Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2024

Simon & Schuster, founded 1924

Filed under: Books, Business, History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte provides a thumbnail history of the American publishing house Simon & Schuster:

The firm was started by Richard Leo Simon, a Great War veteran and piano salesman, and his partner, Max Lincoln Schuster, an auto magazine editor. They had met when Simon failed to sell Schuster a piano. They scraped together $8,000 in savings and loans from friends, family, and a telephone operator, and launched their first title in 1924: The Cross Word Puzzle Book, a collection compiled by the editors of the New York World, which was reputed to have the best crossword of the day. Each copy of the book came with a pencil and an eraser.

Messrs. Simon and Schuster initially called themselves The Plaza Publishing Company (something S&S doesn’t mention on its history webpage). They didn’t want to be personally associated with a novelty publishing project.

The novelty project sold 40,000 copies in three months and just under half a million in its first year, earning the boys a profit of $100,000, which has to be the fastest start ever for a book publisher. The Cross Word Puzzle Book was a cash cow for decades to come — there were at least fifty-six more editions, the vast majority published as S&S books. Its proceeds funded many better quality publishing initiatives.

Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy was published in 1926 to critical success and impressive sales. Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse won the Pulitzer in 1934, as did Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again in 1940. Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, which started publishing in 1935 and would take forty years to complete, also won a Pulitzer and was another huge seller.

By the time S&S acquired the paperback rights to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind in 1942 and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in 1945, it was already the leading publisher in America. To make sure everyone knew it, the boys moved into a stunning new headquarters at one of the most expensive addresses in the world, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, part of Rockefeller Center.

While it was winning its share of literary awards and publishing some great books, Simon & Schuster never forgot its roots in commercial projects. In mid-life it was famous as the how-to publisher: How to Read a Book, How to Improve your Memory, How to Raise a Dog, How to Think Straight, How to Play Winning Checkers, and the bestselling granddaddy of them all, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has sold a staggering thirty million copies and still routinely shows up on bestseller lists.

Interestingly, the operational brains behind S&S was an unnamed partner, Leonard Shimkin, who joined the company as business manager at age seventeen. It was largely at Shimkin’s initiative that S&S launched Pocket Books in 1939, establishing the concept of inexpensive paperbacks, which broadened the reading public and opened the door to the expansion of genre fiction. He was also the one who walked Dale Carnegie into S&S.

The boys sold the company to Marshall Field, owner of the Chicago Sun, in 1944 but continued to work at it. They bought it back when Field died in 1956, this time with Shimkin taking an equity position. Simon retired in 1957 and Schuster not long after, eventually leaving Shimkin with sole ownership.

Meanwhile, the hits kept coming. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in 1961, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1966, Alex Haley’s Roots in 1976, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove in 1985, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in 1988, and so on.

In 1975, Shimkin sold S&S to Gulf + Western, the first in a depressing series of corporate foster homes, none of which has known anything about or cared anything for books. G+W became Paramount in 1989, which was acquired by Viacom in 1994, which split into two companies in 2005, with Simon & Schuster becoming part of CBS Corporation, which in 2019 was merged back with Viacom, which in 2022 changed its name to Paramount Global and, after failing to unload S&S to Penguin Random House that same year, landed it with KKR the next. More on why all the corporate shuffling is far from over here.

Simon & Schuster and its subsidiary, Scribner, are the last great American-owned monuments to the golden age of American book publishing, which runs from about 1920 through to … I don’t know, the 1970s? All the others — Random House, Knopf, HarperCollins, Little, Brown & Co. — are owned by foreign conglomerates (HC’s owner, News Corp, is technically American but its controlling family, the Murdochs, are culturally British when they’re not being Australian).

April 4, 2024

Boeing and the ongoing competency crisis

Filed under: Business, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo on the pitiful state of Boeing within the larger social issues of collapsing social trust and blatantly declining competence in almost everything:

By now, most of you have heard of the increasingly popular concept known as “the competency crisis”. For those of you who haven’t, the competency crisis argues that the USA is headed towards a crisis in which critical infrastructure and important manufacturing will suffer a catastrophic decline in competency due to the fact that the people (almost all males) who know how to build/run these things are retiring, and there is no one available to fill these roles once they’re gone. The competency crisis is one of the major points brought up by people when they point out that America is in a state of decline.

