Tag: corpocracy

Keeping Big Tech in Line

Not the United States, unfortunately. But China continues to crack down on the corporate elite and their rapacious financial parasitism:

China’s state market regulator said it was fining e-commerce giant Alibaba, along with other Big Tech majors including Baidu and JD.com, over violations of the country’s anti-monopoly legislation. The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) slapped fines of $78,300 on each corporation, saying they failed to declare 43 deals, dating back to 2012, to the proper authorities.

The list of antitrust violation cases that have been brought to light include Beijing Baidu Wangxun Technology and Nanjing Wangdian Technology’s joint purchase of Nanjing Xinfeng Network Technology, Alibaba’s acquisition of the equity of AutoNavi Software Holdings, and Tencent’s acquisition of equity in China Medical Online.

All the cases announced represent transactions that should have been declared but weren’t. SAMR noted that the list includes a raft of firms and a long transaction time span.

“With the in-depth advancement of anti-monopoly law enforcement, the awareness of corporate operators’ concentration declarations has continued to increase, proactively sorting out and reporting the concentration of operators that have not previously been declared illegally … and actively cooperating with investigations,” the watchdog said on Saturday on its official WeChat account.

The penalties are the latest development in Beijing’s major clampdown on technology-focused businesses, amid a nationwide move towards increasing national security. The country’s tech giants, particularly the ones operating in the financial sector, have been under close scrutiny from state authorities due to their increasing power.

In October, the SAMR imposed a fine of $533.5 million on food delivery platform Meituan. The penalty over monopolistic practices was the second-biggest fine on the Chinese platform economy since Alibaba was slapped a record $2.8 billion antitrust fine in April, for exclusionary practices.

The corporations, both Chinese and US-based, should have seen this coming. There can be no question that Xi is genuinely committed to fighting all forms of corruption; an intelligence report on him written before he came to power even highlighted the expectation that he would “aggressively attempt to address these evils”.

Xi knows how very corrupt China is and is repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society,
with its attendant nouveau riche, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such “moral evils”
as drugs and prostitution, the professor stated. The professor speculated that if Xi were to become the Party General Secretary, he would likely aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.

DISCUSS ON SG

23 and Me Sells Your DNA Data

This is the exact opposite of “surprising”:

Cynics will say that nothing says “trusted neighborhood doctor” quite like a company that is a cross between Big Pharma and Big Tech – but apparently Anne Wojcicki’s 23andMe wants to be perceived as having the characteristics of all three.

The company, best known for harvesting genetic data from millions of Americans via spit tests that produced questionably useful information to the customers, recently went public, and now the serious side of its business is emerging – using all that data to develop new drugs and usher in the era of a new kind of Big Pharma that relies on Big Tech strategies of collecting data and monetizing it.

It would have been difficult not to see this one coming. I’m just a little surprised they didn’t do it sooner.

DISCUSS ON SG

Evading the Obvious

It’s always amusing to see how SJWs set their projects up for failure, then do their best to hide the obvious reason for the failure from everyone. This year’s Strictly Come Dancing premier, which is one of the most popular British television events, mysteriously lost 16 percent of its ratings from last year’s premier, and is down nearly one-quarter from its 2016 peak viewership. A plethora of reasons for this decline have been suggested.

Strictly’s launch night scored its lowest ever viewing figures on Saturday – with the low numbers said to be down to good weather, line-up and anti-vaxx controversy.

The BBC show attracted an audience of 7.2 million viewers for the inaugural show over the weekend, and while those numbers remain broadly impressive, they still represent a significant drop from last year’s 8.6 million.

While insiders remain positive over a rise when live shows return, prior to the launch airing fans insisted they were less than impressed with the line-up and Covid claims surrounding the show, while sources said the good weather was to blame.

Other users grumbled over the absence of Janette Manrara and insisted the show peaked with last year’s winner Bill Bailey. The Twitter users in question penned: ‘Why is janette not dancing this year? I love watching her. It’s not the same on ITT… I’m not even watching it this year, Bill was peak Strictly for me, cannot be beaten’.

Another claim was that the weather was a key factor in explaining the figures.

The TV source told the Sunday Mirror newspaper: ‘Lots of people had been out and about enjoying the early autumn sunshine and will probably watch on catch-up today.’

Other concerns surround the news of a ‘no jab, no jive’ row, over the refusal of two of its dancers to be vaccinated.

Of course, while the real reason is mentioned, it is not mentioned in the context of being responsible for the near-textbook ratings loss, which I would anticipate will end up being around the usual 20 percent first-year convergence-related decline described in Corporate Cancer.

Craig Revel Horwood has tipped John Waite and Johannes Radebe to win this year’s ‘Strictly’. The duo have formed the first ever all-male pairing on the show, and Craig views them as the frontrunners in this year’s competition.

