Great documentary that Frontline made about something similar called Firestone and the Warlord. Firestone paid warlord Charles Taylor money to ‘protect’ their rubber plantations (essentially extortion), this money ended up providing him almost all of his funding during the Liberian civil war and made him a major player. He is now in prison for war crimes for what he did during this period.
They did all those things unsustainably so they could gain market share and raise prices when people were locked in. Similar to Uber and AirBnB etc. All those things are good but not feasible and subsidized by the capital/venture markets. The game is market share and ecosystem lock-in both from suppliers and customers.
A truly competitive marketplace allows any supplier to easily match with any customer. Suppliers gain market share by being the ‘best’, not by being the only option.
How did they actually raise prices? They are still competing on prices on everything. They have the best return policy even besting Costco. FTC and Lina Khan can pound sand. They should go after Walmart for destroying American towns and small businesses before they go after Amazon. I cannot think of a single company that produced more utility for consumers than Amazon.
MLS has the same problem basketball leagues have overseas. The NBA is where the best players in the world play and I can watch it on TV, why would I watch a local sports league? There is some hometown pride from the diehards but casuals would watch the NBA. Similarly in soccer, I don’t think it is feasible to expect the MLS to break out of their niche. The casuals are watching the Premier League. We are now just watching the MLS figure out how big the niche can get.
You underestimate the reach of Messi. I lived in Italy for a large part of my adult life and had messages from friends there commenting on the Inter Miami replay which was being broadcast in a pub they were at. I don't personally believe the NBA comparison works well as you have global stars playing in leagues around the world - not just isolated to the premier league. A simple example is Mbappe is in France, Halland in England, Vinicius in Spain, and the heavy ballon d'or favorite in America.
The Inter Miami Instagram account went from under a million followers to one of the most followed accounts in American sports - beating every NFL, NHL, and MLB team.
I also think you underestimate how many people from the United States follow MLS. For example, Atlanta Uniteds 2022 average attendance was the second highest average attendance across sports in North and Central America. The 2022 numbers would put it at 8th highest average attendance in the premier league. The recent LA Galaxy vs LAFC match had an attendance of over 82k fans. For comparison, the 2018 Arsenal vs Spurs match at Wembly was played in front of 83k.
Also, MLS sees the heaviest growth around the World Cup time period. Over the next four years you have massive tournaments being played in the United States from the 2023 Copa America to the World Cup.
I imagine smaller pubs in Italy couldn't care less about whether they are allowed to show MLS matches or not. If the HDMI cord works, it works.
Just an honest thought as I've heard it from now two different individuals at two different pubs.
EDIT: Just did some digging and it appears that MLS Season Pass is made available at over 300,000 restaurants and pubs in the United States alone through Direct TV.
For me, I think the key difference is time of day (at least as a USA watcher).
European soccer is 5 hours ahead. By the time I'm settling in for the night, all of the European leagues are over.
Right now, I'm watching a lot of South American and Mexican teams. I have no idea who they are, but they fill a void while I browse on my laptop. MLS can easily fill that prime time/late night void.
People love going to mls games, they are cheap and accessible, and for the most part its very much an atmosphere of die hard soccer fans. They can’t go to manchester united games, but they can watch el tráfico and it gets intense. Fans get into fights with the opposition just like in Europe.
I’ve heard of this before. That there are geniuses tolling away in fields but because they don’t have the right resources, no one knows who they are. But Isaac Newton changed science without the Industrial Revolution. Without running water or cars or electricity or modern medicine. Cream rises to the top and natural geniuses like that would be very apparent very fast.
The reason for the strong political influence of the military is two fold:
1. Political institutions in Pakistan are very weak and when things start to truly go bad, people look toward the military to bring law and order and not their elected leaders. This in turn gives the military a seat at the table to impact internal matters and foreign relations.
2. India - using India as a general boogeyman since independence has given the military brass a lot of money and power. They in turn use this to further their political ideology and when things start to go a way they don’t like they can start a coup. In turn the people generally go along with this as they think army control might be better than their leaders to solve their issues.
Like it was mentioned, Pakistan needs a few decades of peaceful democracy to get their shit together. Otherwise it will keep circling the drain of being a failed state.
I have been reading about this topic recently and still don't really understand how 'new money' is being created. In a loan, the bank creates an IOU that didn't exist before and doesn't point to a stack of $$ on the shelf. But it does point to the bank, and the bank itself has tons of customer deposits. And if I take that IOU and give it to a car dealership who puts it in their bank, for the transfer my bank will take actual money from the general pool of customer deposits. AND I have to pay back the loan which goes into the general pool. So while specific money isn't earmarked, the IOU represents money that the bank has right?
I guess a way to ask the question would be: if i were to liquidate all assets of a bank and call in every loan, would that be >= all customer deposits?
