Month: April 2020
Dark Sarcasm In the Classroom
And in other places, like New York. I must confess to snickering nastily at New Yorker’s response to Mayor OBlah-blah’s unveiling of a system to nark out your neighbors for not obeying every jot and tittle of the Wuhan Corona-crud restrictions. Said system was immediately swamped in an unstoppable rising tide of rude pictures, pictures of rude gestures, and sarcastic references to Hitler, as well as crude personal jibes regarding the Mayor himself – to the point where the system was taken down entirely. Well, good for New Yorkers, I say – and a very good thing that such a thing wasn’t tried in a Texas city; seriously, the receiving server would have melted down into a radioactive puddle of goo. And California skateboarders industriously clearing out their skate-park of the sand dumped into it by officious authorities and making a dirt-bike track out of the excess sand? That’s just freaking awesome. We have not forgotten how to cock a snook at overweening authority; a tradition has been passed on to a new generation…
Worthwhile Reading
Waiting for Good Dough. Excerpts of some thoughts on central banking and monetary policy, from a newsletter issued by Paul Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management. Best post/article title I’ve seen in a long time.
Remote work in industry during the pandemic and maybe afterwards…some thoughts from the CEO of GE Digital.
Skills development in industry. Career progression doesn’t always have to involve college education.
Grim excerpts and critiques an Atlantic article which is a rather hysterical attack on a class of people who are very different from the author.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (he was coauthor of the first widely-used web browser and cofounder of Netscape) writes about the need for America to focus on building things. Surely most of us here will agree with that spirit, but a lot of his specifics seem dubious to say the least. Stuart Schneiderman offers some thoughts; worthwhile comment thread.
A cat and a dog offer differing views about the merits of the work from home approach.
25 Stories About Work – Harassing a Fortune 500 CEO
A short one here.
I run a small business here in the hinterlands of this great country and many years ago I had the opportunity to poke a Fortune 500 CEO in the eye, repeatedly.
To this day I can’t remember how or why I got his personal email and cell numbers but I did. It was likely some sort of a mistake that was made at a trade show or something. The net is that I had them.
I was a distributor for one of this company’s many lines. They made some completely awful decisions that had to do with the local market. I called the CEO several times and told him that these decisions needed to be reversed, immediately, or literally 100% of their sales would go away in my markets.
Of course this is exactly what happened, and with relish, I called the CEO after their sales in my markets went to the level of zero, previously predicted, and asked him to tell me that I was right and how smart I was. I also told him what a great job his competitors were doing since we had moved away to their products in a heartbeat when the disastrous strategy was rolled out. He shouted at me and I laughed at him and asked him again to tell me how right and smart I was. He hung up on me after using some bad words. I laughed my ass off.
Eventually he got tired of my nonsense and blocked me, but it was fun since he actually took my abuse so many times (even though my “abuse” was actually the boots on the ground truth). I started out polite and respectful, but when he acted like I was just some dopey hick from the sticks that didn’t know jack, well, I was forced to taunt him several times, as Monty Python used to say.
25 Stories About Work – The Sales and Use Tax Audit
During a recent conversation I was reminded of our fabulous “25 Stories About Work” series here on the blog and thought I would share one with you. This post is going to be fairly boring to most, although it will be interesting to those who like to hear about what small business owners go through on the daily, and who may also be interested in what happens if you are presented with a sales and use tax audit. The rest is below the fold.