As all of you are already aware, there is also a general collapse in trust in governing institutions in the USA (and all across the West). Cynicism is the order of the day, with people naturally assuming that they are being lied to constantly by the ruling elites, whether in media, government, the corporate world, and so on. A competency crisis paired with a collapse in trust in key institutions is a vicious one-two punch for any country to absorb. Nowhere is this one-two combo more evident than in one of America’s crown jewels: Boeing.

I’m certain that all of you are familiar with the “suicide” of John Barnett that happened almost a month ago. John Barnett was a Quality Control Manager working for Boeing in the Charleston, South Carolina operation. He was a “lifer”, in that he spent his entire career at Boeing. He was also a whistleblower. His “suicide” via a gunshot wound to the right temple happened on what was scheduled to be the third and last day of his deposition in his case against his former employer.

In more innocent and less cynical times, the suggestion that he was murdered would have had currency only in conspiratorial circles, serving as fodder for programs like the Art Bell Show. But we are in a different world now, and to suggest that Barnett might have been killed for turning whistleblower earns one replies like “could be”, “I’m pretty sure that’s the case”, and the most common one of all: “I wouldn’t doubt it”. No one believes that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Many people believe the same about John Barnett. The collapse in trust in ruling institutions has resulted in an environment where conspiratorial thinking naturally flourishes. Maureen Tkacik reports on Boeing’s downward turn, using Barnett’s case as a centre piece:

    “John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

Please keep in mind that this report offers up only one side of the story.

A decaying institution:

    But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

    “Prince Jim” — as some long-timers used to call him — repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes”, and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

There is a new trend that blames many fumbles on DEI. Boeing is not one of those. Instead, the short-term profit maximization mindset that drives stock prices upward is the main reason for the decline in this corporate behemoth.

February 22, 2024

QotD: Why companies continue to irritate their customers with online social justice marketing

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

So, up top, when I said that Facebook “can’t or won’t” stop this kind of stuff? I lied. There’s no “can’t” about it. It’s “won’t”, for the simple reason that Facebook understands its market and the Daily Mail writers obviously don’t. You’d think that the legendarily trashy British tabloid media would get this — and as I understand it, the Daily Mail is somewhere in the bottom half of the barrel — but Facebook’s market isn’t its users. Not even big companies like Starbucks. Facebook’s market is advertisers, and what they, Facebook, are selling is views. Eyeballs. “Engagement”, I think the Ad Biz term d’art is. In short: It doesn’t matter what the comments are; it matters that the comments are.

Ad company execs are walking into a meeting with a Starbucks-sized company right now. They’re pitching a bold new social media strategy to their clients. And they know it works, these ad men say, because look at all this data from Starbucks. Their posts average so much “engagement” every time, but look, when they post on “social justice” topics, their “engagement” jumps 350%!!

In case you were wondering how all this “social justice” shit keeps appearing in ads, despite the well-known effect of pissing off companies’ established client base, well, there you go — the company execs, being #woke Cloud People, want to do it anyway, and they’ve got whole binders full of data from the marketing department that prove “social justice” ups social media “engagement” with “the brand” umpteen zillion percent.

Severian, “Internet Tough Guys”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-10.

February 2, 2024

“Who funds you?”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall considers George Monbiot (lovingly known as “The Moonbat” to early bloggers) and his demand that others make their sources of income transparent to show whether their opinions are being “bought” by shady interested parties:

George Monbiot has his positive attributes. His change of mind on nuclear power in the face of the evidence from Fukushima — that no one at all died from three reactors going pop, while 15k and more did from the tsunami and therefore he became in favour of nuclear — is an example. OK, that’s rather hitting someone over the head with a cluebat but it’s also true that Caroline Lucas didn’t manage to note that same point. So, there is that. Even if “more aware of reality that Caroline Lucas” is a low bar to have to clear.

George can also rather dig himself into holes. As he is here with his insistence about funding of varied think tanks and so on.

And, OK, let’s go look at George’s registry of interests […]

OK, that’s the sword that George declares he’s going to live by. Fair play and all that.

