Tag: corpocracy

Why the Polls Were So Off

538’s final forecast for the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is officially out, and it’s a real nail-biter. Our model gives Harris a 50 out of 100 chance of winning the majority of Electoral College votes. Our model gives Trump a 49 out of 100 chance. The model shifted toward Harris slightly on Monday, Nov. 4, after high-quality polls released over the weekend showed her tied or ahead in the key northern battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Of course, Harris lost badly, including all three key northern battleground states in which she was supposedly “tied or ahead”. Donald Trump’s electoral college ranked #39 out of the 59 historical US presidential elections; it was not exactly the “real nail-biter” that 538 forecasted. And the Dark Herald knows why:

A while back, Disney subsidiary ESPN bought up Nate Silver’s 538 to help with their forecasting. It was actually a pretty smart idea. Then 538 gets transferred over to ABC News, which takes it away from Jason Pitaro and puts it under the control of… You guessed it! Dana Walden. Nate Silver “resigns” from the company he created and is replaced by G. Elliot Morris a 28-year-old flaming idealogue and journalist. This is when things started to go down hill fast for 538.

Rasmussen Polls were sent a few polite-ish requests for their procedures and some proprietary information. The boss of Rasmussen doesn’t like how this smells and refuses. Sure enough, it was the equivalent of “We are going to write this story about you and feel you should have a chance to tell your side of the story.” It was obviously a trap. Sure enough, Disney’s 538 sends Rasmussen a vicious letter accusing them of every kind of bias in their methodology and informing them they are now being dropped from 538’s aggregation.

538 also injected ABC News’ own polling into their aggregation which immediately biased things to the left. Basically they poll the same people over and over again and they are allegedly influenced by community managers.

That’s right. The Devil Mouse has now graduated from ruining news and entertainment to destroying the purpose of election polls. This is progress?

DISCUSS ON SG

Ghost Jobs

The corpocracy just keeps coming up with new ways to be evil:

If you’ve recently been laid off and have started the arduous process of looking for a new job, you’ve probably seen them on networking platforms like LinkedIn: postings for roles that are 30 days old, maybe more, with suspiciously wide salary ranges. They usually have hundreds, or even thousands, of hopeful applicants vying for the same position, but if you do a quick cross-check and notice that the role isn’t posted on the company’s actual website — or any of their social media pages — you should probably stop drafting that cover letter, because it’s possible they’re not hiring at all.

“Ghost jobs,” or ads for positions that aren’t actually open, are a common phenomenon in the tech industry, which has been plagued by layoffs and budget cuts over recent years. As unemployed workers struggle to regain their footing, recruiters and career coaches who spoke with SFGATE warned that these fake jobs posted by real companies serve multiple, sometimes insidious purposes.

According to a 2024 survey from MyPerfectResume, 81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled. While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it’s also used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable. They also made ads to “trick overworked employees” into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload.

It also allows politicians to falsely claim that Americans are lazy, that more H1-Bs and immigrants are needed, and that immigration is good for the economy. If you’re a corporate executive, the best thing you can do is eliminate your Human Resources department, and discovering that they are posting ghost jobs would be an excellent justification for doing so.

Because the most important reason for creating ghost jobs is that they permit HR to engage in makework to cover the fact that they don’t even have anything to do when the business isn’t hiring.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Mediocre Death Spiral

John Carter explains how the university system and academia is doomed now that it has become women’s work:

If you want your society to produce transcendent excellence in a given field, the only way to do so is to attach a competitive male status hierarchy to it. With status on the line, men will throw themselves into the arena, immersing themselves completely, devoting their every waking moment to mastering a skill or subject, making it their life’s purpose to push a discipline beyond its limits. Competitive pressures between the best of the best then raises performance to its apogee. Iron sharpens iron.

Conversely, if you want reliable mediocrity, then you want women’s work. Women don’t have the same sexual incentive to compete with one another in performance, and so, by and large, don’t (they compete in other ways). Their instinct is to perform to a perfectly acceptable standard, but not, in general, to push themselves to exceed it.

