Category: Business

Next To Go

Business, Crime

Here’s a fun exercise:

Fallen crypto guru Sam Bankman-Fried is likely to be placed on suicide watch when moved to a tiny cell in his hellhole jail in the Bahamas.

The former CEO of collapsed currency exchange FTX – who takes medication for depression – remains under evaluation in the maximum security sickbay and is expected to be there until the end of next week.

His next move inside notorious His Majesty’s Prison Fox Hill will be decided by the jail’s Classification Board and a medical assessment.

Ordinarily, this would be a post about his impending “suicide” — — but this skulduggery is of the Ponzi kind, and nothing to do with the Clinton Foundation, so all we have to think about is this pudgy little asshole doing away with himself out of self-pity.

Frankly, given that he’s a vegan and future inmate, there’s not much reason for him to live, so he might as well.

One of the “side benefits” of being old is that one spends a lot of time in waiting-rooms — in this case, at Discount Tires — where I happened upon the Aug/Sep issue of Forbes magazine which had an interview with the above asshole (long before his financial criminality and -irresponsibility became well known, of course).

I read the interview, which spent a lot of time looking at all FTX’s acquisitions and share purchases, and I thought (not with hindsight, but as a contemporaneous reader):

“Where the hell are you getting all your investment capital from?”

FTX was either leveraged to the hilt — couldn’t be, because he was paying out mouthwatering returns to his investors — or he was playing the old Bernie Maddow game of using fresh investor money to pay out earlier investors.  Certainly, he wasn’t getting anything like dividends from flaccid blockchain exchanges or collapsing software companies — his favored purchase targets, so the money had to be coming from new investors.

What suckers.  It’s even worse when you learn that some of his new (and earlier) investors were not individuals, but institutional.  Don’t these places have any safety controls or risk-assessment checks?

I am not a nihilist by any stretch, but I swear there are times when I want the whole fucking house of cards to collapse, rich people / institutions to be impoverished, and crowds of the now-desperately-poor (that would be people like me) roaming the streets with shotguns and AK-47s, shooting these bastards as they walk out of their office buildings, or using their plummeting bodies as skeet targets as they try to escape the shame and ruin that has ensued from their greed, mendacity and foolishness.

No doubt someone will have a problem with this scenario.

I Like This

Business, Lifestyle

I remember back when Wal-Mart and their ilk were building stores everywhere, and small-town businesses everywhere were being put out of business by their erstwhile customers falling prey to the fallacy that Price Is King, and lured into the soulless caverns that were Wal-Mart, Home Depot and so on, all for the chance to save a couple bucks on nails and screwdrivers.

I was heartened when I visited Britishland for the first time, back in 1997, and found that there were still plenty of ironmongers (hardware stores) dotted in the main streets of British towns.  Invariably, I’d drift into one, and wish that I lived somewhere nearby because of all the cool stuff they sold, stuff which I hadn’t seen in over decade of walking through Lowes or Home Depot, let alone Wal-Mart.

Let me be clear here:  to men of my generation, hardware stores are to us like drugstores are to women.  Yet while you can find a CVS, Walgreens or Osco drugstore within spitting distance of your house in any town, you will not find a hardware store which caters to men.  Oh sure, drive a few miles and get drawn into a Wal-Mart, only to find that if you want a couple of #2 self-tapping screws for that project on the honey-do list, sorry but they’re only available in the 50-pack, $5.99 instead of a buck for the two you needed.  (And yes, I know all about economies of scale and bulk savings — but at the end of the day, you end up spending six bucks instead of two, and are saddled with four dozen screws that you may or may not need in the future.)

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Here’s a story from, of all places, Wales, where the local ironmongery was about to close its doors after years of serving the town, but the locals, realizing what they might miss if the place disappeared, did something about it.

Note how carefully they structured the financing, so that GlobalMegaCorp Inc. couldn’t sink their ravenous fangs into the place and turn it into something other than what they wanted to keep.

I wish we’d done something like this in small towns Over Here, but that bullet’s gone through the church and we’re stuck with megastores, damn it.

There are about three or four posts that burst the banks of this stream of consciousness, but they can wait for another time.

Diddly Squat

Business, Gummint

Ben Ainslie and his wife Georgia Thompson are probably not known to many Murkins, although in the yachting world he’s very well known as the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, not to mention the head of Britain’s America’s Cup team.

So during the Covid Lockdown Silliness they created a podcast / TV show called Performance People in which they talk to various successful people such as F1 Mercedes AMG team principal Toto Wolff and his equally-accomplished wife Susie — surely the absolute exemplars of the “power couple”.

The show that got me, however, was their interview with The Greatest Living Englishman and his man Kaleb, on the Diddly Squat Farm.  Funny as always, the pair are wonderfully entertaining, right up until the discussion moves to farming, and what farmers have to deal with.

I have no idea whether our farmers have to put up with the same degree of red tape as the Brits do, but when Jeremy Clarkson points out that the suicide rate for British farmers is the highest of any profession in the U.K., things get really serious.

If you do nothing else today, watch this show.

Recession Times

Bad News, Business, Economics

As always, we should ignore all government pronouncements as to the state of the economy.  Thus, when we are told that “recession is not coming” or “inflation is temporary”, we should instead look to what’s actually happening.