Except, except. Last year was pretty good, book royalties flowing in and more power to that typing. The core earning is The Guardian, royalties on top. Not unusual for a writer to be honest. Gain a core contract that produces an ongoing and assured income, spend time floating books or other work out there to see what happens to income. Freelancing is certainly a great deal more fun if you already know where the monthly nut is going to come from with such a core contract.

But, but.

Book royalties, umm, Penguin? Used to be part owned by Pearson, also at the time owners of the Financial Times. So that’s a connection into the shadowy world of international capitalists. It’s now Bertelsman, so foreign international capitalists to boot. Macmillan? They admitted to bribery in Sudan over a school books contract. So a link to international thieving capitalists too. HarperCollins? That’s Murdoch, no more need be said, right?

But, but, a reasonable response would be that this is all far removed from the level George works at. That would be a fair enough response too.

But note the thing here. By agreeing that there’s some level of connection which is too ephemeral to matter we are agreeing that this thing called the corporate veil exists. We can indeed don the tin foil hats and connect near anything we want. Pretty much all Europeans are 16th cousins for example. So I — and George — am/are responsible for WWI because we’re both related to the Kaiser, Emperor and Tsar all at the same time. It’s our family wot dun it, see? Within economic connections that concept, that there’s this thing ‘ere which is responsible not the further connections away from that, is called that corporate veil. I shop at Sainsbury’s sometimes. The Labour Minister husband of a Sainsbury’s heiress employed two butlers (before dumping her for his boyfriend if memory serves). It’s possible to claim that I therefore fund dual butlership but it’s not a claim that all that many are going to regard as valid.

But The Guardian, that core contract. The newspaper seems to have returned to profit recently but there was a decade or so there where it was losing tens of millions a year — and more in some 12 month periods. Those losses were covered by the profits from Autotrader more than anything else. So, George was funded by the facilitation of climate destruction through the trade in internal combustion engined cars.

If, you know, we wanted to put it that way.

January 21, 2024

QotD: The life-cycle of bureaucracies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… a large bureaucracy will, in approximately 100 percent of cases, become extremely wasteful, and essentially corrupt. It will perpetuate the “problem” that it was founded to solve, and at its most creative, invent new and quite imaginative evils. It will become a vested interest — an “economic player” in its own right — and spread, like a cancer, well beyond the flesh it first inhabited. Any attempt to restrain it will then engender new bureaucracies. The idea of a “humane” bureaucracy is a contradiction of terms. There is no such thing.

Gentle reader must understand that I am not speaking only of “guvmint”, but of bureaucracy, at large. The thing is not necessarily a government department. Any big corporation will quickly show symptoms. The only difference between “public” and “private” is in longevity. A private bureaucracy will kill its host, but thanks to the power of taxation, a public bureaucracy can be long sustained. It is also backed by law and police action, which even today is more effective than mere pointless rules and regulations. The latter, however, are more nimble in expansion, and prepare the ground for law — the full spiritual stasis.

David Warren, “Austrian schoolboy”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-09-17.

December 11, 2023

This man built his office inside a lift

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 28 Aug 2023

The Baťa Skyscraper, in Zlín, Czechia, is a landmark of architecture. And the office of Jan Antonín Baťa … is an elevator.

Thanks to the museum staff for fact-checking and translation!
(more…)

November 21, 2023

QotD: Collabortage

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Yes, that’s a new word in the blog title: collabortage. It’s a tech-industry phenomenon that needed a name and never had one before. Collabortage is what happens when a promising product or technology is compromised, slowed down, and ultimately ruined by a strategic alliance between corporations that was formed (at least ostensibly) to develop it and bring it to market.

Collabortage always looks accidental, like a result of exhaustion or management failure. Contributing factors tend to include: poor communication between project teams on opposite sides of an intercorporate barrier, never-resolved conflicts between partners about project objectives, understaffing by both partners because each expects the other to do the heavy lifting, and (very often) loss of internal resource-contention battles to efforts fully owned by one player.

Occasionally the suspicion develops that collabortage was deliberate, the underhanded tactic of one partner (usually the larger one) intended to derail a partner whose innovations might otherwise have disrupted a business plan.

Eric S. Raymond, “Collabortage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-16.

