Quotulatiousness

January 14, 2023

More on the Barnes & Noble turnaround

Filed under: Books, Business, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte looks at the Barnes & Noble recovery story (discussed a couple of weeks back):

“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Back in 2018, the bookselling chain was losing $18 million a year. It had just fired 1,800 full-time employees. About 150 stores had been closed, leaving the company with 600. It had lost its fourth CEO in five years, this one to a sexual-harassment charge. The firm’s big digital initiative, the Nook e-reader, was a flop. The share price was down 80 percent.

Not only was the business failing: it was demoralized. As the writer Ted Gioia noted in a recent newsletter, B&N had lost faith in the public’s willingness to buy books from anyone but Amazon. Its leadership “shifted a huge portion of its floorspace to peddling toys, greeting cards, calendars, and various tchotchkes”. It doubled down on in-store cafes and even tried launching freestanding Barnes & Noble restaurants.

Just when it seemed B&N was certain to follow the path of its former competitor, the Borders chain, which closed in 2011, it was purchased for $638 million (US) by Elliott Advisors, a hedge fund.

SHuSH has been skeptical about the record of hedge funds in the cultural space. We are also skeptical of hedge funds in the retail space where they have a well-established record of buying chains, slashing costs, and driving them into the ground: Sears, Toys R Us, Payless Shoes, Radio Shack, Aeropostale, Sports Authority, etc.

Elliott Advisors is an exception.

The UK based-firm has a demonstrated commitment to bookselling (at least in the medium term — more on this later). It bought the Waterstones chain in 2018. Waterstones and its 283 stores had been rescued from near-bankruptcy in 2011 by lifelong bookseller James Daunt and a Russian backer. Elliott kept Daunt at the helm and a year later bought Barnes & Noble and added this second chain to his responsibilities.

Daunt acknowledged that Barnes & Noble was in rough shape when acquired by Elliott. Its stores were “crucifyingly boring”. But he was confident the chain could be turned around. There was no template or magic ingredient, he said. It was a simple matter of “running really nice bookshops”. To that end, he gives his stores unusual autonomy to develop their own personalities and tailor their stock to the interests of their communities.

Barnes & Noble stores have since dropped most of their crap: they no longer look like big-box flea markets. They’ve quit accepting payments from the major publishers to put their books on display, a practice that brought B&N revenue but left publishers in charge of what customers saw when they walked into stores. Local managers now decide how their books are presented based on what they think will appeal to their customers.

The company used the COVID lockdown to freshen up its dowdy stores. Managers were instructed to take every single book off the shelves and “weed out the rubbish”. Walls were painted, aged carpet replaced, furnishings upgraded. The result is a much improved browsing experience. Readers like to browse.

There were hard decisions, too. Daunt cut the B&N head office staff in half and shed about 5,000 of 30,000 employees.

All in all, it worked. Last spring, The New York Times reported that sales were up and costs were down at Barnes & Noble and that “the same people who for decades saw the superchain as a supervillain are celebrating its success. In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers, writers and book lovers as strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores in its quest for market share … Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble — including most independent booksellers. Its unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon.”

There are not a lot of reliable financial numbers available on Barnes & Noble because it is no longer a public company, but it reports that its 2021 sales in were up 3 percent over pre-pandemic times. Most importantly, sales of books were up 14 percent.

Colonial History on the Mississippi River

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 13 Jan 2023

This video explores the surprising traces of French and American colonial history along the 150 miles of Mississippi River between St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois.
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Of course the Egyptologists would deny it – Great Pyramid conspiracy theories

Filed under: Africa, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander looks at one of the persistent Great Pyramid conspiracy theories:

The Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops) in Giza, Egypt, the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Photo by Nian Aldin Thune via Wikimedia Commons.

Some conspiracy theories center on finding anomalies in a narrative. For example, Oswald couldn’t have shot Kennedy, because the bullet came from the wrong direction. Or: the Egyptians couldn’t have built the Pyramids, because they required XYZ advanced technology. I like these because they feel straightforwardly about styles of processing evidence

(Remember, I use the word “evidence” in a broad sense that includes bad evidence. By saying that some conspiracy theory has “evidence”, I’m not suggesting it’s justifiable, just that someone somewhere has asserted that they believe it for some particular reason. For example, someone might say they believe in alien abductions because of eyewitnesses who claim to have been abducted; I’ll be calling the eyewitnesses “evidence” without meaning to assert it is any good.)

Consider the pseudohistory claims I discuss in The Pyramid And The Garden. The Great Pyramid’s latitude in standard notation equals, to within seven decimal places, the speed of light in tens of millions of meters per second. In a strict sense, this is a one-in-a-million chance, although the post tries to explain why this might be less impressive than it sounds.

So the evidence in favor of “aliens who knew the speed of light built the Great Pyramid” is that it would explain this otherwise baffling coincidence. The evidence against is everything else we know about history, archaeology, architecture, and common sense. Why would superadvanced aliens have visited Earth, created one primitive stone structure, and left without doing anything else? Why does the Great Pyramid look so much like other Egyptian pyramids, and fit into our narrative of Egyptian history so well? What about marks on the Great Pyramid suggesting it was made with primitive tools? Et cetera.

