Boeing through hook and by crook had become the world’s only major passenger plane manufacturer. Their order books was years deep, with tens of billions of orders waiting to be fulfilled. Somehow they’ve managed to sink into near insolvency. How did it happen?

Boeing spent tens of billions of dollars over years and years buying up their own stock. They refused to invest in new designs, they refused to invest in their workers, they refused to invest in their process, their tooling, their research and development, and instead played financial games designed to boost their stock price while ignoring the fundamentals of their business. This is what happens when MBA’s take over a company, and Boeing has become a shining example of what not to do with a major company if you care about it surviving, growing, and prospering over the long run.

Continue reading How MBA management destroyed Boeing at uncoy.

In “Climate Change” is a $100 Trillion Wealth Transfer from the Poor to the Rich, Elizabeth Nickson lays out clearly what has been behind all this noise about carbon credits for years:

At the same time, in our vast swaths of upland forests, the UN organization Transitions is slowly accreting that land. For who? We don’t really know. Transitions is everywhere, in the US, in Canada, in every country in Europe.  It is where you live. It is one of the many prongs of Agenda 2030. Everywhere, it invades local governments and acts to suppress economic activity.

Transitions also trades carbon credits. For who? Who do you think?

Therefore Transitions, which has a rainbow-colored smiley PR face, is in that business. Buying land to transfer it to international organizations and mega-rich families so they can make money on our forests.

Continue reading What are Carbon Credits? Who benefits? at uncoy.

In the comments to The 15 Most Valuable Bitcoin Addresses, The Underdog notes:

This is a shallow, empty, meaningless article, that basically screams to anyone paying attention that: all your transactions are public.

The thing to pay attention to here is this is a one-way trap: the moment the wallet address ID gets associated to your name (think ‘mark of the beast’ or so-called “biometric security”), all of your transaction history becomes retroactively public.

Lets say I’m evil FBI agent #320, and I run #AlQaedaSockAccountProxy. All I have to do to incriminate you is either:

A) Send you a “donation” from my US gov financed sock account of a terrorist org, or

B) Convince (trick) you into donating, such as pretending to be a poor, poor orphan dying from AIDs in Africa, or something (you know, usual charity scams all the gullible NPCs fall for)

Once that’s done, ‘evidence, mi’lord, that the person has financial ties to a terrorist organisation’ become public knowledge, and suddenly you can be convicted.

Continue reading Bitcoin offers zero privacy: vulnerable to entrapment and confiscation at uncoy.

US Government Moves Nearly 10k Bitcoin Worth Over $300 Million Related To Silk Road Seizure:

Initially, approximately 9,825 of the Bitcoin associated with the Silk Road seizure moved in a pair of transactions sent to three addresses at around 1:00 pm UTC. The bulk of the coins — 8,200 BTC worth nearly $250 million as of the time of this article’s publication — were sent to a single address, which subsequently split the total amount across 101 separate addresses a little over an hour later:

GenXXL makes the ironic point.

buh muh digital tulips are immune to government interference

Imaverb answers rotely:

Silk guys handed it over.

Yes, they did hand over their bitcoin, in exchange for reduced sentences. There is no secure store of value.

That’s the whole point about Bitcoin.

Continue reading US Government sells off $300 million of SilkRoad bitcoin: Secure and Anonymous at uncoy.

For those of us in tech or in finance, the story of the week has been the bank run on Silicon Valley Bank. Thousands of the Silicon Valley running on fumes VC funded startups were at risk of not meeting payroll. In the rest of the world, startups are expected to become profitable in fairly short order or keep their expenses down. But not in California.

Silicon Valley profligacy, embodied in the VC drive to traction instead of sustainability and profit and IPO-centric management, mean a company like Telegram runs with 60 core staff, while Twitter’s head count before Elon Musk was over 6000. Post-Elon, Twitter is now down to about 1000 employees. Twitter has about 550 million active users. Telegram has over 700 million active users. AirBnb

VK’s headcount ballooned from approximately 3000 to 10000 between 2015 and 2021.

Continue reading Long term consequences of the FDIC bailout of Silicon Valley Bank at uncoy.