For men, the play-by-play events of a competitive environment are high drama. Not so for women. Women, as the old saying goes, don’t care about the struggles of the competitors: they just wait at the finish line and fuck the winner. The drama women tend to care about focuses more on the heroine’s struggle to distinguish winners from posers, to decide which winner she wants, and/or to stand out from the other girls so she can catch the eye of the winner. “I’m so torn … do I go with the musky barbarian warlord werewolf rapist, or the the aloof immortal billionaire vampire knight?” the heroine asks herself for three hundred pages. How he became an immortal billionaire vampire knight in the first place is of much less interest than whether or not he’s really interested in her.

Men are constantly on the lookout for arenas in which they can prove their worth, and thereby attract a mate or, more accurately, as many mates as possible. Across the myriad competitive arenas that men have invented, there is one common element shared by all of them, which both men and women are exquisitely sensitive to:

An arena cannot be dominated by women.

The reason for this is obvious. The purpose of the arena, from the male point of view, is to demonstrate his worth relative to other men. To enter an arena filled with women is to engage in a lose/lose proposition: if one does poorly, one has been beaten (up) by girls; if one does well, one has beaten (up) girls. Neither outcome is going to impress the girls. Or, for that matter, the guys.

For this reason, men who enter a social environment in which women predominate will tend to make a hasty exit. There is nothing for them there. This is not a social construct which can be corrected with sufficient nagging. It is hardwired into human sexual psychology. There is nothing that can be done about it, short of redesigning human beings from their genes on up. At which point you’re not talking about humans anymore.

You might make people pretend that men do not prefer to compete in male-dominated arenas; you might, through sufficient emotional abuse, give them bad consciences about their natural instincts; you will not, not ever, not even once, change those natural instincts. If you ignore those instincts, you will only awaken the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

This explains two related phenomena, both much deplored by feminists, who are in the business of ignoring human instinct.

  • The first is male flight: the tendency of male involvement in a given profession, occupation, institution, or industry to drop precipitously once a certain threshold of female involvement is surpassed.
  • The second is the low value assigned to women’s work.

Men are no more welcome in any field that becomes female-dominated than they are in the women’s bathroom. Any man who insists on entering such a field is regarded as a metaphorical transgender whose decision to compete with the female majority there is considered intrinsically unfair. Any man choosing to do so will be considered an interloper and opportunist by the women and as less of a man by the men.

As Carter lays out in considerable detail, this process is natural, inevitable, and absolutely unstoppable. We’ve witnessed it taking place in our lifetimes in several fields, and while academia is not something that most of us pay any attention to, we’ve seen it in books, we’ve seen it in comics, and we’ve seen it in video games. Once the women get involved in a field and start demanding mediocrity while simultaneously decrying excellence, the men start walking away. Competition is replaced by consensus, quality collapses, prestige vanishes, and eventually the entire field becomes a wasteland of posers and imposters pretending to be impressed with each other, producing nothing and selling to no one. Profitable productivity is replaced with political parasitism off financial hosts, and when the ability to parasitize is eventually lost, the entire field collapses.

This is probably a good time to start developing alternative credentials based on objective standards. They will be increasingly in demand as the value of academic credentials continue to collapse. Apprentice systems and guilds are also likely to become more important, as the need to demonstrate an actual ability to do the work required replaces paper certificates of implied potential capability.

DISCUSS ON SG

Death by Diversity

Boeing is laying off 17,000 employees in the aftermath of a series of diversity-inspired disasters:

The US manufacturer Boeing has announced plans to eliminate around 10% of its workforce over the coming months, as the aerospace giant’s losses continue to mount and a strike undercuts the production of its best-selling planes.

The job cuts will include executives and managers in addition to ordinary employees, according to a memo shared by the company’s new president and CEO Kelly Ortberg on Friday. The corporation employs nearly 170,000 people worldwide.

“Our business is in a difficult position, and it is hard to overstate the challenges we face together,” said Ortberg, who became CEO of the troubled aircraft maker two months ago. A month after he took the helm, 33,000 hourly workers went on strike. “We reset our workforce levels to align with our financial reality and to a more focused set of priorities,” he added.

The “tough” decision is aimed at completing structural changes that will ensure the company’s ability to stay competitive and execute the customers’ orders over the long term, the CEO emphasized.

It’s not going to make any difference whatsoever if they don’t a) abandon their commitment to diversity and b) get rid of all the employees who were hired for their diversity instead of their excellence. Any company that has a commitment to diversity necessarily lacks a commitment to excellence, or even basic competence, and which will eventually have very negative consequences for its products and services.

