The economy is sliding downhill, the stock markets have crashed, unemployment rates go up, and banks are going down (or belly up). Everybody seems to be slowing down in business - realtors are not selling homes, and those owners who do manage to sell are doing so at a reduced sale price. GM and Ford are finding it hard to make ends meet, and… well. You get the idea.

Rough times, and money is harder to find. Let’s look at some of us who are making some good money in this bad time in history. Maybe we can get some ideas!

5. Bankruptcy Lawyers

I don’t think I need to explain this one, do I? Bankruptcy has been going up around the world, including in North America as well as European nations. France is a nation known for its love for fine dining and wining, yet French restaurants are feeling the pinch of bankruptcy. Check out the Google Trends for the search term “Bankruptcy Lawyers”. It’s been rising the last few months it seems.

4. Divorce Lawyers

Tough economic times mean more strains on marriages, and we all know that financial problems are the number one cause for divorce. Divorces involve lawyers. They’re getting lots of business with all those households that are going into financial crisis.

3. Online Fraudsters

According to Symantec, online fraudsters who steal and abuse credit card information and bank account details will make $3.3b this year. That’s a lot more money than most financial institutions will net in profits this year.

2. Loan Sharks in HELOC

HELOC stands for Home Equity Line of Credit, and it refers to a loan that is made with your home equity on the line as collateral. If you default on your HELOC, the loan company can then take your home and sell it off to mitigate their losses in debts. But this in turn, obviously, becomes a huge asset to the loan sharks. In most default and foreclosure cases, chances are, the homeowner will lose a lot of money to the mortgage investors. Foreclosure rates in the US have been going up since late 2007. Of course, if property values drop down a lot more, then perhaps the resale of a foreclosed home may not return all of the money owed anymore.

1. Somali Pirates

This is my favorite one. Forget all the other lucrative recession-time opportunities listed above - check out the Somali pirates. They’ve been more active than ever, hijacking cargo ships full of goodies all over the high-seas. They made $150b this year. That’s a hell of a lot more than what Ford and GM are going to make this year. Sounds like the most lucrative gig on the list right now!

When I say “Junior” to James Bond, I’m not talking about the second Daniel Craig-bearing James Bond movie that just came out today, which I just saw at midnight this morning. However. I’m not here to talk about Quantum of Solace - I’m here to talk about James Bond Jr, Bond’s 17 year old nephew who has the streaks of a special agent slash hero. Yes, his name is James Bond Jr. Have you ever heard of him? Maybe, maybe not.

James Bond Jr. is a tv show that aired across the United States and Canada in 1991~1992. It was an old-school cartoon. I’m not talking about Family Guy style cartoon - this was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles type of a cartoon, strictly for kids. With the release of the second “new” 007 movie, I thought I’d pay tribute to the old tv show that I grew up on as a kid. I used to love this old show.

Michael Kwan is looking for cases where we’ve done something charitable for those in need. Well, I have a charitable act that I do very often that helps many many sides of our society.

You see, I’m not the average North American - privileged from birth, full of empathy and sympathy, trying to be self-righteous by doing small insignificant deeds of good that only makes the doer feel good while it does not fix the problem. I’m a very realistic person who sees things for the truth rather than idealism. I don’t believe in basics or minimums that are guaranteed by default, and I believe in Darwinism. Even the right to survive is, technically and truthfully, not a guarantee. We have won it as a society, and we also need to sustain it as individuals.

When you decide to cross the street at night wearing a black jacket, you are gambling with your right to life. When you decide to go to war with Iraq, you are forcefully taking away the right to life from innocent Iraqi civilians. In an ideal world, everybody has the right to live. But who said these rights are guaranteed? I don’t understand how these standards somehow became a philosophy. These standards we set are merely artificial human attempts at achieving a higher goal, but really, there’s no law in physics that grants us any kind of rights whatsoever.

When you ditch out on a job and decide to shoot up on heroine, eventually you will lose your right to an income. When you lose right to an income, you lose your rights to food, shelter. You’ll also lose the right to heroine, since money will be scarce. Eventually you will lose rights to live. You will die on the streets. Unless. We encounter the idiots who decide to give petty change to these people, feed them in soup kitchens, so as to grant them the right to food and heroine that rightfully should be taken away from them. It only makes the problem worse.

Some people might be saying at this point, “In some cases, it’s not their fault. They have mental illnesses.” or something of the sort. Once again, going back to the very basics of physics - nothing is guaranteed. Unfortunately some are born without adequate ability to survive. If they have rich parents who are willing to lend them the right to carry on, great. If they found some other talent through which they can obtain the right to live, great (paralympians, for example). If not, who the hell says that we as society should guarantee them basic rights just because they’re human beings? It’s all man-made, and merely an opinion. It’s not a golden standard, unfortunately.

When a homeless person asks me for change, my response is “No. Get a job.” If you are incapable of getting a job, REGARDLESS of whose fault it is, then you lose rights to money, and in consequence, you lose your rights to food, shelter, and ultimately, survival.

