Tag: corpocracy

Google takes a stand

It’s a bold move by Sundararajan. We’ll see how it works out for him. It was inevitable, because SJWs always double down, but the irony of Pichai Sundararajan, a high-caste Tamil Brahmin, firing an employee for expressing his belief in biological inequality, is practically off the charts.

Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo that ascribed gender inequality in the technology industry to biological differences. James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal saying that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes,” in an email to Reuters on Monday. Damore said he is exploring all possible legal remedies.

As I observed after reading the Google CEO’s memo, Damore was doomed because Sundararajan had to mollify his insane SJW employee base, which right now is dancing and celebrating its own inevitable demise. Damore will be fine; he’s better off out of the SJW-converged madhouse and has already been offered jobs by Gab’s Andrew Torba and WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange. But Google will not be, because this is a clear signal to the key engineers in Search and AdWords that it is Time To Go.
DH, who is one of the Dread Ilk’s expert data guy’s, explains.

All of Google is kept afloat by one thing only. Adwords. They have no other significant source of income after a decade or more of trying to diversify. Every other business is borderline trivial when compared to AdWords. All the moonshots have failed. All the R&D has failed. It’s. All. AdWords.
The money-making core of Google is a tiny speck of its workforce, a tiny core of people who make AdWords work. The fear is not that 2/3 are SJWs, it’s that one or two or three of the key engineers, who are working on the next version of Search and Adwords, who are actively fighting and hardening against existential threats to the product, might walk, or even just do a slightly less great job.
Google is actually a very fragile company. They are ripe for disruption from a new player, or alternatively, to be drained from a few deep pocketed rivals. The entire bubble of online advertising stems from a belief that is often irrational that online advertising is effective at certain definitions of cost effectiveness.

In other words, as the AdWords model fails, which is already happening, Google’s massive market cap is going to rapidly decline with it because all of its other businesses have failed to find traction. The company has observably entered the ideological death spiral that is the inevitable result of the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence.

Those talented immigrants

No doubt it’s just their unique South Asian set of skills that accounts for this suspicious statistical anomaly.

Infosys, the India-based information technology consulting firm with an office in Plano, is facing yet another reverse discrimination lawsuit asserting that it creates a hostile work environment for workers who are not from India or South Asia.

Erin Green, a former supervisor at Infosys, filed suit this week in the Eastern District of Texas in Sherman, alleging that he and black and white staffers on his team were denied raises and promotions, and that other “non-South Asian” workers were berated by South Asian company officials…. In filing suit, Green joined a list of Infosys job applicants and employees who have filed suit in courts in several U.S. jurisdictions arguing reverse discrimination.

“Infosys maintains [more than 20,000] employees working in the United States,” Green’s suit said. While less than 5 percent of the U. S. population is of the South Asian race and national origin, roughly 93 percent to 94 percent of Infosys’s United States workforce “is of the South Asian national origin, (primarily Indian).”

“This disproportionately South Asian and Indian workforce, by race and national origin, is a result of Infosys’s intentional employment discrimination against individuals who are not South Asian, including discrimination in the hiring, promotion, compensation and termination of individuals,” the suit said.

It’s all about identity now. It’s about time whites started playing according to the replacement rules created by the Jews, Italians, and Irish. The days of the old “give it your best shot, Eddie, and may the best man win” have been over since 1965. The USA is no longer an American nation-state, so the only question that matters is “is it good for the whites”.

Or, in this case, Indians.

Realistically, 93 to 94 percent of Infosys’s employees should be repatriated. Because not good for the whites.

They’ve got nothing

Literally nothing. And they know it now too:

The spell worked its magic for three decades. For three decades humanity believed in the blessings that globalization would bring in its wake. It was assumed that in the end everyone involved will benefit when we remove regulations, when corporations become ubiquitous throughout the world, when the banks have lots of money, when tax havens exist, and of course when government stays out of our hair. What prevailed was the primacy of the economy, whether in Herne, New York or Shenyang. It was as simple as that.

But times have changed. Once considered to be the High Temple of market dogma, the mighty financial world was about to collapse ten years ago, before it had to be rescued by – surprise – the rest of us.

What also collapsed was the myth that markets can regulate themselves. Simmering unrest emerged, borne by diffuse fears, half-knowledge and justifiable rejection of what has gone wrong with globalization. It became an opportune time for con men and authoritarians.

We now see a void that cannot be remedied by trying to fix details. What the world needs instead is a new leitmotif, a new guiding concept. We indeed need it before populists of all stripes fill this void by inciting people against each other. Time is of the essence….