October 21, 2023

“… we’re not a business publication. One of them can point out that corporate governance is a joke in Canada”

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte reviews a recent BNN Bloomberg interview with Heather Reisman former-and-now-current-again CEO of Canada’s only big box book retailer, Indigo:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

Heather Reisman gave an interview to Amanda Lang of BNN Bloomberg last week, her first effort to explain a summer of screwball management at Canada’s only bricks-and-mortar book chain.

[…]

How did Heather explain the zany sequence of events that started with her reporting Indigo’s fourth massive annual loss in five years in May; saw her booted in June from her role as executive chairman of Indigo, the company she founded, by her husband and controlling shareholder, Gerry Schwartz, along with every member of the board of directors who wasn’t personally beholden to Gerry; saw her spin her exit as a personal life-stages choice (“deciding when it is time to move on is one of the toughest decisions a founder must make”); saw her hand-picked successor and CEO, long-time British clothing retailer Peter Ruis, grab a seven-figure payout and make his own exit in September; saw the company announce that it would “act swiftly to find the right leader to move the company forward following Peter’s resignation”; saw Heather reinstated at the head of the chain two weeks later?

She didn’t. How could anyone explain that?

Heather bullshitted her way through the interview. It was all Ruis’s fault, she told Amanda. Indigo “took a journey off brand” under Ruis. She’d put him in charge of a book chain and “suddenly I was hearing that we were getting famous for selling $550 barbecues,” she said. “Somehow vibrators turned up in our stores and I remember saying ‘no, that’s not who we are.'” Ruis had “lost sight of … what our commitment is to customers.” He was “taking the business in the wrong direction” and it was showing up in the financials.

Heather claimed she’d been powerless to stop Ruis: “I was gone formally for over a year and informally for two and a half years in the sense that I was pulling back and not able to influence things.”

I scarcely know where to start. We could talk about the breathtaking ease with which Heather presented herself as a victim of Ruis while running him over with a forklift. How she hired a career fashion retailer to run what most Canadians still understand as a book chain and complained that he took the business off brand. How his barbecues and dildo merchandising was a logical extension of the cheeseboards and blankets merchandising she’d been doing for a decade.

If we were a serious business publication, we’d have to talk about her supposed powerlessness to do anything about the dildo-happy Ruis. The people who run public companies have duties to their shareholders, one of which is to keep them informed—promptly, honestly, transparently—about the management of the business. If Heather was gone “formally for over a year” and “informally for two and a half years,” investors should have known, right?

Let’s start with “formally for over a year.” Heather is referring to the most recent period of September 2022 to August 2023 during which Barbecue Boy was CEO of the company. Was Heather gone?

She was no longer CEO, a title she’d held for a quarter century, but according to corporate records she remained executive chairman of Indigo during that time, drawing an annual salary of almost a million. Titles matter in public companies. The difference between an executive chairman and a run-of-the-mill chairman is that the former is recognized as having an active role in the operations of the business, hence the executive-level salary. Executive chairman is higher on the org chart than CEO. If the company was moving off brand, betraying its customers, she was the one person with the formal role and the moral authority, as founder, to send the “four hours of fun” Firefighter Vibrator from Smile Makers ($75.00) back to the warehouse. Either Heather misspoke to Amanda last week about being “gone” or she spent her last year at Indigo misrepresenting herself to her shareholders and drawing a salary under false pretenses.

September 24, 2023

A sliver of hope for Indigo?

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte relays some new-ish rumours in the book business that may provide a bit of help for the struggling Indigo chain:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

So what do we make of Heather Reisman’s return as CEO of the Indigo bookselling chain after her unceremonious removal from that role just two months ago?

The short answer is I have no idea, but SHuSH has never shied away from delivering irresponsible speculation on happenings at Indigo. I heard this week from a reasonably reliable source that Indigo is in discussions with Elliott Management Corp., owners of Barnes & Noble and the world’s only buyer of distressed bookselling chains.

This conflicts with some chatter I reported last spring suggesting that Elliott Management was uninterested in Indigo. If what I’m now hearing is true, it’s great news.

I have to emphasize, I have no idea. But if a deal were imminent, it would make sense to bring Heather back to see it through. Indigo wouldn’t want the bother of recruiting a new leader simply to effect the handover, and who would want the job on those terms?

