From Pine View Farm

Masters of the Universe category archive

The Fee Hand of the Market 0

Woman to pharmacist:  What's the most common side effect of this drug.  Pharmacist:  Bankruptcy.

Click for the original image.

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This New Gilded Age 0

Sam and his crew discuss Fran Drescher’s comments on the Hollywood strikes.

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Fiduciary Schmiduciary 0

Meet a Wells-Fargo wannabe.

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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:

If we want to address the real problem, we need to enact serious privacy laws, not security theater, to stop our data from being collected, analyzed, and sold—by anyone. Such laws would protect us in the long term, and not just from the app of the week. They would also prevent data breaches and ransomware attacks from spilling our data out into the digital underworld, including hacker message boards and chat servers, hostile state actors, and outside hacker groups. And, most importantly, they would be compatible with our bedrock values of free speech and commerce, which Congress’s current strategies are not.

The entire article is worth a read.

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And Now for a Musical Interlude 0

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Twits Who Would Own Twitter 0

SFGate’s Drew Magary phones it in.

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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.

I’ve found the best way to deal with it is to make my own voice as robotic as possible. I take deep breaths and empty my mind. I pretend that I, too, am a robot. Robots don’t care about being on hold for 25 minutes. Robots don’t think about how terrible our health care system is. Robot secretary has one goal: Retrieve numerical code that will enable patient to obtain vital test.

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How Far Will Wells-Fargo? 0

Pretty damned far.

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Twits on Twitter 0

A rules-don’t-apply-to-me twit.

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The Never-Ending Misdirection Play 0

Home:  Plutocrat looking at a woman and a MAGA-hatted man arguing.  Caption:  They got you fighting a culture war to stop you from fighting a class war.

Via Job’s Anger.

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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.

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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.

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How Far Will Wells Fargo? 0

Pretty damned far.

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.

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How Far Will Wells Fargo? 0

Pretty damned far.

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The Great American Con 0

Jason330 explains.

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Goldman’s Sacks, Humpty-Dumpty Dept. 0

At Goldman Sachs, words mean what they want them to mean.

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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.

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All the News that Fits . . . 0

. . . and none that doesn’t.

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The Fee Hand of the Market 0

Maya Cohen explains how only a few are permitted to wield the free hand of the market.

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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.)

From stem to stern, the American economic system is corrupted to boost the market as a collective entity. And THAT is where you put your money.

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.

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