On July 28, to much fanfare, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a government entity formed from USAID in 2018, announced a commitment to loan $765 million to Kodak to have them start manufacturing base chemicals used for pharmaceuticals. Gross incompetent Peter Navarro was deeply involved, blathering some nonsense that I won’t bother to repeat.
Today’s Kodak is just a shell of the former company. It employs a mere 1,300 people (when it had up to 100K employees years ago). Over the years as their film business burned out, they sold off every profitable division, leaving one large, old industrial complex in the center of Rochester, Kodak Park. Imagine everything that the word “park” conjures up, and invert it — Kodak Park is dirty, old and polluted. The story around Rochester is that when it rained near Kodak Park, the raindrops would burn the paint off of parked cars.
Still, Kodak owns a plant that can manufacture chemicals. So, I guess it is a candidate to make pharma chemicals, and perhaps some startup costs and time could be saved by using their existing infrastructure.
But, there’s more than just a chemical cloud over Kodak Park and this deal. In June, while negotiations were happening, Kodak’s grossly overcompensated CEO, Jim Continenza, bought 46,737 shared of stock as part of his compensation plan. So, when the stock went from ~$2 to $30 on the day of the announcement, one might wonder if someone grabbed the invisible hand and forced it to shove $1.3 million into Continenza’s pockets.
Shockingly, even the Trump Administration’s SEC is investigating, and now the whole deal is up in the air. I’ll wager it will never happen, because the “deal” signed on July 28 was a couple vague paragraphs that aren’t even a letter of intent.
This is of a piece with getting GM to manufacture ventilators. It’s as if someone who had been in a coma since the 70’s suddenly awoke and was asked to name two big US companies: “GM and Kodak. Now get me a Tab and a Hostess Fruit Pie – it’s almost time for Bonanza!”
Mary G
I’m enjoying the ratio this tweet is getting:
She is being welcomed to the Resistance of the Twitler Administration’s sabotage of the USPS.
James E Powell
Okay, I get your point. But was it really necessary to disparage the Hostess Fruit Pie?
Jeffro
@Mary G: I love how we do everything by tweet now (NOT)
Also…Tab! I loved Tab back in the day. We even have one of those hourglass-shaped official Tab glasses here. =)
debbie
Navarro (spit on the ground)? The clown who’s claiming the Lord and the Founding Fathers created executive orders?
Dog Mom
Two other questions that I have not had the energy to investigate: All those millions and only 300 jobs created? And an ingredient of Hydroxychloroquine was touted as something to be produced – is there demand? Serious, for real and true demand?
dr. bloor
My dad worked most of his career at Kodak. As far back as the late 70’s/early 80’s, he’d shake his head at the direction the company was headed. He would be completely unsurprised to find out they can’t even crime well nowadays.
Marcopolo
Back when I was a yute, I spent 4 years at the University of Rochester, much of whose endowment was related to a bequest by George Eastman who founded Kodak. I saw a lot of the town but never made it to Kodak Park. I was particularly fond of running in Mt Hope Cemetery, going to the Record Archive, and drinking Genesee beer. Back then Kodak was still a thriving company. God I am old. Apocryphally, one of my English professors taught Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and at the time said it was partially based on Kodak Park. Apparently he was wrong, the book is based on Vonnegut’s experience at a GE plant in Troy, NY, but both companies have not managed the transition to the future particularly well. Btw, I do recommend the book, it is a fun read.
Also, this seems like a good thread to post this:
Let’s just say I am shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here!
Quicksand
There’s a fun show on Netflix called Hyperdrive — it’s a car drift competition where the international contestants bring their own cars and try to run fast through a series of ridiculous obstacles while hitting some targets with the back end of their car and avoiding hitting other things.
It was filmed at Eastman Business Park, fka Kodak Park, and it looks in the show entirely like an abandoned post-apocalyptic industrial wasteland. But I guess there are tenants there!
The Moar You Know
America desperately needs to regain some, hell, any control of it’s precursor/raw material supply chains. That being said, the being spent amount is ridiculously low and the company it went to is flat-out not qualified or able to do the job.
Words that, should justice prevail (and it does not always) will be the epitaph of not only this administration but this phase of American existence – “not qualified or able to do the job”.
oopzwtf
But Kodak does have a very successful business unit that currently produces chemicals for use in the pharmaceutical industry!
Oopz, no, sold it in 1994 :(
Maybe they need the 3/4B to clean up their previous 100+ years of soil and Genesee riverbed contamination before they start making a new mess?
Gravenstone
@James E Powell: It’s been years since I’ve had a Hostess Fruit Pie, but they were even then shells of what they used to be in my youth. More like Hostess Fruit Flavored Syrup Pie.
jonas
The irony of Kodak’s demise is that a lot of the digital camera technology that eventually rendered their traditional film business obsolete was in fact developed by…Kodak. They were sitting on all these patents and simply never capitalized on it. One of the biggest — and most avoidable — corporate collapses in US history.
And yet people are still convinced that the key to running government is to run it “like a business.” smh.
JCJ
@James E Powell:
OMG – I loved Hostess Fruit Pies back in the day. To wash them down with Tab after smoking some herbs……ah, those were the days!
BruceFromOhio
LMAO, nailed it.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Quicksand:
Yes, this was the second big Kodak facility in Rochester, west of the city. It was sold long ago as Kodak shrunk. Kodak held on to the original Kodak Park.
hells littlest angel
Sorry to be nitpicky, but I think it’s more like Diet Coke, chocolate ice cream and The Gabby Hayes Show.
Frankensteinbeck
There was an enormous amount of trading the day before the stocks skyrocketed. I bet Continenza is only one of the profiters in a straightforward stock manipulation scheme, with Trump being another. I have no idea if that’s illegal. Laws about that stuff are weird.
Kay
I’m convinced Trump remains in that time period because those were his “glory days” when he was younger and less repulsive. Slightly less, but still.
oopzwtf
@jonas: In the late 90’s Kodak produced 3 different models of ‘PalmPix’ cameras. They attached to various Palm Pilot handheld devices and made them capable of digital photography.
Kodak decided to abandon these efforts, once it became overwhelmingly clear that there was absolutely no future for handheld devices capable of digital photography.
Ruckus
When you run a business and think that it will go on forever unchanged, it’s not the business that is the problem. Life does go on, but it also changes and now we see technology changing faster than ever before. Every field is different, changed, and possibly even for the better. But it’s difficult to see the world in front of you with your head firmly seated in your rectal cavity. It’s even more difficult if you are willfully sticking your head up there, which shitforbrains seems to enjoy so he does it often. Kodak enjoyed a massive lead in their field for a long time. But that was as much a burden as it was good for them, it made them comfortable, reduced their ability to see risk as a possibility and rather as a distraction, a negative. This has happened a lot in US business, it has become a victim of it’s success, of a lot of looking backwards at what was, not forward to what could be. And time of course never goes backwards, progress can be ruined but it can not be stopped, it will just happen somewhere else. As we age we tend of course to want the old successes but those don’t come around again and all we end up with is new time wasting or worse new nothing. Republicans want the clocks to stop, difficult to tell what year but it is long ago. They don’t want the future because it might be more equitable, their stature will change, because it always does. It isn’t even because they think they earned something it’s because they think nothing should ever change. But that isn’t reality, no matter how hard they resist. Think about this being their last hurrah, everything they’ve got, they’ve thrown their best at it. Depressing isn’t it, this is their best.
A Ghost to Most
@dr. bloor: My brother the Nazi worked 37 years in the chemicals division. His fuck science attitude led him to eschew safety equipment repeatedly. There oughta be a pool for the type of cancer that gets him.
senyordave
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Sunday defended President Donald Trump’s decision to use executive orders to provide relief to people impacted economically by the coronavirus pandemic, arguing his hand had been forced by congressional inaction.
“The Lord and the Founding Fathers created executive orders because of partisan bickering and divided government. That’s what we have here,” Navarro said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
Navarro must actually believe the shit he spews. He shouldn’t be allowed to flip burgers at McDonalds, much less be the chief trade negotiator for the WH.
Kay
@Mary G:
The USPS does “last mile” delivery for FedEx (and UPS) but FedEx are the wingut choice because they’re not unionized – UPS drivers are Teamsters. I used to chat with both sets of drivers when I worked for the postal service. FedEx drivers were consistently the most unhappy, disgruntled drivers. They REGULARLY asked if I knew of a job open in the USPS.
Cheryl Rofer
If that chemical manufacturing equipment hasn’t been used for years, it’s going to take a bunch of money and effort to clean it up for use. And some of it won’t be useful
I wonder who inspected the plant before awarding the contract.
Another Scott
@dr. bloor: Kodak seemingly cannot catch a break.
I remember when then Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market and caused Kodak a whole lot of pain (since their film used a lot of silver – IIRC, Kodak was the world’s largest buyer of silver).
Kodak was a pioneer in large-format solid state imagers. People there knew that film’s days were numbered very early on, and were doing the work to transition to electronic photography. But, …
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Sab
@Kay: I remember when UPS had a huge strike in the late 1990s. The company wanted to steal the Teamsters union managed pension fund.
Phucked me up financially in a big way (store with no Christmas deliveries, but I loved my UPS driver). So we saved his pension. Okay by me.
ChrisS
@Cheryl Rofer: I don’t believe that anything like that happened.
However, I know someone connected to pharma stuff in Rochester and they said that there had been rumors of Kodak moving towards pharma before and a few months ago there were a few jobs advertised for CGMP specialists.
It looks like the big winners here may have been bond holders.
WaterGirl
This is so perfect!
Cathie from Canada
@Ruckus: Yes indeed. Here in Canada, the Eaton’s department store closed in the 90s, to the shock of everyone in the country. It had existed for more than a century, family-run. And of course, that was the problem – the great-grandchildren of the founder couldn’t agree on how to run it.
They had a terrific catalog division, too, long before there was Amazon – It produced these beautiful catalogs every year and would ship anything and everything across the country, even including entire houses. This was run into the ground and closed too, just before the internet would have revolutionized it.
The Eaton’s Catalog was featured in The Sweater:
https://youtu.be/ZZyDsF-Gp3o
download my app in the app store mistermix
@jonas:
Absolutely true, but I can’t think of a company that invented a follow-on technology to their dominant cash cow and succeeded in deploying it. The internal corporate culture prefers the cash cow.
Marcopolo
Btw, I don’t think anyone has mentioned this but all of the activity around Kodak has been based entirely on the publicity around the loan. The loan agreement is not yet in effect and according to this story from an hour ago may not happen at all:
Kodak stock dives 30% after $765 million loan is put on hold
This is so typical of everything the Trump administration does. It’s all vaporware meant to generate headlines but there is never any there there.
WaterGirl
@Cheryl Rofer:
Hahahahaha
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Cheryl Rofer:
My guess: when Continenza took Navarro up to the top floor of Kodak Tower, he pointed in the direction of Kodak Park and said, “Look, it’s a big chemical factory.”
