Here’s something completely different — the parent company has laid off the entire staff, or most of it, of Sports Illustrated, apparently. SI is the most widely read sports publication in the U.S., with an average audience of 40.86 million, and it’s about to go under. The cause seems to be massive incompetence on the part of the publisher. See Greed Killed Sports Illustrated at New York Magazine.
The publisher is a company that bought the magazine in 2019 and, as they say, ran it into the ground. For example:
In February, management laid off the magazine’s sports editors, one employee told me. “Genuinely, everyone looked around at each other and said, ‘What do we do when one of the NBA writers files something when the editor was just fired?’ And that repeated over and over, in every sport. Like, you guys, I don’t know if you’ve read the title of our publication.”
It’s certainly possible SI could be resurrected, but not without a staff. But this is an old, sad story. I saw variations of it when I was in publishing. What essentially happens is that the people who occupy the big offices and make the big decisions that impact how the work gets done are nearly always people with backgrounds in finance or marketing but no hands-on experience making the product. And they make stupid decisions that hobble productivity. The problems caused are not necessarily bad enough to sink the company, but it does hold the company back. And nearly always everybody who has worked for very long in the production, editorial, and manufacturing departments could tell you how workflow and cost efficiency could be improved, but the Big Shots don’t listen. From time to time they’d hire consultants who’d swoop around for a day or two and then make more stupid decisions that had to be undone eventually because deadlines were being missed. I saw it over and over again in the industry.
Boeing has been back in the news lately, and that’s another example. I wrote back in 2019,
Basically, the 737 Max is the plane built by MBAs and financial experts instead of engineers; the fruit of popular business theory. The flaws are bigger than just glitchy software. The creation of the plane from inception to crash was marked by corner-cutting and disregard for engineering and production skill.
For more, do see Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I had not realized that the Great Honking Idiot Elon Musk had publicly blamed the Boeing door plug incident on diversity hiring. Musk hasn’t noticed what a joke he is now, I take it. Will Bunch:
But then, you don’t need to be some kind of corporate Sherlock Holmes to sleuth out the real culprit at Boeing: the surrender of an engineering-driven, safety-oriented culture to one dominated by cost-cutting and a quarterly profit mentality aimed at boosting shareholder value above all else. Since the dawn of the 21st century, Boeing has been led by protégées and acolytes of the legendary and also notorious late GE boss Jack Welch, who pioneered the managerial philosophy of steering dollars toward investors and away from other stakeholders — including customers like the hapless souls who clung to their dear lives aboard Flight 1282.
The 346 people killed aboard Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were not so lucky. Despite Boeing’s initial attempt to blame the pilots, it soon became clear that an engineering flaw led to the twin crashes, and that shoddy practices and a penny-wise and pound-foolish decision to redesign its old 737s, instead of spending the $20 billion on designing a new class of jetliners from scratch, was largely to blame. And yet Boeing seems to have learned little from that fiasco.
After the Alaska Airlines door plug landed in an Oregon family’s backyard earlier this month, the Lever reported that the subcontractor that made the faulty part and had been spun off from Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems, is facing a federal lawsuit from former employees. They charge that cost-cutting, including major layoffs in 2020, triggered production problems, yet executives ignored their warnings of “an excessive amount of defects.”
Simply put, it wasn’t “a Black guy” — or a slew of Black guys, or women, or any other nonwhite hires — behind the new wave of airline safety concerns. It was the shortsightedness of late-stage capitalism.
Do read the whole article. And speaking of diversity programs, do read ‘America Is Under Attack’: Inside the Anti-D.E.I. Crusade by Nicholas Confessore at the New York Times. And then read Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans for ‘Institutionalizing Trumpism’ by (no paywalls).
"I had not realized that the Great Honking Idiot Elon Musk had publicly blamed the Boeing door plug incident on diversity hiring"
Of course whenever something goes wrong at any level the Q-nut GOP'ers like Musk will blame it on Open Borders, Woke, DEI, CRT and or any other concept that scares the poor (and not so poor) stupid white folk. It works look at the millions of dullard mouth breathers voting for con-men and women like Clap hands Stump. In fact I was over on breitbart the other day (I like to torture myself occasionally) and they had an "article" blaming the Sports Illustrated collapse on woke and the fact that they put a "plus sized" women on the cover of the swimsuit edition. "Go woke go broke" was the tag line. It's a brilliant political strategy you just keep exploiting stupid white folk with the same old tired sexist, racist, homophobic scare tactics. It works and our corporate media is all too willing to play along, makes it easy for them as well, why hire writers, analysts, just shovel the shit. For the GQP it is free super fuel why come up with real solutions when you can just throw shit against the wall over and over! Sorry for the scatological references but that is all the GOP is anymore, as Swami would say a “big bag of shit”!
