Tag: corpocracy

Defensive telecommuting

Sarah Hoyt predicts an increase in defensive telecommuting due to the expected rise in the number of false accusations of sexual harassment:

One of the predictions I’m seeing everywhere, for instance, is how now Human Resources will need a lot more power over companies to prevent more #metoo incidents of sexual importuning of women.

The funny thing about this is that anyone with two eyes and a modicum of understanding of the world knows that this is not where the crazy is headed. As the attempt to drown out the legitimate cases of harassment – mostly by leftists, in leftist-dominated institutions – by claiming #metoo and that all men were essentially harassers became more frantic, it has become obvious that any man can be accused of harassment at any time by anyone.

So, here is a genuine prediction: I predict that instead of giving HR more power, this will give companies pause before hiring women, which will lead to a lot of decent and qualified women being left unemployed.

The second-order effect of that, for companies that can’t avoid hiring women, is two-fold: they’ll either hire women to “make-believe” positions, in which they interact only or primarily with other women, creating a drain on the bottom line, or they will allow a lot more work-at-home by both men and women.  I predict we’ll see a great move towards that in the next year.

It’s true that at this point, any man would have to either be insane or incredibly short-sighted to hire or voluntarily work with a woman in any role that involved direct physical contact. The Left is trying to set up its usual “heads I win, tails you lose” situation here, but as we all know, a no-win situation is just another way to spell “carte blanche”.

And giving more power to HR to cure corporate ills is akin to prescribing two packs a day to someone already suffering from lung cancer.

Convergence kills

The business world is beginning to recognize that more and more corporations have a diversity problem:

Does the world of comic-book superheroes have a diversity problem?

The question matters a lot for investors. Here’s why.

Consumers pay up for good, original content. And comic books come through in spades. They spawn a colorful array of endearing superheroes, followed by profitable movie spinoffs, action figures and collectibles.

Thus superheroes play a significant role in sales trends at Time Warner TWX, +0.26{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee}  and Walt Disney Co. DIS, +0.12{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} home of DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment, respectively. They also impact sales at Netflix NFLX, +0.64{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} which has produced two popular series based on comic-book characters, Cinemark CNK, +1.49{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} Regal Entertainment RGC, +0.04{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} AMC Entertainment AMC, +5.32{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} Hasbro HAS, -0.16{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} and Mattel MAT, -1.79{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee}

So if the new wave of “diverse” superheroes has caused the recent slump in comic-book sales growth, that’s a trend investors need to sit up and notice.

In the past few years, Disney’s Marvel Entertainment has rolled out an Afro-Latino Spider-Man, a Muslim Ms. Marvel, a female Thor, a gay Iceman, a Korean Hulk, an African-American female lead in Iron Man, and a lesbian Latina America Chavez.

Now fans accustomed to more “traditional” characters may have come down with diversity fatigue. And they could be walking away in protest….

Already, the trends don’t look good. Last year, sales growth of comic books, graphic novels and digital offerings cooled off to 5.3{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} as revenue hit $1.08 billion, says ICv2. That was significantly lower than the 9.9{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} annual average growth during 2010-2015.

This year could be even worse. ICv2 President Milton Griepp says comic-book store sales fell 10.5{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} in the first nine months of this year compared with the same time in 2016. He doesn’t yet have hard numbers for digital and regular bookstore sales. But he doubts they will be strong enough to offset the steep decline at comic-book stores, which account for over half of sales.

Convergence represents a problem for some, but tremendous opportunity for others. And as for our foray into comics, we are on track to release at least two 24-pagers in both digital and print format in February, as well as a pair of full-length black-and-white graphic novels.

And the good news is that SJWs always double down, as one perspicacious and hauntingly magnetic observer has noted.

Marvel also pushes back on the theory that diversity hurts sales…. So Marvel is sticking to its guns. “We have had such a great opportunity to create new and interesting characters that are truly representative of the way the world is,” says Sana Amanat, Marvel’s content development director who helped create Kamala Kahn, the popular Muslim Ms. Marvel. “We have made great strides, and we have more to go.”

But the writer has what really promises to be a great idea:

Here’s a suggestion for Cebulski, from the cheap seats. Your company, Marvel, loves to say it reflects the world outside your window. If so, why not step up and launch a series that features alt-right characters battling it out with social justice warriors?  

That would, indeed, be intriguing, would it not? What a brilliant idea!

 

Beyond improbable

So, as you may recall, the Christmas adverts in the UK were suspiciously interethnic this year. Six of the major retailers, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Debenham’s, Sainesbury and Tesco, all just happened to feature interethnic couples who, despite the fairly complex web of interethnic relations tracked by Her Majesty’s Government, all just happened to be of the black man-white woman variety.