Brachiator
Or it’s as if a president who is in his 70s woke up from a stupor and tried to implement another of his stupid schemes.
But clearly the intent is to try to bring industrial jobs back to the US or to expand the country’s manufacturing base. And it is possible that Kodak could transfer past expertise in photography related chemicals into pharmaceuticals.
Of course, this idea might be as dumb as the fantasy that the US will achieve prosperity by processing unicorn farts into green energy.
But Trump also likes to bring in business leaders to give advice on any big political issue, even when it is clear that this is a bad idea. It makes him feel like a big boy. And he can pretend that he is the star of an episode of The Apprentice.
Of course, it’s not just that their film business burned out. They got outcompeted by a foreign company, the Japanese industrial giant Fuji. And then the film and imaging industries got swept away by the digital revolution.
When was the last time anyone pulled out an Instamatic for some candid snaps?
Also, the few profitable divisions Kodak still had were in sharp decline and on life support.
There may be some financial irregularities at play here. Whenever Trump is involved, you have to look for grift.
But we also need a smarter, better president who might have some realistic ideas about helping old Industry transition into new areas. And there needs to be emphasis on a lot of industrial cleanup.
Sab
@ChrisS: Is chemical to pharma a big stretch? Probably not if any of these folks were well-intentioned and competent.
Possibly some of them could be well-intentioned. Kodak was basically a chemical company.
Well intenioned? No way on earth or in space.
SiubhanDuinne
@Cathie from Canada:
One of the few animated films I really love.
Marcopolo
@download my app in the app store mistermix: I can’t think of any companies off the top of my head but I feel like somewhere in my brain (my ability to access information isn’t what it once was) I know some places that developed new technologies, then spun them off into new divisions/new companies that found success. Something about having to get out from under the umbrella of the core company’s governing philosophy.
Roger Moore
@dr. bloor:
Honestly, Kodak was surprisingly forward looking. For all people talk about them being dinosaurs who didn’t want to give up their money from film cameras, Kodak as actually a major innovator in digital photography. They didn’t invent the CCD, but they did invent the color filter array that made it easy to take good color pictures using a digital sensor, and they were a major manufacturer of digital sensors for a long time. The earliest digital SLRs were collaborative efforts between Kodak and conventional SLR manufacturers like Nikon and Canon. They lost out in the digital camera sensor race in the long run, but it wasn’t because they didn’t see the transition to digital photography coming.
Roger Moore
@Marcopolo:
My family moved to Rochester for one year when I was very young so my father could get his masters degree in optics from University of Rochester. At the time they had one of the best schools of optics in the world, and I think it’s still a strong point.
The Moar You Know
@download my app in the app store mistermix: I can only think of one: Apple. Cash cow #1: iPod. Cash cow #2: phone. And I hate giving the guy any credit because I think he was the world’s biggest asshole, but the only reason that happened was because Jobs was driving the bus. You won’t see that happen again there; Cook is a GREAT caretaker CEO, but he can’t make lone-gun dictator decisions and therefore, Apple will stay a phone company for a good long time.
Anotherlurker
@jonas: I have thought similar things about Sears, Roebuck & Co. They had a good start on being Amazon. They didn’t follow thru in that direction.
Correct me if I’m wrong on this . I know there are Jakals who can speak on this with knowledge and authority..
Barbara
@Marcopolo: GE has done exponentially better than Kodak, but its paint by MBA number management style seems to have passed its sell-by date. It seems that at some point, there is no substitute for creativity, spark, and the expertise to capitalize on it. Oh well.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Good point. And even digital photography did not offer a future at the same scale as Kodak’s old business.
lumpkin
@Jeffro:
And when you wanted a little change of pace there was Fresca.
Remember cyclamates? Cancer in a bottle. Those were the days, my friend.
catclub
@senyordave:
Navarro is desperately making up for that one good thing he did by warning Trump of the consequences of a pandemic – and writing it down. There is a mention in Saletans article.
Barbara
@Gravenstone: I have tried hard to get beyond snacking on little cakes and pies, but if I had to I would definitely go for the raspberry Zingers — yellow cake, white cream filling, rolled in raspberry jelly and coconut. Which are Dolly Madison, not Hostess.
Roger Moore
@jonas:
That’s not really true. Kodak was a major manufacturer of digital sensors. The first digital SLRs from Canon and Nikon used Kodak sensors. So did the first digital Leica M. Many early digital point-and-shoot cameras used Kodak sensors, and they also sold in the industrial market. I think their bigger problem was that they stopped innovating after their first burst of important patents, and that let other manufacturers take over their market.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
I think that 3M has been one of the few big companies that has continued to innovate and grow over a sustained period.
And possibly DuPont, which has been around seemingly forever.
Cheryl Rofer
Nor do I believe anyone inspected the plant. But in a normal, honest adminstration, that is one of the things that would have been done before a contract was awarded.
Another Scott
@The Moar You Know: IBM created its PC division in Boca Raton, FL to get away from their corporate offices and do their own thing without interference. It was hugely successful for a time, and certainly much more successful than it would have been without being setup that way.
I haven’t read it, but https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244 is supposedly the bible on how a company must be willing to move onto new things even while making money on old things or the company will die.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
Which is exactly why Apple is the biggest company in the history of the world and Kodak owns some industrial wasteland in Rochester.
Honestly I’d rather have Apple designing my phones not Kodak.
The Moar You Know
@Brachiator: Of course. Great catch. The breadth of what they make is staggering. When I started working as a guitar builder, half the items in my paint lab were labeled “3M”, as was all my safety gear.
I eventually got tired of starving and moved to IT work. Office environment. About a quarter of everything in the office has “3M” on it. Medical environment? Even more. Their stuff is everywhere.
dr. bloor
@Roger Moore: Alas, “forward looking” and “capable of executing a plan without repeatedly stepping on rakes” are two different things.
I mean, as someone pointed out above, they’ve already dabbled in pharmaceuticals. The pieces they’ve purchased and sold off in the last 40 years are not a legacy of success.
Kent
Netflix. Remember the red envelopes? They put their DVD mailers out of business.
swiftfox
Bonanza was done by May of ’72 as the death of Dan Blocker pretty much ended the will of the remaining cast to continue. I’d go with M*A*S*H*, a Mountain Dew with real sugar, and creme-filled Tastycakes wrapped in wax paper.
Gravenstone
@The Moar You Know:
The reason everything is cheaper from China and/or India is because they are willing to ignore environmental regs and will pay pennies on the dollar to their disposable staff. I (and probably everyone else in industry) can tell you horror stories about the state of bulk chemicals obtained from those sources.
While I agree there is definite benefit to bringing some of that production back home, it’s going to be a complicated affair. You’ll have to undo MBA culture, accept higher inherent costs for materials because it is more expensive to do the work here, and frankly we would need to completely rebuild large swathes of infrastructure. You really would be hard pressed to bring most retired plants out of mothballs to resume manufacture – at least to do so safely.
Another Scott
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-baltimore-blast/gas-explosion-destroys-baltimore-homes-one-dead-and-children-trapped-idUSKCN2561UH
:-(
100+ year old infrastructure is dangerous. We need to be spending much more money now, and for a long time to come, to fix things like this.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Sab:
They had another big strike after that one. The postal service got a big chunk of their parcels when they were out, which is when you realize how many parcels they deliver :)
Many, many.
NotMax
Shaky pop culture analogies.
Bonanza ran through the entirety of the 60s (began in late 1959), finally axed in ’73. Associating it as somehow indicative of the media of the 70s is strained at best.
Tab has never gone away since its introduction in 1963, is still being produced.
;)
narya
@Marcopolo: I loved Vonnegut back in the day–“God Bless You Mr. Rosewater” was my first read, when I was about 12, I think. That said, over time I’ve become aware of the thread–sometimes whole swath–of misogyny in a lot of his work, and Player Piano is really one of the worst in many ways. Which is unfortunate, because there is another thread in that book that fascinates me (how people continue to innovate and invent, even when their previous innovations and inventions put them out of a job), and his critique of Taylorism embedded there is interesting as well.
Also too: you folks arguing about Hostess products are ALL WRONG. TastyKakes for the win! Especially when they were still wrapped in wax paper. Chocolate cupcakes, cream filling, vanilla icing with a chocolate stripe. ETA: and the only proper way to eat them was to nibble the cake around the edges so the final bite was mostly filling and frosting and a smidge of cake.
narya
@Gravenstone: If I had gotten a job as a professor, my second book was going to be about how MBAs have ruined the world.
artem1s
We Jackals all knew waaaaay back in 2017 that these grifters would try to steal everything that wasn’t nailed down on their way out the door when that day finally came. Don’t let anyone tell you they didn’t have any idea how bad it was going to get. Those who chose to ignore the fact that we had a straight up conman in the WH did so because they anticipated an upside to hanging around until until DC started to look like the final days of Hanoi.
In some ways it’s kind of relief that it finally here.
Kay
Even if the Republican Party survives Trump they have a new (and probably worse) problem- a not insignificant part of their base are adherents of a bizarre religion that has as its central tenet that all their “enemies” should be imprisoned and then possibly executed.
QAonon had a “national rally” last week. What that meant in my town was 3 people standing outside the courthouse, but there was also a group in Toledo. Complete nutjob fanatics. That’s what ahead for the GOP. They have something like 9 House candidates who call themselves believers.
Roger Moore
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
I would probably count IBM in that category. They made a huge amount of money from mechanical tabulators, but they were obviously successful in developing and deploying the digital computers that replaced them. They also successfully developed and deployed desktop computers that replaced their mainframe computer business. You could say something similar about Phillips developing and deploying LEDs that replaced their conventional light bulb business.
I think a key thing is that we don’t notice as much when a big company successfully transitions between technologies. They tend to develop the new technology in ways that make it less disruptive to their existing business. That also makes things less disruptive to their customers, so people don’t notice it the same way.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
Had no idea PG&E’s territory included Baltimore. Gas infrastructure has to be maintained and operated with care, period.
jonas
@Anotherlurker: That’s what I’ve read as well. Their catalog operation was in effect the largest consumer database in the world, iirc, and they chucked it all in the 90’s to focus on retail stores, which Eddie Lampert then took and trashed as well.
Sab
Call your Senators. This isn’t Party.
My Repub Dad can’t get mail in his nursing home. My husband can’t get his meds.I can’t get my facemasks. I haven’t had junkmail in weeks. I can’t get my bill payments delivered on time ( also too their bills.) That hurts my vendor and also hurts my credit rating.
This isn’t a Party issue. It is a governance issue. and some political hacks are failing.
artem1s
@Another Scott:
especially since maintaining that infrastructure has been abdicated to the companies who only wanted to skim profits off the top on the infrastructure WE built with our tax dollars. This is a direct result of W privatizing the natural gas delivery industry. We’ll have to reverse a lot of damage done by privatization and return publicly held utilities too.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
It’s hard for companies to get beyond old ways of thinking, especially when the old ways were responsible for their success.