Lord Knows!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6voAw66Bxko
Good find, that's some hardcore Nashville you've dug up!
uncledad,
WHERE in the deepest, darkest musical archives in Hell did you find this country gem?!?
nineteen hundred and seventy two!
Nineteen Hundred and Seventy Two! The year my oldest sister graduated from high school, things were edgy for sure!
I'd bet that almost everyone has lived through one of these corporate fuster-clucks.
And if you haven't, thank your lucky star.
I, myself, went through several with Time-Warner Cable. Oy!
And that's including the corporate merger of Time Inc. and Warner Brothers.
THAT, was the fuster-cluckiest fuster-cluck OF ALL TIME (-WARNER?)
I worked for a pretty big outfit for a few decades, 80,000 employees, it was called Westinghouse back in the old days. Got bought and incorporated in Ireland. Things changed but it wasn't drastic at first. Suffice to say I retired a few years before I really wanted to, they sort of wanted me stay if. I was lucky to be in the position to say no! Now I'm on the county!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gPSGrpIlkc
Forgive me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSMLcC2_jyU
God better get on the stick, if he raised a fighter in Ron DeSantis he didn't do a very good job of it. DeSantis couldn't answer the bell after the first round. He was no raging bull…more like raging bullshit. Woke kicked his ass.
Ron DeSantis, "The Boy Who Cried Woke"
A great "Tom Tomorrow"
https://images.dailykos.com/images/1266449/lightbox/TMW2024-01-22colorXL.jpg
Hats off to Maha for the theme of this thread; so entirely spot on! I have stories about this (too many) but I have to get some exercise first so I'll just post something (off topic) that struck me while watching Deadline Whitehouse earlier this afternoon.
The 2024 election is the true big enchilada for this test of our Constitutional Republic. I won't elaborate on my reasoning, but I think high turnout hurts TFG. So I'd like to see one of the political organizations put together a simple ad to be played over and over late in the campaign season.
In the United States, we have secret ballot elections. To all Americans, if you have the legal right to vote, then vote in the election! Your vote is your power. If you don't vote, you are giving away that power to others, and you have no idea what they will do with your power. So vote! With secret ballots, nobody will ever know how you voted. That's how it is supposed to work. The founding fathers gave you the vote, so don't waste it.
About twenty years ago I had a number of social connections with Boing workers. On occasions I would hear them talking about work. They always talked about management's concerns, but none of the management's concerns seemed to be about building quality airplanes. This bothered me, and I kind of wrote Boing off as an investment option. I did keep track of their stock price over the years, and I had some years of non-buyers remorse. Now, not so much remorse.
I now see how the value of a company today, as indicated by its current stock price trend, may lag seriously behind the management errors that probably caused it. I have little doubt that Boing's management's inattention to the company product quality yielded doors flying off today, but it sure took a while.
Sports Illustrated, I thought that was a fashion magazine specializing in swimsuits. Quality articles about sports… I'm not sure they ever had them.
uncledad,
I can't thank you enough for sharing that glorious David Bowie number with us!
He''s one of my absolute favorite musicians/philosophers/etc, but I'd never heard that song, or saw that video, before.
I'll scouring the inter-tubes over the next few weeks, looking for Bowie stuff I missed.
And it's from '72 – one of the greatest years in R&R history!!!
Five years is my favorite Bowie tune of all time, my brother had that album "spiders from mars" when I was a kid, been hooked on it ever since. The entire album is great, every song. It was in my opinion his greatest work, he sort of went "disco-mod" after that album, but that's just my opinion. I was a freshman in high school 1976 when he released "Golden years" as a single, I hated it, man was I depressed. But Bowie was a real artist, he kept trying new things, I didn't like all of it but as they say there is no accounting for taste!
Hey uncleDad,
Ziggy Stardust was great though Aladdin Sane was even better. Watch that man, Drive in Saturday, Panic in Detroit etc
Imo Station to station is also a great album. The title track goes for 10 minutes but once it kicks in it really rocks. Word on a wing is also brilliant…..
Bowie's genius was that he appealed to so many different listeners. All his albums were quite different for the most part. When it comes to Bowie im still an adolesent 12 year old listening to my brother's Pioneer SX625 and his dual turntable. I really just never took to much of his stuff after the Spiders from Mars. I like some of his early stuff when he was a london blues dude trying to find his way but the spiders album was different than anything I had ever heard or have heard since. To me Bowie was the first punk rocker, no Iggy, no clash, without Bowie. I'm going to give station to station a good listen again maybe tomorrow!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM3E-x3nQe4
I think if you're on a Boeing plane, a parachute should not count against you as carry-on luggage.
