nVerse

Spinal Tap at Glastonbury

Not that I really ever considered shlepping across the Atlantic to attend one of the biggest rock festivals, but I do feel a twinge of forlorn for having missed Spinal Tap play there.  I mean, well, WOW. Spinal Tap.  Think about it.   What a phenomenon.  No, no, really. Bear with me.

This “band” was the subject of the mockumentary film (the first of its kind?) directed by Rob Reiner in 1984, that would lead to such other comedic gems of adlib acting by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer (and others) - think a Mighty Wind, Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman…

Though it’s great lines have become sooooo annoying to hear other people quote - like those great lines from caddy shack - the movie remains a masterpiece.  And if you haven’t seen the movie because of how annoying and off-putting it is to hear tools and nimrods quote it all the time, I don’t blame you - but you really should see the movie. 

And in the 90’s the band came back with another album and a tour - oh wait a minute, weird, they actually toured.  They actually put out an album.  And now, they took the stage at Glastonbury and are releasing another album.

Outstanding.

Music Ramblings

It’s no surprise that the Bay Area/Silicon Valley is a bit of a tech bubble…our daily technological ingestion may not represent anything close to reality in the other parts of the world.  For example, nearly everyone out here uses Firefox, Safari or Chrome as their web browsers (occasionally you will encounter an early-adopter/tech-rebel that uses Flock)…said another way, i can’t think of anyone that uses Microsoft Explorer to surf the web.  Yet I just saw a report that places the Explorer market share at nearly 70%!!!  really? wow. i guess that makes sense.

In the same way, it’s also a bit of a bubble out here when it comes to music consumption.  MP3s and streaming audio has been the way for many many many years now that when Tower Records and more recently, Virgin Records, packed up shop and left town, I wasn’t surprised.

Makes sense to me.

BUT, I did assume that we are in somewhat of a bubble, and surely CDs are still huge everywhere else.  Not so.  I have read a series of reports and press releases over the past month that made me realize that perhaps the digital musc phenomenon has made a really sizeable dent in the CD business and there really is some big truth behind the big 4 record companies’ cries of pain and woe.  iTunes is now the biggest music retailer with 20% of the market.  wow.  (amazon has 8 percent).  Ok, that’s cool. But here’s what i find to be really astounding and evidentiary that the big hurt really is on record labels: it used to take about 2.5 million CDs sold in its first week for a debut album to hit #1 on the charts, now it takes only 500 thousand.  That’s a factor of 5. And, as we all know, downolading a 99 cent track makes the labels far less money that buying a CD for $14…  so that compounds that factor of 5 to maybe a factor of 10?  that stinks for the labels but not for the consumer…or does it?  A new era of music promotion and rockstar culture is on the horizon.

Ahh The Perils of Industrial Beef Processing

It’s not new.  You have heard about it from a million friends and seen it on many TV shows…the perils of industrialized beef processing on a mass scale.

It’s Bad for us.  Not just ’cause there is a lot of fat and bad cuts-o-meat in the mass processed beef you eat, but also because of the mad cow prions that you just can’t cook away (prions are essentially infectious agents made up of protein chains).  Not many cows in the US have these mad-cow-prions, but there may be one or two steers out there that have it.  So, keep that in mind next time you are at a cookout and someone offers you a pre-made, pre-pressed, perfectly round Kirkland-brand burger disk from Costco - it just may have that infectious agent in there.  One burger patty can contain bits and pieces of hundreds if not thousands of different cows.

Gross.

Anyhoo, apparently, there is another beef recall due to e. coli - this time from the Colorado-based JBS Swift Beef Company.

They are recalling over 41,000 pounds of beef according to the USDA.  The types of beef they are recalling have wondrously curiously ominous names like “Bnls Beef Bottom Sirloin” and “Butt Ball Tip 2/UP S/T.”

mmmmmm Butt Ball Tip 2/UP S/T !!!

can i have some more gravy from the butt ball tip please?

Anyways, for years now i’ve been trying to eat mostly organic beef when i do eat beef, preferably the local stuff.  like from Prather Ranch.

Delicious!

Be careful out there….

Green Shoots? Apparently US Execs Don’t Seem to Think So

A recent Financial Times article (”pessimistic executives cash out shares”) reports that leading executives in US companies (S&P 500 companies) sold way more shares of publicly traded companies than they bought…cashing out their holdings at a very rapid pace.  In June alone, they sold $2.6Bn shares while only making $120m in purchases….yes that is a factor of more than 22x!

Dude, once again: they sold 2.6 Billion dollars worth of shares and only bought 120 million worth of shares.

Methinks this is a reflection of inside knowledge that we should be less concerned about inflation and interest rates, and be more wary of the fact that corporate profits will sink and lofty valuations for companies in the marketplace will be rare.

Recruiting the Digital Way - Via Email

Suppose a company is looking to hire someone.  There are a number of routes to go down, and personally, I have found that the low-tech craigslist site is the most effective method.  But another popular choice is to use a recruiter.

So a recruiter forwards on a job opening to friends and contacts via email, with a finders fee promised.  (keep in mind a recruiter’s compensation for filing a job is essentially a finders fee, albeit a big one).  Then, someone who receives the email doesn’t really know a good candidate so he/she forwards on to another person who in turn forwards it on, and so on.

SO - how does one divvy up the fee? Let’s say the request is emailed on to two people before it finally finds someone who knows a suitable candidate…Do they split it up 50-50?  Probably.  But what if it were 3 people deep? Split it into thirds?   How much effort was involved in forwarding it on initially?  Clicking the [fwd] button and sending it off to a few people who may know people outside of your social and professional sphere doesn’t seem like much effort.

To make any of this email forwarding chain of any value, it must ultimately be received by someone who actually knows a candidate. Otherwise, it’s just social spam.  Why do the folks in the middle of the chain forward it on? Because in this digital era, it is nearly effortless to do so, and there maybe a few bucks in it … kinda like opening a Monopoly Sweepstakes ticket from McDonalds…you just might win a free bag of small fries!  all you have to do is peel off the ticket.

But if the finders fee is split up, it begs the question of was there actually equal work & value contributed?  I think the answer lies in why someone actually says, “yes! i know someone.”  9 times out of 10 it is probably because that person knows someone looking for a new gig and wants to help.  A finders fee doesn’t hurt, but the main motivation is really just to help out.  And since we are thinking along those lines, the person who initially forwarded on the email probably did so out of the same pool of altruism - to help their recruiter friend do his/her job.  So yes. Splitting it equally seems right.

So what’s the big hub-bub?  I suppose the point is that emailing is so easy and cheap that methinks that recruiters must be facing some serious downward pricing pressure - especially in these times, where unemployment in California is above 12% and to help someone get a job and to help a company do so cheaply means a lot more than a few dollars.  I would guess that if you reduced the finders fee significantly - say, bring it down to zero - you’d probably still get the same results.  Besides, simply putting the recruiter in touch with a candidate doesn’t guarantee a finders fee - that person needs to be hired first…thus driving down the expected value (statistically speaking) of the finders fee even closer to zero.