Obviously, this area is a big part of business schools.
A small example. A tax company I worked for had these big Xerox photocopy machines to print tax returns. They also required a maintenance contract and a guy came by regularly to service it and to keep it filled with the gunk used to print stuff. This was how things were done. Big printers and service contracts.
You also had to jump through hoops to set the codes needed to format the output to print tax returns.
Some people actually laughed when someone bought a small HP LaserJet printer with their own money and brought it in to use for print jobs. Small, self contained, and with easily loadable fonts. And no elaborate system of service contracts.
And when individual tax preparers could use PCs and laser printers in their own offices, well… The rest is history.
NotMax
@James E Powell
Remember Hostess Big Wheels? Ding Dongs on steroids.
:)
Kay
The QAnon thing is interesting because it came out of mainstream conservatism. Starting with George W Bush there has been a focus on reducing sex trafficking on the Right. Bush talked about it and so did his AG and I knew about it from religious conservatives where I live –
So that’s where it came from- the nutters then applied all that to all of their political enemies.
Gravenstone
@Sab:
Huuuuge, unless the chemical manufacturer is already equipped to run under cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practice) conditions. If you’re not already there, it is a painful paperwork and processing extravaganza to get the proper certifications.
Sab
@Kay: We are at a big disadvantage because our guys don’t do sex trafficking. It wasn’t even on our radar. Millions of girls every day, but our guys don’t do it so we were not aware.
Sab
@Gravenstone:Thanks. I am an accountant. Can crunch numbers, but not in anything that matters.
Geminid
@Gravenstone: Some Mennonites in the Shenandoah Valley are putting out “Grandma’s Fried Pies.” Chocolate, Blueberry, Rasberry….Mm,Mmh!
Mallard FIlmore
@artem1s:
“Hanoi” ??? Not sure what era this refers to. Did you mean Saigon?
Roger Moore
@jonas:
One of the things that I can’t help noticing whenever I hear about another retailer going out of business is that they’re almost all companies that were purchased and hollowed out by VCs. For all the complaints about mom-and-pop businesses being crushed by Amazon, there are a lot of brick-and-mortar retailers that have succeeded in moving into online sales without undermining their physical stores.
Best Buy is still in business and has been successful with their “shop online, pick up at your local store” approach. Office Depot and Staples do the same kind of thing. The same thing is true of plenty of other big box retailers, like Home Depot. And then there are plenty of specialty retailers, like BJ favorite Penzeys Spices, that have moved from being local stores to selling nationwide through online sales.
Companies that were well run and had some forethought were capable of adapting their business to include online sales. The problem was that a lot of businesses were badly run and didn’t even try. This was especially common in business that had been taken over by VC types, who were so focused on squeezing out every penny from the existing business while investing as little as possible that they simply didn’t have the resources to try a serious online strategy.
Sab
One of my favorite moments in tax accounting was when our seasonally hired Puerto Rican secretary asked me “don’t these old snowbirds know that ‘Boca Raton’ means ‘Rat mouth?'” I had to assure her that they were clueless.
Just One More Canuck
@Cathie from Canada: the catalogs made great hockey pads
MattF
OT. Jen Rubin throws a bit of shade on Mr. Brooks:
Roger Moore
@Gravenstone:
I do some work under cGMP, and I would expect any manufacturer that’s already having to do ISO900x stuff shouldn’t have too hard a time adapting to cGMP. The QA/QC principles are the same; it’s mostly about a different set of buzzwords and a different regulatory agency.
Uncle Cosmo
You should try doing some research less than 50 years out of date before you post stuff like this. From a trustworthy source just a tad more current:
Last time I looked, cyclamates were legal & readily obtainable artificial sweeteners in Canada, & it doesn’t seem to have done them a lot of harm overall.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: My wife used to work with non-profits specifically to stop child sex trafficking. It is and was a huge problem and working on it breaks people because it’s so dispiriting and soul-numbing.
But what’s come out of QAnon is just… bizarre. It makes no sense. It doesn’t follow any of the standard practices or understanding of how trafficking works. It’s basically just two things:
1) Trafficking is bad, so we’re passionate about it and anyone who says we’re crazy is de facto evil.
2) Democrats are evil and therefore are traffickers.
I think that’s it. Then you apply the standard conspiracy theory thinking “Clinton had a new basement installed WITH LOCKS and a child went missing in the area, therefore Clinton has the child locked in a basement”, with lots of footnotes so you can convince people who have fucking idea what they’re doing.
That’s it. Nothing more than that.
catclub
In new orleans… handpies. Hubig’s
Gravenstone
@Roger Moore: Came back to add that it’s usually just the last three steps leading to the API that have to be done under cGMP. So that certainly helps other manufacturers make the upstream steps, leaving the cGMP work for rated facilities. My employer makes all manner of custom materials for various pharma customers. But they’re always far enough back in the sequence that we don’t need the added regulatory and documentation rigamarole of cGMP for our work. Typically our deliverables go to a sister site that specializes in API manufacture for those last critical steps.
MisterForkbeard
@Roger Moore:
I didn’t think Best Buy has been particularly successful. They’ve been closing stores and the folks I know that work there (geek squard, tech support folks) think the writing is on the wall. However, I just checked and apparently their stock price has been going up for years.
Not sure whether the company is actually healthy or not.
sdhays
You wouldn’t, by any chance, have an idea who has the inside track on the unicorn farts contract, would you?
Kelly
@Brachiator: If I recall correctly Xerox’s PARC lab invented and abandoned most of the graphical interface stuff that Apple and Microsoft eventual made billions off of.
Central Planning
@Another Scott: Supposedly the margin on film was something like 10,000%.
That’s a hard habit to break, like mainlining crack and heroin simultaneously.
I worked at Kodak in the 90s, and when George MC Fisher, CEO, said at company meeting “Our benefits are in the top 10% of our peer companies; we want to be in the 50% range” I knew I would not be sticking around.
raven
@Roger Moore: Good carburetors too.
Baud
@MisterForkbeard:
Sounds like a version of purity trolling except by right wingers.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
VCs may be part of the problem, but physical stores are declining everywhere.
Online shopping is also hitting hard with respect to clothing stores and groceries, areas where previously people wanted to be able to touch the goods.
Best Buy is hanging on by a thread, trying to make customer service and tech support an essential part of the shopping experience. I was just wowed when I was in a Best Buy store before the pandemic and saw a staffer using American Sign Language to help answer a customer’s questions.
But they are still struggling.
One of the Depots, Home or Office, is dying faster than the other. I can’t keep them straight. A couple of years ago, one of them opened a big store in the Hollywood area. I noticed it being built as I went to a long series of medical appointments at Kaiser. Then, last year or so, the store went out of business. It was wild to watch such a relatively rapid rise and fall.
As an aside, it was also wild to see how few construction workers were required to put up a building, especially using modular components.
Interesting. I never knew that this company had any physical stores. But this is a niche market that can maybe can well exploit an online space.
MattF
@Kelly: And much more. PARC invented a lot of the technology we’re using today. And Xerox corporate was, at best, unaware. I recall that an AI group in my department once bought a Xerox workstation that never worked properly. After some struggles, a Xerox repairman showed up. He picked up the mouse connected to the workstation and said “What’s this?”
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: Right, except the use of extensive footnootes and unrelated information is presented as “facts” that prove it.
It’s the same thinking that had the Clinton Kill List going for a couple decades. Lots of facts presented as if they’re connected, but they’re not. And the facts themselves are frequently wrong or hugely misrepresented.
NotMax
@Brachiator
Yup. Both Best Buy and Office Max/Office Depot have been teetering for some time now.
Martin
I’m sorry everyone. I’ve known Peter Navarro for 25 years both professionally and somewhat personally. He was my neighbor for a brief period. He has always been a crank and an idiot, and everyone knew it. Professionally he was largely ostracized, and generally nobody liked him because he was so odious. Anyone who’s worked in a university setting knows that even the cranks have friends, but Navarro largely managed to avoid even that problem.
When the WH grabbed him there was a huge cry of relief that we were finally rid of this embarrassment, and I was part of that. It was one of the few real benefits of a Trump presidency. We never figured they’d keep shoving him in front of TV cameras. We figured he was too much of a hack to survive that. We were wrong, and we’re sorry.
Central Planning
@Roger Moore:
I knew the guy who invented that array. He was a nice, interesting guy.
trollhattan
@MattF:
Hah, beginning to think they’ve lost JRubs for all time. Not Brooksie though, he’s just disturbed by the mal behavior, not the beliefs.
Roger Moore
@Gravenstone:
I know for our work, we are allowed to trust a manufacturer COA for non-critical materials as long as we do a quality survey and accept their quality standards, which are generally ISO900x rather than cGMP. For critical materials we still have to do our own quality testing, but once the material has passed our tests it’s considered good to go, even if it wasn’t cGMP qualified coming in.
Of course we’re a contract test lab rather than a manufacturer, so our material requirements are a bit lower. If we get a bad batch of chemical it can mess up our data, but it won’t harm a patient. It helps that almost any way a bad lot of chemical would affect us would be to make a test fail that should have passed, not the other way around. That risk assessment obviously affects our process.
Brachiator
@Kelly:
It’s not always easy to see how an invention can best be used. Sometimes you have to wait for a new market to be invented.
It’s also interesting to note how many companies needed a sales and marketing visionary to work with (and sometimes displace) the inventors. Sears, Singer sewing machines, some of the early typewriter companies, even Edison and Tesla, needed people who could transform inventions into useful and popular products.
David Buick, founder of the auto company, initially thought that the engines he was building would be used almost solely for agricultural use.
MisterForkbeard
@Brachiator:
They’re a CA Bay Area feature. I’m lucky enough to have lived close to their retail stores in both of my last two houses, because they’re a delight to walk through. You buy WAY too many spices, pick up free recipes, etc.
trollhattan
@Martin:
He’s be “fun” on an HOA board, chasing all the Chinese homeowners all the way to the shore, yelling something about “our steely spines.”
trollhattan
@MisterForkbeard:
We don’t have one in the metroplex that I know of, but the wife wandered into one in Portland and went nuts. Our luggage was very fragrant on the flight home, good thing they didn’t sic the drug and bomb dogs on us.
NotMax
@Roger Moore
Going almost full circle in terms of filling emptying retail space, modifying it from a destination to a viaduct for commerce:
tokyokie
@narya:
I’ve long advocated sending all MBAs to re-education camps, but I haven’t written any books advocating that position.
debbie
@Martin:
Couldn’t you have punched him over a pile of leaves or something similar? //
Baud
@MisterForkbeard:
A long time ago, I was listening to a right wing radio guy talking about some study that showed how correct they were, and he noted that the study was credible because it was footnoted. (That’s all I remember about it.)
sdhays
@NotMax: A couple years ago, I went to Best Buy to buy a Bluetooth mouse for my wife. The sales representative tried to sell me a mouse that was wireless, but not Bluetooth. They didn’t know the difference. Which didn’t irritate me too much, but they did waste my time having to explain it to them, and I didn’t actually ask for their help in the first place. That Best Buy is now closed for good.