And another thing …

In last week’s piece about Indigo, I noted that the company’s staff, “with exceptions, were young, inexpert, and disinterested”. Amal, clearly one of the exceptions, left an interesting comment:

    No. We became disinterested simply because a) we were all book lovers and had zero interest in selling crap and b) just like the author of this piece, head office and management were beyond dismissive of our knowledge, our book expertise, our genuine love of the written word. I worked at Chapters/Indigo starting in 2006 all the way until 2019, a couple of days a week, simply for my love of books. I am incredibly proud of my time there — especially when I was able to introduce new authors or genres to readers. My staff picks would sell out because I would hand sell them to people with my joy. It certainly wasn’t for the stellar pay or the people who treat retail employees like we are “inexpert”. Fun fact: you were asked in the job interview what your favourite books/genres were.

August 23, 2023

QotD: “Megacorporations” of the Roman era

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The definition of a megacorp differs a bit, work to work. They are, of course, megacorporations in the literal sense; massive, vertically integrated companies that often have monopolistic control over multiple markets. But more fundamental to the definition of the megacorp is that they typically employ their own armed forces and either enforce their own law or are at least able to ignore the law more generally. It is not enough for a company to be big, it has to generate the sort of wealth to which M. Licinius Crassus famously quipped “no one was truly rich who could not support an army at his own expense” (Plut. Cras. 2.7).

Which is to say that what really defines a megacorporation is that it trespasses into domains usually occupied by the state: military, police and judicial functions – the use of force. A megacorporation is, simply put, a corporation so large and powerful that it begins to act as a state, be that in the form of the private armies of Cyberpunk 2077, the privatized police force of the Robocop franchise, or the straight-up corporate governments of Stellaris (which in turn channel things like the Spacer’s Guild or the Ferengi Alliance) And that is core to the generally dystopian leaning of megacorporations – they are meant to reflect capitalism and corporate empire building taken to an extreme, to the point where it has swallowed the entire rest of the society.

Taking that definition to history, we can actually see a fair number of megacorporations; they are by no means common, but they do exist. Going very far back, the Roman societates (lit: “fellowships”, but “business association” or “company” is an accurate enough rendering) of the publicani (businessmen who filled public contracts) exercised close to this sort of power in some of Rome’s early provinces. During the Middle and Late Roman Republic, the job of extracting tax revenue from the provinces was too administratively complex for the limited machinery of the Republic, so instead the senate directed the censors to auction the right to collect taxes. Groups of Roman businessmen (and often silent patrician partners) would group resources together to bid for the right to collect taxes from a province – any taxes they took in excess of that figure would be their profit.

These companies could be very large indeed. For instance, parts of the lex portorii Asiae (the customs laws for the Roman province of Asia) survive and include regulations for the relevant company including a slew of customs houses and guard posts (the law is incomplete, but mentions more than 30 collection points – all major ports – to which would also need to be added posts along the land routes into the province). From other evidence we know that the staff at customs posts included armed guards along with the expected tax collectors and bookkeepers. And we know that publicani were sometimes delegated local or Roman forces to do their work (e.g. Cic. Ad Att. 114, using Shackleton Bailey’s numbering). They also maintained the closest thing the Roman Republic had to a postal service (Cic. Ad Att. 108). It’s not clear exactly how many employees one of the larger tax collection companies might have had (and those for the province of Asia – equivalent to the west coast of Anatolia – would have been some of the largest), but it was clearly considerable, as were the sums of money involved.

To the cities and towns of a province, such Roman companies must have seemed like megacorporations, especially if they were in with the governor (which they generally were) and thus could call down the forces of Rome on recalcitrant taxpayers. And we certainly know that these publicani often collected substantially far more than was due to them under the law (the reason why “tax collector” and “sinner” seem to be nearly synonymous in the New Testament, a fact that gave Ernst Badian’s study of them, Publicans and Sinners, its title). At the same time, we see the clear limitations too: such companies were clearly subservient to the governor and to the Roman state. Administrative changes beginning under Julius Caesar and brought to completion under Augustus did away with some of the largest tax contracts and the influence of the societates publicanorum with them.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.