The greatest promise has remained unfulfilled: Half of the Americans today have seen stagnating or even significantly lower real incomes since 1989. In Germany, there are 40 percent who are less well-off in real terms, and half of Germans possess practically no wealth. And nearly one in four Germans works for little pay. Such enormous wealth gaps between the rich and the poor existed in the nineteenth century as well.

Depending on the calculation, progress has thus by-passed a third to half of the population. The Americans and Britons were the first to be jolted by this development through the election victories of Trump and Brexit. Ironically it is those very countries who most eagerly followed the mantra of the free markets that are now confronted with Industry 0.0 and social division. Meanwhile, IMF experts are having to concede that capital markets are probably not so efficient after all. And the once orthodox-liberal OECD is only defining growth these days as good growth if it benefits the poor.

The myth of the past has become passé. What is missing is the new, powerful concept…. What we need to find is a unifying formula to define the new paradigm: the leitmotif.

Finding it is a tremendous challenge. It cannot be as simple as the market-works-wonders formula. Yet it must be simple enough to make it plausible to everyone. The solution probably lies somewhere in the middle: in a better controlled, enlightened globalization that can do without the compulsion to standardize everything throughout the world. What is needed is a new balance of liberties with built-in safeguards against excesses. And an environment in which politicians can again shape and decide on policies instead of rescuing banks or states without having much choice in the matter.

The great irony is that the author quite clearly doesn’t realize that “the myth of the past” was a con all along, and what he’s begging for is a new and improved con from the same set of con artists.

You must not think disapproved thoughts

The Denver Post fires the four-time Colorado sportswriter of the year for a single tweet:

The Denver Post has parted ways with writer Terry Frei after he shared an insensitive tweet following Sunday’s Indy 500 win by Takuma Sato. Sato became the first Japanese-born driver to win the Indianapolis 500 race.

“I am very uncomfortable with a Japanese driver winning the Indianapolis 500 during Memorial Day weekend,” Frei wrote before deleting the tweet.

The Denver Post issued the following statement:

“We apologize for the disrespectful and unacceptable tweet that was sent by one of our reporters. Terry Frei is no longer an employee of The Denver Post. It’s our policy not to comment further on personnel issues. The tweet doesn’t represent what we believe nor what we stand for. We hope you will accept our profound apologies.”

Frei apologized in his own separate statement:

“I fouled up,” Frei wrote. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I said when I said it. I should have known better and I regret it. I in no way meant to represent my employer and I apologize to The Denver Post.”

“I made a stupid reference, during an emotional weekend, to one of the nations that we fought in World War II,” he added.

His real mistake wasn’t apologizing – he was doomed anyhow – but in thinking that most Americans even remember who their ancestors fought in WWII, much less care. And remember, there are 85 million or so new post-1965 Paper Americans who don’t give a damn about WWII. If anything, their grandparents and great-grandparents were on the other side. It’s not only ancient history to them, but someone else’s ancient history.

Meanwhile, in Britain, Britain’s Got Talent spares a lad for his “sexist and racist” tweets because he is only 16, but gives him a severe warning:

A source told The Sun: ‘Producers were not happy when they saw he had posted such an inflammatory picture on his Twitter as well as a host of disparaging comments about women.

‘It’s not only a huge embarrassment for Ali, it’s a massive embarrassment for the show too, but producers decided on this occasion to give him the benefit of the doubt and leave him with a warning because he’s only 16. But they will not tolerate contestants using this kind of language as above all BGT celebrates diversity.’

What I would like to see is people start getting fired for publicly expressing views approving of diversity and equality, or other aspects of social justice. I suspect there are already more than a few SJWs not getting hired for that reason, but the Left won’t drop this tactic until right-wing executives respond in kind.

The point is, if you can legitimately be fired for expressing one point of view, you can certainly be fired for expressing the opposite perspective.

The triumph of oligarchy

Michael Lind has an intriguing and deeply historical article on what he calls the New Class War in the American Affairs Journal.

If I am correct, the post–Cold War period has come to a close, and the industrial democracies of North America and Europe have entered a new and turbulent era. The managerial class has destroyed the social settlements that constrained it temporarily in the second half of the twentieth century and created a new kind of politics, largely insulated from popular participation and electoral democracy, based on large donors and shifting coalitions within a highly homogeneous coalition of allied Western elites. Following two decades of increasing consolidation of the power of the managerial class, the populist and nationalist wave on both sides of the Atlantic is a predictable rebellion by working-class outsiders against managerial-class insiders and their domestic allies, who are often recruited from native minorities or immigrant diasporas.

