[5584] in APO Printshop
Re: Letterpress Printing - anne's jobs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kristin Kuhn)
Mon Feb 2 15:14:12 2009
In-Reply-To: <200902021331.n12DVAS1028343@byte-me.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 15:14:02 -0500
From: Kristin Kuhn <kkuhn@MIT.EDU>
To: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu>
Cc: Cat Thu Nguyen Huu <catthu@mit.edu>,
"Leonard H Tower Jr." <tower@alum.mit.edu>, apo-printshop@mit.edu
I plan on printing my wedding invitations at AX, so I don't think
printing wedding invitations should be against chapter policy. :D
I think the real issue is: is there anyone willing to take this job? I
have never designed, set, and run a job entirely on my own, so I am
reluctant to take a job where such quality is needed. But hey, I gotta
learn sometime, and I can always poke older and wiser press-ops for
design help and whatnot.
There was another job sent out recently to apo-printshop; I would like
to do *one* of these jobs, though I wouldn't be able to start thinking
about it until next week.
-kristin
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@mit.edu> wrote:
> [punted apo-presidenet; it's misspelled and the President is a Press Op]
>
> 1) The idea that we can only run jobs for charities is inconsistent with
> one of the major things the Printshop advertises - business cards.
> We could certainly have some policy that we'll only print business
> cards for people who work for charities, but we don't say that, and
> it'd be pretty extreme anyway, to the point of seldom running a non-APO
> job. And if you extend it to us printing business cards for anyone
> in the MIT community, you're in the same situation - except for actual
> employees of MIT, most business cards we'd print for a community member
> would be business cards for them in their capacity as employees of
> a commercial business, like their startup.
>
> 2) In the context of the AXcoAPO Printshop, we have no tax liabilities
> tied to Nationals to run afoul of. We are beholden only to MIT. Our
> only use of a federal tax ID number tied to Nationals is on the Sectional
> Account, which is unconnected with the operating expenses and income of the
> chapter and Printshop.
>
> 3) Businesses don't get married. So, the fact that we've printed wedding
> invitations before means we've been content to serve not only non-for-
> profit enterprises.
>
> 4) I'm not a lawyer. I'm certainly not a tax lawyer. I won't tell you
> that if MIT were brought before a court of tax law to determine whether
> it were acceptable for it as a 501(c)3 to have a student group print
> a hundred wedding invitations each year and accept compensation for
> the materials, that the court would find in MIT's favor. I'll tell
> you that MIT's not going to get sued for it and isn't going to court
> over it. MIT doesn't go to court even for major violations of federal
> law (like the telephone billing fiasco that lost the dorms free local
> phone service) most of the time.
>
> 5) The chapter as an MIT student group doesn't legally exist. We're not
> a business and can't have any legal action come against us (as the
> maintainers of the Sectional account, it's a different story somewhat,
> but that's not related here). MIT is the only legal entity that exists.
> If any problem came out of the <$100 we're looking at here, which I
> assure you the federal auditors a) don't care about and b) have seen
> in aggregate form over the years and not piped up about, what would occur
> is that the Controller's Office would tell SAFO to tell us we shouldn't
> do this any more. That's all. And we saw last term that when the
> CAO is displeased with some of our finances, they clearly know how
> to get the message to us.
>
> 6) We're not making serious profit; we're mostly billing for materials.
> This is consistent with the spirit of a nonprofit, all actual legal
> judgments aside. The Coke Fridge, and every other student group that
> has a similar institution (which is a lot of them) makes much more
> of a clear profit off of it, and especially if they ever let nonmembers
> buy from it (which most of them do sometimes), that's probably more
> of a technical legal problem... that nobody (including the IRS and MIT)
> cares about.
