Category: Business

Tole Ya So

Business, Men & Women

As I suggested earlier in the week, male employers are going to think twice before hiring women in the future.  Or maybe the future is now:

The Society for Human Resource Management published a report Thursday that documented the result of the movement that called on society to believe allegations of sexual harassment without question.
According to the study, nearly a third of executives report that they have “changed their behaviors to a moderate, great or very great extent to avoid behavior that could be perceived as sexual harassment.”
The CEO of the SHRM, Johnny C. Taylor Jr., explained that “some of the more concerning pieces of data that came out of the research are around the concern that there may be a backlash of sorts. There were men who specifically said I will not hire a woman going forward,” he explained. “Those who said they would hire a woman said they would not travel with one, and they, more importantly they would not engage in activities after business hours.”

But that’s not all.  How about this development:

Amazon’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem.
The team had been building computer programs since 2014 to review job applicants’ resumes with the aim of mechanizing the search for top talent, five people familiar with the effort told Reuters.
But the firm was ultimately forced to end the project after it found the system had taught itself to prefer male candidates over females.

When even machines, looking at the thing empirically and dispassionately, find reasons to disqualify women…

There ya go, ladies.   Hope it was worth it.

OMG Houston, We Have A Problem

Business, Gummint, Men & Women

“This is not the kind of business I would like to see in Houston and certainly this is not the kind of business the City is seeking to attract,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said.

What kind of business would that be, that it would rile up Hizzoner so badly?  Why, this kind of business:

 

Yessirree, it’s Houston’s (and Texas’s) very first sex doll brothel.

Only it’s not a brothel.  Why?

Yuval Gavriel, the founder of KinySdollS, calls it a showroom.  Gavriel said customers can try out the merchandise [before buying].

Slippery.  And in one of those delicious little ironies:

The business does not meet the definition of a sexually oriented business and requires simply an occupancy permit.

Needless to say, Houston’s “There-Ought-To-Be-A-Law!” Brigade is in full cry:

Residents and activists have expressed their opposition to the brothel. “There’s kids around here and it’s a family-oriented neighborhood and I live right here and to have that here is just gross.” [said one killjoy]

Considering that Houston has one of the highest strip-clubs per 000 population ratios in the whole United States, this seems… okay, “hilarious” is the word I’m looking for here.  Not that this is going to deter the Puritans In Government [PIGs]:

[Mayor] Turner said “the city is currently reviewing existing ordinances that may restrict or regulate such businesses as well as looking to upgrade our ordinances to cover these type of businesses.”

To reiterate:  while I’m no longer strictly against “regular” prostitution per se, I’m certainly agnostic about the moral issues involved in this robot sex nonsense — but I knew the sex doll thing was going to open up a can of worms.  (I should also point out that unlike Alabama, Texas does not have any laws pertaining to sex toys, so the PIGs have their work cut out for them.)  Clearly, the Houston government has fixed up all the city’s other problems so that city government can afford to devote so much time and energy to stopping a business which will affect, at a rough guess, about a hundred people.

Somebody pass the popcorn.

Big Picture

Bad News, Business

Yesterday I bitched about Levi Strauss and their support for gun control.  Then, on reading about the new Nike marketing campaign featuring that asswipe quarterback as a symbol, I stumbled on this gem at The Last Refuge which, as always, put both events into perspective:

The bigger risk to Nike has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, U.S. Consumers, or Antifa-like political advocacy. The bigger financial risk to the Nike Corporation has everything to do with geopolitics and a reset of international trade agreements.

You must read it all;  but as a spoiler, let me just hint that both Nike’s and Levi’s campaigns are being driven by a secret textile manufacturing agreement with… North Korea through China.  In fact, instead of bringing the manufacturing of their products back to the United States (which is actually a viable option), it seems that both corporations would rather undermine the U.S. government’s trade policy, just to keep their own foreign business deals going.

Bastards.  Bastards.

Temptation

Business, The Gun Thing

Over at Insty’s, Stephen Green commented on this little story that he couldn’t imagine going into a Levi Strauss store ever again, and I agree.

Levi Strauss announced on Tuesday it would be creating a new gun-control group with billionaire Michael Bloomberg and donating millions of dollars to a collection of established gun-control groups.

I don’t wear jeans often — in fact, I last wore them about a year ago, so I’m hardly in Levi’s target market anyway.

But that’s not the “temptation” I refer to in the headline;  this is.