You see, if you give these guys change, they’ll carry on for another day. Buy cheap food, and cheap drugs. That doesn’t solve the problem. The only thing it might do is make you feel like a nice smug person who is generous and all. But it doesn’t really help anything in the long run.

I’m a more charitable person than those donating soups and change to the drug-addicted homeless people in downtown and the eastside (I live in Vancouver by the way). Because I encourage them to learn how to fish, so they can find their own rights, rather than borrow rights from others on a daily basis. We as society, thanks to our ancestors, have created this magnificent world of opportunity and wealth. If you can’t grasp even a tiny bit of it, too bad. Darwinism says you will just perish away and nobody will remember you. It’s cold, it’s sad, but it’s the truth.

Just to make things clear - I donate for other charitable causes that involve childrens charities, as well as international charities for Africa and what not. Their economy and way of life has been raided by the influence of Western civilization, the global economy and the currency exchange system that enslaves some of the poorest nations. This is a fact I cannot change because I’m not that powerful. To offset the fact that the wealths I enjoy are trickled down wealths from the global economy that leeches from the poor 3rd world countries and piles it up in the hands of North Americans, I donate for those causes. I just don’t give a single fucking penny to homeless people in Vancouver.

With advancement in mobile email technology in iPhones, Blackberries, and of course, laptops, the world of emails is evolving too. And Google is definitely on top of things, once again. Nearly a year ago my company, Synchronous Design & Marketing, switched to the Google Apps platform for our email and collaboration. We have not looked back since, and the productivity and accessibility is simply amazing.

Most hosting companies do not provide an IMAP platform, and the most common email method is POP3. Even worse, a lot of small businesses opt to simply forward their corporate emails to their hotmail or gmail accounts and reply from those addresses. The downside of using POP3 on your hosting server is that webmail access is often cumbersome and awkward (using CUBE mail or Squirrel Mail etc.) and if you have several computers, you have to delete emails or mark them as read emails on multiple platforms, and that includes your handhelds. With an IMAP platform, however if you read the email on your computer, it will be marked as read on your iPhone as well as your webmail platform.

Putting all this together is the Google Apps solution. This is how you activate Google Apps.

1. Visit https://www.google.com/a/.
2. Sign up for either the free or the Premium edition, as it fits you. You need to have a domain, or sign up for a domain on the spot.
3. Verify domain ownership.
4. Configure your MX record on your domain (this is through your web hosting company).
5. Configure your computer, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.

Using the Google Apps platform, your Mail Exchange record (MX Record) is updated so that all emails are routed go ghs.google.com, or a similar address. The emails are hosted on the Gmail platform, BUT using your domain natively. So even though you are on the gmail platform, you are still natively sending emails from your own company domain.

Using this set-up, you can have IMAP access to your emails from all devices, as well as advanced gmail access if you need webmail access while you’re on the road. As a matter of fact, I find myself often using the gmail platform on my portal at http://portal.synchronous.ca (you won’t be able to log in - you must be an employee) rather than Mail on my Macbook Pro. It’s fast, easy to use, well organized, and clean.

Other benefits of using Google Apps as your email and collaboration solutions are these:

• You get a calendar on the Google Apps platform which can be shared (or not shared) between employees, and synchronized to your desktop calendar (such as Outlook, or iCal)
• You get the Google Docs platform, on which you can do word processing, spreadsheets, and more. No more confusion on who has the most recent file of that proposal document. You work on it together online. And the functions are so robust, you won’t miss Microsoft Word or Pages.
• SalesForce is the most popular CRM solution on the market, and Google and Salesforce are partners. They offer an integrated CRM/Google Apps solution that integrate seamlessly with each other. Visit http://www.salesforce.com/googleapps/ for more details.

Using the Google Apps platform, we have achieved ease of use, time saving, easy collaboration and data sharing, better synchronization, and most of all, relaxation. It just works.

Today, October 14th is the day of the Canadian Federal Elections. Please go and vote. It is a privilege, an honour, and a responsibility as a citizen of Canada to go vote in the elections to make sure your voice is heard.

Many of you are already aware that I am a Liberal Party supporter, and I support them mainly based on their foreign policies, as well as tax regulations. The Conservative Party has robbed us by reducing one tax and increasing another one. The Conservative Party is also too much in line with aggressive partisan politics of the Republican Party down south.

Many Canadians are supporting a vote that will get the Partisan Harper government out - meaning, they are supporting voters to vote for whichever candidate has a better chance of defeating the Conservative candidate in the riding.

www.voteforenvironment.ca is one of the most prominent websites that promote the anti-Conservative vote. Essentially, these people (and myself) feel that getting the Conservative Government out by any means is a better way to ensure Canada experiences a balanced growth in a peaceful and respectful manner.

But. My opinions are my opinions, and as a staunch supporter of true democracy, I invite you to vote for whoever you wish to vote. Better to vote than to not vote, honestly.