Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

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Thad
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Wed Feb 17, 2016 6:26 pm

Denise Cummins at PBS: This is what happens when you take Ayn Rand seriously

In 2008, Sears CEO Eddie Lampert decided to restructure the company according to Rand’s principles.

Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss. The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business:

An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.

Instead, the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. Interviews with more than 40 former executives, many of whom sat at the highest levels of the company, paint a picture of a business that’s ravaged by infighting as its divisions battle over fewer resources.


Special bonus link: Ayn Rand Once Cursed A Guy’s Dick So Bad He Moved Across The Country

It is amazing to me that not only do people take this woman seriously, but people who take this woman seriously get appointed to offices like fucking Fed Chairman. (And Greenspan knew her personally, for God's sake! He had to know what a mess she was.)

I mean, not to say that a person with a fraught personal life can't have some good ideas about economics, but I think perhaps a person who responds to a breakup by cursing her ex's penis should maybe not be treated as a paragon of rational thought. If I heard Paul Krugman had cast a curse on somebody's wang, it would probably color my opinion of his reliability.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Classic » Thu Feb 18, 2016 6:07 pm

Because of homophobia or because you believe that such a use of old magicks shows a gross lack of character?

Seriously though, you can't remember a breakup in which you did something completely off the walls insane? The reason to dislike Rand isn't because she cursed dicks, it's because she tried to promote vice as virtue.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Thu Feb 18, 2016 6:34 pm

I'm saying that her personal life is not separate from the morality she preached, it is an illustration of the morality she preached.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Sat Mar 12, 2016 5:44 pm

Harper Lee's estate discontinues the mass-market version of To Kill a Mockingbird.

On a completely unrelated note, To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, and the US copyright term used to be 56 years.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 16, 2016 1:14 am

Ars: The FDA quietly changed the rules to block the next Martin Shkreli

With a tiny change to the rules, the Food and Drug Administration made it a bit harder for Martin Shkreli and his ilk to make a killing by jacking up the prices of off-patent drugs.

The regulatory tweak now allows a “priority” or expedited review process for any generic drug that would compete with an off-patent drug that is only made by one company—the kinds of drugs that have seen skyrocketing price tags of late. The faster review process could cut the window for a pharmaceutical company to have a monopoly over the drug from years to months, sharply cutting profits from potential price gouging.

In an e-mail to Bloomberg, FDA spokesperson Sandy Walsh wrote that the agency expects as many as 125 generic drug applications will now be fast-tracked due to the change. The agency previously expedited reviews of generics that would compete with newly off-patent brand name drugs.


It's definitely not a silver bullet, but anything that gets generics to market faster is a good thing.

Well, not anything. Let's please still make sure the generics are safe, right FDA?

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mazian » Mon Mar 21, 2016 12:24 pm

Meanwhile, Scummy-But-Not-Quite-Shkreli-Scummy pharma company Valeant is busily imploding, after an amazingly bad investor presentation that incorrectly included $600M of earnings due to a "typo", their stock has cratered hard, and their CEO just got the boot.

(Their now ex-CEO was formerly a McKinsey consultant, continuing the trend I've noticed where any article involving McKinsey probably belongs in this thread.)

If Valeant and Turing get cleared away, it's going to be almost pleasant to return to the old days where Pfizer is the boogeyman of the industry. They actually do major R&D, and their management is just conventionally greedy without trying to get creative, y'know?

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Spooky Skeleton » Tue Mar 22, 2016 8:37 pm


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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Wed Mar 23, 2016 2:07 am

Ooh. She's impressive. She knows her facts and she's very good at expressing them.

I'd love to see her run for office -- though of course taking care of her health and her family are the most important thing right now.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Spooky Skeleton » Wed Mar 23, 2016 3:06 pm

Classic wrote:Seriously though, you can't remember a breakup in which you did something completely off the walls insane?


I can't.

Get a hold of yourself.

I've also never gotten into a fight while drunk. People like to act like some very silly things aren't indicative of character or a person's rationality, but they are.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Classic » Sun Mar 27, 2016 2:47 am

Like making irrelevant responses to posts over a month old?

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Spooky Skeleton » Sun Mar 27, 2016 3:14 am

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Classic » Sun Mar 27, 2016 12:51 pm

Politics quarantine is not the shitpost board. No matter how you might feel about my example.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Sun Mar 27, 2016 1:51 pm


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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Tue Apr 05, 2016 2:11 am

So how about those Panama Papers?

So far the list of major players named in the leaked documents includes (but obviously won't be limited to):

- Putin (and circle of friends)
- Xi Jinping (and apparently a huge number of the senior Chinese leadership is also being named)
- David Cameron's father and possibly ole Davey himself
- Petro Poroshenko (Ukrainian President, who was already heading towards being unplugged from his current political life-support)
- Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson (Iceland's Prime Minister)
- Lionel Messi

To give you some idea of the scope of this thing, the leak contains detailed information on fully 10% of all the worlds known offshore and shell companies. This is nutso massive.

Fun to come...
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Tue Apr 05, 2016 2:11 am

Of course,



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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Smiler » Wed Apr 06, 2016 3:51 pm

I for one am amazed that someone like Putin might be corrupt.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Wed Apr 06, 2016 6:50 pm

I honestly have no idea if you're being sarcastic or not. It's a legit question as to whether Vlad gives a damn about money at all (which, if you're not being sarcastic, is what I assume you're talking about).

He lives luxuriously completely legally because the Russian state grants the President (and Prime Minister and other senior members of government) several residences, a fat income, lots of freebies and services, etc. and Vlad himself seems far more obsessed with pure power or being canonized as the Leader Who Made Russia Great Again, than mere wealth.

The best-guess consensus prior to this was that he probably does have lots of money squirrelled away, but it not a tenth as much as he could *potentially* have embezzled and this is mainly an emergency fund/bribery slush fund (he may have both of course... emergency last-resort funds that are hidden more deeply as well as a more accessible and liquid palm-greasing fund). The fact that the current leaks implicate all his friends more strongly than they do him seems to confirm this, at least on the surface.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Joxam » Wed Apr 06, 2016 6:58 pm

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Wed May 18, 2016 1:15 pm

Do you use Uber? You probably shouldn't.



The associated tweets have more info. I remember the car-finance thing from last year too.
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