Both overseas and domestic business leaders recognize that investing domestically in the U.S. makes sense under a restrained regulatory environment that encourages innovation and allows America’s entrepreneurial spirit to thrive. That legal and compliance framework is also now bolstered by an aggressive energy agenda that unleashes the full potential of America’s resources to power industry well into the future with plentiful, reliable U.S. energy.
Good. Now do the same for agriculture.
From Reader Steve S. via email:
“This is the next step with the ‘add a tip’ option on the kiosks & checkout pads. Shake Shack’s kiosk demonstrates what happens when you don’t have a printed menu, but instead the kiosk displays what the computer is programmed to do. It asks for a ‘tip’, and if you chose ‘zero’, it increases the price of every item ordered by $0.50. As he notes, the kiosk in this case put up a pop-up noting the ‘price adjustment’, but how many kiosks are programmed to do it in the background where you will only see the total?
“I note it is Shake Shack, but have to believe that other vendors will do the same thing as long as they feel they can get away with it.”
I know a basic response to this bullshit.
Pay cash instead of using a card.
This, by the way, will actually have two effects. Firstly, you won’t be caught up in this little bit of highway robbery. Secondly, paying cash — actual cash — will remind you just how expensive so-called “convenience” food has become, which may result in you visiting these places on fewer occasions.
Just another way that “convenience” + “technology” = “ripoff”.
Oh, and one last thing: for most retailers, the extended cost of handling cash is actually higher than paying the card transaction fee.
Yer welcome.
On a personal note, I have to say that I last bought a burger from Shake Shack about four years ago, and was thoroughly unimpressed. Never again.
Our local BBQ joint has a menu item called a “French Fries Plate”, which consists of a hearty portion of pulled pork, mixed with cheesy fries, for about $14. That may sound like a lot; but when I say the portion is “hearty”, I mean that it’s enough to feed both New Wife and me — and $7 each for a takeout meal is not all that bad. Plus, the food quality is excellent, something few people can say about takeout burgers, from any establishment.
I had to laugh at the news that the WNBA is going to need “weeks and months” to decide (in essence) the definition of a “woman”, which will decide once and for all (or probably not, see below) who qualifies to play in their stupid little league.
Here’s the problem. Women are by nature accommodationist. They seek to make decisions based on consensus, something that takes all viewpoints and attitudes into account, and finally arrive at such decisions with the implicit (and sometimes explicit) understanding that the decisions may be altered at some point — even when the decision may be critical and a matter of foundation principle, as is the case here.
In this case, that approach is not only wrong, but completely wrong.
At the risk of sounding all mansplainy, allow me to offer some advice to the WNBA chicks.
That’s the 200,000-ft perspective. Here’s the nitty gritty:
Decide that the definition of a woman is someone identified as such on their birth certificate. Period, end of statement, end of discussion.
Yes, I know there is a percentage of the population who were born female but turned out to be male, either by physiology or inclination — and vice versa. And yes, I know that it’s a tragic circumstance for them.
Here’s what I also know: decisions have to be made — especially in a corporate environment — that benefit both the organization and a significant majority of their employees.
Let me mansplain that further.
Allowing biological men to play in the WNBA will do two things, both fatal to the organization and to the game.
Whether you like it or not, a huge percentage of your already-tiny audience is going to react negatively to the spectacle of “cocks in frocks” taking over the game and rendering the contest meaningless. With the disappearance of spectators — live or on TV — this is going to mean reduced interest from your advertisers, and a concomitant loss of revenue for your already-cash-poor organization. That’s the corporate outcome.
As far as the sport is concerned, that dominance is going to subtract the entire essence of sport — of equals competing against each other. Thus, adding the aforesaid cocks in frocks is just going to end up with teams recruiting more and more of them, which is going to harm your (actual) female performers both physically and in terms of their competitiveness.
Yes, that means that the gender-confused will be forever denied a chance to play in your competition. It’s sad, but in real life, tiny minorities often get the short end of the stick. It’s just the way of the world, and has been so forever. All the good intentions aren’t going to change that, and most probably, such intentions are going to be very counterproductive to your corporate wellbeing.
So, if I may be permitted to use a very masculine term, the WNBA has to bite the bullet, and make the above — and correct — decision.
They won’t. And the WNBA will begin its slide into oblivion.
You read it here first.
Lots of educational video to watch today, because… it’s the weekend!
One of the reasons why wealthy people are looking at hypercars as fungible assets and investment vehicles [sic] is because they are wealthy enough to ride the ups and downs of consumer demand — why, for example, a rusted-out 1950s-era Porsche 911 or 1960s E-type Jag can ask for, and get, a premium price for that piece of junk. Scarcity, of course, helps — which is why a rusted old 1956 Porsche 356 cabriolet will always be worth more than a worn-out 1975 Honda Civic: the first is worth restoring, the second is only worth recycling.