I don’t think they’re long for this world.
MisterForkbeard
@trollhattan: Yeah. When my wife and I first started dating, we walked into Penzey’s as part of a larger date – she wanted to go because she knew I liked to cook, so we went there after lunch and a bookstore visit.
I was relatively poor then. Still bought $100 worth of spices on the spot and made my then-girlfriend dinner with them that night. And breakfast the next morning. Bam.
I’m not going to say Penzey’s gets ALL the credit for our marriage, but I like to think they contributed :)
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
I’m going with a guy named No Body.
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: Footnotes are the first refuge of the scoundrel.
This has actually been a long-term gambit on the right. Limbaugh and Coulter used to brag about having footnotes or endnotes in their books as PROOF that they’d researched it all and their data was all correct. They bragged about it constantly. Mark Levin was still doing it 7-8 years ago, not sure about now.
Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations by Al Franken went into this extensively. Al really had their number, even in the mid-90s.
trollhattan
@Baud:
With actual feet. Take that, libs!
Jay Noble
@lumpkin: ” . . . Was Fresca?”
I think our Blogmaster might like to have a few words with you :-)
Captain C
@tokyokie: I still haven’t figured out why some bright board/stockholders group hasn’t tossed a 8 or 9 digit-pay CEO and replaced them with one from a country where they get a tenth or less of that for the same or better performance. “Sorry, Bob, but given your performance these last few quarters, we can hire someone from Asia/Europe/Wherever for a tenth the cost, and given their record, we’ll do better (even if it’s only because of the savings on your salary and benefits).”
Martin
@Kelly: Yeah, but sort of. Basically, they sparked an idea, and demonstrated the technical cost of that idea. There was huge mountain lifting that was needed after that spark of an idea.
But that’s normal for academic discovery. They introduced some important concepts and did enough prototype work to show that the concepts were sound, but the concepts needed massive refinement to be marketable.
Xerox could have done that work, but really that work was meant to be licensed to others, and it was – they made fucking bank off of the Apple stock that Jobs paid them with. What’s usually missed from the story is the more direct role that Xerox played nearby. They invented the laser printer there which Apple also licensed and released with the Laserwriter which was the first successful consumer laser printer just after the Mac came out. It succeeded because of the serendipitous convergence of Xeroxs work on the printing mechanism, Adobe’s development of Postscript, which Apple licensed, and the Mac to give users a visual representation of what would be printed (inventing the concept of WYSIWYG). The laser printer was a much more direct benefit from Xerox because it wasn’t just the concept, they were directly involved in the development of it – shrinking the laser printing engine down to fit on a desk and get the cost down to vaguely consumer levels. But without Apple and Adobe, it would never find a market. And the Laserwriter really helped the Mac take off because it provided a really valuable benefit to users – you could do proper page layout and typography and deploy on a small scale. That created an entire industry.
Baud
@MisterForkbeard:
Most right wing memes aren’t really that new. They just reinvent the same old wheels.
Baud
@trollhattan: They should be called assholenotes.
snoey
@NotMax: Pretty sure I read that people were using the dead food courts for 1 central kitchen many brands delivery. They’ve got the ductwork and wiring in place.
Martin
@debbie: I’ve had many baby Hitler moments with this presidency. I probably could have taken Trump out sometime back in the 80s when I saw him in a store in Manhattan. Yeah, I’d have spent 15 years in prison, but in hindsight it would have absolutely been worth it.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@debbie: You’ve never heard of the divine right of kings?
Kent
Technically it would be mouse’s mouth. In Spanish “rata” = rat and “ratón” = mouse.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: Home Depot is/was a seriously weird company. I’ve seen more than a couple examples of them opening up a new store within a few hundred yards of a new Lowe’s even when there was an existing HD maybe 1/4 of a mile down the street.
Walmart has done weird things like that, too, when Target or Costco opens a store.
Their management was pathologically afraid of genuine competition and had to try to crush anyone that dared to try to compete fairly.
When I’m elected benevolent despot, antitrust rules are going to have teeth and investigators will be ready to check abuses!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@Captain C: The problem is the high paycheck is virtue signaling to investors. Get rid of this notion of ‘delivering value to the shareholder’ and that shit will go away.
Kay
@MisterForkbeard:
I’ve had training in recognizing it because I work in juvenile courts and while our presenter was a serious person, and credible, there was a whiff of crusaders around some of the people that put me off a little. I know a lot about the moral panic in and around child care that led to all those crazy prosecutions in the 1980’s so I’m wary. I watched another moral panic when they put in the original round of sex offender laws- those were applied in draconian ways and absolutely destroyed some juvenile offenders- crazy cases, where they were getting 20 years of reporting for having sex with someone 2 years younger than they were.
It’s gotten better. Judges recognized it was out of control and in my state (Ohio) actually sued the state legislature and won discretion in the juvenile sex offender cases. They had taken that away from judges, which is contrary to the state constitution.
There can be a lot of bad law around children because people (rightfully) feel strongly that they have to be defended. It leads to poor results. The cases ARE heartbreaking but I’ve come to think one needs intensely practical people to handle them – overly emotional hurts everyone. The opposite of what someone on the outside looking on might think is needed.
raven
@Martin: Ah, an Anteater huh?
danielx
This is one of those BJ threads when I have to watch myself after I get off whatever device I’m using, lest I start channeling Samuel L. jackson around the family units.
These fucking people…
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
That professional sports business I worked at 1994-2005 stopped using film for it’s glossy 80-96 page magazine it put out every month around 2000. I had to do some photo work in my department and switched in 2001. The magazine folks told me that most magazines were going digital about then, no one wanted to use film if they didn’t need to. Now it was expensive because the only good digital stuff was about the same cost as film cameras if not more.
Baud
@danielx: There are BJ threads that are not like that?
Aleta
Swimmers jumping from the abutment right now — classic kodak moment
live Covered Bridge Webcam Vermont’s Mad River Valley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf6XmDa4ju0
EthylEster
So I have been wondering for months about this:
Did GM actually make any vents?
And did the My Pillow guy actually make any masks?
NotMax
@sdhays
I still miss Radio Shack. ;)
Expect that Best Buy (wrongly, IMHO) will tweak their business model to focus on the poles of the spectrum – high-end gear (greater profit per item) and bargain basement wares (volume, volume, volume), ignoring the relatively reasonable middle tier altogether, ceding that segment to exclusively online retailers and other big box outlets (like Costco) where it is but one department designed to have goods ebb and flow with the market or the season.
catclub
according to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, it is patriotism.
Not to knock an inferior lexicographer who said patriotism was the last refuge.
raven
@Aleta: We watched “Niagara” last night. Jean Peters almost took the jump over the falls like that!
Martin
@trollhattan: His China views are so perversely weird. So much of our local real estate is thanks to the Chinese. When this part of SoCal was really building out, it was Taiwanese buyers back when they were convinced Carter had handed Taiwan to PRC and they wanted a place they could escape to. That then changed to mainland Chinese as they got money and wanted to expatriate it (you can’t really buy land in China).
So our economy is wildly dependent on Chinese immigrants of various flavors as well as outside investment. We have always catered to that. Any reasonable upscale home has to have a wok kitchen and the right orientation and a lucky street number. And yeah, there are a bunch of geriatric white guys bitching about them to this day, but man are they becoming rare. I don’t blame the barber for whining about the immigrants, but how the fuck can you be an economist and not recognize the massive economic benefits that the asian community has brought to us? Not just Chinese but also Korean and Vietnamese and others.
It’s just wild. And Navarro has never been to China despite claiming to be an expert on China. Like I said, he’s a fucking crank.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Yep. Film gave you a constant customer base, even after buying the product that used it. Once you have a decent digital, you really don’t need that company any longer, until you decide you need another, better/different camera. I have friends using 10-11 yr old computers. They really aren’t into upgrading for what they use them for. Plus they are old and somewhat set in their ways, shock of all shocks.
dnfree
@Brachiator: when we moved, Best Buy sold us a new TV and installed it and our entire sound system, including vintage Klipsch speakers now connected with Bluetooth. They did a good job.
Kent
And the fastest way to get your local Wal-Mart to roll up shop and close is to organize unionization campaign. I’m not sure why more anti Wal-Mart community groups don’t do that. Surest way on the planet to get your local Wal-Mart to close.
But yes, here in East Vancouver we have a Home Depot and Lowes that are literally only separated by the Wal-Mart parking lot.
Aleta
@raven: I’ve been watching the bears hanging out with the salmon in the rushing water by webcam. Refreshing…
Brooks Falls – Katmai National Park, Alaska powered by EXPLORE.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcWTPFnqOLo
danielx
@Baud:
Well, there are some: cooking, pets, naked mopping, personal injuries, that kind of thing.
But of late – for the last three years and eight months, more or less – I read and I feel like I should be gobbling blood pressure meds like M&Ms.
raven
@Aleta: That is soooo cool!
Here’s the live webcam at the fish cleaning area in Venice, LA. I don’t know why I watch it, it just makes me sad that we only caught one 60 pounder tuna last year!
https://www.venicemarina.com/live-view.html
Ruckus
@Kent:
They still have a DVD devision. They still mail a lot of them around, a lot of older shows and movies are only available on DVD and not watched enough to bother with otherwise. From the pricing (I just canceled my DVD service because I was using it so rarely) increase they are doing I’d say they aren’t all that interested in keeping it though. USPS being destroyed by shitforbrains may just kill it completely.
Jay Noble
@Kay: Judging from what I’m seeing on Facebook, they are gearing up bigly to transition the anti sex-trafficking campaign into “All Democrats are Pedophiles!!! Especially Creepy Old Uncle Joe!” Seriously concerned religious types putting up things such as you posted from various sources but then subtle (and not so subtl) comments blaming it on the libs. The scary thing is some of these folks are revealing they had been trafficked and abused but not making the connection to who actually abused or trafficked them – say a youth pastor or Confedrate flag wearing good ol’ boy or some business conventioneer.
NotMax
@raven
Ah, oversaturated Technicolor. Them was the days.
:)
EthylEster
@hells littlest angel: it’s more like Diet Coke, chocolate ice cream and The Gabby Hayes Show
There were no diet sodas when the Gabby Hayes Show was on.
raven
@NotMax: Was it B&W originally? The thumbnail for youtubetv movies will be black and white and the film is color??
Martin
@NotMax: Best Buy is only alive because of their extended warranty business. Their business will almost certainly surround what they can offer extended warranties on, and what gets people in the store.