Will the result of the contemporary class war among managers and workers on both sides of the Atlantic be a revival of fascism? In some countries in Europe, populist nationalist parties have emerged from tiny fringe fascist parties, or have attracted their supporters. But talk about Weimar America or Weimar Europe is based on a misunderstanding of history, which blames fascism on populism. In reality, despite their populist trappings, most interwar fascist movements were favored by military and economic elites as a way to block social democracy and communism.

It is not the Weimar republic but the banana republic that provides the most likely negative model. In many Latin American countries, politics has traditionally pitted oligarchs versus populists. A similar pattern existed in many Southern states in the United States between the Civil War and the civil rights revolution.

When populist outsiders challenge oligarchic insiders, the oligarchs almost always win. How could they lose? They may not have numbers, but they control most of the wealth, expertise, and political influence and dominate the media, universities, and nonprofit sectors. Most populist waves break and disperse on the concrete seawalls of elite privilege.

In the American South, most populist politicians gave up or sold out. In some cases, like that of Texas governor and senator W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a country music singer, they were simply folksy fronts for corporate and upper-class interests all along. The few populists who maintained some independence were those who could finance themselves, usually by corrupt means. Louisiana governor Huey Long could battle the ruling families and the powerful corporations because he skimmed money from state employee checks and kept it in a locked “deduct box.” In Texas, anti-Klan populist governor James “Pa” Ferguson, along with his wife Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who was elected governor after her husband was impeached on the slogan “Two Governors for the price of one,” sold pardons to the relatives of convicted criminals. As billionaires who could finance their own campaigns, Ross Perot and Donald Trump could claim, with some justification, to be free to run against the national establishment.

Those who believe in liberal democracy can look on this kind of political order only with dismay. Most of the time, coteries within a nepotistic elite run things for the benefit of their class. Now and then, a charismatic populist arises, only to fail, sell out to the establishment, or establish a personal or dynastic political-economic racket. Formal democracy may survive, but its spirit has fled. No matter who wins, the insiders or outsiders, the majority will lose.

This is broadly in line with my own expectations, but it tends to contradict anacyclosis and the Ciceronian political cycle, which sees tyranny following democracy rather than aristocracy. Of course, an elite that has learned the importance of keeping its head down may have had the wherewithal to simply skip that aspect of the cycle in favor of the amorphous vampire squid ink of the corpocracy and rule by artificial  judicial persons, each of whom can support thousands of oligarchic insiders like a legal form of Lovecraft’s Nyarlatothep.

The section on Hobson’s predictions is almost alarming in its prophetic accuracy. It’s long, but definitely read the whole thing. I’ve seen what I personally call “the pirate class” in operation myself, descending upon every promising young corporation and seeking to either drain it dry or personally profit by offering it up as a sacrifice to a larger entity.

Failure at Fox News

As a general rule, when your management decisions are being met by the news that your competitors “smell blood in the water” and “are moving to take advantage”, you should probably rethink your overall strategy:

The profitable, influential, seemingly impregnable Fox News is suddenly vulnerable.

In a massive disruption for right-wing media, Fox talent is on the market, the purge of the old-boy clique may continue, and there’s huge internal paranoia about further lawsuits and revelations.

On top of that, there are episodic pushes from the next generation of Murdoch leadership for changes in culture and personality.

So at a time when all of cable is vulnerable as viewer habits change, Fox is caught between the America-first instincts of its base viewers, and the globalist impulses for Rupert Murdoch’s sons.

A woman to run Fox News? The Hollywood Reporter reports that James and Lachlan Murdoch have quietly put out feelers for a new head of Fox News to replace Bill Shine, the Roger Ailes consigliere.

“[T]he preference … is that the new leader be female.”

And competitors are moving to take advantage.

Perhaps they could hire Marissa Mayer. I understand she is available these days.

Never too big

Bill O’Reilly is just the latest to learn that no matter how big you are, SJWs in the media and the corpocracy can take you down if you give them half a chance.

The Murdochs have decided Bill O’Reilly’s 21-year run at Fox News will come to an end. According to sources briefed on the discussions, network executives are preparing to announce O’Reilly’s departure before he returns from an Italian vacation on April 24…. The Murdochs’ decision to dump O’Reilly shocked many Fox News staffers I’ve spoken to in recent days. Late last week, the feeling inside the company was that Rupert Murdoch would prevail over his son James, who lobbied to jettison the embattled host. It’s still unclear exactly how the tide turned. According to one source, Lachlan Murdoch’s wife helped convince her husband that O’Reilly needed to go, which moved Lachlan into James’s corner.

