Central Vet: Fill & Download for Free

So glad you got kitty back! Watch out for Hepatic lipidosis or ‘fatty liver disease’. My cat had this during a traumatic moving experience. She’d been staying with a friend of ours in China and when it came time to bring her home to Australia via rabies free Hong Kong it hit her hard. We think the conditions in transit had a lot to do with it but there’s no way to know. She lost condition and had some vomiting but the giveaway symptom was extremely yellow eyes. Our little Liwu was fortunate enough to survive thanks to the efforts of the Hong Kong Pets Central vets, who introduced a feeding tube to stop her body from converting fat and inundating the liver.Here she is recovering, about three weeks after the peak of her illness.And more recently, about five years down the track. Liwu is still going strong.

There’s an assumption that, despite the stereotypes, most firms are in fact doing their best to provide reasonable service and products to their customers.The hierarchy of power, however, in almost all financial service firms, is (i) shareholders (ii) regulators (iii) customers, in that order. And, although compensation has been falling, it’s been falling from a high level: managers are compensated very well indeed for serving that hierarchy successfully.You should expect that, when you interact with a financial services firm, that the firm will put its own interests first. It will have arranged its interaction with you primarily to ensure that it is profitable for the firm. Second, it will have arranged its interaction so that it creates as little liability for the firm as possible - and, today, that usually means regulatory liability.For example, a retail bank that I know well has a monthly revenue target of $60,000 for each of its retail (not private banking) sales people, each of whom have a portfolio of about 100 bank customers with balances in excess of a certain amount. That’s $60,000 ($15,000 per week, $3,000 per day) of commissions, fees, spreads, generated from customers’ transactions. The products and services are centrally vetted to ensure minimal liability for the bank. A customer of the bank will therefore see a fairly limited subset of the financial ecosystem, that’s safe for the bank; and be encouraged to transact in a way that makes money for the bank. The poor salesperson’s job is to try to turn that into a value proposition for their clients.This is not dishonest behaviour by financial firms. It is a logical outcome of the constraints and objectives they face.So, on the assumption that most people dismiss the big bad Wall St they see in Hollywood as a fiction (and they should certainly dismiss the red braces, striped shirts, greaseball hair and champagne showers), they should not expect that the firm they’re dealing with, or the individual they’re dealing with, has their best interests at heart.For perfectly good commercial reasons, they won’t.

You don’t. The last time I thought I had spotted a fake veteran was in a bar in Central Bosnia.There was this chubby guy on our table who had quite long hair and talked with my friends about the military. I thought he didn’t really look like a soldier and therefore, I asked him if he’s ever been in the army.The guy just smiled, pointed under the table, and wrapped up the leg of his left trousers. Instead of a healthy leg, there was an artificial limb. He had lost his leg in a mine explosion.My friends told me that he had been the commander of a reconnaissance unit in one of the toughest spots on the frontline when it happened. I later heard that he even got some kind of medal for his bravery.I can’t remember ever feeling more embarrassed. Although I didn’t accuse him directly of faking anything, my “have you even fought” kind of question was a total a-hole move.Lesson learned. You can’t spot the fakers.