Why Hasnt Elon Musk Been Sanctioned by Tesla?

Why hasn't Elon Musk been sanctioned by his shareholders?

"If a CEO is found to have intentionally destroyed shareholder value, they could face legal action from shareholders through a shareholder derivative lawsuit, potentially leading to personal liability, fines, or even removal from their position. The board of directors is responsible for overseeing the CEO's actions and can take steps to remove them if they believe the CEO is not acting in the best interests of the shareholders."  according to Google.

I suspect its another example of the failure of the so-called capitalist or market system.

Who Has the Best Failed State?

I could use some help figuring out what we believe the long term deaths and wounded statistics of the Chernobyl disaster. Chernobyl is the gold standard by which to measure the failure of a government to cope with a crisis and the long term effects of their incompetence. But its hard to get good numbers of the long term deaths and wounded of Chernobyl. There are reasons for this beyond mere suppression of the facts for political purposes (like we find in this country). They may be trying to avoid despair which causes death through other self inflicted wounds such as tobacco and alcohol. If you believe you are going to die of radiation poisoning anyway why not smoke another pack of cigarettes a day and drink more vodka?

I am pretty sure though that America and a few other countries like Brazil can proudly say that their failed governments have been much more incompetent and caused many more deaths than the USSR and successor states. In fact, the Republican response may still be killing a Chernobyls worth of their own citizens every 100 days. Oddly, these deaths of the last six months are restricted almost entirely to the unvaccinated, who are almost all Republicans. This will not affect elections since voter suppression and the supreme court's destruction of voter rights have the intent and effect of delegitimizing elections and installing more right wing thugs like Trump and is self perpetuating. But the reports I have read suggest that the USSR and successor countries have devoted and still devote huge resources to social and medical welfare to people in the various affected regions even when it is likely that they were not affected. Our country, with its corrupt right wing judiciary, throws people on the street if they are 3 days late on rent. I had to hear a lot of shit about how bad communism was and how great western democracy is. Not so sure about the former but about the latter I can be quite sure. We laugh at people saying that under Socialism an NKRP reactor (or whatever) cant explode. Well in this country we have trump and the moron republicans (there are only republicans, the people who oppose them and a third group which is passive) saying the virus is a hoax, that the democrats are using it to defeat trump, who is the chosen one, that the virus is just bad flu, that quinine water or horse tenderizer will keep you from getting bad virus, and that there has never been a time when any american has been forced to exercise basic public health protocols (because the people saying it are too stupid to know about the history in this country of cholera, yellow fever, basic sewage, speed limits and water controls, etc). The Republicans did this, and caused what will be no less than a million unnecessary deaths (we are very close to that number now).

Shouldnt I be hearing a lot of people talking about the failures of the western democracy and capitalism?

 

 

 

One Interpretation of Facebook's Loss of $150B in Two Hours

Facebook lost 150 Billion $US in two hours on Wall Street which, we are told, is the single largest loss of a company on Wall Street in history.  Whether or not that is true, it is natural to speculate what was going on in the minds of investors.  Obviously, they were responding in part to the loss of users, and other issues involving privacy which would result in lower revenues from advertising. But what does it really mean?

Well, one thought is that Wall Street had responded well in the past to Facebook's strategy of exploiting its users in the most crude and vulgar ways, working hand in hand with foreign powers to destroy democracy by emphasizing contradictions, spreading right wing propaganda, and assisting polarization.  When, unfortunately, Facebook was identified as a primary agent of Russian destabilization and had to start toning back its worst and most shallow exploitation in order to keep users and avoid regulation, Wall Street naturally and regretfully had to downgrade FB's value. It just wont be like the good old days, at least not for a while. Still Facebook will try to find more subtle ways to exploit the people who have, in the past, trusted them, so all is not lost and Facebook still retains tremendous value.

[Shel Kaplan reminds me that this apparent loss in value is actually just appearance, that FB's long term value has been monotonically increasing for years. So this apparent setback may be nothing more than a tempest in a teapot and a headline created by shallow analysis. So what else is new?]

The Drug Companies Have Nothing to Worry About

In the following article in USA Today about Mylan, the exploitative company behind the notorious EpiPen, the authors make the point that Mylan is not the only guilty party, but that many drug manufacturers use their market position to extract monopolistic fees from their victims.  See the article here.

In particular, they have a fabulous quote by a market analyst about why investors have nothing to worry about from government legislation.