Now, I am fully accustomed to the usual excuse-mongering about how interethnicity simply reflects modern society and how anyone who finds this to be suspicious, unlikely, improbable, or indeed, anything less than inspiring is a dirty, double-dyed racist who is unfit to live in any civilized society. Nevertheless, I thought that I would run the numbers to see just how likely it would be for six major commercials to just happen to feature that particular interethnic combination.

There are nine recognized interethnic combinations that are capable of describing the full range of couples shown in the commercials. They are:

  • White and Black Caribbean with White British
  • White and Black Caribbean with Other White
  • White and Black African with White British
  • White and Black African with Other White
  •  African with White British
  • African with Other White
  • Caribbean with White British
  • Caribbean with White Other
  • Other Black with White British

The grand total of individuals on the right column involved in such relationships in the United Kingdom is 156,000. Since the statistics are not divided by sex, but the actors in the commercials are, we must divide that number by two; observe we’re keeping the number of sexes to two rather than, say, 37, in order to keep this reasonably simple. That gives us 78,000.

However, the total number of UK individuals involved in relationships is 25,555,555. Dividing 78k by 25.6M gives us 0.3 percent. So, there is a one in 327 chance that such a BM/WW couple would randomly appear in an advert. However, we are dealing with not one, not two, but SIX commercials.

Multiplied out, my calculator does not display that many zeroes, but to put it another way, there is a one in 1,237,350,745,449,354 chance that these particular adverts just happened to reflect reality. That is one in 1.2 quadrillion.

Which is the mathematical way of saying, “why yes, that is indeed SJW convergence I espy.”

The five stages of corporate convergence

An excerpt from my most recent little project. Hey, sometimes you have to go where the inspiration takes you.

Convergence describes the degree to which an organization prioritizes social justice. There are five stages of corporate convergence:

  1. Infiltrated. The corporation has been entered by people devoted to social justice, but they do not have any significant influence or authority within the company. Employees are hired, fired, and promoted on the basis of either merit or connections. The marketing tends to reflect the company’s products and services.
  2. Lightly Converged. The social justice infiltrators have begun to move into their preferred areas, such as Human Resources and Marketing, but they don’t have any real influence over the corporation’s policies or corporate strategies. The company starts to make occasional noises about “outreach” and “diversity”, but doesn’t actually change its employment practices. The marketing is still mostly about the company’s products, but now features improbably diverse scenarios.
  3. Moderately Converged. Social justice advocates now control Human Resources, which is used as a corporate high ground to exert influence over other departments as well as the executive team. The corporate marketing begins to devote more attention to signaling corporate virtue than selling its products. Managers are encouraged to hire diverse candidates and to stop holding low-performance employees accountable. HR begins holding mandatory awareness sessions and hiring diversity consultants. The corporation’s customer service begins to go downhill.
  4. Heavily Converged. Social justice advocates now control the corporate high ground and the strategic centers. Significant elements of the executive team and the board are devoted to social justice, often in a very public manner. Implicit hiring quotas are imposed and it becomes almost impossible to fire anyone for anything short of murder in the workplace. HR openly dictates corporate policy to employees, often without consulting the executives. The marketing materials not only signal corporate virtue, but openly advocate various social justice issues. The corporation shows indifference to its core customer base and begins to obsess over new markets that mostly exist in its imagination.
  5. Fully Converged. The corporation devotes significant resources to social causes that have absolutely nothing to do with its core business activities. Human Resources is transformed into a full Inquisition, imposing its policies without restraint and striking fear into everyone from the Chairman of the Board on down. The CEO regularly mouths social justice platitudes in the place of corporate strategies and the marketing materials are so full of virtue-signaling and social justice advocacy that it becomes difficult to tell from them what the company actually does or sells. The corporation now shows open contempt for its customers.
I could use some help in identifying various corporations at each of these stages. For example, I would consider the NFL and ESPN to be at Stage Four, whereas Marvel Comics is at Stage Five. Apple is in transition from Stage Three to Stage Four; they’ve historically done a good job of talking the social justice game without actually believing their own BS, but Tim Cook appears to have changed that.

UPDATE: Bruce Charlton adds a few thoughts:

“Managers are encouraged to … stop holding low-performance employees accountable.”

This is correct in terms of accountability for employee performance in what is advertised as the institution’s core business activities (products, services or whatever).

