Ain't No Rest for the Wicked
The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, October 16-22, 2024
I saw a preacher man in cuffs
He'd taken money from the church
He'd stuffed his bank account with righteous dollar bills
But even still I can't say much
Because I know we're all the same
Oh yes, we all seek out to satisfy those thrills
You know there ain't no rest for the wicked
Money don't grow on trees
We got bills to pay
We got mouths to feed
There ain't nothing in this world for free
I know we can't slow down
We can't hold back, though you know, we wish we could
Oh no, there ain't no rest for the wicked
Until we close our eyes for good
Comment of the Week
Steve Ross on California outlaws its own regulations: My father, who ran a hardware store, said "you can't cheat an honest man." I was a well-paid speaker at a gathering of Enron public relations folks about a half-year before the firm's collapse. I still have a copy of their ethics guide. I was also hoping to use the Enron story to teach my journalism students a bit about financial reporting... how to read balance sheets and income statements.
Problem: I could not figure out why all the partnerships (raptors) existed AS PARTNERSHIPS. Now, I'm supposed to be pretty good at this. My financial models are probably the.most widely used on earth by broadband deployers. I've held finance committee posts on every board or advisory committee I've ever served on... including one of your startups and Columbia University Senate.
So I turned to a cousin, a top tax attorney, and asked him about Enron. Were the Raptors only a tax dodge and thus illegal under IRS rules? Worse than that, he said. They kept massive debt off the balance sheet of Enron itself, hiding debt from stock investors. At the time, Enron had the 7th largest stock value on the NY exchange.
"Your clients are lucky to have you," I said.
"When I tell them I will not be a party to helping them invest in Enron, they get angry and go elsewhere," he said. "I've lost clients."
Enron collapsed a few months later. Cousin never got his Enron-eating clients back. I ended up using Amazon (which was about to report its first profitable year) as my classroom case study. I helped start a broadband magazine a year later and found that broadband deployers in Texas had profited greatly by buying the fiber-optic cable that Enton raptors had laid down all over the state. The sales price was often 2 or 3 cents on each dollar of original cost.
Also found out that you CAN cheat an honest man. Your startup, on whose advisory board I served, was hired by Wells-Fargo to create an accurate customer-tracking data utility. Lower-level W-F managers obstructed the project, keeping it from completion. Your company closed down. Some months later we found out the reason for the obstruction: the new system would have exposed their scheme that had created millions of new services assigned to existing bank customers -- services the customers were charged for, but never knew even existed.
W-F was recently fined $5 billion for more skullduggery -- two decades later. Ick.
Thanks for sharing, Steve. Ick is right. And, alas, it’s not even the only time that happened to us. We were asked to look at the circulation systems for one of the largest newspapers in the country because they could not get their numbers to balance. The number of newspapers printed, delivered and sold on newsstands just never seemed to add up. We came up with a way to integrate their systems and get definitive numbers and…they fired us. Which was mystifying, until they got sued the following year and had pay out millions to advertisers for fake circulation numbers. Turns out the reason the numbers didn’t add up was that truckloads of newspapers were being counted in the circulation numbers, then driven straight to the dump. Which our proposal would have exposed.
The Truth Will Set You Free! Unless you’re committing fraud.
Then The Truth Will See You Incarcerated!!
Perfecting Equilibrium Stories
Feola Elsewhere on the Internet
Pentaxians explain why they shoot film in this Digital Age
Why shoot film in 2024?
By cjfeola in Photography on Oct 18, 2024
The new Pentax 17 half-frame film camera is a hit, selling out all over the world. I've been daily driving one loaded with Kodak Ektachrome 100 since mid-summer, for color photography to go along with my Pentax K-3 III Monochrome. And I'm not the only one. Who is shooting film decades deep into this digital age, and why? Here are Pentaxians who are shooting film explaining why in their own words and images.
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Friday October 25th - Foto.Feola.Friday: A Pentaxian Phojo: Part 3
Sunday, October 27 — Our Republic is a libertarian experiment; Our government is famously inefficient, choked with checks and balances until it’s impossible to Get Things Done. Nazis and other tyrants, on the other hand, are super efficient, which is good when you get Volkswagon and trains that run on time, and not so good when you get World War II and the Holocaust. If mankind is inherently venal and corrupt, how do you design a system of government that doesn’t ended up corrupted? The American Founders answered this conundrum by inventing the worst possible system of government...excepting all the other ones. But our system is actually wickedly clever in its perverse inefficiency.