Category: Business

Incremental Costs

Business, Economics

Soft-headed Lefties are always going on about the evils of cheap labor, using children as workers, and paying “fair wages”.  Then there’s the use of agricultural pesticides to improve yields, which is doubleplusungood.  Of course, they still expect to pay low prices for, say, their fruits and vegetables, as these neo-Marxists don’t have the first clue about how an economy actually works.

So we come to this breathless headline:

Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Farm Squat Shop is over 200% more expensive for essential items than the nearest supermarket.

Well, yes.  He pays his staff (“workers”) well, doesn’t use pesticides, and charges prices that will yield his business a profit so that he can afford the costs of complying with government regulations.  (He does not pay himself or his shop manager / girlfriend Lisa a salary, for obvious reasons, although technically speaking he should.)

All that said, the quality of the farm shop’s products is beyond reproach — fresh milk, vegetables and fruits, homemade honey from his own bees — and all those things that the high-end Waitrose chain, for example, have traded on for years.

And so his prices are higher than those of the local supermarket (Aldi, a “budget” operation if ever there was one) only six miles away, leading one to ask that if his prices are indeed that unbearably high, why are there long lines of people queuing up to buy the stuff? (Answer:  because it’s the Diddly Squat brand.)

One would question why the “researchers” chose to use EDLP (everyday low price) Aldi rather than pricey Waitrose — answer:  because the price disparity might not be that great, if there was any disparity at all… oops.

And let’s not forget that The Greatest Living Englishman is a frequent target for The Envious Set, because he’s wealthy and successful — just not as a result of farming.

Journalists… those who talk about everything, but know absolutely nothing.

Not To Mention An Actual Life Skill

Good Stuff, Trades

Longtime Readers will all be aware of my support for the trades — electricians, plumbers, carpenters and so on — so you can imagine my grin of satisfaction upon reading this article:

Skilled tradespersons tradesmen* such as welders, plumbers, machinists, and carpenters “are in super-high demand,” Sasse observed.  Take-home pay for skilled trade workers is typically between $80 and $200 thousand per year, Sasse determined.  He said a construction superintendent in South Dakota recently informed him that concrete finishers were being paid $75 per hour for a particular project.

And let’s not even mention the financials:

“Most trade schools are six-to-nine months versus a four-year college,” Sasse stated, “but the minute you get out of that trade school — guess what — you get to go to work. So you’re going to make money for three and a half years while your buddy, who’s in a four-year college [program], is just racking up more and more debt. So you get this massive three-and-a-half-year jump on anybody that’s the same age.”

Yup. Not to mention the fact that at the end of the day, you could also start your own small business, to make the serious money.

And by the way, I like what Sasse’s organization stands for — follow the link for more detail.

Good stuff, indeed.

*Yeah, I know women can do most of this stuff too (see below).

But that’s not the point.  This is.

I don’t use “chairperson” because the position is “chairman” OR “chairwoman”, “spokesperson” because the function is “spokesman” OR “spokeswoman” (if we’re going to be pedantic), and “head teacher” when the correct words are “headmaster” OR “headmistress”, depending.

“Tradespeople”?  Nonsensical, as so much PC bullshit is.

Shortcomings

Business, Eco-Crap

The other evening I was watching a rather good TV bio of the Virgin wunderkind  (not so much of a kid anymore) Richard Branson.  I love “rags-to-riches” stories at the best of times, and while Branson was not really a “rags” case — comfortably middle-class, rather — the fact remains that he built the Virgin conglomerate from nothing into what it is today.  And he wasn’t schooled, much, because he’s severely dyslexic and this in no small part caused him to leave school at age 16 and never look back.

And now he’s gone and cocked it all up.

You see, he’s bought into the nonsensical “climate-change-we’re-all-gonna-diiiieeeee” philosophy hook, line, sinker and rod, as have so many successful people of his ilk.

And I can’t help thinking that it’s because he’s uneducated.  Now granted, in today’s world such stupidity can and has sprung from the academe (not to mention other Marxist ideologues), but that’s beside the point.