In the comments to 6 Years Late And 250% Over Budget: Georgia’s Newest Nuclear Plant | ZeroHedge7, at99sy notes:

100% the fault of union contracts. My brother was an electrician on a nuke plant in Alabama in the 70’s. They were not allowed to put up more than 8′ of hard pipe a day in an 8 hour shift. They come in 10′ lengths and it takes about 10 minutes to lay out and install one pipe. They had to hide for the rest of their shift. I spent 5 years as a Union metal framer, lets say that the guys in the bigger cities rarely break a sweat or get in a hurry. The big dig in Boston is a classic example of union construction boondoggles. Billions over budget and years behind schedule when it was finally done.

Continue reading Are unions to blame for collapse of USA? at uncoy.

In the comments to Cryptos – waiting for the bids… super elite notes:

A Brief History of Ponzi

Charles Ponzi became famous as a result of the mania he created in 1920 in the midst of the post World War depression. His scheme involved convincing the public that he had a profitable business (arbitraging price differentials in International Reply Coupons, or IRCs). But the market for IRCs was too tiny to plausibly support the many millions of profit that Charles Ponzi claimed to be making, so suspicions grew and his scheme collapsed. He started with nearly nothing, made millions, lost the faith of his investors, and finally pled guilty all in the same year.

The stock market mania in the 1920’s then led to the Great Depression, and in the 1930’s a chain letter craze swept across the US.

Continue reading Is cryptocurrency, i.e. Bitcoin, a Ponzi scheme? at uncoy.

Hail Spode writes about the consequences of fake money, i.e. backstopping of big business by national banks, sometimes described as quantitive easing (but it’s not):

Bingo. Fake money leads to fake everything. Fake business, fake media, fake politicians, fake science, fake religion.

The big boys know that all that really matters is pleasing those who control the thin-air money spigot. It is why business will insult their customers, media will lie to their viewers, politicians will betray their constituents, preachers will ignore their calling, researchers will skew/ignore data, and educators will defy the parents of the students.

Having all power in one place is the opposite of freedom, and you can’t have decentralized government and central banking. You have to choose one or the other. I know it is human nature to rally around personalities rather than ideas, but it is imperative we grow up and do so.

Continue reading The Unattractive Consequences of Free Money at uncoy.

As California burns, scapegoats for the coming decay in infrastructure post-fire are actively sought. California public service retirees have drawn the short stick

. Here’s a typical observation:

Enjoy watching your smug 55yo CalPERS funded neighbor hosing the ash off his shiny new boat while you make the 2 hour bay area commute on zimbabwe-tier roads to your non-pension job so you can pay the coming 15% state income tax necessitated by said neighbor’s fat 90% retirement check.

Ubuntuser accuses fraud:

The politicians making the promises to public workers scammed the people to get votes, I think that’s enough to cancel this fraud. You can’t scam citizens and then enslave them to pay for this fraud. It should be law not to allow future promises of benefits and pensions to public workers.

motoXdude points out that public workers are keen to shut down for Covid-19.

Continue reading Never let a wildfire go to waste: libertarian rage at CalPERS at uncoy.

The corruption at the top hollows out the bottom of the economy. Younger people don't have much interest in an honest day's work as they see that those gaming the system and not working are doing so much better. There will be no one to do the work, little to eat. If the super wealthy think they will be safe in their guarded havens, they haven't been reading history. The aristocrats of *Ancien Régime* France were the most coddled and protected and privileged class since the heyday of Ancient Egypt.

Most of them lost their heads. King Charles I of England was reputedly a very jolly fellow until Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads had enough of subsidising his shallow lascivity.

I'm not sure what we — the intelligentsia or upper middle class — can do to stop these shenanigans. If they don't stop it will end badly for all of us. The upper middle class will be the first to suffer - as we're easier to get to — eventually the really rich will pay an even higher price. Not to put too blunt a point on it, the redistribution of wealth does not start again soon, the fate of Ghadaffi awaits their heirs. I originally wrote elite instead of rich. But these people are not elite. They are scum, lacking either ethics or humanity, only interested in pecuniary gain and willing to break any rules to obtain these riches.

No one can take wealth to the grave. Wealth should be a tool to improve the world, not a method to hold it senselessly ransom.

Continue reading Money Laundering 2.0 or Changing Laws to Rob the People at uncoy.