Some think the fears about government attention on high drug profit margins are overblown. "We believe that this effort (efforts against Mylan's price hikes) likely will follow the same playbook that lawmakers used to shame Gilead, Valeant (VRX), and others," according to Spencer Perlman, analyst at Height Securities. "Congressional hearings and a press onslaught, but no substantive legislative action."

In other words, our politicians, corrupt to the very core, pay lip service to the problem but take no action. As always. As long as they get their money from the corporations, they don't really care about anything else.

The problem with this “business as usual”, is that we are expected to be patient with the process, to trust these people, our representatives, to have our interests at heart, and very clearly they do not. Being patient, and trusting them is in fact part of their game. Therefore it is a reasonable response to demand substantive legislation immediately, or take direct action through the proposition system, and then, of course, to expel these corrupt miscreants, our elected representatives, from office.

Of course, anyone who knows the history here knows there is very little chance of anything good happening. The pharmaceuticals industry is spending over $100 million in the state of California to defeat a proposition designed to allow Medicare to get the same prices as the VA department.

That would be horrible, wouldnt it, to help poor people get their medication?  Why, that violates everything that America and our political system stands for.  You can be sure that our politicians will not allow this to happen.

The Los Angeles Car Show in 2015 ... Future? What Future?

Sometimes we are called to look into the heart of Hell, the Devil's home, the place of Sin, where Righteousness is relegated to the gutter and vile Evil is outlined in chrome and worshiped.

For Los Angeles, the city of the Angels, what could symbolize Satan more than the automobile? This one invention has caused the corruption of the civic body, the destruction of neighborhood after neighborhood, the contamination of the very air with the fumes of Sulphur and other chemicals from the Infernal Regions, the people daily subjected to the insanity of traffic that sucks away their life and their hope, the parade of elite vehicles on the pothole filled streets that  provide some of the worst examples of the rich demonstrating their greed and indifference in the face of obscene poverty.

In Los Angeles we have the second largest automobile show in the world, second only to Detroit. Surely in light of the gross corruption and degradation of Los Angeles through the institution of the automobile  the annual car show must be the very Citadel of Mammon!

What will we see? The best? The worst? The future? The past?

I have always wanted to attend this show but through sheer Sloth I have never made it. But on this Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, it was easy for me to tag along with others who were going and I did.

It also provided an opportunity to drive in my first Tesla and I was impressed.

My friend, the owner of this Tesla made the point that Tesla had proven that the barriers to entry to the automobile industry in this country were no longer the gating factor. For decades it has been said that no new brands could come into existence without an enormous amount of money and maybe not even then.  But Tesla has proven otherwise.

My friend and I both believe that we are on the cusp of a tsunami of change that will whack the automotive industry the way it has deserved to be whacked for decades.  Self-parking, autonomy, and semi-autonomy, new drive trains hybrid and electric, new manufacturers in the People's Republic of China and India, we should expect that the dinosaurs of the past will be swept into the gutter where they belong and replaced by a new people and a new legion of car manufacturers.

Too bad America, you had your chance and you completely fucked it up.   This time the government wont save you.

This is the second largest car show in the country, possibly the world. I would expect the existing manufacturers to take their head out of their ass (the tragedy of rectal-cranial inversion) and present their ideas about the future to their loyal base. That is pretty much who comes to car shows I think, the loyal base of customers who care enough to spend the day and $15.00 checking out the polished and mechanical visions of the automobile manufacturers.

This is a short list of what I might expect at least from some of the exhibitors:

I would expect there to be demonstrations of some of this new technology, even if it was not ready to be deployed to the consumer. So I would expect demonstrations of self-parking cars, cars which were autonomous for long distance driving, cars that were autonomous for city driving. These demonstrations might not be using real, full-size cars. They might be short films on a large display, mini-documentaries if you will, or they might be radio controlled model cars, or even films of radio controlled model cars. I think that would have been very entertaining and would have the result of helping to associate that brand with innovation in the eyes and minds of their hard-core customer base.

I might expect expect to see a time line of the future of these technologies at the brand. What is often called a “road map”. I would expect a company that published such a road map to hedge their bets in numerous ways, but it might indicate when they thought a new drive train (e.g. hybrid, electric, solar) might be available, or when a new brand for a new technology might come into existence. Public companies have to be very careful about what they say about the future and I do not know all the rules, but still I would expect some of this road map to ba available, however hedged.

I might expect to see live demonstrations of such things as new displays for car control, or eye/head tracking so that they knew where the driver was looking.

