Our Tax Dollars At Work
Published on 5 Sep 2005 at 5:00 pm by Paul |
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As a blogger, I’d be remiss in not joining the Katrina bandwagon for at least one post. But there are very good reasons why our site is the Cargo Cult of Business, and not the Cargo Cult of Government. And Katrina is a case in point as to why this is.
Marginal Revolution has an excellent rundown on various FEMA-related issues. And, of course, CNN and Reuters have substantive coverage of the disaster itself. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune has a treatment of Homeland Security’s, shall we say, lack of preparedness. Even President Bush, in a rare move, owned up to some inadequacy. And the violent barbarism that erupted, some of it by law enforcement charged with protecting the populace, should leave everyone responsible for the inadequate response ashamed to show their faces in public. Lastly, and needless to say, the Blogosphere’s presses have been running non-stop. So as far as commenting on the actual disaster, and even the specifics of governmental ineptitude, I’m going to take a pass. It’s been done.
But what I am going to do is take this opportunity to expound on why Cargo Cult commentary on governances and their various shenanigans is inherently pointless. It is for the very simple reason that, where governments are concerned, it’s all cargo cultism.
I indicated in a prior post that Apple is our poster-child for business cargo-cultism. Well, they, and I would say, every appearance-oriented corporation combined, haven’t a patch on the operation of governances. The further up the chain you go, the worse it is, but I’ve seen debacles at the city and county level that have left me breathless: Cincinnati with it’s two stadiums, initially nixed by the voters in a ballot, until a blitzkreig in the local media herded the sheep into a staggering waste of taxpayer money. Almost every county in the U.S. adopting a Universal Building code that, being copyrighted, becomes a law no longer accessible to the citizenry (and tries to apply the same standards to ranches in Montana and townhouses in Boston). The list for local governances goes on.
But when we get to the Federal level, the dogs have really been let out. There’s the army with the much-publicized Bradley armored personnel vehicle imbroglio. Of course, Clinton and Lewinskygate, where it became completely unclear who was trying to hide what from whom, so deep were the layers of whitewash flying. And then, the poster child of the old millenium, the War on Drugs. And if that doesn’t work for you, there’s the poster child of the new millenium, the War on Iraq, where acting on wrong information was the order of the day. The list of examples of cargo cult behavior for the Feds is, literally, endless.
And it’s endless for one very simple reason: our system of government, combined with the so-called Fourth Estate of the media, form a system that, by its very design, emphasizes appearance and personality over competence and character. The voting public is complicitous in this game, albeit because they have been conditioned by both government and media to attend to appearances and not ask deep questions or– heaven forbid!– bring any critical thinking to bear.
Machiavelli pegged this behavior back in his day with one of my favorite quotes: "For the vast majority of mankind is concerned with appearances, as if they were realities, and would prefer to deal with the things that seem rather than those that are." This predilection reaches its zenith in any sort of democratic government. The system is inherently flawed; it breeds incompetence of the worst sort, rewards glad handing and schmoozing and punishes realistic assessment and competency.
Read on…False Precision, or… High Caliber Journalism
Published on 1 Sep 2005 at 12:22 am by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Thanks for Playing, Brain Trust, Technopolitical, Design, Interface, and Usability, Main Stream Media.
I should state at the outset that I have never seen media coverage during my career in that business, nor since, which was accurate in its depiction of events or matters of which I had personal knowledge. Why this is so is a multi-faceted subject and I only intend to take on one facet here.
Years ago I was witness to an incident in which a reporter mentioned offhandedly in a story that he had purchased a .22 rifle at a garage sale. A producer with a narrow background and education was given the task of re-working the story for the international market. Lacking any knowledge of firearms or the metric system the caliber was translated to metric by the simple expedient of replacing “caliber” with “mm.” “.22 rifle” became “22 mm rifle.” This particular producer wouldn’t hear of any objections – especially not from the engineering staff — and the story was duly broadcast worldwide.