Yeah, it’s probably the weather. Right. The reality is that the better the offensive all-male pairing does on the show, the more the ratings will decline. It doesn’t matter whether the subject is sports, video games, or female-focused television, convergence always kills. And those pushing and/or defending the convergence never, ever learn from all of the previously documented examples of the phenomenon.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Broken Window School of Medicine

Pfizer is going to offer booster subscribers a twice-daily pill to keep them from dying of adverse reactions and mutant ADE infections breaking through the boosters:

Pharmaceutical megacorporation pfizer is now developing a COVID pill that is meant to be taken alongside the COVID vaccines that have already made the company a staggering amount of money. The new pill is expected to be released by the end of the year and will be required to be taken twice per day.

“Success against #COVID19 will likely require both vaccines & treatments,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Wednesday. “We’re pleased to share we’ve started a Phase 2/3 study of our oral antiviral candidate-specifically designed to combat SARS-CoV-2-in non-hospitalized, low-risk adults.”

Seriously, who keeps falling for this nonsense? Precisely how brain-dead must you be to keep buying what they’re selling?

DISCUSS ON SG

Not All Employers are Idiots

Even some hospitals are beginning to recognize that not requiring the vaxx – which as soon as October will require THREE shots in the USA to maintain “fully vaccinated” status -will give them a competitive advantage in acquiring and retaining employees in a difficult labor environment:

I was visiting with a couple board members of local hospitals recently. One asked the other if they were going to require their employees to get vaccinated. The hospital is ~70% vaccinated, and the board member said they discussed it but decided at this time, they would not because 1) they were worried about losing even a small portion of the remaining 30% and creating issues with hospital staffing, and 2) as most hospitals around us are requiring it, they felt they may have a hiring advantage if they are in the minority of hospitals that do not require employees to be vaccinated.

So don’t be afraid to tell your employer that a) you are willing to get fired over any requirement to inject foreign substances into your body and b) that if employees with less than three shots are not also fired before the end of the year, you will sue them for discrimination.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Game of Corporate Chicken

An executive at a Fortune 500 confirms that the corporations are bluffing with regards to their vaccination policies:

I’m in a senior position at a Fortune 500 company, and I can tell you that leadership is highly, highly stressed about the number of people refusing mandatory vaccinations. They are currently betting that employees will blink before management, but if the unvaccinated employees stand firm in their convictions, this company will be fucked. If the company follows through on its threats and fires all the unvaccinated employees, the company will be decimated and will not be able to function.

Don’t give up. Don’t give in. There are more of us than there are of them.

He’s right. Stand strong, stand firm, and keep your genes clean. And did you catch what this stress on the part of vaccine-refusers implies? The reported percentage of people who have already been vaccinated is almost certainly exaggerated.

Discuss on SG.

Advertising doesn’t work

Contra the popular business assumptions, all that “online ad revenue” is more akin to money laundering among the cognoscenti and voluntary donations from the ignorati than anything resembling the stimulation of demand in the prospective market:

I’ve often recounted the curious tale of how in the 1980s I worked for a marketing research start-up that created perhaps the all time best real world lab for carrying out Randomized Controlled Trials.

In eight towns, we bought the new laser beam checkout scanners for all the supermarkets and drug stores in town in return for their cooperation. We recruited 3000 households in each town who agreed to identify themselves to the checkout clerk, so we could record all their consumer packaged goods shopping. And we controlled what TV commercials they saw on cable TV. So we could divide our sample into test and control groups that had exactly identical amounts of purchasing of the client’s product over the previous year and then show them more or different ads for a year and measure how much their purchasing increased.

Even today. this sounds like science fiction, but it was all up and running 40 years ago.

Brand managers at CPG firms were initially wildly enthusiastic: finally, they could scientifically prove to the beancounters at headquarters that their advertising is so effective that they should double their ad budgets!

But after a half decade of spectacular growth in our service, it turned out more or new advertising only rarely increased sales. And I don’t mean that doubling the ad budget only increased sales in the test group of thousands of families by, say, 7{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} over sales in the control group of families, and that didn’t quite payout in terms of profitability. No, I mean, the typical result was that the sales in the test cell that saw twice as many ads as the control cell bought 0.1{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} less.

They turned off all their keyword-search ads, then measured actual sales:

TADELIS: And the impact on average was pretty much zero.

What was eBay’s existing belief about paid-search advertising?

TADELIS: The company believed that roughly 5 percent of sales were driven by paid-search advertising, meaning that they believed that if we would pull the plug on advertising, sales would drop by 5 percent. What we found was that sales dropped by about half a percent. So, that’s an order of magnitude less. And it was not statistically different from zero.