If you’re interested in learning about this business — even or especially if you can’t afford to play in it — then I would suggest you watch Cars & Money, Rob Moore’s excellent podcast channel with his partner, Carl Hartley of Tom Hartley Motors. Here’s one example. (All the podcast episodes are long, about twenty minutes too long in my opinion, but they’re peculiarly fascinating. This particular episode, you can quit at 1:28.00)
And speaking of watching, there’s the premium watch business, where Teddy Baldassarre, for example, plies his business. (Here’s one.)
But in this latter category, if you want to see all the costs of creating a watch collection — as an investment strategy — then please take a look at this one, (yeah, it’s A.I., but it’s factually correct) to find out how the big watch brands are bending collectors over the table:
(…and these guys are the worst, which is why I’ll never own a Rolex, because I’m not going to play their stupid game.)
Oh, and by the way: the actual purchase price of these items is only the first lightning-strike on the wallet. Then comes the (mandatory) servicing, the parts replacement, etc. etc. etc…. see how the insurance companies play ducks and drakes with your premiums.
Oh, and by the way, car manufacturers like Ferrari are equally guilty of the same kind of practices (which you’ll also learn from Cars & Money; watch out for the word “allocation”).
…and Porsche is just as bad.
If a fool and his money are soon parted, then the duration of “soon” is shrinking faster than a cheap Chinese cotton T-shirt in the clothes dryer.
And when baubles like watches and performance sports cars start becoming investment assets, the Finance Fucks in companies like Rolex are going to start making marketing decisions (pro tip: they already are).
It’s the utter cynicism of the whole business which gets up my nose. My only consolation is that the fools who’re being thus led around by the nose are the super-wealthy who can afford to pay those bullshit prices. And I have absolutely no sympathy for them.
As with so many of their articles, this one at American Thinker does an admirable job of delving deep into the minutiae — this time of the European car manufacturing malaise — and comes up with the inevitable conclusion. First, though the writer tees up the argument with a statement that is obvious to most of us:
Looking at the global automotive market, one conclusion is unavoidable: the end of the combustion engine is nowhere in sight.
When I say it’s obvious, I mean that anyone with a brain could see that the constraints of the combustion engine’s purported replacements — electricity especially, and ditto hydrogen power — had just too many negatives to make any replacement a lengthy (and super-costly) affair.
So why, then, did the Big Brains in the German automotive industry go so hard after electric cars, devoting billions of dollars into the creation of manufacturing facilities dedicated to the Big New Thing? Here’s AT‘s take:
But one thing is clear: an energy policy detached from economic reality, driven by climate-apocalyptic ambitions, has harmed the industry at least as much as strategic mistakes at the management level.
We’ve looked at the climate-apocalyptics many times before on these pages, and once again, we all knew that the Watermelons had an agenda that, to be charitable, wasn’t just about Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©, but also about crippling Western capitalism to “level the playing field” with Third World nations.
We also know that when it comes to that kind of neo-socialist government mindset of the German government — and most of the other Euro governments — the idea of central control is seductive, nay imperative. So it would be logical, in their eyes, to mandate that electric cars constitute a large majority of the auto market by x date (2030), and therefore it had to happen.
Of course, when you set yourself against market forces — especially one as entrenched as automotive power — you’re going to fail utterly absent some massive and ummm super-costly infrastructure creation, even assuming that any government had the cash and resources to actually implement such a construction project inside that timeline (and none do, not even the U.S.).
Which leads to the question: if this scenario is so glaringly obvious, why did German car manufacturers not stand up to their government and say, “No.”?
Well, all corporations are lickspittles to their respective governments in the end, so such resistance is of course unthinkable. But Thomas Kolbe supplies another factor:
The tragedy of Germany’s automotive industry is not that it failed to recognize technological change. On the contrary: few industries have invested more resources over recent decades into researching new drive technologies.
The deeper problem is German overconfidence: a hidden statism and an arrogance cultivated by decades of undeniable success — the belief that Germany could not only identify the technology of the future but also predict its entire development path.
A mixture of technological hubris and a belief in unlimited manageability — a character flaw that prepares the ground for failure.
To believe one can outsmart the market, to know more than millions of economic actors operating through decentralized information networks: Is this the German disease?
If so, it’s a disease that has infected Germany since Bismarck’s time — the auto manufacturing industry being just the latest manifestation (the earlier one was militarism).
I guess they should have just stuck to doing brilliant engineering — except that their political class (like most political classes) are just as wedded to the concept of social engineering as Mercedes is to automotive engineering.
There’s a broader lesson to be learned here, but I’m not at all sanguine of anyone actually learning it.
“A prospective employee today saying that they don’t use A.I. is the equivalent of a prospective secretary in 1995 saying that she doesn’t use a PC.” — Scott Galloway
I hadn’t thought of it that way before — being preternaturally suspicious of A.I. as I am — but the more I read and speak to people, the more I’m starting to see why the above is true.
I’m just glad I’m not part of today’s prospective employee group.