Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Man Who Killed Google Search: When Raghavan joined the company, Yahoo held a 30.4% market share — not far from Google’s 36.9%, and miles ahead of the 15.7% of MSN Search. By May 2012, Yahoo was down to just 13.4% and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months, and was being beaten even by the newly-released Bing. That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its corporate history, shedding nearly 2,000 employees — or 14% of its overall workforce. Under Raghavan, Google has become less reliable, less transparent, and is dominated by search engine optimized aggregators, advertising, and outright spam. (Where’s Your Ed At?)
• Why You Can’t Get a Restaurant Reservation: How bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers have turned the restaurant reservation system inside out. (New Yorker)
• How G.M. Tricked Millions of Drivers Into Being Spied On (Including Me): This privacy reporter and her husband bought a Chevrolet Bolt in December. Two risk-profiling companies had been getting detailed data about their driving ever since.(New York Times)
• Scammers are targeting teenage boys on social media—and driving some to suicide. Hundreds of tips began flooding in from across the country, bucking the trend of typical exploitation cases. Usually, older male predators spend months grooming young girls into sending nude photos for their own sexual gratification. But in these new reports, teen boys were being catfished by individuals pretending to be teen girls—and they were sending the nude photos first. The extortion was rapid-fire, sometimes occurring within hours. And it wasn’t sexually motivated; the predators wanted money. The tips were coming from dozens of states, yet the blackmailers were all saying the same thing: “I’m going to ruin your life.” “I’m going to make it go viral.” “Answer me quickly. Time is ticking.” “I have what I need to destroy your life.” (Businessweek)
• The Jews Aren’t Taking Away TikTok: But conspiracy theories that say otherwise are coming for democracy itself. (The Atlantic) but see also Israel Military Purge Escalating, Will Topple More Major Officials: ‘Avalanche’ of exits to include defense minister, IDF commander, Shin Bet chief, sources say (Spy Talk)
• McKinsey Under Criminal Investigation Over Opioid-Related Consulting: Justice Department is investigating the consulting firm’s advice to manufacturers of OxyContin and other opioid products. (Wall Street Journal)
• The salmon industry faces extinction — not because of drought, but government policies and politics: The main reason is the decline of the salmon population in the Sacramento River to such an unsustainable level that there’s reason to fear that it may not recover for years, if ever — unless government policies are radically reconsidered. Commercial fishers who relied on the fall-run salmon as their dominant source of income have struggled to find alternatives. (Los Angeles Times)
• Fox News has destroyed American confidence in itself: Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. Why? Because we have Fox News and the others don’t. Oh, they have tabloids and conservative newspapers and so forth, but nothing like Fox News, which makes its living by spreading outrage over the way the country is run. (Kevin Drum) see also America’s Fox News Problem: When it comes to misinforming the American public about the issues that matter to policymakers, many are quick to blame the internet, especially Facebook and Google. However, other factors have been at work for far longer than those companies — false memes, factual misinformation, political bias. Many of those roads lead to Fox News. (The Big Picture)
• The Humbling of Marjorie Taylor Greene: “She has, in very little time, undermined the influence of her party’s entire right flank, driving less unhinged Republican, slike the poo-flinging chaos monkeys they are” (New York Times)
•How athletes and entertainers like Shohei Ohtani get financially duped by those they trust: Wealth management experts say athletes and entertainers who squander enormous sums fall into three interconnected buckets: They are naive about or inattentive to their finances; they make risky investments; they overspend on family, friends and expensive toys. (Los Angeles Times) (No paywall at AOL)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Dr. Ed Yardeni, President of Yardeni Research and former Chief Investment Strategist at Deutsche Bank, Cheif Economist at Prudential, and researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His most recent book is “Predicting the Markets: A Professional Autobiography.”
How’s the PE Winter looking? Yes, you probably have to care about this one
Source: Financial Times
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Still on book leave . . . but I am past the midway point and making good progress!