I’m not a fan of O’Reilly. My book Media Whores was killed by the publisher and I was paid not to write it after Fox News learned that O’Reilly was one of the subjects to whom a chapter was devoted. But the point is that no one is bigger on cable news than he is, and yet a few allegations were enough to bring him down despite his continuing popularity.

This is why you MUST build your own platform. It’s a non-negotiable.

Amazon cuts affiliate income

By reducing affiliate compensation by more than 50 percent. Independent publishers need to be aware that this is eventually going to happen to them too. KU was the original warning. Note that even a relatively small affiliate used to be able to count on making 8.5 percent on its affiliate sales, with a minimum of 6 percent. Now the standard compensation is less than half that. The publishing equivalent would be reducing ebook royalties from 70 percent to 30 percent. Peter Grant has more about this at the Mad Genius Club.

Power vs influence

North Carolina cucks for the NCAA on trannies:

North Carolina state Senate leader Phil Berger says his fellow Republican legislators have struck a deal with governor Roy Cooper to repeal House Bill 2 hours before an NCAA deadline that would have eliminated all scheduled NCAA championship events in that state until the year 2022.

HB2—an anti-LGBT bill that restricted the rights of transgender people—eliminated local governments’ abilities to raise the minimum wage, banned cities from passing their own ordinances to ban discrimination, and most famously required transgender people to use the labeled bathroom matching that on their birth certificates. Some of the state’s most prominent sports figures spoke out against the bill, while the NBA moved the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte and the NCAA moved the ACC championship game to Orlando.

The NCAA initially gave North Carolina until the end of February to knock down the bill, but later changed that to this Thursday, per the Charlotte Observer. It seems as if the NCAA’s pressure was enough to get the state’s GOP-led legislature to get a last-minute deal done.

Amazing and yet not at all surprising. The NC legislature would have done better to ban the NCAA from all activity in North Carolina, or at the very least, followed the example of Texas Gov. Abbott addressing the NFL’s demands. After all, the NCAA needs North Carolina a lot more than North Carolina needs the NCAA.

On Friday, in response to an email question about the Texas bill, which was filed last month, league spokesman Brian McCarthy said: “If a proposal that is discriminatory or inconsistent with our values were to become law there, that would certainly be a factor considered when thinking about awarding future events.”

Said Abbott on Tuesday: “For some low-level NFL adviser to come out and say that they are going to micromanage and try to dictate to the state of Texas what types of policies we’re going to pass in our state, that’s unacceptable.

“We don’t care what the NFL thinks and certainly what their political policies are because they are not a political arm of the state of Texas or the United States of America. They need to learn their place in the United States, which is to govern football, not politics.”

Every state legislature should pass a law banning any entity that makes threatening or extortionist statements intended to manipulate the legislators from further activity in that state. Plus a seven-digit fine. Gov. Abbott understands the difference between power and influence. Gov. Cooper and the NC legislators clearly do not.

The decline proceeds apace

The influence of the gatekeepers of Big Publishing continues to decline in a precipitous manner. As we are demonstrating with the apples-to-apples comparison of The Corroding Empire with The Collapsing Empire, there is simply nothing that the Big Five Publishers can do that small and medium publishers can’t do better, except for buying endcaps in increasingly empty bookstores and purchasing slots on fake bestseller lists for PR.

As the chart shows, whereas the initial ebook boom most favored indy writers, now that the market is maturing a bit and it is getting harder to make a name, the trend is favoring small to medium publishers who can offer branding and force multiplication efforts to the Indy authors who a) are not a top 100 author in a major category or b) snapped up by Amazon itself.

One big reason for the fact that the Small/Medium Publisher category outperforms in Gross $ Sales versus units (33 percent vs 17 percent) is that they tend to maintain a higher price point. Looking at the per-unit Indy revenue average, there is no reason for any of those independents, no matter how successful they are, not to go with a Small/Medium Publisher on average. Even if they don’t sell more units to make up for the publisher’s cut, they’ll make the same amount of money or more per unit anyhow due to the ability of the S/MPs to maintain higher price points.

How is that possible? Esssentially, S/MPs are delivering Big Five quality, or better, at prices that are twice Indy levels but less than half the price of the Big Five. It’s a value sweet spot and Castalia is just part of the much larger trend here. I think the reputation of S/MP publishers is only going to increase, because it is the reader’s perception of quality that is essential to our very reason for existence. The success metric is simple: deliver reliable quality harmonious with your brand or see your readers abandon you for Indies and the bestsellers that Amazon has skimmed off everyone else.