I might expect that the different power trains already in production might be clearly marked out: what was a traditional gasoline engine, a rotary engine, a hybrid engine, an electric one, and so forth.

I might expect that the insurance industry would have some sort of presence to explain how they are working with industry and government to evolve this incredibly important aspect of driving.

I might expect some sort of discussion of the gross violation of trust that Volkswagon was guilty of, and how that is being handled for the future both by Volkswagon and other brands.

Since it is an open secret that people are reprogramming their cars to change engine and other parameters of a vehicle away from those set by the manufacturer, I might expect some sort of statement about where the car companies stood on this practice.

Since I knew that some of the car companies are performing trials with new technologies, I might expect some description of these trials and what is expected to come out of them and when.

And finally here is one more.  We are in the midst of the Paris Climate Talks. What positions are the various car companies taking with the respective governments on climate change?  Well this is a critical thing to know.  How can they not know?  How could they not tell us?  Are these the same old lying pieces of garbage car companies like the ones that destroyed mass transit in LA?   (Yes they did.  The counter rumors are just lies, they really, really did destroy mass transit in LA all those years ago).

But none of the above was visible at the car show. It was as if they expected nothing to change, no information needed to be communicated. All was well in the garden.

Total zip.

Not quite. There were, if you knew where to look, completely without any description, some cool vehicles that I happened to know were a part of tests. You had to know what they were, and what they represented and make your own guess about whether this might really ever become available but there were a few there.

There were many examples on the floor of innovative technologies, but essentially none of them were active and you had to know enough to even realize they were there. For many years now, apparently, certain high end cars have had a display that allows you to see your odometer, etc, without refocus from far to near distance. There were several, possibly even many, examples of this technology on the floor, but none of them were on, and you had to know they were there.

My friend pointed out in their defense that the show was as popular as ever, that people were buying more cars than ever before, that in some sense of the word, this show was serving the purpose that it was meant to serve, and I had to agree with him.

But for those of us who went because we thought in light of all these new technologies, changes, and violation of trust, that this car show would also present some vision of the future, we left disappointed. Perhaps we were wrong to expect such a theme at the car show.

But it seems to me in light of the tsunami of change that is coming down the road for these companies, that a vision of the future would have been a very smart thing to have on display for the attendees of this show, who were self-selected to be the most interested in the automobile in this city, the most car oriented city of the Union.

But I am happy to say that there was one redeeming exhibit: a magnificent statue of Satan, Lucifer himself, the fallen one, in the middle of all the car exhibitors laughing, laughing at the impending disaster that will wipe them off the face of the earth and straight to the hell that they so deserve.

Thomas Piketty and the New Celebrity Economics

You know that things are going to hell in a handbasket when Economists become cultural heroes. When America, the ultimate anti-intellectual state, starts reading and discussing economics, then that is all the evidence you need that things must be bad, really bad.

For decades even centuries, the only economist that Americans needed was Adam Smith and a Cliff Notes for The Wealth of Nations.  But now not even Adam Smith is proof against revisionist Economics.

And Piketty has been particularly vicious and non traditional.  Looking for any evidence that the free market results in increased wealth for everyone, he discovered that, whoopsie, there was no evidence.  You mean that all that crap about capitalism and the free market has no evidence to support it? Thats a bummer, dont you think?

See
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/13/occupy-right-capitalism-failed-world-french-economist-thomas-piketty

More on the Vision of the Future Past

Dave Moon asks if there was really a vision about tomorrow in America? He points out that the 1964 Worlds Fair left a lot of people out.

He is right, so let me qualify my statement, which I believe is still correct but for fewer people. Among middle class Americans, most of them white but by no means all of them, there was a vision of tomorrow that was shared, unspoken and positive. I believe that the 1964 World's Fair was the high point of that belief system as it was before Vietnam, Three Mile Island, the Oil crisis, Watergate, and the Tea Party.

So I confess, I readily use words like “Everyone” when I really mean and meant the middle-class of this country, a class that probably does not exist anymore. Could poor black families in the inner cities or Hispanic families laboring for below minimum wage in the fields of the rich buy into this vision? I guess not, although I think some of them might have.

A taxi driver from Ethiopia told me, a few weeks ago, that America was a great country and a country of opportunity for anyone with a lot of energy who was willing to play by the rules. I did not disagree with him to his face and I thought it was actually a very nice thing for an immigrant (1) to say and believe. But I do not happen to believe it.  Maybe it is true relative to where he came from.