A couple weeks back I gave a woman a “lyft” to the airport.  She’d just come out of the Levi Strauss store here in Plano, and as we drove off I asked her what she’d just bought there.  She said “Nothing;  actually, I work for Levi Strauss.”

For a moment I considered — really considered — whether I should act like someone from the Left would act, and terminate the ride then and there, declaring that as a member of the National Rifle Association, I refused to provide a service to an organization which supported gun control.

I didn’t do that, of course, because I’m not some virtue-signaling asshole.  What I could have done was start to talk about how much I loved guns, and shooting, just to piss her off;  but I didn’t do that either because that might have “triggered” the woman into giving me a one-star Uber rating at ride’s end, running the risk that she was a virtue-signaling asshole (she was a San Francisco native, so the odds would have been high).

As it stands, though, I’ll just have to content myself with never again buying anything associated with Levi Strauss (which would be Dockers, Signature and Denizen).

Bastards.

Wealth-Envious Bullshit

Business

Apparently, some financial “experts” in Britishland have taken exception to the massive bonus paid out to a company’s executive chairman:

One of Britain best-paid female bosses has been slammed by critics over a £29million bonus.
Avril Palmer-Baunack runs British Car Auctions, which owns We Buy Any Car, the car-buying website known for its catchy jingles.
On top of the £29 million bonus, which is linked to an increase in the share price, she also got an eight per cent increase to her basic salary to £525,000. The company defended it by saying it needed to pay a ‘competitive’ rate.
But in a report to investors, influential advisory firm Glass Lewis called the £29 million payout to Palmer-Baunack ‘exceptionally disproportionate’.

…and needless to say, the politicians want to get in the game:

Last year, Theresa May announced plans to censure stock market-listed firms who drew exceptional levels of complaints from shareholders over bosses’ pay.

There is just one problem with all of this outrage:  it’s total bullshit.  Here’s why (from the article itself):

The vast sum, 59 times her normal salary, is the result of an incentive plan drawn up four years ago to grow the firm.

In other words, four years ago the board of directors told the CEO that if she managed to grow the company’s value by x, she would be paid y.  (And I should also point out that this incentive plan would have required a formal agreement from the shareholders — the same shareholders who are now bitching about the thing — before being implemented.)

Well, that’s exactly what our Avril did, so she has to get paid the bonus.  (The size of the bonus is irrelevant, because it was obviously based on a sliding percentage driven by the amount of growth.)

Of course, the trolls at Glass Lewis don’t see it that way, because (and once again from the article):

[Glass Lewis] said the increase in the value of BCA may have been boosted by broader swings in stock market prices ‘rather than company or management performance’.

Well, guess what?  “Broader swings” in the stock market are a result of shareholder confidence in the market’s activities and results — and if the company and its boss benefit from that, it’s called “good luck”.  I should point out once again that if the market is tanking and it takes a company down with it — through no fault of the company boss, mind you — the boss may well get fired anyway because at the end (and please note this, because it’s important), executive management is responsible for one thing, and one thing only:  growth in the value of the shareholders’ investment.  How it gets there is irrelevant (except in the Land Of Wealth Envy).  When they say, “The buck stops here”, that’s precisely what it means:  the ultimate responsibility for shareholder value lies with the executive manager, and with this comes either termination or reward, as agreed by the shareholders.

All the other guff about Palmer-Baunack being a female executive, incidentally, is just smoke — her sex is completely irrelevant, as it should be.  Then there’s this:

The vote on the pay report is only advisory so, if Palmer-Baunack feels able to shrug off criticism, she will be allowed to keep the lot.

Let’s hope the woman has an iron nerve (which she seems to have, by the way), and tells all the wailers to fuck off.

Palmer-Baunack, who has a grown-up son and daughter and is married to a German executive at Volkswagen, previously defended her £7.1 million pay packet for 2015 by saying: ‘Anyone who says they don’t want money is talking bullshit. We all want to earn money for our family.’
The Edinburgh-born executive, 54, has been vocal about women in the workplace in the past. She once said she was ‘very cynical’ about the existence of ‘glass ceilings’ – the term used to describe the limits on the career opportunities for women in big corporations.

Considering that she started off as an agent for a car rental company, I think she’s proved her point.

And if the wailing gets too much, she should really tell them all to get stuffed by taking her £29million bonus and going off to live in Switzerland, Monaco or the Caymans, beyond the reach of the would-be wealth confiscators.

Good luck to her, say I.