But does not seem to capture the whole picture, in the sense that my impression is that increasingly even the slightest degree of complaint, dissent or disobedience often seems to be enough to provoke sanctions from HR (legal sanctions, entrapment/ dirty tricks, and full-on psychological threats and harassment) – even when that employee contributes greatly to the core business.

So, as with most tyrannies, in the modern institution obedience to (the real) authority is the primary virtue, and disobedience the only sanctioned sin.

He’s out

And let’s face it, when it comes to original fans of Star Wars, who isn’t?

In just 10 days, “The Last Jedi” has brought in $365 million domestically. This is a huge amount of money. It sets some records no doubt.

But “The Force Awakens” took in $540 million in its first 10 days, two years ago. That’s almost $175 million difference. And that’s BIG.

Everyone has a theory. Schools weren’t completely out for Christmas. The wind was coming from the north. Odd days vs. even days.

But now that two weekends have passed, we can state the obvious: they killed off Luke Skywalker. I mean, come on. Happy, peppy Luke became a wizened old man on a mountain with no family, no love, no connections, no friends, no faith. Both he and Han Solo were essentially knocked off by Han and Leia’s son. I mean, WTF? None of it makes sense. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Plus, Rey isn’t related to anyone, and Kylo mocks her for it. It’s a drag.

Now Mark Hamill is speaking out, saying he took direction from Rian Johnson but knew it was all wrong. He says. maybe it’s a cousin “Jake Skywalker” but certainly not the Luke he knew.

George Lucas must be furious. In two movies they killed off two of his three main characters. And who could have foreseen Carrie Fisher’s real life death? So now Leia will expire in Episode IX. Her son– and Han’s– is irredeemably evil. So that’s it.

This is why I wrote back at the beginning that I am done with “Star Wars.” If you’re from the generation that started with the series in 1977, the death of our heroes is not what we signed up for. So I am out, and I sense from the box office so are a lot of people. Big mistakes were made here.

Convergence kills. Convergence costs corporations VERY BIG money. I am seriously thinking of starting a corporate consultancy to help established companies avoid becoming converged by diagnosing convergence and treating it early.

To put it in perspective, TFA fell 28 percent from $38 million two years ago. TLJ fell 50 percent from $29 million today. So, TLJ is falling nearly twice as fast from a lower peak.

SJW convergence is corporate cancer.

A strong step forward

This 14-point corporate tax cut really is a big deal and a massive win for the God-Emperor:

Telecom giant AT&T was quick to respond to news of U.S. tax reform, announcing it would give some employees bonuses once the legislation is signed into law.

AT&T said in a press release Wednesday that it would give more than 200,000 of its U.S. workers who are union members a special bonus of $1,000. The company also increased its capital expenditures budget by $1 billion in the U.S.

“Congress, working closely with the President, took a monumental step to bring taxes paid by U.S. businesses in line with the rest of the industrialized world,” CEO Randall Stephenson said in a statement. “This tax reform will drive economic growth and create good-paying jobs. In fact, we will increase our U.S. investment and pay a special bonus to our U.S. employees.”

AT&T had previously said that it would invest $1 billion in the U.S. if “competitive” tax reform legislation was passed, and has said that the tax reform framework could increase demand for AT&T’s services.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday sent tax reform legislation to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it soon. Trump lauded the bill, calling it “an extraordinary victory for American families, workers, and businesses.”

The new tax law will drop the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from the current 35 percent and includes other measures that Republicans say will spur businesses to invest domestically. AT&T’s effective tax rate was 32.7 percent in 2016, according to its annual report.

High corporate taxes are brutal because they cost so many people beyond the intended targets; it’s like eating the seed corn. It would be nice to see the God-Emperor follow this up by offering a carrot-and-stick solution to corporations holding Eurodollars overseas, then getting rid of the ludicrous and unconstitutional FATCA.

Learning to be the boss

PA has a good three-part series for gammas who find themselves in positions of authority for which they are ill-prepared:

A reader writes:

I’ve been a Gamma for most of my adult life, and now I am a boss. In my last job I had a real hard time keeping my female subordinates under control, even though I was starting to learn Game theory because the concepts were new to me. I’m still not very good at mastering Alpha behavior yet and I’m trying to implement it at a rate that I can maintain because it’s alien to me.  Can you direct me to examples of Gamma behavior in bosses to help me identify what to avoid?

A quick explanation of jargon. “Gamma” refers to a man who is, for a variety of reasons, low on the socio-sexual scale as outlined on Vox Day’s “Alpha Game” page HERE. Additional discussion about gammas picks up at Alpha Game earlier this year in a continuing series by his guest-blogger Delta Man. If you are interested, look for posts tagged “gamma” or “delta.” “Alpha” refers to apex-male position on the socio-sexual hierarchy.