But back then “everyone”, again by which I mean the mostly white middle class, believed that Americans would have jobs and be able to support their children and send them to college. Even Don Corleone believed that his children or grandchildren could prosper without crime.  That was when people believed that the government, although not perfect by any means, was generally on our side and not entirely a corrupt servant of the rich. This was when nuclear power was good, the environment was not yet recognized as being destroyed, and there were two cars in every garage. That was before a very large part of our citizenry had publicly disavowed their belief in science because it did not support their politics. A citizenry who wants to sell the national park system as part of some sort of religious faith in the free market which not even an economist can begin to make sense of.

That vision, the promise of the future being better, gave a stability and a moral force to all our actions. Even if some detail was not right, a corrupt local politician for example or racism in our education system, we knew that the broad vision was in place and that things would work out.

But they did not work out. Technology has not been a force of good. Intolerance, racism, greed and stupidity is rampant throughout this country. No one even knows how many unemployed there are. Genetic engineering is feared and loathed by most Americans when it is used to engineer more profitable plants: note its all about profits not about feeding the world. I do not know when genetic engineering will achieve its promise in medicine, or if it will, but I am confident that only the rich will be able to afford it when it happens. I am not sure what the war in Iraq was about, but if it really was about the banality of protecting oil sources, which I do not think it was, then at least it was about something instead of being merely insane.

The morality is gone, perhaps it was never there.

The belief that we were fighting for the right, and that our strength was as the strength of ten because our heart was pure is gone, betrayed.

Elections were stolen, districts gerrymandered, the government worked and continues to work very hard to see that the poor and the sick are exploited for the profit of their friends.

I can give you hundreds if not thousands of examples where we threw it away. From Los Angeles transit to offshore drilling contracts let to incompetent friends of the Nixon White House to a total failure to regulate the obviously out of control and dangerous financial community,

The abandoned and derelict transit systems and compromised attractions at Tomorowland are mere symptoms of the failure of our cultural myth.  Yes, I am saying at some deeper level, Disneyland and our civilization, if you call this civilized, are symbolically or at least metaphorically linked.

In fact, it is probably even arguable the Disneyland is overall more functional than society as a whole. Consider, for example, that while no doubt there are privileges for the rich at Disneyland, they are not slapped in your face every moment of every day as it is in the rest of America where being poor is the greatest crime and the rich laugh at the misery of their fellow Americans.

So yes, Dave, I do believe that there was a shared vision of tomorrow that was positive and that motivated and gave hope to a large segment of the American people. But you are right to point out that there were always people who did not share that delusion.

I may be romanticizing things a bit.

Well, this is certainly a bright note to start the new year with.

_______________________________________________________

1. We are all of course immigrants here in America except for perhaps the Native Americans.

Stupidity on the Internet: Is Quora the New Stupid?

This post is part of a series on the topic of Stupidity on the Internet.   There is so much material there to discuss!

One of the great things about the maturing of the Internet and the creation of vast wealth for a small number of criminals like the guy who runs Facebook, is that we no longer have to worry about any bullshit from right wingers about how "capitalism rewards merit".   Theft of ideas, sure, always rewarded.  Bad user interface design, absolutely.  Rewarded a billion times over.   Criminally stupid and obnoxious?  You bet!

But how stupid are people who are financed with hundreds of millions of dollars to steal money on the Internet?  Very stupid indeed.

Take for example, Quora.  No link provided, you want to talk to these morons, type in the link yourself.

I am surprised that Quora has not gone public and made 100 billion dollars like Facebook. They are eminently qualified.

Quora spammed me to tell me that a friend had provided an answer to a question about the future of Bitcoin. Ok, I said, I'll bite. Lets go see what my friend has to say. So I click on the link and ... Quora starts demanding answers to questions. Here are fifty topics we think you are interested in: Dick size in pygmies, dress lengths in Zimbabwe, How to Roast Pig, How to Castrate Pigs, How to Spam Your Friends and Make Money. All topics that have nothing to do with the link. And this goes on and on, without an option to "skip".

But best of all. Best, best, best of all:

It refuses, absolutely refuses, to let me see my friend's response.

So Quora, lets be clear: Fuck you. Never talk to me again.

This leads me to a practical suggestion for web browsers.   I need an easier way to block sites, and an easier way to suggest to friends that they also block web sites.   I understand that stupid companies are what the Internet is all about.  I understand that stupid companies is what Wall Street throws money at.  No problem there.  I just want to make it easier to make it clear I want them to go away and never, ever give a web hit to support their stupidity.