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The Invasion is No Accident

The wave of Indians invading the corpocracy is not an accident. As is always the case among those from low-trust societies, once one is in, their primary objective is to allow more in. And once they gain control of HR, they exclude the natives. It doesn’t matter if it’s Jews controlling the entrance departments of the Ivy League schools or Indians controlling the employment agencies, the same process will be observed:

A company that supplies thousands of workers for Silicon Valley’s technology industry and other Bay Area employers intentionally discriminated against non-Indian workers, a jury has found.

The jury verdict against Cognizant, founded in Chennai and now headquartered in New Jersey, came Friday in a class-action lawsuit that revolved around claims the firm abused the H-1B visa process. The visa is intended for workers with specialized skills, and Silicon Valley tech firms rely on it heavily to secure top talent and also to obtain workers for lower-level jobs via Cognizant and other staffing firms.

Three U.S.-born workers described in the lawsuit as “Caucasian” — Vartan Piroumian of California, Christy Palmer of Arizona and Edward Cox of Texas — sued Cognizant in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles in 2017. Another plaintiff described as Caucasian, Jean-Claude Franchitti, a green card holder from France, joined as a plaintiff later.

The lawsuit claimed Cognizant ousted many non-Indian workers by first taking them off projects and “benching” them without work, then keeping them benched until firing them in accordance with a company policy.

Cognizant said Monday it was “disappointed with the verdict” and would appeal.

“We provide equal employment opportunities for all employees and have built a diverse and inclusive workplace that promotes a culture of belonging in which all employees feel valued, are engaged and have the opportunity to develop and succeed,” the company said. “Cognizant does not tolerate discrimination and takes such claims seriously.”

Federal government data show Cognizant obtains H-1B visas for hundreds of Indian citizens to work in Bay Area jobs per year, said Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who studies the visa and testified for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Data from 2023 show Cognizant placed H-1B holders at Bay Area employers ranging from Google, Meta and Apple to PG&E, Kaiser Permanente and Walmart.

The H-1B has become a political flashpoint. Critics point to abuses including replacement of U.S. workers by visa holders, while the tech industry lobbies to boost the annual cap on new visas past 85,000.

The most recent research, by the Bay Area Council, showed nearly 60,000 foreign citizens on the H-1B were approved to work for Bay Area companies in 2019. The vast majority are from India.

A company, a company “founded in Chennai,” which is the city “formerly known as Madras, is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is the state’s primate city and is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal.”

So an Indian company gets a foothold into the Silicon Valley HR departments, controls access to the jobs distributed there, and promptly floods all of the corporations with Indians. This is yet another reason why anti-discrimination laws are unjust and need to be abolished on the basis of violating the freedom of association. Discrimination is a good and necessary policy on the part of any employer; one always must discriminate on the basis of competence and agreeability if the operation is to function correctly. If the discrimination is not open and above-board on the part of the natives, it will be subversive and destructive on the part of the invaders.

UPDATE: An informative comment on SG: The company I used to work for hired a “British” CEO. Within a year, 75% of the C suite was Indian, and my whole team was outsourced to India. The stock has tanked 90% in 2 years.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Corpocracy Devours Itself

I thought the most informative aspect of this IBM employee’s critical rant about the former tech giant is the way it reveals how the corpocracy ends up devouring itself once it makes the shift from production to services. We’re presently seeing this transformation take place in the game space, as the corpocratic-“game developers” seek to capture customers and feed upon them over time rather than simply make good games and sell them to gamers.

And the larger corporations, of course, can’t survive by feeding on individual consumers, so they have to predate upon smaller corporations, locking them into “service contracts” and keeping them dependent upon their increasingly inferior technologies. The inevitable results are exactly the opposite of the theoretical benefits of so-called “capitalism”.

I have been at IBM for a couple of years now and I honestly question why any of us are still here, pretending that this company is going to turn it around. Our best days are long gone and what we are witnessing is the slow, painful death of IBM yet we are still on this sinking ship.

