Category: Business

Ya Thank?

Business

As any fule kno, you need to have a lot of self-discipline to work unsupervised at a job, any job, with a high degree of productivity.  (Self-employment doesn’t count.)

Lotta fules out there:

In the aftermath of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th biggest bank in the country, many are left wondering what went wrong. Both current and former employees have stated that the bank’s support of remote work is a contributing factor.

Well, duh.  When even a wunderkind  like that Facebook twerp is thinking about ending laze-at-home and bringing the worker bees back into the hive, you have to know that the writing is on the wall.

Of all the bullshit ideas perpetrated on the public by the WuFlu panic, WFH was easily one of the worst.

A WHAT?

Business

This is kind of an interesting story:

A wealthy divorcee has sold her luxury home to fund a new life on the high seas.  Mimi Bland, 59, is one of hundreds of high-fliers buying cabins on maritime firm Storylines’ luxury residential cruise ship, MV Narrative.  The liner will go around the world once every three years continuously with stops in ports across the globe.

So far, so good, although the ship’s name did cause a momentary twitch of the nose — “narrative” is not what I’d call a romantic name — but the question which arose as I was reading is:  that’s all well and good, but eventually she’s going to need some income to pay for all that luxury, i.e. a job.  Which is when my nose nearly twitched right off my face.

She plans to work as a mindfulness mentor while on board.

Great Kafka’s throbbing phallus:  WTF is a “mindfulness mentor”?

I thought I had seen some bullshit jobs (and titles) in my time — “diversity consultant”, “human resources manager” and “psychologist” come to mind — but this one takes the Golden Turd Award.

For someone hammering hard on the door of 60, our prospective mindfulness mentor is quite a babe;  but aside from being mindful of her boobs, I can’t actually think what she’d bring to any sane man’s party.

 

Unless “mindfulness mentor” is just another modern term for “sex worker”, but I’m completely out of touch in that area as well.  I report, you decide.

One Or The Other

Corporate Wokism, Literature

If it’s not Gummint fucking us over, it’s Gummint Lite (amazon.com) and its suppliers:

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race. Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.

Dahl’s biographer Matthew Dennison last night accused the publisher of “strong-arming readers into accepting a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.”

I think it’s the “automatically” part that gets to me — even though I don’t have Kindle or any ebooks.

Thanks but no thanks. Paper, Dead Tree, whatever you want to call it, are mine, all mine. As for Kindle: turning them into “kindling” would be my suggestion.

Incremental Costs

Business, Economics

Soft-headed Lefties are always going on about the evils of cheap labor, using children as workers, and paying “fair wages”.  Then there’s the use of agricultural pesticides to improve yields, which is doubleplusungood.  Of course, they still expect to pay low prices for, say, their fruits and vegetables, as these neo-Marxists don’t have the first clue about how an economy actually works.

So we come to this breathless headline:

Jeremy Clarkson’s Diddly Farm Squat Shop is over 200% more expensive for essential items than the nearest supermarket.

Well, yes.  He pays his staff (“workers”) well, doesn’t use pesticides, and charges prices that will yield his business a profit so that he can afford the costs of complying with government regulations.  (He does not pay himself or his shop manager / girlfriend Lisa a salary, for obvious reasons, although technically speaking he should.)

All that said, the quality of the farm shop’s products is beyond reproach — fresh milk, vegetables and fruits, homemade honey from his own bees — and all those things that the high-end Waitrose chain, for example, have traded on for years.

And so his prices are higher than those of the local supermarket (Aldi, a “budget” operation if ever there was one) only six miles away, leading one to ask that if his prices are indeed that unbearably high, why are there long lines of people queuing up to buy the stuff? (Answer:  because it’s the Diddly Squat brand.)

One would question why the “researchers” chose to use EDLP (everyday low price) Aldi rather than pricey Waitrose — answer:  because the price disparity might not be that great, if there was any disparity at all… oops.

And let’s not forget that The Greatest Living Englishman is a frequent target for The Envious Set, because he’s wealthy and successful — just not as a result of farming.

Journalists… those who talk about everything, but know absolutely nothing.

Not To Mention An Actual Life Skill

Good Stuff, Trades

Longtime Readers will all be aware of my support for the trades — electricians, plumbers, carpenters and so on — so you can imagine my grin of satisfaction upon reading this article:

Skilled tradespersons tradesmen* such as welders, plumbers, machinists, and carpenters “are in super-high demand,” Sasse observed.  Take-home pay for skilled trade workers is typically between $80 and $200 thousand per year, Sasse determined.  He said a construction superintendent in South Dakota recently informed him that concrete finishers were being paid $75 per hour for a particular project.

And let’s not even mention the financials:

“Most trade schools are six-to-nine months versus a four-year college,” Sasse stated, “but the minute you get out of that trade school — guess what — you get to go to work. So you’re going to make money for three and a half years while your buddy, who’s in a four-year college [program], is just racking up more and more debt. So you get this massive three-and-a-half-year jump on anybody that’s the same age.”

Yup. Not to mention the fact that at the end of the day, you could also start your own small business, to make the serious money.

And by the way, I like what Sasse’s organization stands for — follow the link for more detail.

Good stuff, indeed.

*Yeah, I know women can do most of this stuff too (see below).

But that’s not the point.  This is.

I don’t use “chairperson” because the position is “chairman” OR “chairwoman”, “spokesperson” because the function is “spokesman” OR “spokeswoman” (if we’re going to be pedantic), and “head teacher” when the correct words are “headmaster” OR “headmistress”, depending.

“Tradespeople”?  Nonsensical, as so much PC bullshit is.