Lots of people can't even spell 'tariff'...

I've been scrolling around and adding twenty-plus percent to Sellier & Bellot, Magtech, Fiocchi, Wolf, PMC, some varieties of Winchester...

(This is to say nothing of CZ, Taurus, most HKs and Glocks, all the various Turkish companies, lotsa Berettas...)

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Point, Counterpoint...

Jaguar's rebrand has run afoul of the culture wars, with Fox News calling it "Bud Light 2.0" which is kinda funny. I'm sorry, but the average Fox News viewer is going to boycott the new Jaguar for the same reason I am: Aren't neither of us the target demographic for the new over-$100k Jag EV.

The most sensible "con" take I've yet run across has been from Mr Jalco, a graphic designer, illustrator, and sometime auto writer and YouTuber:

Now, before we dive too deep, there are two things we need to establish. Firstly, I love Jaguar. I think they’ve made some of the most beautiful and iconic cars of the 20th century, and the potential offered by their brand and racing heritage is beaten only by Ferrari or Porsche. Secondly, I am absolutely not talking about their yet to be revealed new cars here. I haven’t seen them – hardly anyone outside the internal team has – so cannot and will not judge them. This is purely about the brand ident they have so far released, what it tells us about their direction of travel as a company and the quality of the creative thinking inside the company.

It's an excellent deep dive that explains "brands", "branding", and the uphill row Jag has to hoe to reposition itself in the market, to mix my metaphors as thoroughly as Jaguar has mixed the cases in its typography.

On the "pro" side of the ledger is this well-argued piece by Alex Goy at Driven:

As well as dragging some of the worst of humanity out of the woodwork, it also brought out a group of concerned Jaguar fans. For them, Jaguar’s been doing broadly the same thing since before they were born. The brand’s heritage, even post Ian Callum reinvention, has been the steadfast hook upon which Jaguar’s hat swung. Images of the E-Type (which has been out of production for nearly 50 years) are everywhere, and rightly so, the Morse (which hasn’t been on our screens for nearly 25 years) Mk II is used as a shining example of how great Jag used to be. The tales of derring do, of record breaking, of Le Mans, Geneva, and the Mille Miglia are staggering, and they hold a special place in a lot of hearts.

Keeping things the same as they’ve always been leads to two problems. Firstly, a lot of people want to let others buy new, and then snap ‘em up in 15 years time for £1,500 - which won’t help Jag now. Far from it. In 2023 Jaguar sold 64,241 cars. To put this into perspective - over 75 million cars were sold globally in 2023. Porsche shifted in excess of 320,200, BMW’s M division flogged over 200,000, and Genesis put over 150,000 new cars in homes during the same year. Lots of people are saying they want the old Jag, but the numbers show they didn’t want to pay for it.

Of course, the car hasn't even been revealed yet, and we're all talking out of our fourth point of contact until sales figures start coming in, but if the purpose of advertising is to get people talking about you, the new ad campaign has succeeded at that.

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Sign of the Times

Jaguar apparently shopped around for a new logo and the one they bought was, um... questionable. It's vague, communicates nothing, and sticking a capital "G" in the middle of a bunch of lower case letters is a crime against typography.

Designer: “What are your company’s core virtues and strengths?”

Jaguar: “Tradition. Luxury. Excellence. High performance…”

Designer: “Cool. Here’s a logo fit for a Spice Girls cover band.”

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Ты с ума сошел, бро?

Russia is big mad that some Russkie channels have been removed from YouTube, so a Moscow arbitration court has fined the tech giant a jillion squillion hojillion dollars, which is roughly a bazillion times more than all the money in the world.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Google’s parent company Alphabet — one of the five most valuable companies in the world — is valued at about $2 trillion, about 10 billion trillion times smaller than the fine.

LOL.

ROFLMAO, even.

This certainly makes me take Russia seriously and not think of them like a cross between a comic opera kleptocracy and the fictional bad guy country from an Austin Powers movie.

(The post title is, of course, Google Translate's attempt at "You mad, bro?" in Russian. Is it accurate? I don't know, and I also don't care, much like Google doesn't care about bogus fines issued by some phony-baloney court.)

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That's good news!

Better check and see if Costco will let you return those three cases of toilet paper you bought on speculation, hoping to sell it to your less-foresighted neighbors in a couple weeks, because the longshoremen's strike is off (at least for the next several months.)

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Tab Clearing...

Today in headlines:

• Fidelity has cut its estimate of X’s value by 79% since Musk’s purchase


• China, at UN, warns against ‘expansion of the battlefield’ in the Ukraine war


• Switzerland and Italy redraw border due to melting glaciers

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A penny saved is a pain in the ass.