But maybe it’s still worth it to gain even that half a percent? Now we have to know what the advertising costs, and measure the return on investment.

TADELIS: When you did the return on investment for every dollar that eBay spends — eBay believed that for every dollar they’re spending, they’re getting roughly a dollar-and-a-half back, meaning 50 cents of net profits. And what we showed is that on average, they’re losing more than 60 cents on every dollar.

So, how did these results go over?

TADELIS: Well, the president of eBay, who later became the C.E.O., he cut the paid-search marketing budget immediately by $100 million a year.

So, what happened next? You might think — what with capitalism being the hyper-competitive, market-optimizing, perfect-information ecosystem it’s supposed to be — you might think that other companies, once they learned about this eBay research, would cut their online ad spending. Or at least commission their own research to test the theories. So, did they?

TADELIS: Excellent question. There was a lot of chatter online after our experiments became public, suggesting that folks at eBay don’t know what they’re doing. And paid-search advertising works wonderfully if you know how to do it. But of course, that was backed with no data and no analysis.

In other words, the digital-ad community did not rush to replicate the results.

In the early 1990s, my father’s company was a leader in high-resolution graphics. They had always sold through a three-level distribution-dealer-end user structure, but saw their market position being eroded by inexpensive Taiwanese manufacturers going direct to the end user. So, they took out some very expensive, very prominent ads in PC Week, hired a number of people to take all the anticipated calls, and eagerly awaited the phone to start ringing.

I was one of the people assigned to the late 5-8 PM shift that covered the West Coast. I took one call on the third day. By the end of the first week, it became clear that the ads wouldn’t even begin to pay for themselves, much less the additional staff.

Not all paid advertising is useless, but I would estimate that 99 percent of it is. Which, of course, is why every owner of a popular Internet site soon learns that no one is willing to pay anything for access to even large and dedicated communities.

Don’t fear to walk away

 Sometimes, the corporations and government offices will even back down:

9 young female employees of a NY court office all oppose C19V (They want kids)They organized & told their supervisor they will ALL walk out on the job if the C19V is mandated. The office cannot run without them. Result: the office is not mandating the shot. 

No job, no career, no travel, is worth submitting to the Vaccine Nazi regime. And this is not the first example of an office backing down from an announced vaccine mandate of which I have heard.

Remember, many corporations are struggling because they can’t find decent employees, so they’re not eager to see their existing ones walk over nonsense like this.

Pfizer lied, people died

The Vaccine Nazis are now running around saying that the vaccines aren’t supposed to prevent infection, just serious illness and death. That is a blatant and easily disproven lie:

REAL-WORLD EVIDENCE CONFIRMS HIGH EFFECTIVENESS OF PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE AND PROFOUND PUBLIC HEALTH IMPACT OF VACCINATION ONE YEAR AFTER PANDEMIC DECLARED

Thursday, March 11, 2021 – 06:45am

Dramatically lower COVID-19 disease incidence rates observed in individuals fully vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, based on real-world data gathered by the Israel Ministry of Health  

Data suggest Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine prevents asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection

Latest data analysis finds unvaccinated individuals were 44 times more likely to develop symptomatic COVID-19 and 29 times more likely to die from COVID-19

Findings represent the most comprehensive real-world evidence to date demonstrating the effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine

Read it again: “Data suggest Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine prevents asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection”

And now the Vaccine Nazis are not only saying it isn’t preventing infections, they’re falsely claiming it isn’t even supposed to do so.

Vaccine fascism in the UK

While it’s good that the governments have generally shied away from mandating human genetic modification, the corporations are stepping in:

Publisher Bloomsbury has told staff vaccines will be compulsory when its offices reopen next month.

The Harry Potter publisher informed employees of the policy in an email sent before the second May Day bank holiday weekend. Offices are due to reopen from July 19.

It said it had based its decision on ‘medical and scientific advice’.

Pimlico Plumbers previously announced Covid-19 jabs would be compulsory for staff and new employees would not be taken on if they had not been inoculated.

Care home workers have also been told by the government that they should be vaccinated or risk losing their jobs.

Perhaps publisher Castalia should make an announcement that new employees will not be taken on if they have been subjected to the experimental modification of their mRNA. Anyhow, anyone who works for an employer that mandates any aspect of health care should quit their job immediately. Because, one way or another, it’s not going to end well there.

Forget the material adverse affects of playing with spike proteins for the moment, and instead, think about how many workplace shootings are likely to take place when furious people who have lost loved ones know exactly who is to blame for their deaths. Do you really want to be working in those offices?

UPDATE: ESPN has also gone full vaccine fascist. Can Disney be far behind?

ESPN has sent an email to staffers warning they must be fully vaccinated in order to work remote game assignments this season, according to various emails obtained by OutKick.