If they go too upscale they lose the warranty business because upscale goods tend to have that covered.
Oh, little tip for people: companies sell products to different retailers with varying warranties. Those cheap laptops at Costco often only have a 90 day warranty with a year of phone support or something like that. A nearly identical laptop from Amazon may have a 1 or 2 year warranty but cost more. So, pay close attention when you comparison shop – that $100 difference is price is likely the warranty, and the cheaper the product, usually the more consequential that is.
We have a laptop program for students, and we will only certify laptops with 2+ year warranties. We do that because financial aid will augment a students aid, but only up-front. So we want the warranty bundled into the purchase price so students can apply their grants to it. It’s not unusual for a cheap Windows laptop to cost twice as much once the warranty is accounted for. The manufacturer knows what the repair rate is on the device, and a shorter warranty lets them sell a shittier product since they won’t be on the hook for repairs, and when you demand the warranty, the price shoots up dramatically. We tend to more favorably certify a laptop where the warranty delta is relatively small, which suggests it’s a better made product.
Ken
Stockholders might do that, but the board is likely largely made up of other CEOs, all in a mutual circle– um, all patting one another on the back about the great job they’re doing.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Yep. One of the things I’ve come to appreciate over time is the importance of marketing. There’s a tendency for technical people to look down on marketing as a bunch of assholes who try to convince people to buy what we have, regardless of whether it’s what they need. And there’s some truth to that; there is a lot of marketing that’s built around selling what we have.
But there’s also a whole branch of marketing that’s built around figuring out what people want so the company knows what to make. Technical people can often be so focused on what they can do that they forget about what the customer needs, and the marketing people who talk to customers can keep that tendency under control. That side of marketing is really vital, and technical people should appreciate it more.
dnfree
@Roger Moore: probably a little-known fact that NCR, the cash-register company, made business computers in the 1960s. I programmed on one, in a language called NEAT (National Easy Assembler Technique, I think). Their technological distinction was using magnetic cards rather than disks. The cards hung from pins, and when data on a particular card was required, the pins would retract so that, in theory only that, card would fall down and wrap around a cylinder to be read and then reinserted. I don’t think they lasted long.
Jay Noble
@Martin:
Dingdingding!!! The root of so much of the decline in American business and manufacturing.
Chyron HR
@tokyokie:
That’s a bit harsh, you just could try educating them first.
Raoul
@Cheryl Rofer: I wonder who inspected the plant before awarding the contract.
I’d think Jarred did, in his spare time.
raven
@Roger Moore: The Viet Cong ran businesses here? Damn, I knew Charlie was adaptable but not THAT adaptable!
Ruckus
@Gravenstone:
This. Massively this.
MBA lack of thought that profit is the ONLY operational information that needs to be considered has rendered a lot of our manufacturing infrastructure obsolete and useless and made our economy try to run on 20 to 30 yr old machines/equipment, which doesn’t allow as productive a system and which breaks down more. In 2012 I interviewed with a mfg company that was going gang busters and had tripled in size in 3 yrs, because they understood and invested in new equipment that produced more and better.
zhena gogolia
J.-L. Cauvin is doing Trump Bible study every day this week at 3:16 ET. Hilarious!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA1G-x2Zse4&feature=youtu.be
zhena gogolia
@raven:
It was originally Technicolor.
Kent
So if the warranty doubles the price of the product, why not just skip it and buy a new better/newer laptop when the old one dies? You come out the same (or ahead with the newer machine). What am I not getting? I’ve never once bought an extended warranty for anything .
In any event, every laptop I have ever owned I replaced because it got too slow and kludgy, not because of a warranty-type repair
In any event, most of the cheap laptops I have seen are cheap because they have crappy screens, keyboards, chassis, processors, RAM, and drives in them.
NotMax
@raven
Filmed in color.
A scene + trailer. Marilyn’s lipstick so vibrant it could be seen in an unlit coal mine at midnight.
;)
danielx
@Aleta:
Always a good and relaxing show. One of my favorite views showed a brown bear that probably weighed half a ton, sitting back in the water holding a big salmon in both front paws and nomming on it like a guy eating a hot dog at a ball park,
germy
https://thebulwark.com/how-to-steal-an-election/
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I think an even bigger problem is that shareholder democracy is more theoretical than anything right now. It’s hard to get together enough activist shareholders to nominate and elect a slate of board candidates. Instead, most of the time the board is made of people nominated by management. The relationship is way too cozy, and the board winds up failing to actively oversee management. IMO, it’s one more argument in favor of some kind of codetermination; it would make it much harder for management to keep a pet board that acted as a rubber stamp.
sdhays
When the Board of Directors is loaded with other CEO’s or at least C-suite people, you are never going to see cost cutting at that level.
Ruckus
@MisterForkbeard:
A company like Best Buy doesn’t do well in a recession or recession like era, sort of like what we are going through now. The cause isn’t economic, it’s viral but the effect is that the economy is not going to spend as much on desirables as necessities. And a lot of Best Buy business is desirables, not necessities. Sure some business will need a computer or a printer, and supplies but how many new big screens are needed? I mean I don’t watch shitforbrains ever, so that I won’t need a new monitor or TV.
Martin
@Ruckus: My view is a bit different. B-schools teach finance, because finance applies to everything. It’s hard to figure out how to make money building a better smartphone, or making better pizzas, or whatever, and its wildly hard to teach that to a bunch of students that don’t know what industry they’ll go into, but it’s easy to teach them how to make money through finance – cut costs here, replace capex with leases, or leases with capex, outsource this stuff, insource that stuff.
We’ve completely lost the plot. Drucker has it right:
Marketing isn’t just advertising. It’s why a Porsche looks and is designed the way it is and why a Cadillac looks and is designed the way it is. They are designed to appeal to different customers by delivering on what the customer wants.
There’s an old adage that the customer doesn’t want a ¼” drill, they want a ¼” hole. It’s up to the marketing folks to convince the customer that the drill is the best means to get the hole, mostly by delivering on making it the best means to get the hole, not the least of which means making the product easy enough for anyone to use, and cheaper than a contractor.
Part of the iPhone’s success is the name. It’s objectively a terrible phone (list all of the innovations Apple brought to the iPhone after it’s introduction when it came out with visual voicemail – there aren’t any) but they convinced consumers that they needed a computer in their pocket that was just capable enough as a phone to replace their existing mobile phone. All of the value proposition of the iPhone is its utility as a computer, not as a phone.
That was the key marketing victory: the go-to-market strategy – the ability to take the real estate already allocated in your pocket/purse/whatever for a mobile phone.
Aleta
@danielx: Yeah I like how relaxed they are. And when they do catch a fish they eat it rather gracefully.
raven
@NotMax: When she was in bed, we noticed that right away!
raven
@danielx: On the chat they are saying this is the last day of jumping fish.
NotMax
@Ruckus
From springtime, when closures and lockdowns were put in place:
Elizabelle
@MattF:
Jen Rubin: WaPost: Do we even need the Republican Party?
Her answer is “no.” She is getting to where we are. They cannot reform the GOP. It’s too far gone. It has to be defeated and destroyed. Period.
Bingo.
mrmoshpotato
@James E Powell:
No. No it was not. Shit better not be talked about Zingers!
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Ha. Or rather, Ho Ho.
;)
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I think you have a lot of this wrong (with respect). The distinction between desirable and necessary is arbitrary. In addition, changes in circumstance can make items vital which previously no one thought about. For example, right now, disinfectant wipes are almost worth their weight in gold. Almost as valuable as toilet paper.
Best Buy sells appliances. A friend’s freezer broke down and, especially because of the lockdown, she needed one quickly. Best Buy to the rescue.
With the shift to remote work and remote learning, people have been buying equipment, supplies and accessories in fairly large amounts.
Also, during the heat of the lockdown, Amazon was not fulfilling orders for a lot of this stuff because it was not deemed to be essential. So in effect, they drove business to Best Buy and other stores.
BTW, I don’t know if Best Buy sells bicycles, but demand for bicycles and bike supplies has increased as some people avoid mass transit.
Again, circumstance greatly affects what products people want.
As an aside, I would suggest that civilization itself hugely enhances humanity’s ability to satisfy desire as well as take care of necessities.
Martin
@Kent: Because it’s a hidden cost. People buy the product expecting x years out of it – it’s a durable good. And they amortize that value in some way in their rationale. But if the product lasts x/2 years, they now are out more money than they had anticipated. They see the $600 laptop at Amazon (with warranty) and the $300 laptop at WalMart (without warranty) and think they’re getting a deal. But I look at that and realize the manufacturer knows that laptop won’t last 2 years and have priced the warranty at full replacement value. That’s a shitty laptop, just don’t buy it at all.
We do this for students because federal financial aid rules allow for an augmentation, but only once. So that augmentation needs to cover the length of life of the product. If we expect a student to get through 4 years with one laptop, then we want to only certify products that will get them through that 4 years on that augmentation. Since we only require the laptop for 2 years (for complicated reasons) we mandate a 2 year warranty, and recognize that if it’s covered for 2 years, odds are pretty good it’ll last 4.
Students can of course buy whatever they want, but we don’t want them to get an augmentation and then only get a year out of it and have to buy a replacement without benefit of financial aid.
Apple is a bit of an odd case on this. Apple’s warranty costs are remarkably low. It can be expensive to repair, but they do it so infrequently that spread across their sales, they spend very little money on warranty repairs. They use that to manage retail costs. A retailer gets almost no margin off of the sale of an iPhone or a Mac. That prevents them from discounting the product, allowing Apple to have a very stable price structure, also eliminating a lot of grey markets (people doing arbitrage). But the retailer can get AppleCare for next to nothing, so that’s where they make their money. Beats serves a similar role – if you sell Apple products and Beats, they’ll severely discount the Beats. You break even on the Apple hardware, and clean up on the Beats and AppleCare.
That doesn’t mean AppleCare is a bad deal – but it’s much more like conventional insurance. Unlike how many consumer electronics companies price warranties as ‘every one of these will require $50 of service, and we’ll break even’, Apple is pricing it as ‘1% of these will require $1000 of service and we’ll give the retailer the profits’. You as the consumer are gambling on whether you are the 1% or not.
I always buy AppleCare, and never buy a warranty for any other product. I’ve used it once so far – for a failed logic board – they handed me a new $3000 computer.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Elizabelle: Go, Jen!
Brachiator
@Martin:
I thought smartphones are cameras with extra features.
But it’s not just a computer. It’s a mobile device. And the value is also in being able to use it for that particular slice of computer stuff that is mobile. It may overlap what you might do with a desktop or laptop, but it is not always the same thing.
Martin
@NotMax: That’s what I was expecting to see. Everyone put their vacation money into a new TV or some other QoL household doo-dad.
