UnderpantsWeevil

Americans love nothing more than to wallow in their own filth while pointing and laughing at their neighbors.

I am smart. You are dumb. That's why we're in this mess together.

the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach

You had a series of very cynical and deliberately manipulative media coverage of the film which tried to spin it as anything but a climate change movie. And then you had a bunch of "man on the street" pieces intended to make viewers appear stupid.

But the core theory of media influenced economic change is rooted in the idea that a movie can shift people from their profit motives. No oil executive is going to watch a slapstick comedy and decide to shift his business's core financial model because of a few jokes. No bank executives are going to divest from carbon emitting industries because some Hollywood starlets made fun of them. No senior member of political leadership is going to change how mining permits and environmental regulations are written because Adam McKay posted big numbers at the box office.

The Network didn't change how Americans consumed their news media. Soylent Green didn't cause Americans to reconsider our policies on factory farming. Jarhead didn't cause any military personal to exit Iraq or Afghanistan. The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's quest to get more IT people to fuck.

Big companies already have elected boards.

Big boards of shareholders consisting of the CEOs of other companies. Its how you get industry cartelization.

Why do CEOs reciprocally sit on each other's boards?

The reciprocal interlocking of chief executive officers is a non-trivial phenomenon: among large companies in 1991, about one company in seven was in a relationship whereby the CEO of one company sat on a second company's board and the second company's CEO sat on the first company's board. We develop hypotheses to distinguish whether this practice furthers the interests of shareholders or the private interests of the CEOs. Using a sample of large companies, we employ a probit model to test these hypotheses. Our empirical findings are that these reciprocal CEO interlocks primarily benefit the CEOs rather than their shareholders.

Very often, a CEO will receive stock in-lieu of compensation. This makes them a major shareholder of their existing firm. Firms will also use stock in-lieu of payment when negotiating contracts between firms, particularly in M&A and other consolidation agreements.

Consequently, you'll have a guy like Michael Dell, whose primary wealth comes not from owning shares in Dell Computers but in Broadcom Semiconductor Company. This came about because he received 22M shares from Broadcom in exchange for his controlling interest in VMWare, a company he obtained by trading his Dell stock to the original owners.

He sits on Broadcom's board and the former CEO of VMWare sits on his board. When Broadcom skyrocketed in valuation (currently in the $1T range) during the Crypto/AI induced chip shortage, Dell's net worth skyrocketed with it.

We actually DO have a shortage of overpaid CEOs, as much of the entrepreneurial web of small businesses and local special interests have been bought out or bankrupted by corporate expansion and conglomeration.

The days of petite bourgeois middling millionairehood are coming to a close. The fat dodos trundling around Middle America with their second homes and their Sea-Do outlets and their small patch of land dedicated to not growing alfalfa have all been clubbed and devoured. You're either at the top of the food chain or you're someone else's dinner.

deregulation made the fire as bad as it is

The California water system is a dense web of legal contracts between public and private interests. Bad policy made the fires worse, as the central valley was transformed from an ecological paradise into a dried up scrubland. But the idea that California ever really had regulations to prevent these wildfires is naive.

one of the things deregulated in the LA area was the building of homes in high fire risk areas

Fires are running straight up to the Malibu coastline. High risk areas have been expanding with the repetitive droughts and the large agricultural developments of cash crops. You've got buildings going up in flames that were perfectly safe to live in 20 or 30 years ago.

Nothing the California state government had done up to this point was preventing the degradation of the local ecology. They're just at the end of their rope.

Its not the Republican-ism that comes first. You have to sell people on the "I'm exceptional" mentality first, then insist they're being exploited by their inferiors. Malibu celebrities are a target rich environment for this kind of delusional elitism.

Expect a lot more Californians going on Joe Rogan and making up tall tales about how the fire was caused by poors and illegals stealing all the good firefighting water, while the state refused help for some arcane bureaucratic reasons related to The Fairness Doctrine.

What you can end up with is a lot of new hires queued up for the firing line. The "bottom 5%" is, initially, the people in the office who are currently in a slump. But then you bring on a load of fresh new hires who have little experience and a lot of pressure. They burn out fast and become the next "bottom 5%".

Meanwhile, the more politically and technically savvy learn to survive by creating make-work tasks that look good on performance metrics but do little for the firm as a whole. Their superiors approve, because a team that is constantly appearing busy is more important than a team that's producing anything of value. So you end up with these little entrenched departmental fiefs, dedicated to making themselves irreplaceable at the expense of the company as a whole.

There's a ton written on the Sears collapse in the early 00s, where this exact dynamic played out. Managers turned against one another, because stack ranking mattered more than inter-department cohesion or bottom line figures. The company went from a network of high end retailers to a shitty outlet stores over the course of a decade.

Its most aggressive at the higher tiers, because promotions are a tool of employee retention and "flattening" the management stack is a good way of pushing out the experienced, expensive older employees. You'll also see a lot more outsourcing of department rolls, as C-levels opt for lowest-bidder contractors you can hire/fire inside a business cycle than big teams of veteran staffers who sit on the payroll thick or thin. That means fewer mid-level managers, as the actual process of team management is sent overseas or subcontracted out to temporary management firms.

McDonald Douglas and Yahoo both executed on this strategy back in the 90s to great effect. Stock valuations boomed, because they were able to create the illusion of cost cutting without impacting quarterly revenue. All it cost them was mountains of technical debt. And then nothing bad happened to either company.

Great for creating a lot of churn and quick-fix make-work. Rather than deploying a single comprehensive solution to a persistent problem, just take credit for fixing the symptoms over and over and over again.

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

Driving Californians (particularly the wealthy and well-connected Malibu celebrity class) insane with rage and paranoia, then pointing them at the milquetoast liberal stand-ins for Far-Left Radicalism, will do to California what it did to New York, Texas, and Florida.

Just a matter of time before the right-wing propaganda machine crushes the brains of the enfranchised class. I'm already hearing my mother-in-law blame the stupid Los Angelinos for raising her own home insurance rates. And more than a few coworkers are smugly insisting this is what a DEI fire department gets you.

One of the cardinal sins of the post WW2 era was the rapid pivot to anti-Communism. The Nazi Bar was the place all the CIA/MI5 spooks went to recruit German/Italian ex-military and their allies/sympathizers. Much like how the Conservative Citizens Council Bar was the place the FBI went to recruit Klansmen and other anti-Civil Rights knee-breakers.

Surely history will remember you as the resistance.

History is written by the winners. And the long arc of history does not bend in the direction its been promised. Fascism is on the upswing and all the Conservative school boards are rushing to scrub the history books of anything that might lead the next generation to be skeptical of white naitonalism or sympathetic to a proletarian democracy.

Its all so divorced from current events. We've past "Malibu is burning down because... " and moved straight into "I hate Gavin! I hate Gavin! I hate Gavin!"

And, don't get me wrong, Gavin Newsome is a careerist corporate hack piece of shit who has been falling upwards his whole life. But that's not why Malibu is on fire. Its certainly not why Musk is inventing new slurs aimed at him.