You see, without a proper education, someone like Branson is more likely to be swayed by plausible-but-still-nonsensical arguments, especially when uttered and backed by “experts” (scientists, doctors, academics, whatever) because uneducated people always give more credence to these mountebanks than the latter deserve.

This is why so many wealthy people buy into stupidity — they’ve been so busy making money that they’ve ignored a substantial amount of the real world (whether political, sociological, scientific or academic) unless it has a specific impact upon their business.

It’s also why the wealthy buy into the arrant bullshit as propagated by the World Economic Forum (WEF), because they feel as though only they have the power to move the lumpenproletariat  (that would be you and me) into a direction that they feel is the “proper” way, regardless of whether the way is actually proper or not (mostly not, as it turns out).  Add to this the naked and unashamed thirst for power by the usual Socialist assholes (most politicians) — who, by the way, already have the power to make the wealthy a lot less wealthy — and you have the hopeless naïveté of people like Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey who think that simply throwing money (their own money, to give them some credit) at a health- or education problem in the Third World is going to solve that problem, when they’ve never read Kipling’s White Man’s Burden  poem (or if they have, they’ve misunderstood its actual meaning — that lack of education, again).

And just to be clear:  when I say “education”, I mean it in its Nockian sense.  Many of my Readers, for example, are highly educated despite not having university degrees;  and many more have university degrees but have educated themselves way past their academic discipline.  I was able, for example, to see right through the forecasting nonsense of the Greens, despite not (yet) having a university degree because I had earlier learned how algorithms work — and more importantly, how they are tested.  When you realize that not one of the near-term doomsday prognoses of the Greens has come even close to being fulfilled, you will understand why their latest climate-change warnings are all pointed away from the near-term and towards times decades or more hence.  (Traditionally, algorithms have had a terrible time in making long-term predictions because of the instability of the world in general, but that’s been conveniently and deliberately ignored by the climate doomsayers.)

Which is why Richard Branson and his cohorts have bought into the Green nonsense completely — they have no idea why (or even that) the forecasts won’t come true, but because “scientific consensus” says they will, they believe them.

They’re as gullible as the fools who bought products from snake-oil salesmen or Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop (serious overlap), but unlike the aforementioned, who buy the products for their own benefit, the Bransons believe that their wealth will help them become world-saving philanthropists.

Idiots.

Baby Vulcan Smiles

Corporate Wokism, Resistance

We Texans love our guns, and therefore our gun stores.  So when some Noo Yawk assholes start fucking around with the latter, we take action:

Citigroup Inc. is once again facing an ouster from the booming Texas municipal-bond market after the state’s Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office determined the bank “discriminates” against the firearms industry. 

The ruling indicates that the New York-based bank runs afoul of a Republican-backed law passed nearly two years ago that bars most government contracts with companies that engage in anti-gun business practices. The decision appears to halt the bank’s ability to underwrite most municipal-bond offerings in the state.

It’s a whipsaw moment for Citigroup. The bank had temporarily halted its work in the Texas muni market after the law went into effect in September 2021 but had revived that business two months later, saying it complies with the law. Paxton’s ruling ends a months-long probe into Citi’s corporate policy.

“It has been determined that Citigroup has a policy that discriminates against a firearm entity or firearm trade association,” Leslie Brock, assistant attorney general chief of the public finance division, wrote in the letter. 

The determination means that Citigroup’s so-called standing letter, a document that had thus far allowed the bank to underwrite debt in one of the nation’s largest public bond markets, has been rejected, according to a Jan. 18 letter distributed to lawyers and viewed by Bloomberg.

“Therefore, until further notice, we will not approve any public security issued on or after today’s date in which Citigroup purchases or underwrites the public security, or in which Citigroup is otherwise a party to a covered contract relating to the public security,” according to the letter.

Of course, Citi’s acting all butt-hurt:

“We’re disappointed with the decision and will remain engaged with the Texas AG office to review our options,” said Mark Costiglio, a Citigroup spokesperson, in an emailed statement. “Citi has been financing public works in Texas for more than 150 years and we currently have more than 8,500 employees who call Texas home. As we’ve said previously, Citi does not discriminate against the firearms sector and believe we are in compliance with Texas law.”

Well, our legal guys say you do, and therefore you aren’t.