False precision is a term used to describe a number of similar phenomena, some intentional, some accidental. A very typical version is when measurements are made to one degree of precision, and results after calculations are given at a higher one, or perhaps multiple measurements of differing precision are combined, but the highest precision, rather than the lowest, is carried forward into the results. For example, let us take a situation in which you have measured your own weight on a bathroom scale graduated to a half a pound, and your car on an industrial scale reading in increments of 10 pounds. Your weight is 152.5 pounds, the car weighs 3250. From this you can determine that you and your car total 3400 pounds plus or – 10 pounds. The 2.5 pounds has become meaningless. This becomes particularly absurd if you then decide to divide by two in order to discover what half of that is, exactly 1701.25 lbs. — even though there’s nothing in the situation capable of measuring a quarter of a pound…
I’ve often wondered about how the false precision in that story sounded to the different people who heard it. I’d imagine that people who are familiar with the US and the metric system and/or guns, probably wouldn’t pay it much attention since it’s obvious that we don’t actually have anti-aircraft cannon, grenade launchers, or something similar, frequently available at garage sales. Those unfamiliar with guns entirely would probably notice little amiss, whether metric savvy or not.
But something interesting happens if we stipulate a chain of references such that the next recipient of this bit of data does understand the metric system but not guns or the US. This person could easily interpret the data correctly, and inadvertently wash out the clues that indicate that it was all a mistake in the first place. A third or fourth party in the chain can then be entirely, and plausibly, misled. These parties, bringing completely accurate knowledge to the table, but using it to interpret a statement which was false, or which at the very least, lacked precision, might introduce a kind of false precision. The listener is lacking the vital precision specification which in this case should have read something like “22mm plus or minus 400%.”
By way of comparison, the very common tendency to translate meters to yards or vice versa as if they were equivalent would be about plus or minus 10%. In that case, the conversion seems justified, first because of the much lower deviation, and second because most people do understand that meters and yards are usually measured pretty casually. “About” almost seems to be a default modifier for most things measured in yards or meters. “They were about 100 yards away.” Essentially, the “about” stands in for the precision specification.
It’s also worth noting, lest I get hundreds of email on the topic, that firearm calibers are not strict diameter measurements. They do track more or less but are a formalized system of naming rather than an actual measurement. This particular incident involved confusion on a number of axes. This doesn’t weaken my point, but rather the contrary. If we treat “22 mm” as a measurement it’s off by 400%. If we treat it as a formalized name it’s just plain wrong.
Fortunately in this case, the remark was a throw-away line which could have been, and probably should have been, removed from the story altogether without any problem. Lines like that tend, one hopes, to be ignored, especially if there’s anything anomalous about them. But, I think that if we focus on a chain of events like this within the news organization, where the parties in question are reporters, stringers, producers, etc. all of whom have a high degree of trust in one another and a certain tendency toward “group-think,” we can begin to see one of the many causes for my initial observation that media output is almost never accurate.
Interestingly, this is also a classic case of cargo cult activity; call this one cargo cult journalism. The producer in question knew nothing of firearms, or the metric system, but had probably seen references to “9mm” in both contexts. It was a quick step then to make the current case look familiar without actually understanding how the thing really works.
[Note: I obviously didn’t invent the idea of false precision. I’ve constructed the examples above from memories of explanations given in lectures, text books, and elsewhere. Should one of my examples closely resemble something published elsewhere I’ll be happy to give credit where it’s due. I don’t think they do, but memory can be a tricky thing.]
Here are some links on the topic:
Vioxx Verdict: Cargo Cult of Pain and Suffering
Published on 29 Aug 2005 at 12:00 pm by Paul |
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OK, so, Vioxx has pretty much been done to death across the blogosphere. I’m not going to let that stop me from chiming in, because the harm done to the medical industry by that hapless group of jurors is just inconceivable. This is a poster case for the disaster that results when appearance takes the lead in judicial matters. Ted Frank over at Point of Law has a substantive rundown of the blast radius. What continues to distress me about this case is the just totally clueless manner in which the jurors, suddenly faced with a case involving complex technical information, were prepared to just completely tune out the "wah-wah-wah" and start punting purely on the basis of emotional whim. (It should be noted that I am relying here on citations by Dr. Bainbridge from the Wall Street Journal, the folks at the Journal having cleverly hidden the article in their pay-per-view section, thus continuing to ensure that I will never again be among their subscribers).
