With all due respect where itās due:
If you search for tenderness
It isnāt hard to find
You can have the love you need
To live -
But
If you look for truthfulness
You might just as well be blind
It always seems to be
So hard
To giveā¦
Honesty
Is such a lonely word
Everyone
Is so untrue
Honesty
Is hardly ever heard
And mostly what I need from you
ā¦
"Of the seven erstwhile āmagnificentā stocks, just two make the list: Apple (AAPL) and Google-parent Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL).
In total there are 61 stocks that are currently recommended for purchase by at least two of these newsletters. Absent from this group are the remaining five of the āMagnificent 7ā: Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA). "
In the past, the high end of the art market was immune to the economic down turns which plagued lower grade collectibles.
Is there something new happening?
Food for thought.
Sothebyās business model just does not comprehend in my feeble mind.
They are an auction house. They have no overhead (inventory wise). They take a commission of each sale. This should be a license to print money, yet they somehow have $1.8 billion in debt. How?
Oh wait, here is how: āthe owner has pulled funds out of the company via dividendsā¦ā āSothebyās has paid out $1.2 billion of dividends to a parent company controlled by Drahiā¦ā AKA Sotherbys is being used as a piggy bank.
This sounds like a Patrick Drahi (Owner of Sotherbyās) problem, more then a financial market problem at least IMO.
They have a pretty significant overhead, most of it in humans, publicity and real estate,
An expensive curatorial staff and a significant amount of publicity cost.
The income is dropping, because the market is not strong. It is not controversial to state that the Chinese economy is weak and a significant portion of Sothebyās revenue in recent years was Chinese buyers.
European economies are in the dumper and will continue to be.
US buying is erratic.
Drahi is behaving as if he was a private equity firm, Sothebyās has historically been a cash generating machine, and it canāt seem to do it.
Although the are similarities to the Stewart hospitals bankruptcy, that was underpinned by hospitals which were losing money prior to becoming part of Stewart. The financial shenanigans were common with the Chrysler bankruptcy, including the same private equity co, Cerebrus.
It is similar, though different.
25 posts were merged into an existing topic: 
The Junk Drawer
I have moved many many posts to the private The Junk Drawer because we donāt have a Potpourri thread 
Inflation alert 
But reduced interest rates may lower annuitized prizes.
You cannot make this economics stuff up.
Well, not unless youāre a gubmint employee (and/or a discredited purveyor of the so-called āDismal Scienceā whoās found a soapbox refuge in this or that niche of the Fifth Column Fourth Estate, as it presently manifests in both foreign and domestic iterations).
Handbaskets abound, to be sure - but Recorded History has a way of teaching those who are willing to study it that surely better `twould all things be should more of us were willing to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps rather than placing our hopes upon outlandish odds of striking it richā¦
In the same vein, this WSJ opinion piece analyzing why people make more money,
Not definitive or exhaustive but highly suggestive, and complementary to the efforts of many companies to encourage a return to the office for their employees.
There is also the issue of sociopathy and performance in the workplace as greed is rewarded as part of the system. This has been known for most of humanity in all manner of social and economic situations.
One thing my wife pointed out in the vein of remote work, was the value of the labor pool opened up by the work from home/telework change. She was looking for a mid level financial analyst and her options for hiring vastly improved years ago when the office mandate was removed. She had a barely mediocre employee hired in a tight local labor market. Recently she replaced that employee 6 months ago with a new hire across the nation who is an absolute rock star who has a special needs child. That employee has been sick zero days, uses the average PTO amount, and is exceeded all expectations and could easily be the next CFO if they desired it.
There is no way they would have hired this individual locally based on market demand and silicon valley sucking the air out of the room.
This I believe, but a one would expect a ārock starā employee to grow into a more responsible position either for the current employee or another. The conflict is over whether that is still likely in a remote work environment. The question is not whether the employee is capable of being the next CFO, it is will the employee be a CFO. And the answer to that question lies at both ends of the electronic connection.
But there are many who do not accept growth as necessary or desirable. I try not to discuss personnel related topics with my SIL who is part of an HR department at an Ivy League university. His expectations for employee productivity, are minimal, for employee growth in skills non-existent, and job satisfaction barbaric.
In the digital age it is far easier to measure ones productivity to the OCD level making any question of capability for remote work fairly easy to determine in regards to productivity. I assert that it is much much easier to find people who love their work, but the social environment is what causes them to be less productive as other people, commuting, meal prepping, etc. are a detriment to the end enjoyment of what they actually do. Remote work, removes that core detriment to finding some key people.
I donāt worry too much what Dollar General says. They could be making even more money if they would actually hire/schedule people to put stuff on shelves instead of leaving everything on the carts in the aisles or in the back room. Thereās a point where a company crosses when they cut labor so much that it invariably hurts sales and then they continue to cut hours based on revenue generated. Downward spiral continues.
But thatās just me.
The alternative point of view is this encourages people to stagnate, fail to learn anything new and fail to advance in the organization and increase their contribution to the bottom line. New skills are often learned informally from co-workers.
Your point of view can be used to justify the replacement of humans by bots. After all, someone who develops no new workplace skills is a bot, human or computerized. And the quality of bots rarely improves, if ever.
Well of course we are not talking about every job here. I cannot ask a master electrical lineman to āzoom it inā, and there is an expectation to improve in ones trade to become a dispatcher, supervisor, etc and increase ones trade skills. but that is also not going to happen at the water cooler either. There has to be personal motivation, not just osmosis with your co-workers.