>
> 7) Agreed that this sort of job is not a good candidate for a training
> or qualifying run because of the quality expectations that will probably
> come with it. However, we finally have 4 pressops who are Actives in
> the Chapter, a couple other qualified alums aside from the journeymen,
> and more who want to be qualified. This means that if they want to
> (and we should hope that they do), we can finally start doing a bunch
> of jobs that aren't training or qual runs. Like this one, perhaps.
>
> Mitch
>
>> Hi Len,
>>
>> Thank you for your email. I have to disagree with your opinion that
>> service to a private individual is not service. For example, is it
>> true that volunteering for a homeless shelter is called service, while
>> helping a random homeless person is not? Although this is not a really
>> good analogy because the degree of impact (of helping a homeless
>> person and printing some invitations) is obviously different, the two
>> for-individual things in each had the same degree of similarity to
>> their respective things that are considered service (helping a group
>> of homeless people at the shelter to helping a homeless person, and
>> printing invitations for non-profit organizations to printing
>> invitations for individuals). I can say much much more than this, but
>> I'll stop here because I have no intention for this to become a
>> discussion on how to define service, and neither do I want to convince
>> anyone to change their opinion on this.
>>
>> I agree, however, that this _might_ not be the kind of service the
>> Chapter wants to provide. And although I said what I said in the
>> previous paragraph, it in fact had not occurred to me to consider the
>> nature of the job and how it matches our principles; so thank you for
>> reminding me about that. Nevertheless, after considering it I still
>> think there's nothing wrong with printing Anne's invitations. That
>> said, I was not aware of the Chapter's tax-exemption status, and I'm
>> not knowledgeable enough to say whether this does have some effects or
>> what we should do; so I'd like to hear someone else's opinions.
>>
>> I wasn't free before 4pm on Saturday, and when I came to the office
>> afterwards you and other people there at that time did not seem to
>> need more assistance. I'm really sorry if I misinterpreted the
>> situation. Thank you for doing all this - I know the recent week has
>> been a rush and all.
>>
>> Cat
>>
>>
>>
>> On Feb 2, 2009, at 12:47 AM, Leonard H Tower Jr. wrote:
>>
>> > hi cat (and apo-printshop and apo-president)
>> >
>> > i realized going home saturday night, that there was a second reason
>> > why i did not wish to be involved with anne's wedding invitations
>> >
>> > it was one of the press shop items i had hoped to talked with you
>> > about after the chapter meeting, but you wanted to help with book ex
>> > setup, and said you preferred e-mail
>> >
>> > the first, which i have talked a little about via email, is that
>> wedding invitations are not good jobs for training or qualifying runs
>> >
>> > the second is that AX shouldn't serve for-profit businesses or private
>> > individuals (even members of the mit community)
>> >
>> > i won't do either using AX facilities
>> > i wish my service to benefit non-profits and the work they do
>> >
>> > doing jobs for private individuals and for-profit businesses also
>> > violates the 501(c)3 tax-exempt status AX has both from MIT and
>> > National (it's more complicated than that, but it isn't worth the
>> > paperwork, even if MIT was willing to let us submit information for
>> > their 990A filing, and i expect it wouldn't pass the IRS regs in most
>> > cases)
>> >
>> > other press ops may feel differently about that, but i won't do
>> > anything further for anne's job, or jobs like it
>> >
>> > we have enough jobs about that can be used for training and
>> > qualifying. in fact, matt just gave me another that is perfect for a
>> > training run
>> >
>> > i'm sure that anne is a fine person, but that isn't what's important
>> > here
>> >
>> > there is more i will email about all the above in some days or next
>> > week, as well as the other half dozen or so open topics, but other
>> > parts of my life need attention
>> >
>> > i was ill the first week of iap, and quite ill the third week, and
>> > just did many days of service for ax this, the fourth week of iap:
>> > helped with the APOffice reorg, helped decker with her training run,
>> > did the typesetting for the reg day card over several days, helped
>> > kristen run the job over almost 10 hours on saturday, etc.
>> >
>> > thanx
>> >
>> > yiLFS -len
>>
>