August 6, 2023

What’s in a (tech) name?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia isn’t a fan of all the recent rebrandings of social media platforms, and tries to explain “why web platforms keep changing their names like criminals in the Witness Protection Program”:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When I first heard that Twitter was renaming itself as X, I thought it was a joke.

Not a funny joke, just a goofy one. Elon Musk has a taste for schoolboy humor — and on many occasions has posted something undignified for a laugh. I assumed X was another example of this.

Who could take that name seriously?

Just consider the significations of X:

  • The crossbones you put in front of a skull on a bottle of poison;
  • A mistake on a test, marked by the teacher in red;
  • How you sign your name if you can’t read or write;
  • Something you haven’t figured out in algebra;
  • A movie that’s dirty, raunchy, or offensive in some manner;
  • A mark on a map where stolen wealth has been buried by pirates or criminals;
  • The street name for an illegal drug (MDMA) with various adverse long-term effects — including depression, anxiety, and impairments of cognition, memory, and learning;
  • A symbol of betrayal (i.e., a double cross);
  • In marketing language, an inferior product, as in “Brand X”;
  • A radioactive ray so dangerous that it killed the people who invented and developed it.

Given these associations, nobody in their right mind would replace a familiar, proven brand name with X. Mr. Musk must be joking again. Or so I thought.

But I thought wrong.

If this were an isolated event, I would dismiss it as just one more quirk on the part of an eccentric CEO. But these horrible rebrands are now standard practice in Silicon Valley, especially among dominant Internet platforms.

Why did Google change its corporate name to Alphabet? Why did Facebook change its corporate name to Meta? These were two of the best known brand names in the history of capitalism. Why get rid of them?

And consider this bizarre coincidence. The very same month that Twitter became X, Instagram launched its own text posting option. But it refused to use the familiar Instagram name, instead calling this new feature Threads.

Threads is another word that has all sorts of negative connotations. It refers to something old and torn. It’s associated with poverty and an embarrassing appearance.

What gives?

Do you remember the carefree early days of the web? Brand names were innocent and playful — they sounded like something from a nursery rhyme: Yahoo, Google, Tumblr. Twitter was one of those cutesy names.

Its symbol was a chirping bird. So sweet. So innocent.

But nowadays, web platforms take on names straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft horror story — Threads, X, Ghost, Twitch, Discord, etc.

Today’s writing prompt: Use all of those words in the opening lines of a story. Then send it off to an editor at Weird Tales.

Current day techno bro vibe

July 28, 2023

QotD: “Stakeholder” Capitalism

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

Like many things faddish and ephemeral — disco, Pet Rocks, feathered hair, taking Michel Foucault seriously as an intellectual — the 1970s gave birth to the concept of stakeholder capitalism, one of the most unfortunate yet enduring of the bad ideas that polyester decade bequeathed us. At its essence, stakeholder capitalism is Marxian capitalism run through a lens of business ethics. It is the attempt to maintain authoritarian control over capitalism by displacing the Invisible Hand with a Velvet Glove, then using that glove, which hides an iron fist, to pound the world into adopting values that both assert and maintain its worldview. It is Theory applied to markets, marketing, wealth creation and management, and an overall globalized ethos of required and policed “virtue”, with the end goal being — as it always is under the discourses of Cultural Marxist thought — power: who has it, who controls it, and who uses it for their own ends most effectively and ruthlessly.

Of course, nobody participating in the push to replace shareholder capitalism with stakeholder capitalism would describe it this way. But then, euphemism and branding are each crucial tools in the Marxist’s verbal toolbox. So when you ask a stakeholder capitalist to describe stakeholder capitalism, what you ordinarily hear is that, as a business ethic, it combines the “sustainability” shareholder capitalism supposedly lacks with the “inclusivity” we’re not supposed to recognize is merely stultifying, policed conformity, the yield being a Woke capitalism that replaces production and consumption with “sharing and caring,” taking it out of the realm of the invisible and mechanical, as Adam Smith would have it, and placing it into the realm of values, where it can be used to shape the Greater Good the Marxist pretends he cares about. It’s fascism with a smiley face.

In the stakeholder capitalist system, investors aren’t — or at least, they shouldn’t be — solely interested in profits driven by production and consumption. And this is because to the stakeholder capitalist, itself a euphemism for collectivist corporatist, “it is well proven that our current form of Capitalism is inherently unsustainable because it requires endless growth on a planet with finite resources.”