And this is cargo-cultism at its worst: the substitution of completely disjoint criteria in critical decision making that will affect the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people. As noted in my previous post on vaccination, while I’m among the last to leap to the defense of Big Pharma, in this case I can’t help but be aghast at these proceedings on Merck’s behalf. Certainly, as Warren Meyer notes over at Coyote Blog, this ruling is yet another blow to liberty as it further erodes the ability of legal adults to willfully assume risks. But as Ted Frank incisively notes, the real harm that is happening with this case and others against our medical establishments is that, by curtailing (to the point of asphyxiation) our ability to willingly choose risk, we leave the organizations that we rely on to sustain our health and well-being with a no-win scenario. Either they take ever more conservative positions in product development, or sail merrilly into bankruptcy.
Being corporations, we know which direction the helm will have to be set. And, as one of the patients dependent on Vioxx for interim management of my Repetitive Strain Injury wrist damage, I am personally going to suffer because of 9 morons who couldn’t be bothered to think carefully and diligently about the one salient issue in this case: assumption of risk. Walter Olson at Overlawyered makes the case for this concisely. For us to avail ourselves of effective medical care, we simply must have the ability to decide, for ourselves, whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
This doesn’t excuse Big Pharma, or any other medical institution, from proper and forthright risk disclosure. But in my opinion, the real blame in this whole mess goes to the judiciary, who have been steadily and thoroughly corroding our judicial system into a parody for the better part of a century by not employing robust gatekeeping in the admission of cases. Not only was the evidence in this case weak, but the use of any drugs that substantially alter biological operations in our bodies are going to carry some inherent risk. Even seemingly innocuous drugs can throw patients with substantial allergies into anaphylactic shock. And what implications does this imbroglio have for the food industry; will the FDA outlaw eggs because some people can have life-threatening allergic reactions to them?
If I was the judge in this case, I’d be ashamed to show my face in public for even letting such a specious suit go to trial. Certainly, there’s a strong legacy of judicial malfeasance in allowing the jury selection process to be reduced to a pick-the-best-idiots contest by excluding anyone who might actually have a clue and be able to apply critical thinking to the matters at hand. But the real problem with these cases is that, when there have been clear disclosures of risk (and the drug monographs, if not the patient brochures, are certainly clear), suit is still permitted to be brought.
I don’t know what the answer is for our medical establishment. Even the passage of damage limitation laws and, as the WSJ suggested (via Professor Bainbridge), tightening FDA approval won’t be enough as long as our judiciary is running out of control and letting dubious cases with clear and prevailing indeterminacy in the door. At this point, the predatory damage lawyers can– and will– challenge anything, regardless of how deep of a legislative bunker it is protected with. Big Pharma’s lobby is in a position to do themselves and their consumer constituency a world of good, simply by focussing their efforts on judicial reform.
Because it’s a sure bet that we haven’t seen the last of a jury that can’t– or won’t– think, even to spare the suffering of millions of other human beings.
A Taxing Misconception
Published on 25 Aug 2005 at 12:26 am by John |
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Filed under Total Quality Madness, Government: Federal, State and Local, Economics and the Economy.
I noticed this article over at CNN Money. It talks about a bi-partisan tax reform panel soliciting suggestions for tax reform. It states that the panel has received most of it’s suggestions on line, but doesn’t give a URL or link… I can’t imagine why, but let that go for the moment.
In the list of examples of suggestions is the old chestnut about having the government merely print more money rather than collect taxes. This is, of course, almost a cliché of economic naiveté, and in some ways a cargo cult idea, but it got me thinking… Let’s not just stop at the surface. I’m not an economist, so maybe someone who is can give me some feedback on this…
A thought experiment:
What if….
We actually did that. Say for example that congress passed an annual appropriation which authorized the government to increase the money supply by a certain figure and merely spend it. Essentially to “just print more” money in the amount of the annual budget.
I suppose that deficit spending being what it is, it could be argued that we already do that. Still, What if…
Would it fit in well with an absolute ban on deficit spending?
Would it increase or decrease popular awareness of the tax burden?
Terrible inflation, certainly, but how bad would it actually be? How would that be related to the ratio of government spending to GDP?
What kind of savings would it bring in regard to the IRS?
The last time I looked at the budget (some time ago) the IRS and the national debt were a big chunk of the Federal budget… to what extent would we see a net savings there?
What about the tax burden? Who would be paying what percentages of their income?
Who would be hurt? Creditors certainly, anybody else?
