Author: Captain Obvious

Maybe it was because I had beautiful daughters who seemed to attract boys like flies. Maybe it all stems from my raising four daughters and imposing “inspections” every morning before they went to school and was deemed prudish and out of date as I counseled my daughters that the way they were dressing drew the wrong type of attention to them.  I would ask them what kind of a boy did they hope would notice them, and clearly their dressing styles would not do that.

So, I admit I am prone to keep thinking this way as I watch TV and see women dress in ways that draw the wrong type of attention to them.  After all, if a woman wants to be considered more than a sex object, I would think the way they dressed would reflect that objective and attitude.  Yet I don’t.

I am fed up watching female newscasters showing cleavage and wearing skin-tight clothes leaving almost nothing to the imagination.  Perhaps to my point, I am amused to see the female prosecutors in the Harvey Weinstein trial dress just the way I am suggesting a professional woman should dress.  Then why is the media awash in this showing it all attitude?

And, if you think this is on the decline, take a look at this article from USA Today.

So, on one hand, the media makes a big deal about bad male behaviors, and they should.  But, this same media seems to be telling our female population they should look like they want that kind of attention.

I guess the height of this hypocrisy is when these same scantily dressed ladies criticize men for their “unwanted” attention.

Perhaps it is the right time for women to dress the way my creative writing teacher told me when I was in 7^th grade,  “Good writing should be like a bathing suit.  Long enough to cover the subject and leaving a lot to the imagination.”

Then why does the media have this hypocrisy?  I would suggest it makes them money: the shows with scantily clad news talking heads get watched more often and longer than the ones who are not hypocrites.

Oh for the day of Walter Kronkite and Joan London and the like.  Mary Tyler Moore where are you?

It is nice at this late stage in my life to learn new things.  Except that sometimes you learn things that take the joy right out of your life because they point out the incorrect or circumstantial proof of things we hold dear.  After all, we always want the good guy to win over the bad guy.  Or, we like to see meaning in things that otherwise seem hopeless and futile.

I have become suspicious of many stories I read online and then Google the key phrases to see if they have been debunked or simply taken out of context.  You all know about this because you see countless questionable statements online.  We should always take what has been reportedly said by Abraham Lincoln: “Don’t trust everything you see online!”  Honest Abe wouldn’t lie 😊

But checking on recent Facebook post brought a new word into my vocabulary: glurge.  Here is the definition from Snopes:

“What is glurge? Think of it as chicken soup with several cups of sugar mixed in: It’s supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits. In ordinary language, glurge is the sending of inspirational (and supposedly “true”) tales, ones that often conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer or undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering a “true story.” Many of us, it seems, cannot overcome the urge to glurge.”

I have to say this does ring true.  Be advised, especially in this year of political nonsense to beware of this urge.

This last week another American iconic brand bit the dust, claiming to fail in part because of the COVID-19 issue.  Perhaps you didn’t even notice.  But I did because

I grew up with it being THE outboard motor everyone wanted.  What I find most interesting about this is that everyone else in the boating industry is celebrating a banner year with unprecedented interest in getting out on the water now that many other recreational opportunities seem less desirable.

Read for yourself if you truly want to see how the emperor can remain naked. 

Two-cycle vs. four-cycle might be the latest example of Betamax vs. VHS.  It has always intrigued me to see how superior technology often fails the market survival challenge.  Betamax was the clear technical winner.  VHS apparently did something else better: they decided that people didn’t buy technology, they

bought a viewing experience and decided to woo the movie producers.

This reminds me so well of one of my industrial process audits for Quaker State Oil.  I was so excited to do this since Quaker State was an iconic company in my mind having grown up in the Northeast.  As I sat with the company president at lunch he told me that the plant was failing because their competitor Pennzoil had recognized that people didn’t want to buy oil, they just needed an oil change, so they had opened up stations that made that easy called Jiffy Lube.

See the pattern repeating?  This is a sad day in my life regardless.

The adage then implies you are dying.  This was attributed to many people for obvious reasons.  Success implies things are getting better.  Better in business generally implies you are getting bigger.  We at Apogee have never defined success that way, but certainly celebrate successful growth as one metric, but learned early on that some business elements are winners and others are losers.  You always have some losers you keep because extracting them just to pump up earnings tends to render you an incomplete provider of services.

This is different than loss leaders that many companies use to “get you into the store.”  They are things that attract you, usually because of a low price, that hopefully results in you buying other things there because you are already there.

Today’s world of electronic overload and talking heads use flamboyant language to play on common fears, and with today’s 401Ks more like 201Ks, a common fear is not having enough money set aside for retirement.  Most of us have never really looked at our retirement accounts carefully, and when we do there can be a wakeup call about winners and losers.

Well, a recent news article about the TV personality who covers stocks caught my eye.  It is Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” who has declared fossil fuels dead.  Read it for yourself. 

You see these antics all the time.  I wish they were all about thoughtful people trying to be helpful.  I have concluded they are not.  They are deliberate attempts to move stock prices using fear which then traders can detect and use to make windfall profits.  These are truly evil acts.  Here is how it works.

You take a commonly held long run belief: right now that is certainly the notion that the world is moving away from fossil fuels for a host of reasons.  You then scare people to believe the sky is falling using some recent stock movements, implying that the “end is near” and it never is.  The market responds and quickly.  You then wait for it to settle at the bottom of the moody cycle and buy knowing it will return to the long term trend line.  “The trend is your friend” is the rule for most trading organizations, and it is.  Market moods especially scares cause short term deviations.  Day traders just love these.

Look, folks, take a hard look at global oil production statistics.  Yes, they may not be increasing, but it is not going out of style quickly.  Yes, oil companies may now diversify to include renewables and energy efficiency investments to “green up” their appearances, but the majority of their business is still going strong, and will for many years.

One of our professional friends who mails things for people knows the long term trends on things being mailed, but still invests in the business because he is hoping that the others who mail things for people will go out of business.  His strategy is to be the last mailing firm in business and then face the realities.  His business is growing as a result.

I know the title caught you off guard, but the research is in.  We are cooling off. The “we” being human beings.  The “normal” healthy body temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is no longer normal.  The average American’s body temperature has evidently dropped. Take a look at the research for yourself.

The 98.6 F standard was established in 1851 and is now being updated to 97.9 F.  Anyone who has watched their own temperatures over their lifetime has probably noted that our body temperature moves around, so what does average really mean anyway.  Plus, if you have been infirmed in a hospital you may have noticed your body temperature changes all day long.

What I find most interesting is that for once, this is not being blamed on climate change!