People save pennies, but don't spend them. They pile up in coffee cans and pickle jars around the country and once in a blue moon someone gets arsed to roll all theirs and take them to the bank, or go dump the jar in a CoinStar machine.

So the government has to keep minting a jillion of the things so that retailers can make change for every purchase which totals up to a number that doesn't end in a 0 or 5. It costs three cents to make a penny. We're flushing money down the toilet and we've known it for almost my entire life.

But when it comes time to get serious about eliminating the penny, the legislature and the Treasury Department, and the general public make like that Spiderman meme.

The one thing I do know is that there's a particular flavor of conservative who absolutely lose their tiny little minds anytime you change anything about the money.

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Tab Clearing...

• Cash & Czechs: Apparently the CSG group has raised the price on their purchase offer for Vista Outdoors.


• Newly expanded NATO base in Romania is even bigger than Ramstein.


• Now we all speak Phone.

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Same guts as Sony!

Boeing & Airbus got stuck with some off-brand titanium, it looks like.

“This is about documents that have been falsified, forged and counterfeited,” said Joe Buccino, a Spirit spokesman. “Once we realized the counterfeit titanium made its way into the supply chain, we immediately contained all suspected parts to determine the scope of the issues.”

The titanium in question has been used in a variety of aircraft parts, according to Spirit officials. For the 787 Dreamliner, that includes the passenger entry door, cargo doors and a component that connects the engines to the plane’s airframe. For the 737 Max and the A220, the affected parts include a heat shield that protects a component, which connects a jet’s engine to the frame, from extreme heat.

When you're reading the list of parts that might be suspect, encountering "the bits that hold the engines to the rest of the plane" will really make you sit up and take notice.

The train of events is very modern and international: Titanium International Group in Italy looked at the certification docs of a batch of Chinese titanium it had purchased from Turkish Aerospace Industries and thought they looked hinky, as did the metal itself. The Italians contacted their customers to warn them and now here we are with an FAA investigation.

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Landlords From Hell

What happens when a pack of internet investors buy your apartment complex?

Things started to fall apart, though, sometime after the first months of the pandemic. Tenants moved out in the dead of night as if they didn’t want anyone to see them; eviction notices would show up on their doors long after they’d left. The gym and pool shut down for “safety” reasons; when the building was sold the summer after COVID hit, the latter turned green. According to McMullen-Clarke, phantom surcharges began showing up on every rent bill, but when she called the front office to discuss them the phone would ring and ring; she later learned they’d stopped paying the phone bill. The new management charged $40 a month for “valet” trash service, but canceled its contract with the company retained to pick up trash every evening, so the same overworked maintenance guy who did everything else on the property had to pick up trash as well, and only when he got around to it. “There was garbage everywhere, it was really tragic,” McMullen-Clarke says.

[SNIP]

Weeds grew, in which new tenants would let their dogs shit without picking it up. Management would shut the water off throughout the entire complex for hours constantly; once a week at first, then just about every other day. But when the water was on, it would leak from 100 different spots and attract ever more pestilence. The rat population exploded, eventually taking up residence in the ceiling above McMullen-Clarke’s bedroom, where they scratched and fought and made it hard to fall asleep. One day as she was ascending the stairway, she noticed a rat sitting contentedly on the handrail for which she’d been reaching. “I took a deep breath and said to myself, OK, one of us is leaving.”

RTWT

FML

Well, it’s been six months since I felt the need to jostle the tip jar suggestively with my elbow while wiping down the VFTP bar top here.

A sudden work trip popped up at the end of this month (and you’ll get the details here at View From the Porch as soon as I’m free to release them) but it’s one of those ones where the public relations agency handling things is like “…and be sure to save your receipts and we’ll reimburse them!”

Now, they’re handling airfare and a hotel and whatnot, but when I read things like that, I’m like “Dude, I’m a freelance writer. Reimbursement of expenses is nice, but I can’t just poop out a thousand bucks on command!”

If you’ve just found a twenty in the sofa cushions and can’t figure out where to spend it, the tip jar in the side bar would be much appreciated!

Short Thoughts

• William of Ockham would like you to know that flying a helicopter in pea soup fog in the mountains is all you need for a crash. Mossad didn't bag Kobe Bryant and they didn't bag Raisi, either. Get-There-itis kills more people than any other factor in general aviation.


• Keep an eye on events in New Caledonia. Guarantee that China's stirring shit there.


• E'rrbody talking about the Red Lobster bankruptcy is all "Hurr Durr Endless Shrimp", but you never have to read far into these articles to find the words "private equity": "The following year, Darden sold Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm, for $2.1 billion. To help fund the deal, Red Lobster spun off its real estate assets in a transaction known as a sale leaseback agreement. Red Lobster had long owned its own real estate but would now be paying rent to lease its restaurants."