IBM Cloud is an absolute joke. It accounts for an extremely tiny fraction of the market and only because most companies that use it are trapped with IBM’s legacy systems. They’re not using it because it’s good but because they have no choice. We bought Red Hat for $34 billion because we dropped the ball so hard on cloud. Why build innovative cloud solutions when we can just acquire something decent and slap our logo on it? Our hybrid cloud strategy is merging old systems with slightly newer systems. Most of our cloud revenue comes from services, consulting, and managing cloud infrastructure AKA getting paid to help other companies figure out our legacy technology.

This is mostly why Global Services is our biggest revenue stream. We basically sell the solution to problems that IBM products make. Our strategy is to sell complexity and eventually that company spirals into integration nightmares so they crawl back to IBM consultants to fix it.

IBM makes billions from just keeping system Z mainframes on life support because they are the backbone to so many major institutions. We can charge a ridiculous amount for software fees for enterprise software and they have no choice but to pay up in order to stay alive. The complexity and cost to move off these systems that have been built for decades is too high and we exploit that tremendously with insane maintenance fees.

This is exactly how our software licensing works too. We just lock companies into proprietary software hell for decades because our core software products like DB2 and Websphere have become deeply embedded in the infrastructure of large organizations. Companies are trapped when we charge high maintenance and support fees and they have to shell out for upgrades they barely need. ELAs are traps designed to squeeze as much money as we can possibly can.

We fail to integrate our acquisitions within our corporate strategy. We just have a mix of cloud platform extensions, AI solutions, and industry specific solutions. We are not innovating ourselves. This is more to help our consulting sales than it is to make a competitive product strategy.

watsonx is a desperate scramble to pretend that we are in the AI market. Everyone knows that we’re not coming up with anything innovative. We are just riding off the coattails of Meta and other open source models just like what we did with Red Hat. No one new will ever adopt watsonx. This is again targeted for our legacy customers who are trapped. It is all just mostly repackaged algorithms and models that everyone is already doing.

Our workforce rebalancing efforts aka our cost cutting strategy by offshoring and replacing highly-paid employees with lower-wage employees has ultimately damaged our long-term profitability. Employees feel less motivated and valued when we see our peers get laid off for cheap labor in India. Employee motivation, experience, and collaboration are crucial for overall productivity and long-term success, but we do it value any of that. It’s all for the short-term profit gains, which again will be overtaken by the long-term negative impact of declining productivity.

Our future is collapsing rapidly. We are holding onto legacy contracts and mainframe lifelines but once those clients migrate off, IBM is left with nothing but scraps. Microsoft, Google, AWS will destroy us as cloud AI leaders and eventually, they will also perfect mainframe-to-migration tools and our mainframe clients with jump ship. I envision we will be sold off as pieces or die all together.

So again, I ask: Why are you still here? IBM is draining your energy and trapping you in an endless cycle of bureaucracy, outdated tech, and corporate nonsense. Do you truly believe that watsonx or IBM Cloud will save us? There is no growth or innovation and you will either be patching up legacy systems, trying to sell dead AI products, or stuck in consulting purgatory. We are not turning it around. Get out while you can and develop skills in modern technology and work somewhere where the future is bright.

TLDR; IBM monetizes on confusion, legacy systems, and corporate inertia. We sell tech to trap companies in it, then charge them forever to keep it working. The only reason companies are with IBM is because the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying and we make billions just off that equation. There is no bright future.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Dangers of Selling Out

Football Outsiders went from a high-quality and influential site to extinction in barely 12 months thanks to selling out to some Canadian financial pirates:

Football Outsiders was founded in 2003 by Aaron Schatz. What began as his passion project grew into a fully fledged website for advanced football analytics and statistics such as DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average). Football Outsiders went on to strike partnerships with ESPN and became a popular source for hardcore football nerds and casual fans alike. In 2018, Schatz sold Football Outsiders to a company called EdjSports. He stayed on as editor-in-chief, and, according to longtime Football Outsiders writer Mike Tanier, the site continued to operate as normal.

Then, in September 2021, Champion Gaming, co-founded by Simmonds and Hershman, entered the picture. It acquired EdjSports, and Football Outsiders along with it, in late 2021 as part of a “reverse takeover,” a way for private companies to go public quickly without having to go through an Initial Public Offering. As part of the deal, Champion Gaming merged with a shell company called Prime City One Capital. According to a news report from the time, “the group closed a funding round of $3.65 million (CAD $4.62 million), giving it a roughly $12.3 million post-money valuation, and it is on track to begin trading in a few weeks.”

