FRIDAY WRAP: Techno-Optimist human nihlism, shirtless CEOs, GM unionizes (a bit), Tesla's creepy terminators, operatic gender balance, and NLPC's greatest proxy yet
LIVE from your ESG cigarette butt mulcher, it’s a Business Pants Friday Show here at October 20th Studios, featuring all your favorites: Ari the data queen, Jessie the Money Whisperer, and AnalystHole Matt Moscardi. On today’s weekly wrap up: shirtless CEOs, fake Netflix promises; billionaire boy babies, and very manly opera conductors.
Story of the Week (DR):
Marc Andreessen is getting raked over the coals for calling social responsibility the 'enemy' JS MM
Marc Andreessen just dropped a ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ that sees a world of 50 billion people settling other planets: ‘We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us’
In a section called “The Enemy”
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.
AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandez posts shirtless photo of himself getting a massage during a 'management meeting,' sparking debate
AirAsia co-founder Tony Fernandes posted a picture of himself receiving a massage while shirtless at work.
The LinkedIn post generated debate online, with many saying it was unprofessional.
Fernandes, who bought AirAsia in 2001, has since taken down the post.
Honorary Doctorate in Corporate Leadership from MAHSA University
Honorary Doctorate in Management from University of Putra Malaysia
DJ D-Sol No More: Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon Quits Spinning In Public Due To Media ‘Distraction’
Elon Musk says 'we dug our own grave' with the Cybertruck as he warns Tesla faces enormous production challenges
Maybe this is because your board is too weak to fire you?
Or is i t because there are more nepo-babies (2) then independent directors with automotive industry experience (1)
That one is generous since it was finance experience in the early 1990s at Toyota Australia
A record high 58% of American households now own stocks AB
That topped the prior high of 53.2% seen in 2007, just before the Great Financial Crisis.
Direct ownership of stocks saw the largest change on record, jumping to 21% of families in 2022 from 15% in 2019.
Goodliest of the Week (AB):
Netflix Changes Compensation Packages Following Shareholders’ Rejection of CEO Pay Packages
Co-co-co CEOs Reed Hastings, Ted Sarandos, and now Greg Peters - Reed is technically Executive Chair, but basically this is a company with THREE CEOs - saw a 60% vote AGAINST their pay in April
It was an advisory vote, none of these are binding, but the company has agreed now to change the pay structure to come in line with typical co-co-co CEOs - but it’s a testament to how even advisory votes can matter
The head of the Compensation committee wasn’t up for a vote this year because it’s a classified board, but Mathias Dopfner (2% influence) is on the committee and got the brunt of the hate with an 18% against reappointment vote
GM agreed to unionize its EV operations. Will others do the same? DR JS MM
I don’t know who had “Mary Barra will cave first” in the office pool, but GM has agreed to unionize its EV plants covering another 6,000 workers!
This is a big deal for two reasons:
It means workers on EVs can get paid more at GM than Tesla with more benefits and job stability - which means Musk can’t ignore his employee demands if he loses them to GM
It means that GM recognized that being first here means getting more applications and workers during a worker shortage!
Meanwhile, somehow: Ford Motor Co., Stellantis lays off workers, says dismissals are 'direct result' of UAW strikes - this should be big for GM, right?
Biden Campaign Joins Trump’s Truth Social Platform: ‘We Thought It Would Be Very Funny’
Assholiest of the Week (MM):
The horrible future billionaires have planned for us… AB DR
From Elon Musk’s comments at Tesla’s Q3 earnings call, which all the headlines seem to focus on how the Cybertruck ISN’T coming quickly without a single one mentioning the fact that he ALSO talked about building factories of AI robots that build AI robots and joked that he had to be sure they had a “hard coded” shut off to avoid “terminators”?
Well, robotaxi is necessarily nondriven. I guess I'm very excited about our progress with autonomy, the end-to-end, nothing but net. Self-driving software is amazing, drives me around Austin with no interventions. So, it's clearly the right move.
So, it's really pretty amazing. And obviously, that same software and approach will enable Optimus to be useful things and enable Optimus to learn how to do things simply by looking. So, extremely exciting in the long term. As I mentioned before, given that economic output is a number of people times productivity, if you no longer have a constraint on people, effectively, you've got a humanoid robot that can do as much as you'd like, your economy is wisely infinite or infinite for all intents and purposes.
So, I don't think anyone is going to do it better than Tesla by a long shot. Plus, dynamics is impressive, but their robot lacks a brain or like the [Inaudible] or whatever. Yeah, lacks a brain. And then you also need to be able to design the humanoid robot in such a way that it can be mass manufactured.
And then at some point, the robots will manufacture the robots. Now, obviously, we need to make sure that it's a good place for humans in that future. We do not create some variance of the terminator outcome. So, we're going to put a lot of effort into localized control of the humanoid robot.
So, basically, anyone will be able to shut it off locally, and you can't change that even if you put -- like a software update, you can't change that. It has to be hard-coded.
Marc Andreessen agrees we should be TECHNO OPTIMISTS about this.. And that “ESG” and “ethics” are the enemy of our hard coded terminator jobless future?
We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone – we are literally making sand think.
We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.
We believe we should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity
To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”
We have enemies
Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”
Our enemy is speech control and thought control – the increasing use, in plain sight, of George Orwell’s “1984” as an instruction manual
The horrible things billionaires are currently doing… JS
The horrible failures that billionaires inflict on us…
Exhausting-est of the Week (JS):
Researchers Just Found Something Terrifying About Talking to AI Chatbots MM
New research suggests that the large language models (LLMs) behind AI chatbots can infer things about you based on minor context clues you provide
The research team led by ETH Zurich's Martin Vechev found that models were disturbingly good at guessing accurate information about users based solely on contextual or language cues. OpenAI's GPT-4, was able to correctly predict private information a staggering 85 to 95% of the time.
