Trump, Musk and Bankman-Fried — Old, Middle-Aged, and Young sociopaths.
Category: Politics, Religion & Money
Pratt Down Under
Trump is buddies with a Pratt? From Australia?? And Donald shared classified nuclear submarine information with him???
Follow-up:
The Big Con/Scheme/Lie/Rip-Off
Episodes of the old Dragnet radio and TV series had titles with “Big” in them. This one is “The Big Grifter”.
With Sam Bankman-Fried on trial for various charges related to fraud, the timing of Michael Lewis’ latest book couldn’t be better for him or, for that matter, worse. Stopping short of accusing Lewis of Stockholm Syndrome, his reputation is taking a Big Hit for his fawning admiration of Bankman-Fried. As a former Wall Street trader, the author of The Big Short is a successful non-fiction writer, but he isn’t a journalist. If he were, once Lewis was up close and personal with Sam and FTX he would have sensed that “something’s wrong with the whole setup.”
Amazon is offering the Kindle edition of Lewis’ book about Bankman-Fried for less than ten bucks.
Even at that low price I won’t buy Going Infinite. The fact that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair embraced the boy wunderkind’s ambition — and short-lived money — doesn’t make me any more understanding that Lewis fell for Bankman-Fried’s obvious sales pitch. One of the people who saw through Bankman-Fried’s act, perhaps not surprisingly, is an actor who played a crusading comic book character on TV. Ben McKenzie has this review of the Michael Lewis book.
A classic Lewis protagonist—the aberrant thinker, the guy who can hear past the noise—has done it again. This is where things get squirrely in Lewis’ telling.
The Kindle edition of Ben’s book is also less than ten bucks. This is the expose of cryptocurrency and SBF that Lewis’ book should have been.
The “big” Three
The expression “The Big Three” continues to be used, but the truth is these former American behemoths aren’t what they were. Without government intervention, it’s unlikely they would even exist.
Chrysler would have folded in 1979 if not for Jimmy Carter saving the company. Almost thirty years later, in 2008, George W. Bush re-defined Republican Capitalism by going along with rescuing not only Chrysler, but GM and all of Wall Street. Ford wasn’t going bankrupt, but it was included in the rescue package.
Considering that government intervention saved these companies, I think Biden was justified in joining striking unionized workers on the picket line. With all of the Trump lovers among the rank and file, however, I won’t be surprised if the UAW doesn’t endorse Biden.
I re-watched Michael Moore’s 1989 movie Roger & Me, and I’m re-reading his pal Ben Hamper’s entertaining and enlightening book Rivethead (1991), about working the line at GM. Hamper talks about the layoffs he went through, and he says in 1980 the pay was “$12.82 an hour.” Before overtime and not including other benefits, that comes to about $100,000/year in today’s money.
Here’s the thing for me. Detroit got into trouble because American cars sucked. Traveling on business for fifteen years, from the early 80’s through the mid-90’s, I rented many Ford, GM, and Chrysler cars. Year after year, every one one of them, without exception was, at best, disappointing, and most were awful. A particularly bad memory was a new model year Pontiac breaking down, leaving me stranded on a return drive to an airport. The rare occasion when I was given a Toyota rental, I was amazed by the quality. Detroit had a decade-and-a-half chance with me, and it failed. As a result I have never purchased a new American car, and I never will. (That includes Tesla, but for a different reason, named Musk.)
The decline of the American automobile industry was due, in my opinion, to the deadly embrace between management and union leadership that gave Japan an opening in the market. Rampant inflation in the 70’s may have started with the gasoline crisis, but it was fueled in part by union wages, at the same time that Detroit had no fuel-efficient models to offer. What did they come up with? The Ford Pinto and Chevy Vega, two of the worst cars ever made.
For a business, being “fat, dumb, and happy” can be fatal. As I saw at my own former place of employment, it means that contentment with past success can result in a failure to see competition coming up in the rearview mirror. By the time a competitor has passed you, it’s too late to catch up. Fat, dumb, and happy is exactly how Roger Smith comes across in Roger & Me, but it’s also how the GM assembly line workers could be in Rivethead, until the layoffs began
The problem for automobile management and workers today isn’t just climate change, it’s the reality that there is only so much oil left in the world. We have no choice but to find another way to power transportation. The money to pay for the cost of developing alternatives to internal combustion engines will have to come from somewhere.
Will competition between companies result in excellent technologies, or would it be smarter for the government to take the lead and pool technical resources in a singular effort? There are only so many brilliant energy scientists, electrical engineers, and mechanical engineers in the world. China seems to be educating a large percentage of them, often in the United States.
With automation already cutting the number of workers needed to assemble a car, the next generation of products will require even less labor. This is something the UAW will have to accept. A point they are rightly harping on is inflated executive pay, especially at the CEO level. Being tone deaf about income inequality isn’t a way for leadership to negotiate in good faith. And with that, I should end this rambling tirade.
Life in Black and White
Warner Brothers wasn’t the only movie studio with a social conscience in the 30’s. Imitation of Life, from Universal, was one of two 1934 films with Claudette Colbert and Warren William.
Aunt Jemima pancake flour is the basis for this story about class and race, with a devastating portrayal of a black girl who passes for white. There is also a Freudian angle, with a girl falling in love with her mother’s fiancé, who represents the father she never had.
Automotive Gridlock
A key point of the striking auto workers is concern over the push to all-electric cars. GM sure looks stupid for killing, and literally destroying, the EV1.
My concern about, and hope for, electric cars is, they could end up being an interim solution, like compact fluorescent lights were on the way to LED. CF was a mistake, leaving us with a lot of mercury to worry about. It would have been better to wait for LED, the way the decision was made to wait for digital HDTV to be ready, rather than approving analog HDTV. The battery problem is far from being solved, and with no essential breakthroughs in applied physics on the horizon it probably never will be.
There is also the essential question of whether or not the electric grid(s) can meet the charging demands of all those cars. The time it takes to charge a car battery means people will be lingering for much longer at highway rest stops, leading to serious congestion problems, as well as longer travel times.
Offering rest stop swap-outs rather than charging, as I’ve seen proposed, will never work. People won’t risk losing their expensive new battery for an old, defective unit. So we’re stuck waiting for a ubiquitous network of well-maintained charging stations.
Until hydrogen or refined sea water can be used reliably as fuel, I don’t see myself going all-electric. My next and possibly last car, that I expect to buy sometime in 2027, will be a hybrid, if that’s still available as an option.