The economy shifted. At least temporarily. And it shifted out of largely non-publicly traded companies (the B&B, restaurants, etc.) and into more publicly traded companies.
raven
@Martin: I was having problems with my covered iPhone and they had a refurbed one at my door in 24 hours.
oopzwtf
@Kent:
Yeah, but the NPD people at Apple never got to experience the pure joy of being a small group trying to design and develop consumer electronics and digital capture devices while working in a much larger group of chemists, managed by layers upon layers of chemists, and led by a CTO who was, um, a chemist.
Also, too, any non analog kodak product had to justify its existence by answering the 100 year mindset question ‘…yeah, ok, but how can this device be leveraged to consume the traditional photographic film and paper that we make obscene profits on?…’. Digital capture devices were always going to fail that test, and kodak’s mindset was never going to evolve beyond the way things had always been.
Elizabelle
@NotMax: That trailer is just plain silly at this point. And what fun Jean … whatever had filming that movie.
Do love those falls, though. I think Niagara is free on Amazon Prime, or it was recently ….
Steeplejack (phone)
@Brachiator, @MisterForkbeard:
I have a Penzeys store near me in Falls Church, VA. Due for a visit.
NotMax
@Martin
Ironically it bodes for a lackluster holiday sales period, as so many people already have their new stuff.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
“A Raging Torrent of Emotion!”
:)
raven
@Elizabelle: Peters, she was married to Howard Hughes once. Talk about an abrupt ending, I was expecting some kind of recognition for Cotten saving her but it wasn’t to be. And what’s with battle fatigue (PTSD) for the company clerk. And while I’m at it, Letterman was NOT some PTSD destination! I’m sure they had their share but the movie made out like it was a mental hospital.
Martin
@Brachiator: The camera was also part of it. The first iPhone was only 2 megapixels, and no video, so it was good for the casual snap, but that’s about it. iPhone 4 is when the low-end digital camera market really started to collapse. The phone had largely caught up.
But yeah, in most respects the iPhone is more capable than your computer. Uber exists because it was trivial for the iPhone to tell Uber ‘I am here on this corner right this second’. That’s come to computers, but in a much more roundabout and imprecise way. The utility of sensors and such expand its role so you can buy groceries with it in greater variety of places than your laptop can, etc.
But those were all evolutions, and they’ll continue to expand. Jobs pitched it as:
App Store didn’t even show up for another 6 months. They didn’t sell it as a computer, but I do Excel on mine from time to time. My son does CAD designs on the sofa with his. None of that could have been pitched to consumers back then. It was a converged iPod and mobile phone you could replace both of those with, that did undefined internet stuff.
⅔ of the pitch was to get it to replace other stuff in your pockets, the last ⅓ is everything we thing of the iPhone as being now. We don’t even think about the first two any more – of course you have your smartphone on you – how could you not?
Elizabelle
@raven: Ah. Had heard the name, but not placed it. Thanks.
Aleta
@NotMax: That might be the greatest trailer ever made.
NotMax
@Martin
Quite easily, thank you very much. Have less than zero need for or interest in such a device.
/outlier
raven
A bear got a fish!!!!!
Kent
@Martin: Yep. Flip phones had cameras on them for years before the iPhone came out.
Ruckus
@NotMax:
How much do 65 in and bigger TVs cost? A lot. Who has a lot to purchase a 65 in or larger TV this year? Or any year? Your average worker? I don’t think so at most any time. So that market is relatively small. At the Best Buy near me sure they sell the bigger ones but the 45-65 market is what sits on the floor and is what is mostly sold. Same at target, where they have one 65 on display and nothing on the floor.
And a PC is mostly a lot cheaper than that 65 in or larger TV, so someone that has a job but is not working may just buy a new PC or Chromebook because they are staring at it all day long.
I’m saying that any market change has a lot of reasons for being. Did the stores drop prices to get rid of inventory because they knew they’d be stuck with them if they didn’t? So were profits up, or just sales?
Martin
@Aleta: This is the greatest trailer of all time.
Although, if I had been alive at the time and old enough to process what I was seeing, I would have completely lost my shit at the ‘2001’ trailer.
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
I do believe that she’s got it!
Take off the blinders, the payoffs to stay and believe, the misdirection, the lies, what are you left with in the republican party?
Read what she wrote and you posted and Bingo is right, the only thing left is the grifters and the racists, which of course are mostly the same thing.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
If, as is likely, we are still deep into the pandemic, the holiday sales period may not even exist.
People still have not adjusted to how much society has changed, and may continue to change.
Who buys back to school clothes if most are remote learning? Who needs as many work outfits?
Kent
Seeing the future is difficult though. Even when you think you are seeing the future.
There was a (perhaps apocryphal) story about the US occupation of Japan where the US authorities strictly limited aircraft manufacturer because they thought that was going to be the future but let the Japanese freely manufacturer and develop “old” technologies like cars and motorcycles. So we got Honda and Toyota competing with the US but Cessna was protected.
Martin
@NotMax: Quite possibly. We’ll see. This could be a permanent shift in consumer discretionary spending. One thing that might facilitate that is carnage across other industries. Even if you would prefer to take that cruise next year, if there are no cruise businesses left operating, you’ll have to find a new place to put your spending.
Honestly the best news out of all of this is that consumer saving is way, way up, and consumer debt was out of hand and needed to get curtailed.
Mallard FIlmore
@Kent:
A friend of mine says the Lowes site location team’s instructions were to simply find a Home Depot and plop down near it.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
I think the deeper problem is that business school people tend to think of the stuff that isn’t taught at business school as less important. They’ve paid a lot of money and a bunch of time and effort to get their MBA, and it lets them jump some steps when getting a job, so they figure it must have all the information they need. That makes them dismiss the industry knowledge of people who have worked their way up the ladder. In practice, of course, that industry knowledge is complementary to the finance stuff people learn in business school, so many successful industries tend to promote from within and get their business school knowledge by paying for people who already know the industry to go back and get their MBA later in their career.
Kent
@Brachiator: When we finally have a vaccine and people start leaving their homes again, there is going to be an ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE glut of exercise equipment flooding Craigslist. Mark my words. If you want a new exercise bike or treadmill, just wait until January or so.
raven
@Brachiator: I’m just coming to grips with the fact that I’m retired and I have all these clothes I’ll never wear again!
jl
Given recent history of these sorts of deals for supplies and services for covid-19 control, my first question is there any evidence at all that this subsidiary of Kodak can fulfill the terms of the contract? That is, is it even capable of making the stuff at all (yep, it’s gotten so bad that we need a very detailed and convincing answer to that question, with truly massive amounts of evidence before we give it a coin-flip chance) , and if so, at acceptable quality and quantity?
I don’t have time to read the whole thread, so sorry if this has been asked before, will check back later to see if any BJ blog polymaths know the answer.
NotMax
@Ruckus
Last time was in Costco noticed they’ve reconfigured one aisle (the first one seen upon entering) strictly for 87-inch TVs.
Tech prices have become positively bizarre, with $1000 chromebooks now being offered, fer corn’s sake. Following the pattern of the Thunderbird, from two-seater sports car to ever more lumbering behemoth.
Aleta
@raven: There was a bear awhile ago sitting in the water who just lifted up his paw with a fish, no effort, like a fish had swum right into it.
Just now saw that one you mention pounce.
Kent
I suspect the same thing happens with CVS and Walgreens. There are so many places in the US where they are literally across the street from each other.
Two blocks from where we used to live in TX: https://goo.gl/maps/fqnrGf3aQqeaz9dPA
Martin
I will add, thanks to Trump, Sony and Microsoft are going to have epic console sales this year.
Martin
@Kent: Apple originally targeted putting them near Pottery Barn. Similar demographics. Now Apple Stores are the last remaining mall anchor.
raven
@Aleta: And the boats are coming in with tons of tuna!
NotMax
@Brachiator
Idly wonder if anyone has tracked any differences in increase of sales of shirts/tops versus pants/skirts since the advent of Zooming.
;)
jl
The Trump era: “OK, was that wrong? Was what I did wrong? If so, probably only a tort, not a crime.”
The GOP standard for acceptable standards of governance has long been if a GOPer avoids patently criminal behavior, we’re all good, or should be. But now they have to scramble to even jump over that bar buried in a trench dug deep into the ground.
Trump To Vance: I Would Prefer A Civil, Not Criminal Subpoena
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/trump-to-vance-i-would-prefer-a-civil-not-criminal-subpoena
Brachiator
@Martin:
But that’s all that most people needed. Coming back to one of the original topics of this thread, smartphone cameras were like a digital Kodak Instamatic. It was a pocket camera that you always had with you.
Even now, most people take junky photos and use apps that are silly effects. But hardware, lenses and sensors, and software has revolutionized smartphone cameras and make them much more capable.
As an aside, one of the truly important innovations has been Google’s Nightsight feature, that lets people take indoor photos without using flash.
MisterForkbeard
@Martin: Nintendo’s Switch has more than doubled it’s console sales this year. And that includes the first three months of the year, where sales were normal.
Anecdotally, I know 4-5 friends who’ve all been trying to buy a Switch in the last 3 months and had trouble, because no one can keep them in stock.
Kent
Honestly, I don’t think any of it is selling. Who has a business/corporate type job and doesn’t already have enough shirts or blouses?
raven
@Aleta: Just caught one on the fly!
raven
@MisterForkbeard: It’s taking me almost 3 weeks to get my recumbent ex bike, it’s supposed to be here tomorrow.
jl
@Kent: Someday the origin of standard business attire of white shirt, tie and jacket + Bermuda shorts and flip-flops will be an obscure trivia question.
Delk
Tornado Alert for Chicago area!
Roger Moore
@Martin:
There’s likely to be a permanent shift, but probably not as big as what we’re seeing now. For example, a lot of people have said they expect to cook more and eat out less even after the pandemic is over. That may be true, especially if a lot of restaurants go out of business, but in the longer term I expect to see people come back to restaurants to a level similar to what they were doing before the pandemic. Cruises may be a different matter, if only because there will be a long term fear of cruise ships as floating incubators, but I think the disruption from companies going out of business will shake out in the medium term.
Chyron HR
@jl:
How about a lamppost on 14th street? Does that work for you?
Aleta
@raven: I missed it. Backed up… wow.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
A lot of projections of what would happen in the retail and restaurant markets has been thrown out the window.
From a March USA Today story.
As working-from-home and teleconferencing become the new norm during the coronavirus pandemic, an executive from Walmart told Yahoo Finance on Thursday that there’s still a demand for presentable work shirts – but that there’s not much of a need for work clothing below the waist.
“We’re seeing increased sales in tops, but not bottoms,” Dan Bartlett, Walmart’s executive vice president of corporate affairs, told Yahoo Finance about people who use Zoom and other types of video conferencing.