Champion Gaming had ambitions to expand beyond NFL coverage. It struck a licensing deal with Inpredictable, an NBA analytics website run by Mike Beuoy, and partnered with SharpRank, a sports betting resource. The terms and status of these partnerships are unclear; Beuoy and SharpRank did not respond to queries. Champion Gaming also brought on Chris Spagnuolo to oversee content (for a particular microgeneration of sports media consumers, Spagnuolo is best known as the guy who left Barstool Sports after writing a blog calling Rihanna fat), and hired ESPN’s Katie George to be a brand ambassador and create video content. Spagnuolo declined to comment. Defector was not able to reach George for comment.

By the summer after the takeover, changes at the top of the company were underway. In June 2022, Simmonds took over from Hershman as CEO; Wickham took over as CFO; and the company’s president, Chief Innovation Officer, and director all resigned. The company framed the changes as an exciting new chapter. Of Simmonds’s ascent to CEO, Hershman said in a press release, “Given his previous experience as a public markets CEO and his extensive background in online gambling, the board of directors and I determined that his leadership of the Company would be both ideal and appropriate to steer us going forward as we build a leading sports content and data intelligence business.”

But by the fall there were signs that the company was floundering. According to financial documents filed in November 2022, which are publicly available through Sedar, Canada’s securities filing system, the company had little cash flow and was carrying significant debt, especially relative to its revenues. In the first nine months of 2022, Champion Gaming reported $969,789 in revenue and $5,619,803 in losses. (All monetary figures cited in the filings are in CAD.) As of Sept. 30, 2022, the entire company had only $55,776 in cash, with even less coming in. As of the same date, the accounts receivable, meaning revenue the company accrued, but which they still needed to be paid, was only $13,911. On page six of the same filing, the company wrote: “These material uncertainties cast significant doubt as to the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

We were never going to sell out, but rest assured we have learned our lesson about the importance of staying in your lane and focusing relentlessly on what you do best. My answer now to the people both within and without the community who tell me “you know, you should do X” is very short and unmistakably negative.

No short cuts. No outside assistance. No wild ambitions. Just the slow and organic growth that comes from steadily improving quality and value. Castalia History is the only sort of growth we want; it’s now very nearly as large as the Library subscription and all four of the first books have sold out whereas none of our competitors can say the same of most of their recent books with similar print runs.

DISCUSS ON SG

Shots Fired

Mike Florio takes a very serious and very public shot at Panthers’ owner David Tepper:

And the incoming quarterbacks have more power than ever before. Their money is the source of it. They have earned plenty. They have (or should have) banked a lot of it. They can make it clear to the Panthers, privately or if need be publicly, that they won’t sign a contract with the Panthers. That whoever is drafted by Tepper’s team will sit out for a year, live off his NIL money (and possibly earn more of it), and re-enter the draft the next time around. That’s how it works. If a player is drafted and doesn’t sign a contract, he re-enters the next draft. If he does it again, he can pick whichever team he wants after the next draft…

It’s high time for incoming quarterbacks to take a stand when it comes to being forced to play for an inept organization. And there’s always strength in numbers. The Panthers should be the first target for a collective “no thanks” by the top prospects.

Florio tends to be a little too inclined to tell other people what they should do for my liking. But for once, his inclination toward interference in the business of others is both justified and sound. David Tepper always looked like he’d be a disaster as an NFL team owner and a disaster is exactly what he’s turned out to be. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if there are more influential NFL figures speaking through Florio’s voice here.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Retardery Burns

On Friday, BackerKit’s Trust and Safety informed us of their “final decision” that the Hypergamouse crowdfunding campaign scheduled to start that very day was cancelled, and that their platform was off-limits to us due to some unspecified associations with some unidentified badthinkers. So, naturally, they emailed us today wanting to know why we’d missed our launch date.

Hypergamouse Volume 1’s launch date has passed. How can we help?

Hypergamouse Volume 1 was scheduled to launch on 09/12/24.

Have your plans changed? Did we miss your launch? Let us know so we know how best to support you.