Would interest rates climb dramatically?
Who would benefit? Debtors, mortgage holders, anybody else?
What would the incentives and disincentives be? Would people be unable to plan for the future?
I’m not proposing it, just wondering. I think sometimes it’s valuable to explore the absurd, you never know what you might find.
Enraging Your Customers 101 - Phone Support
Published on 23 Aug 2005 at 4:00 pm by Paul |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Total Quality Madness, Service With A Smirk, Design, Interface, and Usability, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology, Branding and Values, Public Relations and Marketing.
[My apologies for not getting this published on our usual Monday/Thursday article schedule. The vagaries of a consultant’s life…]
"Please listen carefully because our menus have changed…"
Chances are good that in those few words I’ve captured the entire point of my article. A recent survey conducted by Public Agenda indicated that automated telephone systems in general are almost universally viewed as rude and obnoxious. For any company that claims in its marketing literature and annual reports to be "customer focussed", yet allows its primary face of direct customer contact to wear such a derisive sneer, is the blackest hypocrisy. As the Telegraph reports, this issue is a pervasive problem across multiple industry sectors.
Now, let me clarify first off that I’m hardly an authority on customer support best practices and call center quality control. For that, Cargo Cult has been graced with John’s extensive background in those areas. I’ll leave the specifics of call center disaster anatomy in his much more capable hands. However I am, like nearly all American consumers, a helpless victim in the face of the dehumanizing and contemptuous practices that dominate automated telephone response systems today.
Certainly, there is a substantive case for the judicious use of automation to facilitate better engagement with one’s customer base, as indicated in this eWeek article. Walgreen’s is a beatiful example of this with their online prescription order capability. No waiting, the system works flawlessly, and I’ve been told that I can hit zero at any time to speak to a pharmacist. Direct, elegant, and effective, Walgreens’ use of this technology gives customers a faster response and let’s the firm save money, a classic win-win.
In the penalty box, though, we have, well, the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems of just about everybody else. My opening quote is one of the most egregious sins that can be inflicted on us. For consumers who need to frequently engage with a firm (say, a healthcare provider, a financial institution, or a creditor) this is an outreach guaranteed to get the blood boiling and the temper up before the call even reaches a queue. Are the firm’s call center execs so inept at IVR policies that they can’t maintain the same menu items from one week to the next? Is it really that much trouble to give your customers– most of whom are calling you because they have already bought your products or services– the courtesy of giving them a little consistency for their trouble? I mean, think about it, a first time caller will need to listen to the whole menu. Anyone else is a repeat caller, and so deserves all the more courtesy.
Read on…That sums it up nicely…
Published on 18 Aug 2005 at 12:25 am by John |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, One Corporation Under God, In Corporations We Trust, Business and Corporation Related, Health and Safety, Branding and Values.
Wastler’s Wanderings on CNN Money has this from back in January.
He’s being a little silly, but there’s a harsh truth under there which applies to our government as well as to our employers. Like government, many corporate employers are falling into the notion that they hold an equity stake in their employees. I believe this is exacerbated by the desires, demands, and expectations that employers provide more and more comprehensive services and benefits for their employees. Child-care, elder-care, company car, health insurance, life insurance, sick days, education benefits, and many more… some are very traditional, but the trend is toward a longer and more comprehensive list. It’s a growing case of corporation in-loco-parentis.
I don’t mean to speak out against benefits per se, but I do mean call for caution. When we ask our employers, or our government, to "take care" of us we need to remember that their is a price to be paid. In fact, the more I think about it, the more inclined I am to say, "Thanks, but I’ll just take the cash."
The Cargo Cult of Disease Control
Published on 15 Aug 2005 at 12:00 pm by Paul |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Brain Trust, In Corporations We Trust, Technopolitical, Business and Corporation Related, Health and Safety, Government: Federal, State and Local.
Hopefully, the majority of readers are already familiar with the ongoing controversy over possible permanent child mental impairment from the administration of mercury-laden vaccines. We debated whether this topic was really relevant to the whole cargo cult approach we’re on about, in spite of the importance of the issue virtually demanding as much exposure as possible. But it was the conduct of the various government and private institutions involved in this disgusting imbroglio that tipped the scales. If you’re new to this topic, then be prepared for an eye-opener of what happens when the ability to distinguish between bamboo and aluminum is lost.