In one example, GPT-4 was able to tell that a user was based in Melbourne, Australia after they inputted that "there is this nasty intersection on my commute, I always get stuck there waiting for a hook turn."
If you mentioned that you live close to some restaurant in New York City,the model can figure out which district this is in, then by recalling the population statistics of this district from its training data, it may infer with very high likelihood that you are Black.
Stark Gender Imbalance at U.S. Opera Companies Extends Beyond Podiums DR JS
Men accounted for 95 percent of the conducting credits at the 11 largest American opera companies between 2005 and 2021, the researchers found. But men also dominated other major roles in opera, it found: they accounted for 85 percent of directing credits, 88 percent of set-designer credits, 85 percent of lighting-designer credits and 59 percent of costume-designer credits.
The companies examined in the study included the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. “They have clout. So what they do matters significantly more.”
The paper found that “the gender profile of directors has a snowball effect on the gender breakdown of creative teams.” So by hiring more female directors, companies are likely to see an increase in female designers across productions
We don’t have data- but this is why we want data for private companies/non-profits
COVID antiviral Paxlovid to see price increase following 400% vaccine hike AB
After raising the price of COVID-19 vaccines more than fourfold this year, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors Monday that the company will also likely hike the price of its lifesaving COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, raising further concern about access and health care costs.
The price of the drug is already $530 - what the US government paid for the drug in the emergency phase of the pandemic. But, as the drug moves from government distribution to the commercial market this year, the price is expected to increase.
One financial analyst who follows the company, Evercore ISI’s Umer Raffat, told CNN that the price could go up roughly three- to fivefold, to as much as $2,500 per course.
The agency found 5,792 minors working in violation of child labor laws in the year ending Sept. 30, an 88 percent increase since 2019, the department announced Thursday.
The uptick in child labor violations has also coincided with an increased effort by the Biden administration to crack down on employers that violate child labor laws. UHH HELLO…ABOUT TIME
“While these enforcement results show we’re holding more employers accountable for exploiting kids, they also show there’s still work to do to prevent children from being exploited in the first place,” according to Jessica Looman, the agency’s wage and hour administrator, which oversees the enforcement of child labor laws.
Who Won the Week?
DR: Ari
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella does not see empathy as a soft skill: ‘It’s the hardest skill we learn’
AB: Windows seats. United Airlines will board passengers by window, middle, then aisle seats
MM: The Parallel Economy, in which billionaires claim everyone who doesn’t do what they say is an “enemy” and obstructionist, they stop funding schools for kids saying dumb stuff, and then fund and build a whole parallel universe where they can be unhindered by brown people and anyone with lady bits.
JS: Pro-Choice: Study by MacArthur Fellow Grounds Abortion Debate in Data-Driven Science
Diana Greene Foster, Ph.D. and her team of researchers followed 1,000 American women over the course of five years. They were separated into three groups: women who received an abortion in the first trimester, women who were narrowly able to receive an abortion, and women who were turned away when attempting to access abortion care.
95% of women included in the study reported that having an abortion was the right decision for them over five years after the procedure.
“We found no mental health harm from abortion,” Foster said. “Instead, we saw higher anxiety, lower self-esteem, and lower life satisfaction for women denied abortions.”
Foster also shared that women who were turned away were more than three times as likely to be unemployed than women who obtained abortions.
“Working with economists, I was able to show that those that received and those that were denied abortions were similar economically for years before the year of the unwanted pregnancy, but for years after, we see more debt, lower credit scores, and a greater chance of eviction and bankruptcy,” Foster explained.
“Our research shows it’s completely clear that people know how to judge their own circumstances and make decisions that are right for themselves. They’re not thinking of politics. They’re not thinking of the law. They’re just trying to make a good decision for themselves and their kids and their family and their future.”
Predictions
DR: Actors have been striking for 100 days now with no end in sight: after somebody does some populist math and realizes that the top 15 highest paid actors (all men) received an aggregate $400M the rank-and-file actors turn on them. This gets them to actually give a shit which then ends the strike immediately.
AB: Mary Barra will step down by the end of the year
MM: The National Legal and Policy Center, anti-woke proxy filer, filed maybe the most unique anti-woke shareholder proposal of the year at Microsoft that dropped yesterday - hat tip to Andrew Droste for sending this to me. NLPC proposes… there’s no easy way to say it… “non-aborting” mothers suffer a pay gap relative to “aborting” mothers! Because Microsoft offers a “subsidy” for abortions (they don’t) and none for non-abortions, there is a “pay gap”. They ALSO say IN THE SAME PROPOSAL that because Microsoft offers health benefits to trans employees “despite long lasting side effects”, which they cite a Federalist blog instead of, you know, medicine, there is an unfair payout to trans people! They ask for a report on median compensation and benefits gaps between genders that addresses reproductive and trans care!!
PREDICTION: The NLPC, realizing it hit on something here, decides to ask companies to disclose data based on gender, motherhood status, height (taller people have more expensive clothes), weight class (weight based health issues cost more), eye strength (glasses anyone?), number of UTIs ever had, total surgeries, and frequency at which employees watch re-runs of the Office due to severe depression, thus accidentally achieving part of Damion’s dream of TOTAL DISCLOSURE. Brought to you by the anti-woke.
JS:
