Burning the company

BLM:90 WHM:90 SMN:90 THF:90 WAR:90 DRK:90 RNG:90 PLD:90

Well I have Gillian back on my wallpaper again. Mostly because she is supporting a cause to have people in Europe that fish, watch what they do so as not to destroy coral reefs which are take ages to create and which house huge amounts of animals and such. Fishermen, instead of fishing conventionally, have begun to scrape the bottom of the ocean to sort of "cheat fish" but this destroys reefs. 

The picture is a lovely picture of her with a thick bottom-dweller snake covering her sexy parts.

I wonder to myself if I should put Sarah Silverman up on my wallpaper. I think I tweet her too much.  And I don't trust myself not to like her too much. Nah, I better not, even though she is lovely in a more butch kind of way. I could see her grabbing my shirt and throwing me this way and that and asking WELL?

In a good way. She's the kind of girl that you could talk to her in the dark and you don't worry what she looks like because she is so interesting. 

Ok, there's goes the not liking her too much.

So my latest thing in politics is to support the revolution in Kiev. I have to ask myself, "if these people weren't white, would we care?" The more I hear about it though, the more I care because it seems to me these people are much more civilized than say Pakistan or Serbia or even Syria, oh wait OF COURSE Syria!

Julia is in a much better mood lately it seems and I am glad. I wonder what it would be like to work there at The New Republic? I know from that movie Shattered Glass, that the job is like top notch. I hope she stays the way she is through the coming years. So that brings me to my moral for today.

Masters of Business Administration. (MBAs)

These are people that for some reason thought it would be nice to major in Art History and then figured out oh wait get rich first THEN know about art! The MBA is really not much more than a glorified Accounting/Finance/Economics degree. Noone with a regular Business degree need get this unless you need two more years studying what you already know and hey, now you can finally date while achieving a 4.0!

One of my managers from Citibank told me early on, which is why I went and got accepted to business school, that if you wanted to ascend past a certain level, that this was a checked box that was part of that ascension. 

So if it was so important why did I not complete it?

Here goes why. I was studying with a girl. She left.  This gave the professor the perfect opportunity to "teach me" about the real world by making me finish the case study on my own, while the other teams had 3 and 4 people.  When we drew straws to find out whose project would go first, it was me.  

Fail.

K, so fast forward to I can't afford it and work won't pay for it and the school won't let me try again--stress for about a year. My life sounds easy ya? I was working full-time while trying to finish. 

Sidetracked.

Ok flashback to when I was an undergrad.  After a long series of courses and a conversation with a caring teacher later, someone will ask you "what is most important?" This is a test of your knowledge and a gauge to see if you are clueless. As a Finance major(my major) the most important thing is to know how to read a company. You are a credit analyst... of a company. In this capacity you must be able to know ROI, earnings per share, ROE and your basic net income and AGI.

See that? I just alienated a bunch of people by using jargon. Yeah, the best things in life are simple.

If I wrote those terms out so that you could understand them easy, you might not think Finance was all that hard? And this might cause your best friend, like mine did, to ask if you wasted all that money you spent on your education? And that is what happens in car repair, in medicine, in drugs, even a bartender might be like "what's a scotch and tonic?" because if I knew what I was talking about I would order a "scotch and water". Hmmf. Yeah we don't think that huge masses of people are out there creating their own language and gang/group, but they are. They want outsiders to not question them and in so doing they allow prices to go up, and demand and interest to increase, mostly because of the "exploration" factor that comes with not knowing what AGI is on a financial statement.

Oh, let me getcha a Certified Financial Planner to tell you what that is! Which sounds like you just ordered a doctor to chart your heartbeat, but it's not. Sadly, trust is a factor. So if you have a "hidden knowledge" field like finance or medicine or even BILLIARDS it's time to get your gang together that provides certification in the field and of course... there's a fee and to make it MORE interesting... there's an oath so that the "gang" can later REVOKE your ass out for any one of many things that THEY decide makes you a liar.

Oaths are overrated. I think the Bible doesn't support them but I haven't thought about it much.

Ok sidetracked, the focus today is on the burning of companies. It makes sense to make as much value as possible so that this "technological leap" (aka. your company vision) makes your investors happy.  Maximizing stockholder value is drilled into your head over and over in business school.

The most important thing on a financial sheet is ROE. This stands for Return on Equity. It would take a long time to explain this but basically it is just a proportion of your stock's worth as compared to the company's income. A good ROE means you have successfully achieved value. So now you can just skip everything else taught in business school and just use this to "cheat" your way through stocks.

I know, I know, I am giving away the farm right? But if you do the same thing in car repair, it should be easy right? Same goes for medicine. We should be able to put in symptoms, churn up the processing, and get a list of possible causes.

