Arriving in my Inbox yesterday afternoon:
Clearly, American isn’t scrutinizing my website, or else they’d have seen this, this and this.
Category: Business
What He Said, And More Besides
Actor James Woods is a well-known conservative, despite his profession and location, and in this case he’s right on the money, as usual:
Specifically, here, is the fact that Democrats make it almost impossible for small companies to survive, weighing them down with not only horribly-burdensome but hostile regulations (as above) like minimum wage dictates.
Then, when the inevitable happens and the small companies go out of business or sell out to larger ones, the socialists like Warren moan about the concentration of trade and the need for “more competition”. (“Price gouging” as referenced by Warren here is meaningless and a red herring.)
May we remind ourselves of food rationing, endless lines formed to get what little food there was, and fixed pricing which led to the ford shortages in the first place? Where was this so prevalent… wait, it’s all coming back to me…
Ah yes, in the Soviet Union, where the State owned all means of production and likewise the entire food chain.
And Warren, lest we forget, is an outright Stalinist whose remedy for the current situation here would involve State control of pricing (and of course of production and the entire food chain), just to make the market more “efficient”.
Do people like this ever experience cognitive dissonance between what they think and say, while constantly seeing evidence that completely repudiates their worldview?
Clearly not, and Woods has the absolute truth of it.
Ripoff?
Let’s say you went into a little seaside diner feeling peckish, and saw that they had a menu item that read: “2 slices of buttered toast”.
Sounds okay, yes? (I’m going with “normal-person peckish” and not “American peckish” which would apparently require the entire loaf to satisfy that hunger pang.)
Then you see the price: $5.00 for the two slices of buttered toast.
Ripoff? Let’s analyze the thing.
I’m going to give the diner the benefit of the doubt here, and allow their claim that this isn’t Wonderbread and store-label butter, but a “premium” offering. I’m also, for the purpose of the analysis, going to allow that they purchased the ingredients thereof at retail prices (they didn’t).
Our diner, by the way, would be located in the equivalent of coastal Florida, up in the Redneck Riviera.
So using my local gourmet store (Central Market) as a price guide, let’s look at the thing:
Let’s see what the unit cost is. Assuming you’re doing thick-ish (e.g. “not-quite-Texan”) slice size, you’re going to get about 16 slices out of that loaf, assuming that we discard the ends, of course. So: $5 / 16 = 31.25 cents ($0.3125) per slice; or 62.5 cents in total for the two.
Now the butter: even assuming you slather the butter on like I typically do, you’re still going to use about 1/32oz per slice, ergo ending up with (8x 32 = 256; 398 / 256 = about 1.5 cents per slice or 3 cents for the menu item.
Total “cost”: (31.25 + 1.5) x 2 = 65.5 cents ($0.655) for the two slices of buttered toast.
Now for the tricky bit.
Restaurants, from back when I still managed one, typically have had to mark up “cost” by 600% just to break even. (Don’t even get me started on whether that’s the case in NYfC or Califuckingfornia: it isn’t.) This takes into account fixed overhead like salaries, supplies & equipment, utilities, real estate and so on (i.e. what it costs your diner each day before you get a single customer in the door).
So the extended cost of that 2-slice item works out to (errr carry the six) $3.93, before adding a single penny for gross profit. (And just so we’re clear: $5 from $3.93 represents about 27% gross profit — I know, don’t make me laugh.)
Is $5, therefore, a total ripoff?
Not from where I stand, and this kind of analysis explains why you have to take your bank manager along to 5 Guys every time you visit them to get you and your wife a burger.
Here’s the article that prompted this post.
And Fuck Joe Biden, because about three years ago that $5 loaf of bread at Central Market used to cost $2.85, and the $4 butter about $2.75 (because I keep track of this kind of thing, even though the Gummint would prefer that I forget that the chocolate ration used to be 5 grams and not three).
[/Orwell]
So Much For That Diversity Thing
I remember once attending a board meeting of a company I worked at, and one of the agenda items was replacing a deceased board member. One of the nominations for the replacement was some woman I’d never heard of, but as the nominator stated, “It’s time we had a little diversity on this board.” And that’s all he said; no mention of her qualifications, experience, nothing.