A representative for Walmart confirmed Bartlett’s initial statement to USA TODAY.
raven
@Roger Moore: For 15 years we walked to the bakery every morning for coffee. I don’t know if we’ll go back to it if this blows over.
mrmoshpotato
Glad to see my congresswoman slap down this mook’s idiocy.
MattF
@Elizabelle: I’ll note that Rubin gave Larry Hogan a hard kick in a sensitive area because he wouldn’t say who he would vote for in November. She’s not fooling around.
Aleta
@raven: oooo. This pair are pros.
Ken
Randall Munroe has pointed out that this increase in size happens in other industries. He’s also noted the proliferation of phone features.
Martin
Nice piece on Kamala Harris that I agree with.
When you look at the work she did down in the weeds where people wouldn’t notice, it’s very progressive. Survivors bias is almost always going to make POC and women look worse, because of the concessions they needed to make in order to survive. She could have stood her ground, in which case nobody would ever have heard of her.
raven
@Aleta: I gotta stop!
frosty
@dnfree: They were one of the BUNCH competitors to IBM:
Burroughs Univac NCR Control Data Honeywell
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
You and I are in agreement here just saying things a bit differently. A lot of companies are still open and working, the one I work at for instance. Now we don’t have any TVs, big screen or not at work but we do have computers for the office and for actual production. We operate a lot on solid models, almost all of our work we are supplied with the solid model design to insure that what we make is what the customer wants. My bosses computer crapped out earlier this year and he had to buy a new one. That’s necessity, not desire. And yes I bought a new computer within the last 6 months myself because I wanted something that worked better and faster. I have been working most of the time since January because we’ve had a lot of work. But I also have social security depositing a not insignificant amount in my account every month. It may not be quite enough at my current spending level but it’s acceptable and keeps me off the street.
Roger Moore
@NotMax:
I think the logic behind the Chromebook has shifted with the price. When it first came out, people saw them as a cheaper alternative to the Windows PC that saved you money on the Microsoft tax, but at the expense of having to use off-brand alternatives to your favorite software. But as the software for Android and ChromeOS has gotten better, and as more and more of computing is handled through the browser rather than native apps, people are seeing them more and more as a straight-up competitor for Windows PC rather than an inferior option. They may even see them as a better alternative, since they promise to be more secure and easier to maintain. That means they’re pushing into more conventional PC territory in terms of price.
catclub
@Jay Noble: for an interesting take on even worse sets of motivations,
check out recent (today) Matt Levine (bloomberg) on the CEO statement on governance responsibilites to groups besides shareholders.
[The CEO’s just use this to justify whatever they want to do. At least when they talk about shareholder values having priority they are being honest.]
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
@Martin:
This could be a permanent shift in consumer discretionary spending.
The restaurant industry has been shaken hard. This includes fast food establishments as well.
Casual dining had been in decline for a while. To adjust for this, a lot of restaurants started to emphasize breakfast more, putting them into greater competition with fast food franchises.
Recovery from the pandemic has obliterated the efficacy of this strategy. Remote work and remote learning has severely impacted both the breakfast and lunch segments of the industry.
I think that buffets have disappeared and may not come back.
Dine in is gone for now, and outdoor dining is doing barely okay. Some restaurants are adapting their menus for takeout, eliminating specialty items that don’t travel well. But it’s tough for restaurants to survive with all these changes and experiments. And it’s hard to see what dining might look like after we get through all this.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Apple Care. I don’t buy it because the systems are so reliable. Over time I save the cost of replacement because the initial warranty is good enough for most issues, in my opinion. But peace of mind does have value, that’s for sure. My experience is that the products are solid enough and I never purchase on initial runs, only after initial sales are done and production is solid. Also normally they don’t change as much or as often and they control almost all the production to a large degree. The product has a better chance of being reliable in the first place.
Martin
@Roger Moore: Yeah, I agree. And it’s almost impossible to predict where things will shift. Did everyone come to try and like delivery services?
I expect there’s a lot of value assessment going on right now. Habits that people don’t really miss may never return, but other things they miss desperately and will probably spend more on in the future. The annual trip to Virginia Beach or do we save up for Europe? Some structural change will happen – Starbucks is preparing for some degree of a permanent change to delivery/takeout. Maybe app ordering and handing it to you in your car becomes the more common thing. New services are filling in. I expect most movie theaters will vanish and more movies will release into services like Disney+, but the theaters that survive will be more upscale. Expectations on movie budgets will change. Probably more cook from home, and a bit less restaurants. Higher end restaurants will probably benefit. I can microwave linguini just as well as Olive Garden can, after all.
Overall, the amount of discretionary spending probably won’t change much, but where it goes will change. That’s not a bad thing. One hope I have is we’ll keep some fraction of the massive emissions gains that we’ve gotten.
frosty
@raven: I know! I looked at my closet a little while ago and wondered if I’m ever going to wear the khakis and shirts again. Thank Dog I only had one suit.
A couple of years before retirement I knew the need for dress shoes was going to be short so I resoled them instead of buying new. They should last the rest of my life now.
raven
@frosty: That’s it exactly. I worked for a university system and we got shirts with logo’s every year. I just stared at them and said NAHHHHHHH!
Brachiator
@NotMax:
Actually, mid range priced Chromebooks are kicking butt. And the Lenovo Chromebook Duet tablet, at $299, has been getting rave reviews, but is exceedingly hard to find. Best Buy and Walmart seem to be the only stores that regularly have them in stock. Not even Amazon.
Low and mid priced Chromebooks continue to be popular for schools.
One thing I find very interesting is the stream of highly regarded Windows laptops that use AMD Ryzen chips and which appear to deliver superior performance at a lower price. This is happening just as more people are looking to buy devices for remote work and for remote learning.
Omnes Omnibus
@frosty: As long as you bought good quality shoes to begin with and took reasonably good care of them, resoling is always the best option. Good shoes are an investment.
Kay
@Jay Noble:
I read a “recovering home schoolers” blog once for a little while to prepare for a case. Like a public support group for adults who had been homeschooled + fundy religious. It was really interesting and oddly heartening because they were so kind to one another. They were all at different points in leaving the “lifestyle” and there was a lot of acceptance and welcome. Anyway- LOTTA abuse by pastors.
The book Educated is along the same lines.
Gravenstone
@NotMax:
Heh, I once test drove a used 1975 T-bird with the 460 4 barrel engine, leather and power everything. Had what we nicknamed the “40 acre hood” because the damn thing went on forever. Was tempted to buy it, but remembered my grandfather having a late 60s T-bird with the same engine. It got 8 mpg, on a good day. Ended up going with a 1977 Cougar XR7 (which was the next generation of Ford sedan body).
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: I said you must be joking son, where did you get those shoes. . .
Kent
I actually buy apple care too, but only for computers, not phones. But then I always buy them on the education discount by showing my teacher ID. That only generates a tiny discount on the purchase price but gives a steep cut in the price of apple care. I forget what it is, 25% or 50% or something like that. Which about makes it worth it. I’ve only used it once to replace an iMac keyboard though. That is all.
Morfydd
@Martin:
Actually, IIRC, Postscript was also developed in Xerox Parc. The engineers were like, “uh, we developed this but you aren’t taking it to market. Would you mind if we did?” And thus was Adobe born.
Adobe has also reinvented itself several times instead of coasting on its cash cows: Postscript to Photoshop to Acrobat to Flash, and currently trying to leverage all the creative and document workflow dominance to become a marketing monster.
J R in WV
@download my app in the app store mistermix:
Same thing happened to Xerox, which had Xerox Parc research center, where the mouse was invented, micro computers were invented, but never taken to market, because management always said, “Our core business is making copy machines!” never stopping to think that a technology that can print things can be used as a copier.
Lots of copy machine companies have disappeared, wonder why?
Ken
Maybe on the cruise ships, on the principle that they can’t make it worse.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
But that’s looking at the relatively short term after the pandemic is over. When things finally get safe enough to eat indoors, the restaurant business is going to look really awful. On the other hand, though, the average restaurant only stays in business for 2 years, so it’s an industry that is used to having to turn over a lot of businesses. 5 years after the pandemic is over, I think people will be back more or less to where they are today.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
Maybe the Starbucks I go to most frequently is the exception, but I get the feeling that people really like hanging out there and will go right back to it when they open up again. There’s an outdoor seating area just outside the Starbucks, and people are using it very actively. They were even going to hang out there when the Starbucks was closed! Starbucks is a local hangout, and people will want to go back to hanging out there when they can.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: I think that this is right. Working from home is one that I wonder about in the long term; companies will need to balance the savings on infrastructure with the loss of control over workers. I suspect that the need to control will win out in most cases.
Kent
When we lived in the exurbs of Waco TX there was a freaky family a block away who homeschooled because they didn’t trust the local rural public school (run mostly by old Southern Baptist ladies) but be conservative enough. Talk about dysfunction. The dad was some sort of insurance coder who worked out of a home office but mostly seemed to be playing video games on his triple monitor setup. He seemed to have rotating 2nd or 3rd wives passing through. His two daughters (about 10 and 11) were the same age as mine and were on the youth soccer team that I coached. For them, homeschooling meant sitting in front of the TV and playing educational DVDs produced by some fundie home schooling operation. That was it. Sit in front of the TV and do your lessons. The dad was also a prescription drug abuser and would try to get my wife (a doctor) to write him script for opioids. She blew him off.
He ran a completely fake prison ministry and so declared his house a parsonage, titled in the name of his fake ministry and paid no property taxes. Nice little scam. I tried to turn him in but I don’t know if it was ever investigated.
We moved closer to town and my daughter said she ran into them in high school. Both girls were completely gothed out druggie types by then.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I’ve talked about this before but I can not work at home, because I don’t have a machine shop in my front room. If you work in an office it’s quite likely that you can work from most anywhere. If you work in a factory it’s quite unlikely that you can. Even the lady who works in our office half days would have a hard time working at home because of the nature of the work. I imagine that many businesses fall along the lines of physical or computer work. Physical, like a restaurant or machine shop or car repair has to be done at a physical location but a computer can be located/accessed most anywhere.
Roger Moore
@Morfydd:
I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but the photographers I’ve talked to all complain about Adobe milking Photoshop. They were particularly angry when Adobe switched to a subscription model for all their “creative cloud” products, including Photoshop, since it wound up increasing the price substantially for the kind of user who only bought every second or third version. And they’re certainly still milking Acrobat, too.
Kay
@Jay Noble:
It’s a weird thing with the fundies because outsiders (law enforcement) put them in this kind of “Christian” box that impacts the whole investigation. You get stories like this one:
Ooookay- how many times do they find a dead child and it’s possibly a..misunderstanding? What?
They get this kind of “lifestyle” deference that no one else gets.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
The restaurant industry was already struggling. I don’t think anyone can say where it will be in 5 years. Also, we don’t know what might be happening with the pandemic in 5 years. People are assuming a totally effective vaccine and no future outbreaks.