Ok so what is happening as you "choose" to maximize value. Your company starts off incredibly rough. Let's say you just started earning enough to cover your overhead. Overhead is the total of your building costs. But there are all sorts of tweeks and choices you can make to cut costs or improve profits. As you do this, you company makes more money. This "work" really has nothing to with demand.  Demand responds to the viability of your vision and how "needed" your product is.  Getting your MBA makes you an expert at tweeking. And yet the business can afford to pay you 60k. How?

Remember that we are keeping demand the same for now. Sooooo, how will you increase value after you have done all the tweeking possible? 

Lessee, we can take all that profit money and invest it, we can buy or lease stuff based on a NEATO calculation, we can use accounting methods like LIFO or FIFO which organize how you pack your inventory. Anyone bored yet? Remember that NONE of these has ANYTHING to do with demand. Your whole education is basically a glorified financial planner teaching you how to manage your checkbook.

Lessee, hmm what could we do that would show people that our job is important? If I was a mechanic, I COULD ruin something else. Yeah because if I am always fixing your car, I come across as a nice guy AND people everywhere see me as BUSY, especially my neighbors who like to wonder what I do with all of my time, esp other mechanics. To make even more money, let me just replace stuff instead of fixing things, because that's what people want right? And, turns out, I do less work yet charge more by just upcharging the new item.

Yeah, that's the MBA. If I want to make your company improve I just ROI this over here while making that equipment obselete and on THIS graph we see how awful that girl is at her job. Witch Doctor status achieved! Billiards is like that, medicine is like that, politics is like that.

Some people are so well-respected that they just Nine Ball you into thinking you aren't very good at pool yet after a whole lot of lingo research you find out that basically you knew LONG AGO what you spent all that time learning.

Studying the Bible is like that.  

But I am off track again. If you wanna burn the company you will need to make sacrifices yet ALL the sacrifices you make didn't really have to happen except to make YOURSELF look like you got a job to do.

This is how dictators operate, eg Kiev. They provoke the opposition and when they get a response, it's time to introduce fear. WHO BETTER to introduce fear but the person in charge. And as people wonder what could happen after escalation, the "witch doctor" directs your view to the oppositon.

I can do that as a business leader. Zucker is about to take CNN on a ride down Bourdain avenue so as to maximize profits. So instead of covering the news and fulfilling the funcion society needs, it's time to make his job more important so as not to get replaced. And if he is motivated by profit, all of this questionable "journalistic license" crap can just be thrown out the window.  If the President calls, well there's no morals to consider... just money. Theoretically, someone must have threatened his job for this to happen. 

I wonder why?  Are journalists being threatened out there you think?

Or let's focus on Amazon for a moment. Yeah,  I can't figure out why an online book authority would want to mess with journalism, although all of that official historical data and its storage, probably needs to be secure somewhere... safe.

And when Citibank bought AT&T UCS whose CEO later helped to oust the legitimate CEO of Citibank, who later joined with an insurance co who then later helped sell "auto-bill" wallet security insurance on people's credit card which was something the first credit card thought of. Yeah, no conflict of interest there. I just been like a fly not knowing nuthin about Citibank.

Do you see how all of that time spent and all those years I worked there, all of that created a VALUE that was mythical. It was all BS. Nothing happened. The incredible profits created were NOT because of efficiencies achieved but because of "questionable projects" that had nothing to do with the credit card business.  The business of interest on a customer's debt.  

The law stated that customers didn't owe more than $50 if their card was stolen and then used, but customers bought the insurance anyway, being the responsible people they are and not knowing what the law was.  Our leaders they went along with this insurance and even auto billed it if people didn't "catch" the message saying it was going to happen if you didn't check a box.

Can you believe it?  Some elderly people had hundreds of dollars billed to them and would not even dispute the charges because they didn't understand them and we had to sit there and watch customers go PAST DUE because of what WE initiated. 

Ok I am tired so instead of beating you with the notion, I will just say that the business cycle MUST be respected. Every company has it's day, no, every industry has it's day and then it must be allowed to fail. Cars should not be being used. We should all be using bikes and trains or maybe electric cars but people get addicted to speed and they don't realize that gasoline causes the cancer that is killing us or is warming our environment. 

Our electricity needs to be purchased and managed by each of us but instead we TRUST the utility. Don't get me started on what happens when water and electricity gets privatized.

Privatization equals dictators. 

Why? Because of what I just told you about my life. There IS NO value past a certain point, yet after that point is reached, value goes down or MAGIC takes over. 

It's like a 40 year old trying to have sex with a 20 something like in the movie Five Year Engagement(Emily Blunt is great).

"Go faster Tom." 

If you use magic to get ahead, be prepared to sacrifice people.