Rhonda Santis. I love that!
Rhonda should be forced to carry his campaign to full term.
This comment from kirk in Montana on Boing's problems makes a great point. It was one from a guest opinion piece about how Boing's problems started long ago.
We sent another batch of those Whiz Kids to help Yeltsin "fix" Russia in the early 1990's, and surprise! the Mobster Oligarchs wound up with all the money. Russians showed their appreciation for our "help" by voting for Putin…
The entertainment world and pop culture are chock full of portrayals of people as brainless, soul-less, unstoppable murderous blood-thirsty zombies relentlessly leaving death and destruction in their wake. And it is in that vein (throbbing, pulsing, ripe for biting) that I totally agree with Mittens Romney "corporations are people too, my friend!", people who can have eternal life and spontaneously reproduce, people who can become too monstrously big and important to fail, people who can have teams of lawyers and PR pros at their disposal to advance and protect their interests and image, people who seek to bulldoze their perceived enemies and vomit out influential dollars to their perceived friends. In short, they are obviously ordinary people just like us, we mustn't hurt their fee-fees!
It has seemed to me that as long as there were doctor's offices there would be magazines such as SI, however in my recent doctor visits everyone in the waiting area was absorbed in their phones, nobody holding a magazine.
Read in the WaPo that, even tho Trump was using a teleprompter in New Hampshire, he repeated stories in his speeches. Multiple stories, each repeated. This failure of short-term memory is classic dementia.
Bob Hubbell says time is on Biden's side and is against Trump. The more the clock runs, the more it will be obvious to everyone that Trump isn't all there, and the more the legal system grinds him down.
Have a lovely 2024.
Just to get ahead of the news tonight – Trump will win in NH by about ten points. BFD. The number I'm watching in the polls is how many Haley voters won't vote for Trump in the general. And let's see how it develops across the next sets of primaries. GOP voters in the general who will leave the top of the ticket blank (or vote third-party) are voting for Biden. Also, see how big the turnout is. Low turnout in the primaries means low energy for Trump except in the cult. Also, I saw a clip of a recent rally for Trump and a lot of the seats were empty. Rhonda Santos said he'd veto a proposed bill to pay $5 million of Trump's legal bills. (So much for a cabinet position.)
I'm not a great communicator but I know some basic principles. Trump's whining about his legal woes isn't a big motivator. MAGA wants to hear from Trump that he's invincible, not terrified. EVERYTHING that happens to Trump gets linked to a request for money, For Trump's problems, not to solve theirs. This is hearsay but some people are walking out of Trump's rallies early – if, true, why? What's not measured in most primaries will be the independent voter. How many of them who voted for Trump in 2016 and maybe 2020 have had enough of MAGA and Qanaon?
We had a blizzard last week but let's track the turnout in the GOP primaries. If it's down, Trump is toast. My personal opinion is that Haley will stay in the election for a long time regardless of results. If Trump drops dead, she wants to be the "only" alternate contender. That's not completely true – when a candidate bows out, they invariably "suspend" their campaign – just in case. But Christie quit before the first primary – DeSantis after the first. If Haly has hung in for a dozen more states and Trump keels over, I think she'll get the nod. If Trump is convicted in DC and the pols say Trump is a dead duck, I'm not sure what the GOP will do if it's before the convention.
Also, the Supremes will be hearing the 14th Amendment arguments in just a couple of weeks. What if the Supremes written decision says that in the absence of a criminal conviction related to the 2020 election, the 14th can't be invoked to remove Trump. That says if Trump IS convicted, he can be found ineligible to take the office of president. I'm not saying the USSC will decide that way. They might just say it's up to the states. But no decision can invalidate the 14th Amendment except a decision that the post-civil-war amendment only pertained to Confederate insurrectionists. I don't think there's five jurists who will go that far.
FOr today, Trump won NH. What's the turnout? What's the margin? What's the trend look like relative to 2016?
"EVERYTHING that happens to Trump gets linked to a request for money, For Trump's problems, not to solve theirs." Right on, to the extent MAGA-ism is grievance driven it is gradually dawning on some cultists who may be less than 100% on the hook that the specific grievances he blabbers on and on about are all his, not theirs. If he was the smart clever schemer he likes to think he is, he would have stashed a stockpile of guns at Maga Lardo while moving boxes around in May '22 for the FBI to discover and confiscate in the Aug search – MAGA world would have boiled over. That would have instantly and thoroughly made it all their shared grievance and confirmed the worst elements of their paranoia. Thankfully he is not so smart and clever.