Also, huge chunks of the travel and leisure Industry are still shut down and this overlaps with restaurants. Hard to predict what will happen here.
In Southern California, traditional American family style restaurants were fading fast and no one was sure why (Coco’s, House of Pancakes, Denny’s etc).
Some shift in dining habits were happening and Industry observers did not have any clear idea why.
Roger Moore
@J R in WV:
The mouse was not invented at Xerox PARC; it was invented at SRI by Doug Englebart. The Xerox Alto was, IIRC, the first computer that was designed from the ground up to use a mouse as an input, though.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
You said it yourself in the graph above the question. Printers just need a scanner and you are done. Boss brought a laser printer with scanner and we have no need for a copier. We print a lot of, well, prints off the computer and can make a great copy as well if necessary. Because we always need a print of a part to work from/write on/spill a soda-coffee on…..
Morfydd
@Roger Moore:
I’ve been listening to their corporate presentations, as a 20-year employee. :)
I didn’t say they weren’t milking those cash cows, but they’re not coasting on them.
They’re also willing to cannibalize those products’ sales to execute on a larger strategy.
(I don’t speak for them and none of this is internal information, blah blah blah)
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
People are adapting. My cousin works at a factory, but she does payroll and similar functions and works from home. A neighbor supervises events and some physical plant operations at a local college. Even though the school was shut down he did a lot of coordination remotely at home, with occasional trips to the campus.
It’s wild to see how remote work is being applied to a wide range of occupations.
I also hear stories of barbers and hairdressers working from home or going to clients’ homes. This was violating the rules before some of these businesses were allowed to work outdoors.
People are adapting.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
I suspect the difference maker will be how employees feel about it. If the employees have a strong preference and the business doesn’t, the employees will probably win.
What I see happening in the long run is some kind of hybrid. People would mostly work from home but have regular meeting days where they come to the office to do stuff that requires special equipment, physical meeting, or just as an excuse to get a team together in person. How in-person days would be planned would vary from business to business, but I think all but the most virtual of companies will have them.
Origuy
@frosty: I worked for Control Data from 78-90. They tried to move from proprietary hardware and software to building minicomputers like Sun. Too bad, because the systems they came out with in the late 80s were mostly really well designed. They got into the Unix field too late.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
This gets really interesting and you make good points. People are social and they like to hang out in certain places. A McDonald’s near me was really popular with seniors and with families, especially Asian Americans. A comfortable, well lit place with Wi-Fi. You’d see kids doing homework.
But Starbucks is increasing drive thru and takeout at a lot of its locations. And breakfast service is down significantly as more people work remotely.
Now this may change years down the road, but it converting to accommodate more walk-in business will be expensive and may lead to more store closing.
Personally, even though I was working at home before the pandemic, I would sometimes hit Starbucks. But I have not done so since the pandemic. Not even drive thru. The exception is a Starbucks inside my local supermarket. And they closed off their sit down area.
J R in WV
@Kay:
I stumbled across a blog called The Wartburg Watch, don’t recall how or when, but it concentrates on Theocratic Calvinist abusers.
Very interesting, lady who runs it is still quite religious in a new vein, but not inclined to cut the Calvinist authoritarian monsters any slack at all. Abusers all over the place, identified and pilloried online.
Recommended.
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
Agree that some companies will opt for control. Some are already getting obnoxious about it, saying that an employee cannot use part of the workday to help with remote learning kids.
A company I interviewed with had remote work, but wanted to install some software on my phone related to security and tracking. I told them that they could buy me a phone, but not put their software on my personal phone. We could not reach agreement.
I use my computer for remote work, but use Amazon Cloud Services for all business work. This effectively creates a walked off area between work and personal spaces.
Elizabelle
@MattF: Missed that, but yea Jen Rubin.
I cannot believe Larry Hogan would vote for Trump, but I guess he can’t say that he won’t out loud, while his state is still in COVID’s crosshairs.
Trump makes vassals of the governors
====
@ Ruckus: Proud of Jen Rubin for saying/writing that out loud. She is so far ahead of too many of our “view from 30,000 feet” pundits.
Sab
@Brachiator: Yikes. Tjey wanted to know all your non-company phone life?
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
Dennys and IHoP were fading fast because their food SUCKS under all circumstances. Even compared to other fast food chains, Denny’s is terrible. McDs is better, and I hate, loath, and despise McDonalds.
Last time I ate at a McDonalds was a 4 am across the street from the hospital where Wife was newly introduced to ICU and a Vent some 10 years ago.
I had to eat something and knew all the ole 24/7 places had closed because the plants were not working 3 rotating shifts anymore. Was as expected, terrible, but edible. Got home, fed the fur balls, crashed hard. Was back at the Hospital asap that next morning.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Brachiator:
I know a good number of photographers that still use film. Last year I was shooting at Palos Verdes and two young Korean-American women where shooting video on film. Film’s making a limited comeback.
Kent
My 22 year old daughter who has a sizeable Instagram following tells me that film cameras are sort of the hot new thing for some instagrammers. Apparently there is a certain washed out overexposed look with lens artifacts that they like to get by making actual prints and then scanning them in or something. Basically your mom’s crappy overexposed vacation snapshots is now the new “in look”. It is the anti-Instagram filter or something.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I was really impressed by our IT department’s response to the pandemic. When it was obvious we were dealing with unprecedented circumstances, they threw out the rule book and did everything they could to get people working from home. Within a couple of days, we went from “you can’t work from home because we don’t have any more laptops to issue” to “here’s how you set up VPN on your home computer” to “we’ll set up VPN on your work desktop so you can take it home”. My most 2020 moment was when I was taking home my desktop computer from work. I was wearing a mask, carrying a computer under my arm, and walking out to the parking lot, and nobody said a thing because they all understood what was happening.
Jinchi
I would prefer a civil, not criminal president.
J R in WV
@Roger Moore:
This is really funny… yet so real ~!!~ Thanks for sharing.
J R in WV
@Roger Moore:
Thanks for the additional information. Must have cross-threaded what was invented when by whom… will forget the details later tonight!
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Their customer base is down to old white people, which is a rapidly declining demographic around here. Minorities will go to ethnic restaurants, and younger whites will, too. Seriously, why would anyone go to Denny’s when they could go to Tasty Garden?
Brachiator
@J R in WV:
I mentioned Denny’s etc because these were names that people knew. This was also more a local story but has been affecting other cities as well. I found some notes I kept on the original story, about Pasadena area restaurants, also Temple City and Rosemead.
I disagree that Denny’s or McDonald’s is as bad as you say, especially for breakfast.
evodevo
@Ruckus: Nooooo say it ain’t so! Us country folk without dependable internet to stream and no money for satellite net hookups depend on those red DVDs…
ljdramone
@dnfree: In 1985 I worked with a NCR Tower system that ran a version of Unix. My employer (a medical practice) bought it to replace an MAI/Basic 4 mini, after deciding the NCR Tower was better than a Fortune 32:16. The NCR Tower’s Motorola 68020 CPU blew the doors off the Fortune’s 68010.
NCR produced business/general purpose computer systems until the company was bought by AT&T in 1991.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
There’s some high-quality BS in that article. I don’t know all the restaurants, but I know that both Big Mamma’s Rib Shack and Robin’s closed down because the owners decided to retire, not because they were unsuccessful as businesses. They tried to spin it as somehow a sign that restaurants are in trouble as a group, but there’s always been a lot of turnover in the industry.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Yep. Some companies got on top of things quickly, and this was good to see. My nephew works for a big company that quickly got remote workers up and running. I have to double check, but I think they may have shipped a monitor to his home also.
@Sab:
Some of this was understandable, but still No.
And to be fair, they promised minimal intrusiveness, but I did not know the company well or how good their IT people were.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I agree that there was some BS. Also, some of the articles were lazy. Elsewhere they implied too much that the increased minimum wage was a major problem and that restaurants that were corporate franchises were immune. This was and is demonstrably false.
Robins had also reduced hours and made other changes because of increased labor and supply costs. The owners decided to retire, but it was also getting tougher to stay in business.
The restaurant business has always been tough and there has always been turnover, but other factors are at play as well. Demographics and gentrification are part of it as well. Some upper end eateries were hanging in before the pandemic, but dine in and casual dining places that appealed to middle class diners were failing. And some corporate franchised places were shutting down.
ETA: and now I’m hungry. Going to go get something to eat.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Martin: HP’s LaserJet came out a year before the LaserWriter, but I don’t think it had postscript.
Gvg
@J R in WV: My work, sent most of us home with the desktops because they hadn’t bought enough laptops. They dithered about the oncoming pandemic when plenty of people in the department were telling them, and other departments had laptops issued and people home a week sooner. What I had to beg for was my ergonomic office chair, but they ok’ed it and I was lucky. Some others got permission to go back a moth later for their chairs. The higher bosses already had laptops and complained they missed their desktops and chairs.
We’ve been called back for fall term because they are being idiots. Office still locked, we could do the same from home, and I bet we’re on lockdown again 3 weeks into the term…big state University. I’m locked in my office all day, it’s much worse than being home.
However the next time we get sent home, I bet EVERYONE ops for desktop and chair. People found out couches made terrible offices for older bodies. I wish I could take my desk. Card table isn’t as good, and I’m not going furniture shopping.
Ruckus
@evodevo:
They have a large selection of DVDs in their library so it may take a while to get there but I’d bet it won’t be decades till it’s gone. No use throwing it away if they can make money off them. But it’s somewhat out dated technology and getting longer in the tooth every day so at some point……
It just wasn’t of much value to me any longer. Any show that’s only on Netflix DVD I can buy for pretty cheap. And there’s HBO streaming and AppleTV so really, for me, no reason to pay.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Ruckus: Digital cameras require software support.
Roger Moore
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Yes, but software support is a cost center, not a profit center.
Austin Bailey
@Brachiator: I think that’s the key point. Kodak had a virtual monopoly on the photographic film business (despite inroads from Fuji) and enjoyed huge profit margins. They built a classic old line manufacturing infrastructure to support that high margin business and the manufacturing world shifted underneath them. The management team wasn’t capable of dealing with the global manufacturing economy.
Roger Moore
@Austin Bailey:
As I understand it, the real profit center for Kodak was the developing and printing side of things rather than film. They were likely to have been in trouble from scanning and digital printing even if direct digital image capture hadn’t taken off.
pluky
@Captain C: Ever hear of interlocking directorates? They’re all in the same club where the primary practice is mutual , , , backscratching.
Ruckus
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Is that software support less or more expensive than development, production, sales, warranty, etc?
I’d bet not more. Or even close.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@download my app in the app store mistermix: DuPont. Their first cash cow was gunpowder.
a thousand flouncing lurkers was fidelio
@trollhattan: There used to be one in the Kansas City suburbs, near Overland Park. It was a dangerous place.
kmax
@J R in WV:
Doug Englebarts idea. Bill English’s engineering.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53638033