Of course, none of this is “well proven” — the history of shareholder capitalism suggests the opposite, in fact, as innovation has led to the production of more and more out of less and less — but whether this is or isn’t the material case is incidental to those who are working on this inorganic worldwide paradigm shift commonly known as The Great Reset.

Because the move toward a “caring and sharing” worldwide economy, especially one that we’re told will be both sustainable and inclusive, requires those who care, those who share, and — most importantly, and at the very heart of the turn — those who get to determine what is cared about, who must do the sharing, and how most effectively to police the excesses that the ruling elite determine aren’t sustainable, while slowly dissolving the idea of the individual and his will to make way for an inclusive collective required to run the machinery of the self-installed Elect. It’s a global system of neo-Feudalism dressed in the finery of familiar values that have been deconstructed and re-signified, often without their consumers even aware that the values they reference — which were once commonly understood and largely shared by the civil society — are now their precise inverse: “tolerance”, thus, becomes the violent rejection of intolerance, as they define it; free speech is separated from “hate speech”, as they adjudicate it; individualism is but a controlling fiction maintained by the white male power structure that must be replaced by an ordered and value-determined collection of identity markers that construct you, while simultaneously acknowledging that there is no “you” beyond this assembly of discourses that assign your being its social situatedness, then places you within a collective of those with similar — though never identical — constructions. Once here, you are graded on the intersectional scale. Your relative worth and power come down to not to the content of your character, but rather to the collection and arrangement of your victimization tokens.

Jeff Goldstein, “Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand, maybe I’ll be there to stakeholder capitalist the land”, protein wisdom reborn!, 2023-04-26.

July 9, 2023

“… corporations sit in the late adopter phase of the marketing curve”

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson reminds us that the mass media corporate messaging is trailing edge, not leading edge:

Now everything is filtered through a warped looking glass, a Mad Hatter tea party of nonsense, run by the grimmest socialist operatives who ever lived, backed by buckets and wheelbarrows of stupid corporatist/fascist money. They are running a demoralization program on us.

It’s not working.

Never forget that corporations sit in the late adopter phase of the marketing curve, which is to say the lifeless part, the raking-in-the-money-from-stupid-women part. Women too, as a class, are part of the late adopter curve, because as Jordan Peterson once pointed out, women instinctively see humans as helpless babies needing protection and SAFETY FIRST. We are easily manipulated by our compassion, as is clear from the fact that only women and those who want to be, support the left now. The left traffics faux compassion and it is a killer drug. Included of course are beta males, hornswoggled by mommy, the wet diaper babies of Antifa and BLM. And of course, the paid operatives of the stinking cabal, the truly horrid public sector unions, the vicious thugs at AFL-CIO and the humanity-hating environmental movement.

The people the left cultivated so carefully over several generations have all fled to populism and eventually their vicious operatives won’t even be able to steal the votes they need. How big is it? Imagine 2000 Trump rallies. And then ten times that. And then quadruple it. Double and double and double again. And they are having the best time, more fun than you can imagine, working away in obscurity, asserting their human right to determine their own future.

[…]

Normals have turned, all of them. They are not available to the Trudeaus, Macrons and Rishi Sunaks of the world. They are wised up. Some of them know more than me about the filth at the heart of “environmentalism” and I know a lot. They are not Russian serfs or Chinese peasants. There is no way they are going to be corralled in 15 minute cities. They are going to bring the house down.

They/we are the people that Richard Haas, when resigning from the Council of Foreign Relations, a nest of nasty neo-liberal, neo-con oppressors if there ever was one, warned against when he said the greatest threat facing the world is American populists. Sure, buddy.

One of the those dreadful people (as they call us) is Kevin Fernandes82 on Instagram. Probably not his real name, but he is not aiming for public recognition. What he does, methodically, every day many times, is chronicle the slow crumbling of the old regime. I am using a lot of his reporting and as he shows, we are beating the pants off them every single day.

Their jobs are untenable. People are resigning from every safe berth in the world or being fired from plush jobs because the world the neo-liberal hegemon has created is counter-rational, so chaotic, it is unstable. It is unstable because we know it is stupid. We are opposed. And our opposition is slowly slowly bringing it down.

