Posts Tagged ‘business’

Drake May, Robert Kraft and the Lack of the Connie Mack Option

Posted: October 21, 2024 by datechguy in business, nfl, Sports
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Riddle: What’s the best way to make a small fortune?

Answer: Start with a large one.

One of the things that a lot of people forget about pro-team owners is that many of them begin as businessmen who have been successful in an industry, Robert Kraft is no exception having done very well in his Kraft Group of business holdings and even better with the Patriots with a lot of help from Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.

Right now however that investment in the New England Patriots does not seem all that grand as he has a team that is 1-6 and likely to finish so bad as to end up with, at worst a top 5 draft pick for the 2nd consecutive year which will be the first time since before he owned the team.

Given that eventuality there have been those who have questioned putting Rookie Quarterback Drake May on the field with an offensive line that is below average at best and a receiving corps that is almost as bad if not worse. After all while the playing time may be of use you are risking a prime asset without the prospect of a return in wins.

The problem of course is that with a team that has managed only a single win he doesn’t have the luxury that Connie Mack the owner/manager of the Philadelphia A’s for 50 years did.

The A’s were Mack’s business and his goal was to make a profit. On that subject he would say that in terms of business the best result for him would be a team that started strong but finished 4th (in a 8 team league with no wild cards). He explained why saying:

A team like that will draw well enough during the first part of the season to show a profit for the year, and you don’t have to give the players raises when they don’t win.

Alas for Mr. Kraft his team has started so badly that the danger of fans deciding it was not worth the price of tickets or the price of the parking. And with no stars of any note, that also meant no shirt sales and all the other gear with the Pats logo that they get a cut out of.

So what do you to keep the butts in the seats and the eyes on the screen. You give them a reason to watch and right now the only reason to do so is a young Quarterback by the name of Drake May.

No he’s going to win you many games with this team and yes you are going to have to risk your valuable 3rd round pick getting himself pummeled.

In the end however this is a business and the only way you’re going to hold the public’s interest long enough so they will still be there when there is a product worth paying for on the field is to give them hope and right now Drake Maye who has proved that he can produce some offense for a team that can’t win, is that hope.

Jews in Hollywood, It’s History, not Some Vast Conspiracy or Something we Can’t Mention

Posted: February 5, 2024 by datechguy in business, comedy, culture, entertainment
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German Woman talk show host: Mr. Williams, why do you think there is not much comedy in Germany?

Robin Williams: Did you ever think you killed all the funny people?

Today at Don Surber’s site he celebrates the contributions of various ethnic groups, starting with Blacks as it’s black history month and ending with the WASPS who founded this country making all those other contributions to America possible. He notes many people who might have been forgotten a few I had never heard of and in going through the list he has this section about Jewish Americans:

As for Jews, I can go on all day about them. They gave the country physicists, Irving Berlin and a host of comedians. Jews invented Hollywood by founding Columbia, Fox, Paramount, Universal and MGM. Even the Warner Brothers were Jewish. Could we kindly stop the anti-Semitism already?

Emphasis mine

That reminded me of this Dave Chappelle bit on Kanye & Jews:

Now the hesitancy to talk about Jews in Hollywood/Entertainment or bring it up is something I’ve never understood. When various ethnic groups come to a country and start a business you will see family coming over and joining in. There is a reason why so many pizza places were run by Italians.

If people start a business, especially people outside the dominant culture they tend to hire family and people from their same ethnic group, additionally people who come to a country looking for work tend to check first within their ethnic group, same culture, same language and once they assimilate they and/or their children & grandchildren branch out.

So see a lot of XXX and sons, but you very rarely see XXX and grandsons because by the time you reach that generation the kids are Americanized and go their own way.

So Thomas Edison not withstanding if Jews went all in on entertainment, if Jews founded Columbia, Fox, Paramount, Universal MGM and Warner Brothers why should anyone be surprised if.

  1. They tended to hire a lot of Jews when they started.
  2. A lot of Jews tended to gravitate to the entertainment business
  3. And a ton of Jews are still in the business today. 

This makes sense particularly if you consider that Jews historically have not been particularly loved or treated well through history. Why wouldn’t you get involved in an industry that is:

  • Profitable
  • Secure (meaning that it won’t disappear)
  • Has influence
  • And gives you the change to put the Jewish point of view out there

Alas because some were far leftists you had a leftist point of view pushed too but I digress.

Bottom line I’m not about to get my knickers in a twist because ethnic Jews took the risk to get into the ground floor of the entertainment business which provides comfort and joy to people all over the world and still reaping the rewards of that risk. If you have a problem with that then that’s your problem.

But neither am I going to deny that’s the case because people might feel upset about it being said openly. Frankly I think the reaction of of a Jewish person to the “Jews run Hollywood” business should be: ”Yeah Jews are big in Hollywood and I’m damn proud of it!”

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just the way things went naturally.

I’ll leave you with the Robin Williams joke I started with, he delivers it better than I write it.

Five Under the Fedora Truths Homeless for Fun and Profit, All Beers Look Alike to Me, Breaking a Twitter Habit, The Chosen Speeding Up and Biden Economy expectations

Posted: August 16, 2023 by datechguy in business, culture, economy, education, entertainment, tech, twitter
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Glenn Reynolds notes the shock of some that passing a law concerning homeless camps and actually enforcing it has caused camps to vanish. This is a disaster for some NGO’s in the sense that they get a lot of government and state money to solve a problem that can be solved by just enforcing the law.