As the most junior executive in the room, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I couldn’t help wondering why nobody else had either.
Anyway, a vote was held and the nomination passed unanimously, albeit with one abstention (guess who).
This was back in the mid-1990s.
Anyway, it appears that one company has recently followed the same route — one assumes for the same reasons, only it backfired horribly on them.
Here’s the story:
On December 5, 2023, Breitbart News noted that shareholders disgruntled over Smith & Wesson’s continued manufacture of AR-15 platform rifles had filed a lawsuit. The suit claims that the defendants, who are Smith & Wesson board members and the company’s senior management team, “knowingly allowed the Company to become exposed to significant liability for intentionally violating federal, state, and local laws through its manufacturing, marketing, and sales of AR-15 style rifles and similar semiautomatic firearms.” .
And who were these “disgruntled shareholders”?
Plaintiffs in the case included the Adrian Dominican Sisters, Sisters of Bon Secours USA, Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, and Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus & Mary.
…making me wonder: what the fuck were Our Ladies Of The Blessed Disarmament doing anywhere near S&W’s management?
Anyway, they failed, the rotten rosary-swingers, and a jolly good thing it was too.
On March 13, 2024, Breitbart News reported that Nevada’s Clark County District Court signaled no “substantial likelihood” Smith & Wesson would be found liable, saying the activist shareholders appear not to be aligned with the company’s best interest and requiring them to post a half-million-dollar bond to continue their suit.
The plaintiffs were instructed to post the bond by April 23, 2024, but they did not.
On May 6, 2024, Judge Joe Hardy pointed to their failure to post the bond as ordered and dismissed the lawsuit against Smith & Wesson.
Errrrr “the activist shareholders appear not to be aligned with the company’s best interest” — I’ll say they aren’t. They tried to get into the company to subvert its business — kinda like the Commies do in our school system — but it didn’t work.
If I were on the S&W board, I would file suit against these BoCs for compensatory damages for the legal fees, at least.
I know, I know: something about “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord.
Bollocks.
Pointless Shit
I’m always ranting about how the auto industry has overloaded basic transportation with evermore-complex technology (3 seat-position memory options? FFS), but of course, they’re not the only ones.
Here’s another example, seen via a link on Insty’s page:
What a load of bullshit. My old Keurig essentially has two options: size of cup, regular/strong brew, and that’s it. (“High Altitude Setting”? FFS #2)
Oh wait… I forgot mine’s warning light for “There’s No More Water In The Reservoir, You Idiot, Can’t You See Through The Clear Plastic?”
Let’s not forget the lie of “Brushed Silver” when it’s just shiny plastic.
And forgive me, but the whole point of a Keurig is that you can make a cuppa quickly without waiting for the water to boil, so the “Auto On/Off” switch is the work of Satan. (Yeah, “saves electricity” blah blah blah… fuck the whales.)
Needless to say, in the spirit of manufacturers everywhere, my model Keurig is no longer available; so when it finally quits working, I’ll be forced to buy one of these multi-featured over-complex monstrosities at, of course, a price which is 40% more than I paid for mine.
Don’t even talk to me about the cost of replacing my ageing VW, or my soaring blood pressure will ensure that the Tiguan outlives its owner.
Well, So Much For That Tagline
We’re all accustomed to the advertising tagline from the Kraut carmakers which touts “German engineering” as the selling proposition for buying one of their overpriced cars.
That doesn’t seem to be the case, as evidenced by this J.D. Power survey of not so long ago:
It’s a large sample (80,000), by the way (the full methodology can be found here).
Basically, apart from all the Kraut shenanigans involved with cartels and illegal manipulations (diesel emissions coff coff etc.), it all boils down to the Germans making their cars evermore sophisticated but in doing so, more fragile and prone to breakage.
Where have we heard this before? Oh yeah, pretty much everywhere.
And people snigger when I say how much I’d prefer to drive something like a Merc 280 SL than any of their newer models…