Tab Clearing...

• The easiest way to be a rich and famous author is to be a rich and famous person who gets offered a book deal.


• "Fully Self Driving" has been a scam. Perhaps in the legal sense, even.


• Stop pointing guns at people you shouldn't be pointing guns at.

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Red Gold

Apparently one of the things that has kept gold's price at record highs the last couple years is consumer demand in one of the largest economies on the planet:

"Often considered a safe investment during times of geopolitical and economic turmoil, gold has soared in price in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza. But gold’s climb to highs above $2,400 per ounce has proved more resilient, and lasted longer, because of China.

Chinese consumers have flocked to gold as their confidence in traditional investments like real estate or stocks has faltered. At the same time, the country’s central bank has steadily added to its gold reserves, while whittling away at its holdings of U.S. debt. And throwing fuel on the fire are Chinese speculators betting that there is still room for appreciation."

It's a paywall-vaulting gift link if you want to read it.

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EV Speedrun Challenge

"Times are starting to get tough for Tesla. The electric vehicle automaker had been riding high, with quarter after quarter of successive growth and plenty of profits in the process. But lately, that success has mostly been due to a series of price cuts meant to tempt customers to buy into an aging lineup. This March, the company reported its first quarterly decline since 2020.

Now, it plans to lay off more than 10 percent of its workforce, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters."

Basically, Tesla's challenge was to learn how to make a car company faster than established car companies could learn how to make Teslas.

Phyllis Schlafly 2.0

On "Tradwife" social media influencers:

"It was only recently that I recognized the blatant hypocrisy hiding in plain sight: I tapped the profile link of a popular Aussie tradwife and was met with a barrage of links urging me to transact: an Amazon storefront, affiliate codes, a mailing list…even an e-book. I tapped through her website and discovered MLM-coded language: “Are you a stay-at-home mom looking to grow your Instagram and earn extra income while juggling the joys and challenges of motherhood?” Oh, no. The “anti-hustle” lifestyle is, in fact, a thinly veiled mega-hustle—one much more convoluted than the Tupperware parties that came before it.

I perused her site. Oh, look, I thought, a lead magnet! (In digital content marketing, a “lead magnet” is a free downloadable item you give away in exchange for an email address.) Hers just so happened to be iPhone backgrounds featuring affirmations like, “With humility, I embrace my role, upholding traditions as the keeper of our cherished home.” What struck me about her website was how familiar it felt: This was pretty transparently a content creator’s monetized hub, no different from the courses, e-books, and affiliate codes distributed by the boss-babe influencers the tradwives claim to disavow. Oh my gosh, I whispered to no one, She’s girlbossing all over us! The call is coming from inside the housewife!

I have to hand it to them: what a diabolical brand strategy! Build a career teaching other women how not to have a career."

Mash that like button and subscribe! This uplifting of tradional roles is sponsored by Betty Crocker!

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"Incompetent trust fund failsons"

I've known some bush-league versions of the type of dudes he's referencing...

"As usual, you have to go over to independent media outlets like Defector to find something vaguely resembling the truth: that Vice was run into the ground by a rotating crop of utterly incompetent trust fund failsons who created unrealistic, hype-fueled company valuations, hoovered up exorbitant salaries, implemented numerous incoherent strategy pivots, and set giant piles of money on fire on a rotating crop of increasingly stupid ideas..."

It's a specific GenX/Millennial digital age variety of the Jack Welch-flavored idiocy that has gutted numerous American businesses.

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Casualty Vampires

A writer on the death of Vice:

"I feel like running the very famous and cool brand Vice – especially with how little they paid people – would be a slam dunk self sustaining business if only 45 people at the top doing nothing weren’t making like $19 million a year.

The death of Vice is the same story as the death of every other company in this country. It's a story of extraction of wealth at all costs for the few with malign indifference for the workers who actually gave the thing its (vastly overinflated) value in the first place."

It happens in all kinds of industries now. Buy a thing, slash costs to boost profits, extract as much value as you can, sell off any parts of the organization you think you can make a buck off of & outsource and/or offshore their functions, and if you can't find a buyer for the husk, just toss it. We've seen it happen with everything from Remington to Sports Illustrated. It's happening in slow motion with Boeing right in front of our eyes.

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And then there were two...

With the closure of the last Kmart store in New Jersey, there are only two remaining locations in the continental USA: one in Miami and one in Long Island.

"Remember that you will end up like Kmart."

RX: "There are only two Kmarts left?"

Me: "In the continental US. There's one in Guam and another few in the US Virgin Islands. Six, total."

RX: "How does a business like that survive with only six stores?"

Me: "I think the question contains the answer."

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They're not wrong...