Key quote:

We get urban decay because we tolerate it. And as for the nonprofits/NGOs, homelessness is far too lucrative a problem to solve.

There is no incentive to solve a problem that is both a profit center for you and allows you to claim virtue.

Speaking of profit centers there is a 2nd post at Insty today on a man who will be teaching about the Budlight fiasco at business school. It’s is certainly a subject worth scholarship but it that had a line that likely floated under the radar to most people that I found absolutely hilarious:

He emphasized that beer is essentially the same product, and what sets it apart is the power of its brand

I would submit and suggest this is pretty much true. I suspect a lot of brand loyalty in beer is all about habit. Break that habit and you break that brand.

And Speaking of Breaking the habit as of Today Tweetdeck is no longer a free service when I tried to access it today I was redirected to a screen offering me a blue subscription check for $80 a year.

The real point is Twitter’s value basically comes from addicting people to multiple streams of data and giving folks who want to reach a maximum size audience (advertisers etc) access to that stream. This move gives an incentive for people to walk away from the stream and once people are broken of the addiction your done.

While Elon Musk should of course make the best possible business decision for his product I submit and suggest this is rather foolish. Tweetdeck makes twitter useful because it allows you to view multiple streams in the same window. Without it twitter involves too many tabs and simply isn’t worth my time. I might keep a tab with my DM page available and I might answer embedded tweets I see elsewhere but if you want to get me to see something by putting it on twitter odds are starting today I’ll miss it

On a totally different note I was shocked to see that season 4 of the chosen was going to include the razing of Lazarus from the dead.

Given that this is the last big miracle before the entry into Jerusalem I figured we would see it till at least season 5, particularly since we are going to get the beheading of John the Baptist this season which comes much earlier.

That suggests that either season 7 is going to be all passion and resurrection, with season six all Jerusalem

(Don’t be surprised with the number of characters there is plenty of material for this to be the case) and Season five everything else OR that Dallas plans on moving up the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ and having a large chunk of season seven covering a big chunk of acts.

Either way it will be interesting to see how he handles it.

Finally we have regularly been getting short weeks at work. Last week was 30 hours, the week before 32 and the week before 30 which is a great incentive to burn vacation days for people and unpaid time off has been offered which can be tempting on a really beautiful summers day.

Yesterday on the drive in all of us in the car agreed that we would be lucky to end up with four hours although one of us was optimistic enough to suggest me might manage 6.

Much to my shock and everyone else’s as well there seemed there was plenty of work in my department and by moving some people to it during the day ( and letting a few go home early who wanted to ) all of us who stayed managed to our delight a full 8 hours of work which guarantees us at least a 32 hour week.

That’s how bad the Biden economy is, it’s so bad that getting a full days work in the middle of a work week on a day you’re scheduled to work a full day is a pleasant surprise worthy of note

Reality Doesn’t Care What Twitter Employees Think or Nobody has Repealed the Laws of Supply and Demand

Posted: November 18, 2022 by datechguy in business, education, Uncategorized
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Back when I learned to code in the early 1980’s people who knew how to code were, in terms of the general population, kinda rare.

About 70% of the class who tried a Computer Science Major washed out because of the math and science involved and ending up with a job that was worth about $24K (the equivalent of $66K today) was par or even below par for the course. We were considered a BFD and had a pretty high opinion of ourselves.

Well after a while I decided I’d rather do other things than code and so I did but while I stepped away from my college major people poured into the industry, computers shrank in size and increased in power exponentially.

When I was looking to get back in the industry it seemed that everyone and their mother knew how to code and had been doing it in languages I had never seen before to the point where old Fortran coders like me in their late 40’s or early 50’s weren’t worth the investment when you could get a kid with now wife and family attachments for less money right out of college with all the new stuff fresh in their heads.

And that in a round about way brings us to the current nonsense at Twitter.

All these kids at Twitter seem to have a really inflated sense of self, not all that surprising given the way public education took a turn in the last few decades but they have in effect forgotten the reality of things which is namely this:

The pool of competent programmers has grown even faster than the processing power of computers over the last 40 years and you don’t have to be one of the richest men in the world to be able to tap into that pool and find a few thousand programmers if you need them.

Furthermore when you are one of the world’s richest men you can easily tap into a pool that extends far beyond America, let alone the blue areas of America.

Put simply while the supposedly bright people at Twitter who are considering leaving may have forgotten the laws of supply and demand Elon Musk hasn’t and if they think Twitter is suddenly going to go black because a bunch of them, even the majority of them choose to leave, then frankly their too stupid to be working at any company Musk owns.

I suspect those who choose to come aboard Twitter to replace these narcissists will be well rewarded for working hard and I suspect those who stay and choose to work hard will be even better rewarded.

This is the chance of a lifetime for a young programmer and if I was younger I’d consider it myself.

As for those leaving given the layoffs going on around the nation in the Biden economy I wish you the best of luck, you’ll need it.

Instalanche: Thanks Stephen, welcome folks take a look around. Same old blogging team but on a .blog account on WordPress. Check out some thoughts under the fedora, acceptable terms concerning abortion , some thoughts on election theft and of course if you like what you see here, consider hitting DaTipJar or subscribing to keep our writers paid as things have been quieter since our .com site has gone and our youtube channel banned though you can find my stuff on Rumble here

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