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In the U.S News and World Report online article, "Corporate Outlooks Worse than During Financial Crisis," author Danielle Kurtzleben explains that the Thomson Reuters research company recently reported that almost a 5 to 1 ratio of the S&P 500 companies were reporting negative earnings guidance, which indicates either poor earnings projections due to real reasons, or pure pessimism. Kurtzleben also ponders if these reports may be from companies dialing back their goals, in order to exceed them at the end of the quarter. My first inclination is that the latter is more of the culprit. Companies are "lowering the bar" so they can look like they've exceeded their expectations, and so economic reports will secure some semblance of investor confidence for their stock. It's smart, but only if they all do it en masse, like we're seeing here. This way, it will give the sense that the entire market is doing poorly, and the company HAD to lower expectations.

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Safety Myths We Could All Live Without Safety MythsI'm going to level with you today: There's a lot, and a mean a metric ton, of misinformation when it comes to safety in the workplace. The more experience you have, the more and more you discover which of the things you've been told actually seem to hold up to the action of a real workplace, and which advice becomes clearly idealistic and less useable. That said, why can't we just skip past the clutter? Why do myths about the nature of safety and accident prevention continue to circulate when experienced practitioners know them to be complete bologna? To be honest, I can't answer that, but hopefully what I can do is more useful; in this article, we're going to go over some common workplace safety myths and dissect them so that, with a whole lot of luck, they won't leave anyone's lips ever again. Accidents Happen Safety Myths AccidentsFirst of all, yes, accidents do happen… but the statement itself is dismissive, and suggests that some things are just out of our control. The problem with this sentiment is twofold. First of all, it's a slippery slope: If you decide one thing is out of your control, it's easier to accept that another thing might be as well. Before you know it, you're leaving too much up to chance and not enough up to your problem solving skills. The second problem is that the idea that accidents just "happen" of their own accord is silly and untrue. There is always something you can do, and you should always be actively improving your safety by finding these things as they come along. One counter example to this that people sometimes come up with is a case in which an employee does something really boneheaded and gets themselves into a dangerous situation. "Isn't that kind of out of my control?" one might ask. Actually, there are two possible situations here: 1. The worker deliberately put themselves in harm's way for some unknown reason. In this case, a resu