You can sort of see how someone with weird evidence-processing styles might get this wrong. The fact on the right is compact, simple, and quantifiable (the two numbers match to about six digits, so it’s a one-in-a-million coincidence). The facts on the left are vague and holistic.

The mainstream archaeologist has to explain away the evidence on the right. Maybe “has to” is a strong phrase — they can just say “that’s weird, but the common sense evidence is so great that I choose to dismiss it as coincidence”. But it’s an awkward hole in their theory. I talk about how you might go about explaining it away here.

But the conspiracy theorist has to explain away the evidence on the left. This is a harder task. Sometimes you can just stretch a lot of things to make it work — I’ve seen people argue that the supposed mentions in Egyptian texts are less definitive than imagined. But one very strong explanation would be “archaeologists are so invested in protecting the mainstream narrative that they cover up all the evidence that would prove me right”, ie a conspiracy. This neatly sweeps aside a lot of the problem.

Star Megastar: Spain’s Massive 10mm Autopistol

Filed under: Europe, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Sep 2022

In the late 1980s, the Spanish gun maker Star decided to join the new hot trend of 10mm semiauto pistols. The cartridge was getting a lot of press, and Star saw this as an opportunity to ride the wave and also the get a pistol on the market that would attract IPSC competitors. Unlike some companies adapting existing .45ACP designs to 10mm, Star decided to start from scratch to build a pistol that was massive and durable; able to handle the power of the cartridge without any worries.

Star engineer Eduardo Zamacola (who had previously designed the M38/30/31 series for Star) had the first prototypes ready in 1990, in both 10mm Auto and .45 ACP. The design took cues from the Petter designs of France and SIG, with full-length internal slide rails and a removable modular fire control system. It offered 12 round capacity in .45 and 14 rounds in 10mm.

The pistol was quite massive and heavy (1.4kg / 3.1 lb), and failed to sell well from the start. The 10mm craze flared out rather quickly — it remains a niche cartridge to this day, despite periodic releases of new 10mm pistols (the SIG 320 in 10mm being the most recent). What really killed the Megastar, though, was the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban in the US. This prohibited new magazines holding more than 10 rounds, and the whole point of the bulk of the Megastar was to allow larger double-stack magazines. With those no longer available, there was really not much reason to get a Megastar instead of something like a 1911. In total, just 978 were made in 10mm and 5,424 in .45ACP, with production ending in 1995.
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QotD: What would it be like to always believe you’re right?

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I think I’m starting to see it now. The weird disconnect between [progressives’] personal behavior and their collective behavior has always baffled me. We all had great fun with that journalist who called Barack Obama “sort of God”, but it was so funny, in part, because all Leftists present themselves as “sort of God” — I have never been so certain in my judgment, so secure in my righteousness, about anything as the typical Leftist is about everything. I’m pretty comfortable saying “I don’t know” when I really don’t know …

This is not because I’m such a humble guy. If anything, it’s the reverse — it’s because “being right” is such an important part of my self-concept that if I’m going to put my reputation on the line, I need to really BE right. And as we all know, 99% of being right comes from acknowledging all the times you were wrong. Admitting I don’t know when I really don’t know is painless. Admitting I was wrong when I thought I was right stings, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as my own inner self-knowledge of being wrong. That really stings, and so I’d rather take the pain of admitting I was wrong any number of times to the much greater pain of actually being wrong on something fundamental.

To the Leftist, none of that computes. They’re always right. About everything. They literally can’t be wrong. And if what they were right about yesterday is 180 degrees from what they’re right about today, well, that’s just Reality reconfiguring itself. The Earth is stable; it’s the sun and stars that are moving around it. And if that leaves you with deferents and epicycles and retrograde motion and all that, well, so be it. See above, re: the physical impossibility of them being wrong …

… at least as individuals. But get them in a group, and all of a sudden a whole roomful of sort-of-Gods turns into a persecuted minority, even when everyone in the group agrees with everyone else. Even when the group, collectively, controls everything. If you think it’s bad in politics, y’all, go to a faculty meeting at the nearest college. To hear them tell it, the wolf is always at the door. Donald Trump and his jackbooted stormtroopers really are lurking behind every bush, waiting to jump out and pour bleach on them while yelling “This is MAGA country, bitch!” They’re afraid of their own students, because they just know those kids are out there thinking Unapproved Thoughts, and somehow those Unapproved Thoughts can physically harm them … even though they control the grade book, and can — and of course do — punish Unapproved Thought with extreme prejudice.

[…]

If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the answer might be as simple as: They can’t abstract, so they’re literally physically incapable of Reality-testing their heuristics. The Experts have given them the TORAH (that’s The One Right Answer, H8rz!), and since they can only evaluate individual cases as they come into view — they can only micro-focus on each parked car in the lot, to return to the earlier metaphor — they can’t draw the really-obvious-to-non-autists conclusion that they are not a persecuted minority, but in fact control everything.

Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.

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