For years, mercury compounds known to be toxic to human tissue have been used in vaccines to prevent spoilage. However, the alarming rise in autism in the past several decades has drawn more and more citizens, government representatives, and advocacy groups to question these mercury compounds (Thimerosal, made by Eli Lilly, being chief among them) as being the likely source of the increasing levels of mental dysfunction we are seeing across larger and larger segments of the child population of the U.S. The response from our governmental agencies entrusted with the well being of our nation’s children has been nothing short of scandalous, as evidenced by this substantive expose from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. via Rolling Stone back in June. If the underhanded dealings at the CDC and its cohorts uncovered by Mr. Kennedy are true then we have a huge problem with the integrity, trustworthiness, and objective scientific rationale of our primary medical institutions like the CDC, the FDA, and the IOM.
What is suprising is that, in spite of ongoing efforts of advocacy groups like SafeMinds to expose this naked and possibly hazardous emperor, and even in spite of the dedicated support and engagement of government representatives like U.S. Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana and U.S. Rep. Dan Weldon of Florida the medical establishment keeps cranking out the same tired rhetoric based on the same skewed sample data (more on what I mean by "skewed" in a moment). In this followup-article, RollingStone notes that their article triggered an allergic reaction in most of the MSM: "What is most striking is the lengths to which major media outlets have gone to disparage the story and to calm public fears — even in the face of the questionable science on the subject."
These are the official party lines of the CDC and FDA. Moreover, over at Slate Arthur Allen takes exception to Mr. Kennedy’s reporting in particular and the public furor in general of this issue. His criticism of advocacy groups for putting passion before diligence may have some amount of truth. But both Allen’s response, and the official responses of the CDC and FDA, do nothing to address the damning evidence uncovered by Mr. Kennedy of the treachery and suppression at the Simpsonwood conference. They just completely ignore it, as if it isn’t there (and no doubt wishing it would just go away). Worse, they not only ignore Verstraeten’s statements at the conference, they have effectively buried by dismissal the earlier studies he cites. Of course this is all utterly unconscionable. I would contend that this active suppression of evidence and inquiry alone constitutes grounds for dismissal and censure of all involved in the Simpsonwood conspiracy, with the possible exception of Mr. Verstraeten. But none of this villainy has anything to do with the proferring of cooked data that is the phenomenon of cargo cult science; I visit it here to specifically point that fact out so that we can move on to the meat of the problem.
Read on…Two Dollars Worth of PR
Published on 12 Aug 2005 at 12:00 pm by John |
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In an earlier post I advocated the retention and development of teams and team members with a broad education and experience. One reasonable objection to that, especially at a time when such people appear to be in short supply, is that it costs too much. I’m a little late to the party here, but I submit this: Olesker Story from the Baltimore Sun, via a chain of blogs too long to list.
I do realize that retail sales positions are traditionally among the lowest paid, lowest prestige, and lowest skilled jobs around. I’d like to challenge that idea. How much did this little fiasco cost Best Buy in terms of PR? If you believe that it doesn’t matter what people are saying as long as their talking I guess it was a very profitable day. If on the other hand the kind of publicity is as important to you as the publicity itself, it’s going to cost a lot to counteract this image of corporate cluelessness. I’d say it didn’t do the police department a lot of good either.
There’s a crazy idea here that the lowest priced, newest, least trained, personnel should be the ones to have the most contact with your customers. While it’s clear that sheer numbers make it difficult to solve this problem, it seems that good training, hiring smart people with a broad education, and providing even better trained and more broadly educated first line managers — who are on the scene — would have solved this problem and many similar (though perhaps less egregious) ones which come up every day.
As an aside this is also a great example of a cargo cult response, in the negative form: The money was real but due to lack of understanding it was believed to be counterfeit and so it was treated as though it were without regard to the underlying reality.
Another interesting angle is the question of the "reality" of a two-dollar bill, when it’s not backed by any tangible good and its negotiability is called into question this way. Note the reaction of Bolesta’s son at the end of the article: The other day, one of Bolesta’s sons needed a few bucks. Bolesta pulled out his wallet and "whipped out a couple of $2 bills. But my son turned away. He said he doesn’t want ‘em any more." For my part, I’ll still treat it as real as long as we have federal taxes and IRS will accept them. I’ll even offer to buy them from Bolesta’s son 3 for a $5 bill.
