Hi, Nick,

 

That's an old trick. But I will go with the Oxford Dictionary definition of "many" which is "much more than one."

 

If you want further confirmation that there are many dishonest businessmen, look through the business pages of your daily newspaper and see how many court cases there are involving dishonest practices by executives of mega-businesses and accept that dishonesty is not reserved for the giants of business but can occur at any level of business. (If you truly believe that a very tiny percentage of businessmen are dishonest, you have been ecxtremely fortunate in your dealings with home renovators.)

 

But I am glad we do agree that businesses will go down the tube if they maintain dishonest practices. And I am sure you would agree that even one dishonest businessman is too many.

 

I am not sure I can agree that an amended and updated version of a publication can be tagged as volume two. It should be labelled "revised and updated"; volume two indicates it comprises new information, not a rehash of volume one with a few changes included.

 

Again, it's a matter of integrity; it's not what we, the producers thinks, but the message that our product conveys to the buying public.

 

As we are both committed to honesty and integrity in our businesses (and home life, too) let's not quibble over semantics but be united in our efforts to reduce dishonesty in the marketplace.

 

Patch

 

 

Is the term quantify the same as define?

 

Quantify: Expressed as a percentage of the entirety...

And "much more than one" ain't gonna do it for me.

 

Let's see... 20 million plus businesses - a handful of scandals... let's see - what's that in terms of a percentage of the whole... seems like FAR less than even a tiny fraction of 1 percent.

 

BTW: The "dishonest ones" you seem to be referring to were employees - not business owners.

Hi Nick,

 

As I said before, it's an old trick to demand somebody quantifies the unquantifiable.  Is there a method of calculating the number of businessmen who carry out unethical practices? Not to my knowledge. To calculate it as the number of CEOS of megacorporations convicted in court compared to the number of active businessmen is unacceptable and tends to discredit your argument.

 

If you want evidence that there are more than the tiny fraction of one per cent that you quote, I suggest you contact the Better Business Bureau in any large city and find out the number of complaints lodged with them each year.

 

My own evidence is based on several years as an editor of a newspaper Action Line, which dealt with issues that included dishonesty by both businessmen and customers. I would not disagree with your assumption that the figure we are seeking is less than one per cent, but is it is a "tiny fraction of one per cent"? I won't ask you to quantify. Because even a tiny fraction of one per cent is too much and can cause incalculable damage to the community. You have only to look at the fall out from Enron (an infintinessimaly tiny fraction of one hundredth of one per cent) to realise that.

 

Your challenge to quantify also diverts our discussion away from integrity to what might be termed a quibble (evasion: OD) over statistics.  Our discussion, and we appeared to agree on our opinions, was on honesty in business.

 

My point, and I am not sure that you agreed with me on this, was that the original posting about "Volume One" did not include the information that there had to be an intention to produce, at least, a Volume Two before such a strategy should be used, leaving the door wide open for businessmen with questionable integrity to use the tactic when there was no intention of producing a second volume.

 

Can we at least come together on this?

 

Patch