Several of my friends are now airline pilots who have a 20+ year career as ājustā a co-pilot because they simply do not wish to trade income for their 10 day a month schedule, to upgrade to captain. That does not make them āstagnateā or make their skills any less abundant, it actually makes them extremely competent in their job. I would definitely want to fly with a 22 year co-pilot instead of a year 1 captain (8 total years) and a 3 year co-pilot.
I donāt find a lot of credibility in your assertion being the overwhelming majority of people advance for the purpose of self improvement, income, ego, etc. The bottom line of the company is the companiesā problem, if they lack the tools to motivate their people to progress through financial or social incentives.
Adapt or die as they say. Not too many bank tellers, switchboard operators, steam train coal shovelers anymore. Nobody asserted that their lack of new skills from their also jobless co-workers would have prepared them for the constantly evolving world around them.
Outside of my medical conditions, I have already told my children it is safer to get hostile fire pay in Nevada
Instead of what we used to risk to get it. Technological progress is inevitable.
I think we agree on more than we disagree, but I put the onus on the company to incentivize employees coupled with the employees varied reasons to desire upward mobility. Anything short of that is why we have performance metrics. Not everyone is going to be the CEO and not everyone is going to be the doorman at the HQ, the bell curve lays most of it out.
We definitely do not agree on this. I put the onus on the individual to want to move up in the world. I could not give a damn whether that is in the same company, a different company or their own company.
Stagnation is not good for the individual or society, in general.
I have helped people who had worked for me, to find other jobs, where they could grow and be rewarded, when they had reached their limits in the company we both worked for or my group. They had not reached the limits of their careers, and we remained friends.
I believe in people, not groups and organizations. Much of the political strife in this country is built on the fundamental conflict between those who value groups of people and those who value individual people.
I am not asking anyone to change their values, just understand how they differ from others peopleās values.
The doorman at the HQ may have a lot more potential to rise from that position, were he to try.
From your WSJ opinion piece.
Going a step further, the paper finds that those who work more earn more because they accumulate more skills during the extra time they work.
I agree based on my life. While I have not worked a day since I founded our company 35 years ago, I have learned more than I can imagine.
Before that, I worked the same way, even when traveling the world speaking on our technology. I would always be reading technical journals, or writing papers to publish.
I had a boss once, challenge me, āI donāt get why you work so much.ā I did not have an answer, it just felt like the right thing to do. I was not that great in school, but finding books, I became a lifelong learner. Only if it was something that interested me.
One day on a flight home from the Asian Basin when I landed the aircraft had a crosswind. I thought what the heck do those numbers indicate on the runway? That weekend, I went to a local flight school, at the airport where Alan Shephard used to hang on the fence.
I needed to make sure I could do it, before I told the family I wanted to do it. Ended up with a SEL, SES both float and flying boat rating plus a instrument rating. Added that to our company portfolio doing Aerial Imaging doing very big projects in North, Central and South America.
To this day, I learn every day. I also teach everyday. We have had over 60 paid interns since starting the company.
āYesterday I thought I knew everything, today I know I knew nothing yesterday.ā
I am not really sure what that is supposed to mean, when I specifically includedā¦
Everyone has different visions of what āmove up in the worldā means and that is not limited to a workforce, career, job, etc. A person who chooses to trade the future of their child over their professional growth is far more valuable than the glut of trust fund babies and entitled youth out there IMO.
Congratulations, but now find a way to pass that mentality on to the rest of the business world, where people are stagnated for the purposes of profit or nepotism. You and I may provide this rich resource of opportunity for our employees and co-workers, but the overwhelming majority of employees in this country are not even remotely provided the environment that you imply is anywhere near the normal job/career in America. That is leaving out all of the social ramifications that hamper opportunity in personal growth, like family. community, economics, etc. People in many cases are treated like cattle.
It is the age old flawed assertion that hard work equals success, when there is FAR FAR more to it than that.
I have had the honor of flying with 7 different Air Force and Navy test pilots in my limited time on this planet, and not one of them had their application accepted to be an astronaut. Is it due to a lack of hard work? A lack of support or motivation? It was simply because not everyone gets to be an astronaut, and the overwhelming majority of the time upward mobility is simply life outside your control. This can be the case for a doorman, dock worker, mid level manager.
I believe people are only making decisions because we as a society have given exceptional power to sociopathic greed machines, and if a community of people think that working together is the right outcome, to negotiate with the power of that machine, then that is for that community to decide.
I also assert that if other companies behaved the way you and I operate our businessā, there would be no need for said groups or organizations as we would be part of them already like family. But sadly the norm in this society, is simply profits over people leaving the actual people with few options.
Well the only value difference I see, is the value you apply to a company charter and its shareholders, versus the value you apply to people or groups of people, which only you can account for in your own way, and really the only thing we disagree about IMO.
For every union, there is 1000s of Martin Shkreliās, Jeff Skillingās, Ken Layās, Elizabeth Holmesā ready to slash benefits and pay for the opportunity to increase their stock price by $.01 so I see it as a necessary evil till either we change how corporate boards are run or other rules are implemented. They simply DGAF about you or your ability to āmove up in the worldā or the costs to society when you canāt.
I still believe we actually agree on more than we donāt.