Have any questions? E-mail us at crowdfunding@backerkit.com or just reply to this email.

I sent them what in the circumstances can only be considered a measured response:

You banned our campaign, you morons. Did you somehow forget that? How can you help? It’s a little late for that now. We were reliably informed that your decision is final. We’re going back to our previous crowdfunding partner.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Minestrippers

It’s not just big established companies that are being managed into irrelevance and eventual extinction. A good article on the “mismanagerial class” doesn’t quite get down to the roots of the structural problem with the US corpocracy:

The problem of companies being enthusiastically managed into irrelevance is often simplified to blaming MBAs, but this doesn’t tell the whole story. Although Intel’s Otellini and Boeing’s McNerney were MBAs, Sony’s Idei was just a career manager who went to college in Japan. Jeff Immelt, an MBA, presided over the precipitous decline of General Electric from 2001 to 2017. Yet his notorious predecessor for twenty years, Jack Welch, is often held equally responsible—and he had a PhD in chemical engineering. Westinghouse, once an American industrial conglomerate with a major line of business in building nuclear reactors, undertook a seemingly absurd and ultimately fatal pivot into becoming a media company in the 1990s. The man who led that change, Michael H. Jordan, was a chemical engineer by training too—though also a former McKinsey partner.

Rather, the problem seems to stem from a particular way of thinking about what a company even is, what its goals are, and what measures are or are not appropriate to achieve those goals. In simplified terms, we can think of companies as organized to create value and sustain themselves by capturing a portion of the created value as financial profit. When executives, board members, and major investors manage companies by and for the bottom line, they operate on a theory of the company as a vehicle solely for capturing profit. When this happens, the difficult and holistic question of creating value in the first place—a question unique for every company—simply goes unaddressed. It is treated as a permanently solved, one-time problem that no longer merits attention or resources; at Boeing, for instance, senior engineers were reportedly told they were no longer needed because Boeing’s products were “mature,” as if it was impossible for further progress in airplanes to ever be made. The focus is instead on raising profit margins and share prices through cost-cutting and various other attempts to improve efficiency or appeal to investors. This school of thought appears to be the dominant one in the influential U.S. financial sector and might be termed “shareholder capitalism.”

Outside of software and the few domains where former software entrepreneurs have already founded new market entrants, creating more unique and tangible value is at best a secondary concern after capturing more profit or contributing to the intangible value of a society with socially conscious firms.

This implies that much of the modern economy is not even trying to undertake productive economic activity as it is commonly understood. Though surprising, this conclusion seems to provide a satisfying and elegant explanation for many contemporary socioeconomic mysteries. Though MBAs, financiers, managers, or accountants are perhaps more inclined to view a company as a vehicle for capturing profits or intangibly contributing to society, there is nothing preventing trained engineers from inclining toward the same views as well. After all, engineers are formally trained in engineering, not in an alternative theory of business management.

From startup to giant government-supported effective monopoly, the core concept of the “company” has changed. Until the 1980s, a company was understood to be an organization that existed in order to profitably provide goods and services to its customers. But with the onset of financialization, a company became seen as a vehicle for the transfer of money from the government, from venture capitalists, or from Wall Street to the primary stakeholders. The customers were secondary, the goods and services tertiary. The existing businesses and customer bases are nothing more than mines to be stripped of all their assets, then abandoned, barren and empty.

This is why deplatforming – unthinkable in “the customer is always right era” – is now very common and the quality of the goods being produced and the services being provided is in free fall. The convergence of the corporations is rendering them totally incapable of fulfilling their nominal core functions, and combined with the financialization of the corporate sector, means they’re not even incentivized to attempt to fulfill those functions.

If Lockheed Martin can arrange to get a government contract paying $100 billion for a single jet fighter that cannot even fly, that’s great business by today’s standards. If a startup can receive $1 billion in venture capital without ever generating a single dime of income, that’s a home run by today’s standards. And yet, there is no actual economic activity. There is nothing being produced and no services provided.

In other words, it’s a fragile system with a foundation that isn’t built on sand, but thin air. Which is why it is vital for those who wish to survive, and perhaps even thrive, amidst the system’s inevitable ruins to ignore the way business is done today and focus on the age-old principles of providing genuine value to actual customers.

DISCUSS ON SG