If I deposit $5 in my bank account, and then the bank keeps $1 in reserve and lends out $4, then they just added $4 to the money supply. I can withdraw my $5, and the loan-taker can withdraw their $4. This is possible because there’s a reserve pool of money which is not loaned out, and because people tend to just leave the money in their account.
At least that’s my understanding. Happy to be corrected
This is wrong. Tesla does have the advantage of being the more tech of all the car companies. They have the disadvantage of being bad at the car part. They spent massive amounts of time and energy being vertically integrated as much as possible. Historically car companies outsource everything in the car but their core differentiator (mostly engines). Tesla thought they could do everything themselves because it is cheaper but you are not going to make seats better than someone whose only job is to make seats. This is why they have all the quality problems.
I would agree that Russia and China bluff their strength but there are entire countries that run their militaries off of purely Russian/Chinese equipment. To trust your national security to something that is subpar seems like a recipe for having a bad time.
My theory is that Russia threw their D league to go fight so that no one could accuse them of them actually trying to take over.
> there are entire countries that run their militaries off of purely Russian/Chinese equipment.
I don't know about China, but Russian exports are mostly soviet-era models, and they are known to have huge maintenance issues. Also note this: in the USSR they knew how to build things, but modern Russia can't. We have no electronics industry, no machine industry, we can't really make commercial airplanes, and we can't build a decent car. How would country with such capabilities make state of the art military equipment?!
> To trust your national security to something that is subpar seems like a recipe for having a bad time.
I'd rather trust my national security on equipment that's subpar but reliable and predictable, instead of trying to make my own and failing. Kind of like home security: I'd rather buy a lock for my front door that may be not perfect rather than trying to machine my own better version, even if I technically know how it works and could maybe make a working prototype. Military development is really, really expensive and extremely hard to do right when your state is still developing and running low on qualified engineers, physicists and mathematicians.
In any case, having recent russian weapons is more than enough when your neighbours are equipped with leftovers from the fifties.
Is the clusterfuck that GE went through the last 10 years purely because they over extended their financing arm? I genuinely ask because their products are still in demand and they have huge market shares in the divisions they are in. On paper this conglomerate should’ve stayed together but it seems their financing division fucked them up?
The problem started in the 80s when Jack welsh was CEO. He thought it would be fun to invest in all sorts of specialized debt. At the time it made GE‘s balance sheets look great. Then the debt obligations started to show up, that’s when things got bad. But not before Jack Welch retired with one of the biggest golden parachutes of all time.
A lot of people praised Welch back in the day. I don't understand all these but maybe he was not that shiny after all. So the trick to be a successful and loved CEO (or anything) is to take ownership of something, beautify the balance sheet and get out before it explodes.
This also applies for software engineering. Try to start a new project in some company, and you get the privilege of:
1. No need to maintain other shit mountain;
2. Get to start your own shit mountain;
3. Can come back as consult and win big bucks
4. Can speak at conferences about "How X is implemented in company Y"
This is an almost universal problem in any endeavor. Everyone loves heros and visionaries, few give any respect to diligent maintainers, so we have a world of shiny, fragile new things on top of crumbling older ones that haven't kept up. Whether its software, infrastructure, equipment or corporate structure or whatever, incentives make it always like this.
Yeah I believe it's just human nature. Can't do much with it except that in my career I'll pay more respect to the maintenance people and others who are sweating for someone else's glory. The glorious guys already get glory and big buck so they don't need anything else.
It’s really amazing that these companies can afford these kinds of compensation commitments and still make payroll and remain competitive in the marketplace. Wild how much of a competitive moat that size is.
Maybe it’s 15+ years of cluster? Combination of overextended finance arm, too much diversification and complexity, and a history of doing any accounting tricks needed to meet the next quarterly number. None of those involved meeting customer needs. You can only go so far on financial engineering. That’s better for dismantling the company rather than growing it.
One of the problems I observed working with GE was they had pockets of a few smart folks who knew what they were doing and armies of people managing outsourcing without really having retained the industry specialization knowledge. It seemed like they barely knew their own business at times, they didn't understand the technology and they were highly specialized in dealing with external vendors. This would lay blame on execs like Gary Reiner who pushed outsourcing everywhere. They did try to turn that around and it is probably worthy of a book to review what they tried to bounce back from over-outsourcing, what worked, and what didn't.
I am coming around to thinking that all good things are driven by small teams of less than 10 people maybe even less than 5, who all have a shared vision and drive to accomplish something. Everyone else is just along for the ride.
My impression is that there was a drive for 'growth' that lead to a bunch of 'creative accounting' aka juicing and in some cases lying. This worked for a while, but came crashing down as it always will... eventually. You can hide the rot for a season.
The basically forgot how to do business. Keeping cost low. Sell more than your competitors and make profit. What they did was get as big market as possible in that sector by all means even if it is bad niche or higher cost than their selling price. Then to cover their incompetencies in doing business they play their books to look good.