Listen to this…
Published on 11 Aug 2005 at 12:18 am by John |
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Filed under Winners and Losers, Technopolitical, Blogosphere, Business and Corporation Related, Open Source Software, Trademark, Copyright, and Patents.
… or maybe it should be "picture this."
I want to applaud Trent Reznor. Ever since I first learned how to use a mixing console 20 years ago I’ve been wishing I had access to the master tracks for my favorite music. Not so I could make money from it, redistribute it, "pirate" it, or what have you, but rather so that I could have a more interactive relationship with it. I’ve wanted to customize it to my tastes. I’m not familiar enough with Garage Band to know if this goes as far as I’d like, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
I’m sure many artists would be loathe to give up the control, or the perception of control. I hope many of them can find the courage to follow Mr. Reznor’s example, and I hope he finds the experience worthwile enough to repeat it.
This is directly analogous to the downloading of individual songs from albums. Apple and others rightly perceived that the ability to customize the content in this way is a highly desirable feature. Sure, many users still download whole albums, and that’s great. Also, there’s no denying that in many cases the continuity of an album taken as a whole is an important part of the artistic statement. Nevertheless, the purchasers of music are more and more interested in being involved, rather than simply listening to an album they want to create their own. Furthermore, this activity isn’t necessarily an alternative to the original album. I have purchased several complete albums which I’ve then re-arranged into my own custom albums based on theme, artist, or mood. Releasing the tracks themselves merely opens this up to another level of involvement for those of us who care take it that far.
What about the future? Can this catch on? If so, will there be a demand for the remixes created by certain individuals with talent? How will Mr. Reznor feel about that? What would be the legal status of those remixes? I don’t know, but I’m certain we would all benefit from some system which makes them separable from the originals, and owned by the people who create them. What I have in mind is something like the GPL, “copy my stuff, make changes, sell your changes if you want, sell services around it doing installs or whatever, but don’t forget to give me credit and don’t sell my stuff without getting my permission."
Once this little daydream comes true, there’s just one more thing… Now, Peter Jackson, about all those giant digital video files you have cluttering up your data storage…
Apple and the Jaws of Intel
Published on 8 Aug 2005 at 11:24 am by Paul |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Total Quality Madness, Pathetic Success, Brain Trust, Winners and Losers, Apple Computer and Macintosh Related, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology.
Most of you catching the title of this article via pings or RSS probably think this is going to be a rant denouncing Apple’s decision to switch to Intel processors. A rant it may be, but that’s not where I’m going. I’m very hardware agnostic; it’s the software angle that continues to concern me in this latest Apple escapade.
Now, I’m the first to admit positive bias where Apple is involved. Where computing is concerned, they make the best product. IMNHSO, the best got better with the switch to OS X. My desk at home has held something with an Apple logo on it since I was loading BASIC programs from my cassette recorder, and I was fan and fool enough to even boast an employee badge for a while. But if I’m such a devout acolyte, what exactly is my problem with these folks? Well, like the I.T. industry back when Macs were still a going concern in business, my problem isn’t with what Apple does. It’s with what they don’t do.
At Cargo Cult, Apple is our darling, our poster-child, our shining example for just about every award we can give, from Pathetic Success to Brain Trust. Sure, Apple is top-of-the-tops in product design. Sure, the iPod is hot stuff. Sure, they are techno-trendsetters par excellence, a veritable sensei to the IKEA’s and IDEO’s. But that’s all window-dressing. It’s all bamboo airframes and coconut-shell headphones. Because none of this is in any way relevant to Apple’s core business, and never has been. All the flash plastics, fly icons, and grinning CEO’s are just a huge coverup for their failure to target and fight for core computing platform marketshare. And, what’s even more staggering– it works! As long as the eye is on the CEO reaching into his black top hat for another rabbit, nobody really pays much attention to the numbers. They are the paragons of personality, they are the sultans of swing, they are the undisputed rulers of all things form over substance. Their fancy footwork can make an entire industry think they actually know what they’re doing. They’ve done it many times before, and once again, we’ll get a ringside seat for the latest encore performance.
Read on…