This is long. You don’t have to read it all to get the point, but give it to the despairing, keep it for when you despair. All these wins happened in the last two weeks. People, judges and administrators and politicians within the system, are starting to dance to the populist tune. Many of the worst are running as fast as they can.

We are the future.

Time to start thinking about what we want the new world to look like.

Herewith:

The Sound of Freedom has outsold the new Indiana Jones film, on 2,000 fewer screens and with no PR, against the full force of the Hollywood machine.

The Dutch government has reportedly fallen over asylum policy. Farms confiscation is wildly unpopular. Mark Rutte, architect of the prosecution of farmers has resigned.

The decoupling of the BRICS from the dollar means the death of the neo-liberal hegemon. Mark Wauk and Tom Luongo do a neat job of wrapping up this particular mess. As they say: there are no neo-liberals in a multi-polar, decoupled world.

The BRICS are set to introduce a new currency backed by gold, against the US backed dollar which depreciates in value every day because of inflation caused by choking energy supply and crazed overspending by governments.

EU laws that let banks shut accounts over political views to be scrapped.

Federal judge in Louisiana prohibits DHS, FBI and DOJ from working with Big Tech to censor posts.

The list goes on for quite a lot longer…

June 30, 2023

The Coolest ”’Country”’ Flag You Need To Know

Filed under: Business, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

CGP Grey
Published 28 Mar 2023
(more…)

June 9, 2023

Putting an end to “stakeholder” capitalism

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Streetwise Professor explains what “stakeholder capitalism” is and why it needs to be staked through the heart to save western economies:

A graphic from Wikipedia showing typical internal and external stakeholders.

At its root, stakeholder capitalism represents a rejection – and usually an explicit one – of shareholder wealth maximization as the sole objective and duty of a corporation’s management. Instead, managers are empowered and encouraged to pursue a variety of agendas that do not promote and are usually inimical to maximizing value to shareholders. These agendas are usually broadly social in nature intended to benefit various non-shareholder groups, some of which may be very narrow (transsexuals) or others which may be all encompassing (all inhabitants of planet earth, human and non-human).

This system, such as it is, founders on two very fundamental problems: the Knowledge Problem and Agency problems.

The Knowledge Problem is that no single agent possesses the information required to achieve any goal – even if universally accepted. For example, even if reducing the risk of global temperature increases was broadly agreed upon as a goal, the information required to determine how to do so efficiently is vast as to be unknowable. What are the benefits of a reduction in global temperature by X degrees? The whole panic about global warming stems from its alleged impact on every aspect of life on earth – who can possibly understand anything so complex? And there are trade-offs: reducing temperature involves cost. The cost varies by the mix of measures adopted – the number of components of the mix is also vast, and evaluating costs is again beyond the capabilities of any human, no matter how smart, how informed, and how lavishly equipped with computational power. (Daron Acemoğlu, take heed).

[…]

Agency problems exist when due to information asymmetries or other considerations, agents may act in their own interests and to the detriment of the interests of their principals. In a simple example, the owner of a QuickieMart may not be able to monitor whether his late-shift employee is sufficiently diligent in preventing shoplifting, or exerts appropriate effort in cleaning the restrooms and so on. In the corporate world, the agency problem is one of incentives. The executives of a corporation with myriad shareholders may have considerable freedom to pursue their own interests using the shareholders’ money because any individual shareholder has little incentive to monitor and police the manager: other shareholders benefit from, and thus can free ride on, any individual’s efforts. So managers can, and often do, get away with extravagant waste of the resources owned by others placed in their control.

This agency problem is one of the costs of public corporations with diffuse ownership: this form of organization survives because the benefits of diversification (i.e., better allocation of risk) outweigh these costs. But agency costs exist, and increasing the scope of managerial discretion to, say, saving the world or achieving social justice inevitably increases these costs: with such increased scope, executives have more ways to waste shareholder wealth – and may even get rewarded for it through, say, glowing publicity and other non-pecuniary rewards (like ego gratification – “Look! I’m saving the world! Aren’t I wonderful?”)

H/T to Tim Worstall for the link.

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