We all know that over the past dozen or so years, Christmas spending has moved away from High Street to the Internet — most especially to places like Amazon.com, to mention just the biggest.

Therefore, as we approach this festive [sic]  season, we would expect that Amazon would be hiring staff to handle the increased demand for merchandise, yes?

No.

The New York Times reports that according to verified sources, Amazon plans to reduce its corporate and technology workforce by as much as 10,000 employees as soon as this week, the largest downsizing in the firm’s history.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

Business Decision

Business, Marketing / Advertising, Movies

I love to read bullshit like this:

John Wick 4 trailer sets up battle between Keanu Reeves and Bill Skarsgard: ‘Only one can survive’

Uh huh.  Like any movie studio is going to kill off the hero of a very successful “franchise”.  I can just visualize the management’s response to some young dimwit suggesting that action:

Let’s face it:  when it comes to art, business always wins.  Always.

Afterthought:  I watched the first Wick movie, hated it with a passion (actually never made it to the end) so I’ve never watched any of the sequels.  The above post has more to do with the marketing thereof than anything related to the movie itself.

Baby Talk

Business, Grammar Nazism

Then we have this silliness:

If I were put in charge of a business today, probably one of the first things I would do is make the use of all “emojis” in corporate communications a cause for immediate termination — whether in internal emails or texts, and certainly in client communication.

Why?  Because a business is a serious thing — there are profits to be made, customer- and client relationships to be forged, and decisions made can have long-term implications and outcomes.

And serious business requires serious communication, not fucking chat-speak shorthand (and by extension, the same goes for acronyms like “AFAIK” and “IMHO”).

There’s no excuse for using any of the above.  “But it expresses what I mean much more quickly and efficiently”  is the common whine in their defense, which tells me that you are a) lazy and b) unable to write / communicate properly.  Neither of those shortcomings is likely to endear you to me, the boss.

I think that this foolishness is in keeping with the modern yoot’s belief that work isn’t serious, that employers have to make employees’ lives easier — safe, yes;  easy, not so much — and it all feeds into the scenario that today’s workers feel that they’re entitled to a job that has few rules, few restrictions on their behavior, and few demands on their intellect (such as it is).

This “work from home” nonsense is another flea on the corporate body.  I once had a job where I worked from home, but only because the (start-up) company was based in Florida and couldn’t afford to relocate me.  Even so, I made a point of spending a full week each month in Florida to meet with other executives and employees, and most especially to justify my continued employment to management.

The way I see it is that if you live closer than twenty miles from the corporate office, you should come in to work every day.

“But I’m just as efficient working from home as from the office!”  (which is a total lie, and everyone knows it) which carries the implication that the employee and not management can set the standard for efficiency.

“But I don’t have to be in the office to work!”  comes the next wail, as though management should have to justify the company’s employment requirements to the employees.  “I decide the working conditions — and if I say you have to work in an office, then you’ll work in an office.  Otherwise, hit the road.”  (or “FIFO” — hah!)

I think it’s the insufferable arrogance that all the above demonstrate that makes me want to walk around with a cane, lightly swatting people who offend me with their attitude and laziness.  (I know, that’s assault — another fucking example of corrective action turned into a criminal misdeed, don’t get me started.)

Long ago, I interviewed a kid for a junior executive position, and was completely floored when he asked me how much access he’d have to senior management, to communicate (as he put it) his “ideas” for improvement.  He was equally taken aback by my response:  “What makes you think that your inexperience qualifies you for such access?”  I then got the “fresh eyes” spiel, whereupon I pointed out that he shouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume that his fresh young eyes were the first such that had ever started work at the company.

Of course, he didn’t get the job — and was somewhat hurt when I told him why I’d made that decision.  (In those days, one actually communicated with applicants when turning them down, instead of ghosting them.  Don’t get me started on this little example of corporate / individual cowardice.)

Elephant herds tend to survive (and thrive) because the older bulls keep the adolescents in line.  In today’s culture, adolescents demand that they should run the show, even though history shows that uninformed opinion and little experience ends up in disaster. One of my favorite movie storylines is that of Big (1988), where Tom Hanks is miraculously transformed into an adult, and whose idea for a toy company makes him a corporate hero.  However, his next idea is terrible, and had he not reverted to childhood, catastrophic failure would have been inevitable.

Never mind history (all that old stuff);  one has only to look at today’s White House and its Cabinet of lightweights like Harris, Buttigieg, Granholm and Raimondo  to see the consequences of such folly.

The business world is no different, by the way, as witnessed by the ineptness and uncaring attitude of adolescent children like Zuckerberg and the twerps at Google, whose “life is just like a game, dude” perspective is equally catastrophic for society.  Great ideas for a start-up, but not so good (okay, terrible) for the long term.

Unfortunately, unlike with Tom Hanks’s Big character, there’s no easy way out for the rest of us who have to live with the Bidenesque- and Metaversal catastrophes.

And while these twerps, insulated from looming catastrophe by age (Biden) and wealth (Zuckerberg), might say “BFD, dude”, the same is not true for the rest of us.

It IS a Big Fucking Deal.