First, let’s take a step back for a moment. If you observe interpersonal dynamics across a variety of classes, professions, and social milieus, you will come across ordinary men, some of whom may be intelligent — sometimes brilliant — or otherwise interesting. Others may be unassuming and not good conversationalists or not come across as having ever been an honors student. Some will be nice, pleasant guys, others will be brusque or gruff. But those men will have one quality in common: while they are not exceptional as leaders, they are liked and respected by others. They are called deltas.

A delta can be an engineer who can lead a technical team. He can be a Marine in a “band of brothers” combat unit. He can be a middle manager who keeps a department running, a competent foreman or a mechanic, a successful musician, a waiter who does his job well. Most men who are trusted, whose judgment is respected by other men, and who are satisfied with their place in this world are deltas. The difference between deltas and the minority of men who are higher on Vox’s socio-sexual scale (alphas, sigmas, betas) is that deltas are not gifted with a dominant personality or extraordinary sexual charisma.

And now, on to gammas. The dividing line between a delta and a gamma is that other men respect deltas but not gammas. Likewise, women are comfortable around deltas (sometimes too comfortable) but are uneasy around gammas.

So what the hell is this gamma? My shorthand for them is “alpha ambition without the alpha goods.” They are restless, depressive, introspective, sarcastic, snarky, visibly bitter, passive-aggressive, cowardly in confrontation, and deluded about their rightful social status. You will find gammas among condescending nerds as well as in high places like law and politics. If you get involved in left wing/progressive activism — especially feminist politics — most men you’ll come across are going to be gammas.

Deltas tend to make ineffective bosses. Gammas tend to make horrific ones that take down entire departments with them. One of the most important things you can do, in any organization, is ensure that your organizational hierarchy is in harmony with the socio-sexual hierarchy. That doesn’t mean you won’t have problems, there are always problems, but things tend to work a lot better when everyone isn’t at everyone else’s throats.

If you find yourself in charge, your very first priority is to find Betas to act as your lieutenants. You will have to challenge them regularly to make their own decisions and to delegate, but they are valuable precisely because they have the ability to take charge of their own areas of responsibility without ever feeling the need to waste time on foolishly challenging you.

Your second priority should be to clear out and reassign those whose responsibilities are not in harmony with their sociosexual status. You’re going to have to fire your Gamma managers sooner or later, so get rid of them before they cause your best Deltas to quit. Return the Deltas who are in over their heads due to the Peter Principle to their previous positions where they were successful, just don’t reduce their pay or organizational status. Break the link between managerial responsibilities and organizational status; a star Delta programmer who is happy and successful working on his own is usually much more more important to the organization than the average Alpha executive.

SJW as far as the eye can see

One of the most SJW-converged corporations on the planet just extended its tentacles even further:

Disney on Thursday announced a deal to acquire many parts of Twenty-First Century Fox for $52.4 billion in stock. The company will get Fox’s movie studios, network Nat Geo, Asian pay-TV operator Star TV, stakes in Sky and Hulu and regional sports networks. The acquisition bolsters Disney’s plans to become a dominant streaming service platform, making it a bigger threat to Netflix.

“The more desirable content they have, the better they will be able to compete in terms of trying to sell a subscription offering at a time there’s so much competition for subscription-based services,” said eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna.

Bob Iger will remain Disney’s chairman and CEO through the end of 2021, at the request of the board of directors of both companies. Disney emphasized the importance of Iger to integrate the acquisition, saying in a statement that “extending his tenure is in the best interests of our company and our shareholders.”

On the plus side, there isn’t much at Fox to ruin. On the downside, this acquisition puts the SJWs in an even stronger position in the cultural war.

This is why it is so important to start and support independent endeavors such as Castalia House and Alt★Hero. Because if we don’t, there will be no alternative to the converged content being piped directly into everyone’s brains like a metaphorical Matrix.

Speaking of which, we need ten more beta testers. If you’re a gamer and you’re interested, please email with ELVETEKA in the subject. Old school Karateka-style arcade action.

Problem or opportunity?

Allum Bokhari contemplates the corporate culture wars:

From coffee machine manufacturers to social media giants to the NFL, progressive virtue-signalling has infected every inch of global corporate culture. It is now the most dangerous opponent of freedom in the west, threatening both the Trump agenda and freedom of speech. How did it start? How can it end?

