Masters of the Universe category archive
Digital Security Theatre 0
Bruce Schneir thinks that the efforts to ban TikTok, which seems to be the new “in” thing in the West, miss the point. A snippet:
The entire article is worth a read.
Twits Who Would Own Twitter 0
SFGate’s Drew Magary phones it in.
Phoning It In 0
At the Portland Press-Herald, Victoria Hugo-Vidal, whose job involves dealing with health insurance companies, describes dealing with “customer service” robots.
If you’ve ever spent 45 minutes or an hour trying to get through to a real live human being, only to be disconnected (thank you, land line telephone company), you will be able to empathize with her. Here’s a bit.
Exports 0
At The Roanoke Times, Nancy Liebrecht reminds us that American manufacturing jobs didn’t go overseas on their own.
American companies moved them there.
Carrion Crows 0
Shirley Smith describes how a private equity firm purchased her employer, a long-established Detroit furniture retailer, picked its bones clean, than cast it and its employees aside.
It is a chilling tale of greed and rapacity.
How Far Will Wells Fargo? 0
I was banking at Wells Fargo because Wells gobbled up the bank that gobbled up the bank that I was banking at.
Moving a bank account is a hassle, especially if you have set up automatic payments, but I left Wells when the “creating fake accounts” scandal broke five years ago and am glad I did.
Goldman’s Sacks, Humpty-Dumpty Dept. 0
At Goldman Sachs, words mean what they want them to mean.
Gaming the Gamers 0
There’s nothing really new in this clip about the Game Stop kerfuffle, but Pap’s guest gives on of the most understandable non-technical explanations of “selling short” that I’ve heard.
All the News that Fits . . . 0
. . . and none that doesn’t.
The Fee Hand of the Market 0
Maya Cohen explains how only a few are permitted to wield the free hand of the market.
The Stock Market Is Not the Economy, Crooked Wheel Dept. 0
Drew Magary took a flyer on the Robinhood app and ended up with very little john, which led him to form a theory about how the stock market works is worked. (Warning: Language.)
Individual stocks may go way up or way down, but the market itself only knows one trajectory. They’ll never let the whole market sink even if certain stocks eat curb. When the pandemic hit, what was the first thing legislators worried about? It wasn’t you. It wasn’t your favorite mom-and-pop pad Thai joint. It was the market. Who’d the legislators bail out in 2008 when the banks collapsed? Not you. The banks. Why? To keep the market up. They’ll never let it fail. All of their interests, regardless of party, coalesce within it. Hence, the average American’s best way to survive the vagaries of the market is to invest in ALL the corruption, not in bits and pieces of it.
That means index funds.
The Fee Hand of the Market 0
The Bangor Daily News reports on a Maine Redditor who invested in Game Stop:
Via Atrios, David Dayen has more.
Aside:
Frankly, a strong case can be made that short-selling, basically betting against a company’s success, should be banned.
DIY 0
And now for a bit of good news . . . .
