column on astronomy.
Astrology developed into a strange discipline, a mixture of careful observations, mathematics, and record-keeping, with fuzzy thinking and pious fraud.
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In the 1990s, they said the internet, the web, was going to quickly destroy the industry. What it really did was give us analytics. We survived, but now knew that people only read two things: police reports and horoscopes
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at least since classified and personal ads became websites and apps anyway. ( and facebook took over obituaries 
)
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Do the anaylytics reveal a gendered tilt?
I’m a little surprised this is news. Sure it has hurt that organization, but it is a very small fraud. As staff are downsized and accounting help is hard to find, this is what happens. Internal controls get lax. However, in aggregate, fraud losses are massive.
Indeed, you gotta do what you can to survive, I just hate the reminder that my average, fellow human, to paraphrase Dr. Hathaway in Real Genius, has the I.Q. of a carrot.
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Those are in fact the two genders.
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Except IQ is a BS metric, people are smarter now than they ever have been, and Real Genius is a comedy, and Atherton as a character is not exactly the most accurate source for scientific rigor.
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My brother lives in Eugene. I hope he’s going to give them some money.
::ANGRY LOUD BUZZER::
Gender is a social construct and only partly connected to how our meatframes are equipped. 
/serious
(I mean, I don’t think of myself as any gender, despite what’s between my legs and the smexy red dress I’m rocking today because I’m feeling fancy…)
Have you heard of Florida? 
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The sunshine law state where all the police reports and incident reports must go to the press? Yes. Florida Man isn’t a statistical anomaly, it’s a result of what happens when the state has open records laws.
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Oh FFS, to paraphrase Mark Twain “don’t let facts get in the way of my comical, pointless, internet posts which in very little way reflect reality or my take on it”
Who will print of the uncontrolled lay-ons and Every Edition Is Weekend Editions? To say nothing of Quick Rummage Through Embezzling Employee Finds Tiny $7B PE Firm?
A $100K shortfall wouldn’t be enough to bring down the New York Times but this is a small newspaper that only had 10 people on staff, and some of those were likely working part-time. Considering the tight margins many small businesses operate under it’s not that surprising that this would be a big enough amount to break them.
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the last time i misplaced $7b, it fell between the couch cushions. unfortunately, i’ve also misplaced the couch.
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