“Your people come first, and if you treat them right, they’ll treat the customers right.”
Wild Turkey whiskey and Kool cigarettes finally caught up with Herb Kelleher. The co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines has died at age eighty-seven. Southwest began flying in 1971, serving three Texas Cities: Dallas (Love Field, not DFW), San Antonio and Houston. Today, Southwest, with 58,000 employees, carries more domestic passengers than any other airline, serving ninety-nine U.S. cities and ten foreign countries. It is the most, actually the only consistently profitable airline, even without charging fees for checked baggage or itinerary changes and with a highly-unionized workforce.
The current occupant of the White House gave a speech to Americans about the urgency of U.S. taxpayers funding a border wall. (As with the deficit and Mexico paying for the wall, Republicans no longer mention the president’s TelePrompTer use.) The major television networks acquiesced and broadcast the scripted, sometimes coherent harangue. Never mind that in 2014 the same networks declined to give airtime to the President – that would be Barack Obama – addressing the nation about border security. The reason given? It was too political. Previously, the networks did air George W. Bush’s immigration speech.
Nicholas Kristof, graduate of Yamhill-Carlton (Oregon) High School, has for the past two decades been reporting for the New York Times from what a certain U.S. leader has referred to as “shithole countries.” Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in 1991 earned a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Tienanmen Square student protests. They became the first husband-wife team gain the honor. Kristof won the Pulitzer again in 2006 for his reporting from Darfur on the genocide there.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Mr.
Kristof’s dispatches focus on subjects such as poverty, famine, human
trafficking and ethnic cleansing from outposts in Myanmar, Yemen, Bangladesh
and other sites of human misery. He has also made known his contrarian views on
the anti-sweatshop movement and the social structure of the U.S. military.
In contrast to his regular reporting and general public perception, Kristof in his year-end summing up makes the case that, overall, 2018 was the best year on record for general improvement of the human condition. Without disregarding all the bad news, he reports that fewer people live in poverty than ever before, that more people have access to clean drinking water and electricity, that literacy is at an all-time high and infant mortality is at its all-time low. (Unlike most other countries, life expectancy in the United States has gotten worse.)
In his book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Harvard professor Steven Pinker presents evidence in text and seventy-five graphs the betterment of the human condition over time.
We
may be past the tipping point on climate change and over-population proceeds
unchecked. Still Nicholas Kristof takes a break from his usual topics to give
us some perspective.
That consumer hatred is turning to gold for Joe Bingochea, president of Channel Master.
Consumer Reports
published an item about a lawsuit Comcast settled recently with the
Massachusetts attorney general. The cable provider agreed to refund $700,000 in
overcharges and cancel debts of 20,000 customers. It seems Comcast’s
advertising neglected to disclose fees that typically increased the price of
multi-year packages by 40%. Unhappy customers were required to pay as much as
$240 to cancel or change a subscription.
An estimated 25 million subscribers broke free from their pay-tv
service this year, a 33% increase over 2017.
Who doesn’t hate their cable or satellite television
provider? The cable and satellite companies force customers to pay for unwanted
channels to get the channels they do want. Because they sold only package deals.
The television providers refused to remove their blinders; they thought they
could resist a la carte pricing forever. Although they also provide Internet
service – and lobby against net neutrality – they didn’t see the Internet would
soon wreck their business model.
That consumer hatred is turning to gold for Joe Bingochea, president of Channel Master. The seventy-year-old company has doubled the size of its Arizona factory to meet surging demand. Its product? Television antennas.
Internet
television allows viewers to subscribe to only channels they want. They don’t need
to pay for ESPN2 to get HBO; they only pay for the HBO channel. And they’ve
learned what mom and dad knew: the local stations, including major network
affiliates and PBS, broadcast their programming for free. All one needs is an
antenna to grab the signal from the atmosphere.
Which explains why Joe Bingochea is so happy. After years in the doldrums, his company’s products are in demand again. Channel Master also offers DVRs that work with antennas, because today’s viewers are accustomed to watching what they want when they want. For less than a hundred bucks, a person can become an ex-customer of the pay-TV companies.
“Trump is not much different than most of the NY real estate developers. Obnoxious, liar, screws people, impossible to trust, etc.”
If your brain can handle more background on the perpetrator of multiple business failures who occasionally spends time in the Oval Office, Foreign Policy magazine – not known as a left-wing propaganda organ – has published a well-researched and dispassionate overview of business dealings with Russia.
A
couple fun quotes:
“I
think part of it was he was toxic to the banks. I think he also probably
learned that personal guarantees [on loans] weren’t a brilliant idea either. So
he was saying to himself, ‘What else could I do in the world? I’ll just
convince people to buy my brand.’ And the only people who were willing to buy
it were tasteless Russians, people who like the absurd, ostentatious gold-leaf
lifestyle he has.”
– former business associate
“Trump
is not much different than most of the NY real estate developers. Obnoxious,
liar, screws people, impossible to trust, etc, but in NY real estate–not
unusual. None of any of that is proof of anything other than Trump was
considered a bad guy who nobody trusted to do business with in the US banking
world. That is far from any proof he did anything wrong as to collusion which
there was none.”
“In guitar music, especially electric guitar, a power chord (also fifth chord) is a colloquial name for a chord that consists of the root note and the fifth. Power chords are commonly played on amplified guitars, especially on electric guitar with distortion.”
Dick Dale and the Del-Tones gained fame in southern California in the late fifties, working from their home base, the Rendezvous Ballroom near Newport Beach. The story goes that in 1962, on a bet that he couldn’t play a song using only a single guitar string, Dick Dale (née Monsour) reached back into his Lebanese roots and remembered his uncle playing a song on one string of a lute. Dale upped the tempo – and the volume – several magnitudes. The song was “Misirlou,” (or “Miserlou”) meaning “Arab Land.” The song had been recorded many times since the 1920s, but never like Dick Dale. “Misirlou” entered the rock canon and established Dale as “King of the Surf Guitar.”