Yankee shitheads. Fuck ’em.

Consulting Ripoffs

Business, Management

Some time back, one of Insty’s contributors made the following comment regarding the foul McKinsey consulting company:

In my first hand experience, McKinsey was hired (no doubt at great expense) to “review” and “improve” the faltering Bloomberg TV network. What did they do? First, the “consultants” asked all the employees what they did, and how things worked. Then they created mountains of PowerPoint presentations and simply repeated what they’d been told. Finally, they recommended a “reduction in forces” (corporate-speak for layoffs). This pattern is the modus operandi for McKinsey: “Teach me what you do, and then I’m going to tell you how to do it.” Another pattern is that often consultants convince clients that they ought to be hired “in-house.” McKinsey doesn’t mind that at all because it’s one more “in”, one more tentacle reaching into corporate America.

It’s actually a lot worse than that — and McKinsey are far from the only bad actors in the management consulting business:  pretty much all of them (Bain, Booz Allen, Accenture, Deloitte, etc.) are pretty much the same, and operate in the same manner as McKinsey, as described above.

They are called “process” consultants in that they bring little actual industry experience to the party;  senior partners will make the sales pitches, but once the contract is signed, they’ll send in the freshly-minted MBAs (“junior associates”) who spend an inordinate amount of (billable, of course) time in learning the client’s business and industry mostly by talking to mid-level managers in the company.  These managers not only know the business, but are quite likely to know the solutions to whatever problems senior management don’t know how to address.

This knowledge will then be (stolen) used by the MBAs in drawing up their conclusions, with the caveat that if the client management do not adhere to their recommendations to the letter, then the consulting firm cannot be held responsible for any future failure.  Of course, this means eventual failure of the process as no one can follow a plan to the letter, ever.

The other kind of consultancy, by the way, is called “experiential”, meaning that the consultancy brings actual industry familiarity and a track record of both building and running a particular business practice or system.

I was one of those.  Typically, I would be brought in by a retail company to either help build or rebuild a customer loyalty program, back before there were actual systems designed to run them.  Building from scratch meant designing a reporting stream (first), and then creating the database structure that would enable such a reporting stream to function.  Rebuilding often meant tweaking the existing system to work properly, but to be honest, most of the time the programs were a veritable shit-show of catastrophes because they had been designed and built by the IT department rather than designed by Marketing.  I would come with an actual drop-in-ready reporting system to start with, that management could tweak or enhance (depending on their specific needs), and a database- and table structure to support it — CEO-level overviews, Buying/Merchandising detailed data, Store Operations (down to store-manager level) and Marketing/Advertising.

I never had a system fail on me, despite all attempts by IT to sabotage or delay implementation.  (I have stories, hoo boy do I have stories…)

If I were running a large-ish business today and needed help in a particular area where I had little experience, I would only hire consultants in the latter group, and probably not even then — it’s always better to find someone who knows the problem and has solved it before than to make it a blank-page project.

But the process guys?  Waste of money, waste of time.

I remember once working for a Great Big Company whose management decided that we needed restructuring, and hired Bain & Co. to consult on the project.  Because most of us peons were pretty smart guys, we soon realized two things:  a) the Bainies were scouting for people and functions they could recommend for termination, and b) the Bainies themselves were only interested in recommendations over a two-year period (the time in which they themselves were going to be judged by their own management).  Consequently, whenever “interviewed” by a Bainie, you had to make sure that in showing them your function and your business plan, that plan had to have a resolution date of at least three or (better yet) five years in the future.  Then they’d lose interest in you and move on to greener pastures.  As I recall, this intelligence was communicated company-wide by jungle telegraph (cafeteria lunch table, phone calls to friends in the branch offices etc.) after the first three days of Bain’s involvement.  (When I told my boss this tale — long after the Bainies had left — he just put his head in his hands and laughed for five minutes.)

I don’t know what Bain finally recommended to our senior management, but I never saw any particular change in the day-to-day.  Quite frankly, the Bain money would have been better spent in performance bonuses, but no doubt the Finance department would have had a shit-fit, for all their usual reasons.

Don’t get me started on Finance…