This week, the story is coffee machine maker Keurig, which pulled ads from Sean Hannity’s show at the prompting of Media Matters, and is now facing a conservative backlash of NFL-size proportions. But it isn’t just one or two companies engaging in virtue-signalling, it’s practically all of them. It’s Pepsi, which panders to antifa in its ads. Its Heineken, which salutes open borders in their adverts. It’s Twitter. It’s Starbucks. It’s KLM airlines. Despite vast differences in their products, services, and consumers, every industry seems to have the same virtue-signallers.

From the moment of Trump’s inauguration, corporations have been engaged in a frantic struggle to block his agenda. White House globalist-in-chief Gary Cohn, along with the now-disbanded CEO council, did everything they could to blunt the President’s trade policies and prevent him from exiting the Paris Climate Agreement. The same CEO council, along with Cohn, sought to pressure Trump with a series of resignations following his response to a combination of racist white nationalist and Antifa violence in Charlottesville.

And that’s corporations playing nice. When their values are threatened by people who do not sit in the Oval Office, they do far more than simply resign. Earlier this year, after being spooked by mainstream news articles claiming YouTube was a cesspit of terrorism and hate speech, corporations promptly yanked their ads from the platform en masse.

Revenues plummeted overnight, and YouTube quickly added stringent new systems that prevent even remotely controversial content from receiving ad revenue. Once, the platform was a place where bold, independent commentators could develop healthy incomes without answering to any old media gatekeeper. Now, even YouTube’s politest fast food reviewer is having trouble keeping his ad revenue, as the platform introduces ever-stricter language codes. One tantrum from corporations was all it took for free speech on one of the web’s most promising platforms to be all but snuffed out.

What this is doing is creating tremendous opportunities as big corporations intentionally cut themselves off from significant portions of their markets. We’re seeing it play out with Marvel/DC right now! This is not something to mourn, complain about, or fight, this is something to exploit.

You know the government is inept

So why trust its advice when it comes to food? Do you really think they’re going to handle such a complicated subject more effectively than basic highway maintenance or the Department of Motor Vehicles?

What lesson can we draw from the cautionary tales of eggs and trans fats? We would surely be slow learners if we didn’t approach other well-established, oft-repeated, endlessly recycled nuggets of nutritional correctness with a rather jaundiced eye. Let’s start with calories. After all, we’ve been told that counting them is the foundation for dietetic rectitude, but it’s beginning to look like a monumental waste of time. Slowly but surely, nutrition researchers are shifting their focus to the concept of “satiety”, that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. In this regard, protein and fat are emerging as the two most useful macronutrients. The penny has dropped that starving yourself on a calorie-restricted diet of crackers and crudités isn’t any answer to the obesity epidemic.

As protein and fat bask in the glow of their recovering nutritional reputation, carbohydrates – the soft, distended belly of government eating advice – are looking decidedly peaky. Carbs are the largest bulk ingredient featured on the NHS’s visual depiction of its recommended diet, the Eat Well Plate. Zoë Harcombe, an independent nutrition expert, has pithily renamed it the Eat Badly Plate – and you can see why. After all, we feed starchy crops to animals to fatten them, so why won’t they have the same effect on us? This less favourable perception of carbohydrates is being fed by trials which show that low carb diets are more effective than low fat and low protein diets in maintaining a healthy body weight.

When fat was the nutrition establishment’s Wicker Man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar on the nation’s health sneaked in under the radar. Stick “low fat” on the label and you can sell people any old rubbish. Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed as natural born killers, on to more lucrative, nutrient-light processed products, stiff with additives and cheap fillers.

In line with the contention that foods containing animal fats are harmful, we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farmed, heavily processed equivalent that contains a cocktail of chemical additives, preservatives and so on. Meanwhile, no government authority has bothered to tell us that lamb, beef and game from free-range, grass-fed animals is a top source of conjugated linoleic acid, the micronutrient that reduces our risk of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

Government diet gurus and health charities have long been engaged on a salt reduction crusade, but what has been missing from this noble effort is the awareness that excessive salt is a problem of processed food. High salt is essential to that larger-than-life processed food taste. Without salt, and a sub-set of assorted chemical flavour enhancers, processed foods would be exposed for what they are: products that have lost their natural savour and nutritional integrity. Salt-free cornflakes, for instance, would be well nigh inedible. No one would want to buy them because they would see that they are a heap of nutritional uselessness. But where is the evidence that salt added as normal seasoning to home cooked food constitutes a health risk?

With salt, as with sugar, the public health establishment is too cowardly to take on the powerful processed food companies and their lobbyists by drawing a distinction between home-prepared food cooked from scratch and industrial convenience food.

Eat less, exercise more, and eat more protein and fewer carbs. My father figured that out 25 years ago. Remember, science that is actually reliable is not called science. It is called “engineering”.