Tag: LBO
-
Classic Mach
There are two bright spots in the current horrendous landscape: Jerome Powell and Unions. After 50 years of collaborating with the corporate demons, SOME unions are regaining their proper anticorporate gumption. (Or Gomption.) The Hollywood writers have achieved a remarkable victory, getting everything they really wanted. Earlier I was unsure of their tactics and destination,…
-
Type trust?
In looking through old catalogs of printing supplies, I kept seeing this declaration: We are not part of the Type Trust! What was the Type Trust? From a book listing all the known trusts, How did it break? Classic LBO tactics, same as now. Pick up a mortgage on part of the company, force payment,…
-
Go all the way
Wesley Smith is complaining about the movement toward “rights” for inanimate things like rivers. He wants to reserve “rights” only for humans. In the first place, “rights” are a recent and destructive invention. God never said anything about “rights”. In all the old scriptures, God talks about duties, not “rights”. In the second place, you’ll…
-
Best hard answer
Haven’t done one of these in a while. Question at EnidBuzz: What tastes better a little burnt? Most of the answers were marshmallows and bacon. The last one hits the mark.
-
Before Bloomberg
Before Bloomberg LBO’d all cities into brainless rubble, city governments were a hub of mechanical invention and innovation. Power plants and streetcar lines were municipal. City street departments had clever mechanics who were free to build devices that served their customers. Local example: Back in the ’60s, Spokane’s street department invented a hydraulic gate that…
-
It was just cost
Speaking of default replacements for horses… Outside of city delivery, gas vehicles were the default replacement. And it wasn’t about Innovative Disruption, it was about a HUGE difference in cost. A logging and lumber company in Rhode Island replaced its three teams of horses… By this truck, carrying and pulling the same amount of logs……
-
Hypothesis
Wolf does his usual excellent graph and excellent explanation on the bankruptcy of a bitcoin “mining” company. The graphs for SPACs and IPOs are so consistent that they suggest a hypothesis. IPO = LBO. The usual myth tells us that an IPO is designed to provide capital for a company to grow. The graphs tell…
-
Now I get it. Maybe.
Elon is leaving Twitter, “letting” the people “make the decision” for him. Now the whole thing makes sense, sort of. Back in April he made an offer purely for noise and publicity, certain that Twitter would never take him up on it. Twitter’s big shareholders, perhaps understanding Elon or perhaps for their own cold-hearted reasons,…
-
I don’t buy it.
I don’t buy the notion that “journalism” can ever be uninfluenced by its owners and financiers. Taibbi tried to peddle this old line. Now a bitcoin outlet called The Block turns out to be LBO’d by Bankman-Fried. The Block is making the same absurd claim: No one at The Block had any knowledge of this…
-
Starlight to Sonnabend?
It’s always fun to explore whatifs surrounding Studebaker. Here’s one that hasn’t been explored much. In 1958, after Curtiss-Wright had already LBO’d and raided the company’s best assets, management hired Abraham Sonnabend to start developing new niches. He got to work quickly and efficiently on a low budget, acquiring several profitable mid-size companies that were…
-
When the S in ESG really meant something…
EnidBuzz featured the Failing company, and linked to a longer article at Okla Hist Soc. I always admired the deco architecture of the building, but had no real connection with the company or its drilling rigs. The commenters filled out the story. The company treated its workers well, and the founder’s family semi-retired into real…
-
Another converger
Last week I noted that Batya had been unusually silent for a while. Now she pops up again, joining her fellow fake “independents” in total convergence to Deepstate. The old bait-n-switch game, also known as Pied Piper. Unsurprising but disappointing. She was advancing an important set of principles about the proper role of journalism. Now…
-
That’s the purpose.
Continuing the theme of previous item, examining modern shit by trying to transpose it to an earlier era. I’ve got Github updates on my mind today because I just finished shaving an especially dirty yak. I’m cranking up my courseware-making tools for a new edition. One of my processing programs depends on the PIL image-handling…
-
Huge exception to an old rule
This is a completely trivial criticism of an old obscure TV show, but it seems to be what I need to write today. Maybe there’s a reason, maybe not. The show was ‘Man of the World’, one of many British James Bond imitators. Other shows in this genre gave us remarkably accurate dramatizations of facts…
-
Google’s ancestor
Returning to Say the black and do the red. Media and “science” were formerly indicative, now imperative. Media and “science” were formerly passive description, now absolute gunpoint commands. Here’s a previous example of media as absolute command, from Wireless World, July 1939. Broadcasting occupies a special position in Germany. It is the official mouthpiece of…
Polistra's Mill 