the brandensite

The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value 2025 Jan 15
Of all the things I'm not, I'm an economist least of all. And neither is this author, Lynn Stout, who instead is a professor at Cornell Law School. Twelve years ago she published this article in The European Financial Review which sounds very prestigious. Republishing it here is a magazine called Evonomics because it's about evolving economics... get it? Anyway.

I add its link to the commentary because it presents a cogent-sounding argument that rings true with my personal observations: that the purpose of business is much more nuanced than simply maximizing shareholder value. Maybe there's an equally cogent-sounding argument in the opposite, but we'll save that for a different day while I instead quote this piece's core point at length:

Although many contemporary business experts take shareholder primacy as a given, the rise of shareholder primacy as dominant business philosophy is a relatively recent phenomenon. ... For most of the twentieth century ... directors viewed themselves not as shareholders’ servants, but as trustees for great institutions that should serve not only shareholders but other corporate stakeholders as well, including customers, creditors, employees, and the community. ...

Yet it is important to note that shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law.

Consider first [Nobel prize-winning economist Milton] Friedman’s erroneous belief that shareholders “own” corporations. Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights. ...

If shareholder primacy theory is correct, corporations that adopt such strategies should do better and produce higher investor returns than corporations that don’t. Does the evidence confirm this? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is “no.”

What's the goal of society? I've always assumed it's a means of working together to make life as least shitty as can be for all of us. Maybe someone disagrees with me, but if they do it's because they're wrong. And working towards anything other than the de-shittifying of life is therefore stupid and wrong. Wealth generation is largely an analogy for making things less shitty, but as always blindly pursuing short-term gains is gaming the system – a place where the analogy breaks down and not true wealth generation.

Will the investor class read articles like this and stop being short-sighted prisoners facing dilemmas? No. But it's good to have ideals.

Neil Gaiman does disgusting things 2025 Jan 13
This is a long Vulture article which details some of the disgusting things Neil Gaiman denies doing. Well, he doesn't deny doing them, he just denies that they were done without consent. Stuff too gross for me to want to quote here, this website which is a bastion of purity. But what the fuck. And it's hard to know what to do with news like this, yet another entry on the list of powerful people who aren't content with merely being offered sex, but need to take it from their fans and employees. Can we separate a creator from their creations? Should we even bother? But what about when that person's as influential as Gaiman is, being someone who in his genre has already had impact on the next generation of creators? Not to mention someone who championed himself as an exemplar of all the things he secretly wasn't?

As Ken Pontac says while evil boils in his eyes, "Meet your heroes."

Antidisestablishmentarianism 2025 Jan 11
When I was a kid, my mother told me the longest English word is antidisestablishmentarianism. She didn't tell me what it meant, because that didn't matter to her, and if she told me where she herself learned this factoid, I've long since forgotten. My mother loved trivia for trivia's sake.

The word is weird enough that it actually has two different pages on the big wiki, one explaining the word itself and one for what is represents: opposing the separation of church and state. But as some other anonymous wikipedian once wrote on the page for the longest word in English, "The identity of the longest word in English depends on the definition of 'word' and of length," and, being wikipedia, the page's first entry is some chemical nomenclature 189,819 letters long and comes with the helpful note "whether this should actually be considered a word is disputed." Well, no shit. There's a lot of weird technical and nonsense words contending to be longest on the list, because language nerds are like that, but down the page, it is pointed out that the longest non-weird words a person is likely to encounter are "deinstitutionalization and counterrevolutionaries, with 22 letters each" (although I can't help but notice my browser's spell check balks at the former).

So what's the deal with antidisestablishmentarianism, why did my mother know this random word? I can only guess, but this 2009 Old Time Radio Bulletin post has a clue:

Gloria Lockerman first appeared on The $64,000 Question on August 17, 1955. The nation sat enthralled as the 12-year-old [black] schoolgirl from Baltimore spelled “antidisestablishmentarianism” correctly on America’s most popular TV quiz show. On the morning after Gloria got the spelling correct, “antidisestablishmentarianism” was the most-uttered word in every office, factory and playground in the United States. ...

In 1987, the Free-Lance Star printed a where-are-they-now type article on Gloria Lockerman. The article related: “...There was a slightly racist aspect to people’s fascination with her: This was before the civil rights movement gained momentum, and Gloria Lockerman was black. Her brilliance was in direct contrast to many Americans’ stereotypes of black people, and there is no question that in countless living rooms, amazement was expressed not only that a girl of her age could spell the word, but that a girl of her color could do it. ... The other fascinating thing is the aforementioned racial angle. Many a newspaper sentence began, 'Gloria, a Negro...'"

(The blog post also contains an amazing 1955 letter-to-the-editor angry about the racist coverage of Lockerman.) Her fifteen minutes of fame may now be forgotten, but evidence of it remains, such as it inspiring The $99,000 Answer, an episode of hit sitcom The Honeymooners. Fresh off her win, Lockerman was invited to nightclubs (um, she was 12?), to state fairs, made an honorary teacher in her home town, and was featured in news reels which would have ran before movie films which played at the cinema motion theater houses. There's a hint she was questioned during the congressional investigations into quiz show scandals which ended up killing the genre by 1958 and boosting Ralph Fiennes' career forty years later.

Lockerman even appeared in a bit on The Martha Raye Show, an apparently popular variety show I've never heard of before (some quick searching shows that Martha Raye, aka Maggie liked to feature "regular people" as guests). Martha Raye's show would be canned shortly after by its irate sponsors when Raye and another white co-star kissed Lockerman, with the follow-up episode featuring a sketch where Raye appeared to get drunk... oh the horror! But Gloria's TV fame was only taking off, with her having appeared on screen 14 different times in the four months after her debut. Like happens, after such overexposure, Lockerman soon faded from interest, and by age 45, a Chicago Tribune reporter searching for her wrote in 1987:

She explained to me that there is nothing she values more than her privacy. She gained so much fame in 1955 that, long ago, she decided it was enough fame for a lifetime. In that summer of ’55 she went from being a shy, brilliant student to an object of the country’s collective curiosity-both because she was so smart at such a young age and because the fact that she was black went against many Americans’ backward stereotypes of the intellectual capacities of black people during that era.

All this antidisestablishmentarianismism was going on in 1955 when my mother was only one year old, a touch too young to be absorbing pop culture. But not too young for her three older siblings, nor for her similarly fascinated-by-trivia father (my grandfather). My mother and grandfather are both sadly passed, but her siblings are very much still here, and might enjoy me poking around into the nonsense of their youth, so I'll have to ask next time I see one of them. But whether they remember Lockerman and her quiz show appearance or not, it seems clear that the rise of American interest in the oddly long word from the political history of England, antidisestablishmentarianism, if not it's meaning, definitely stems from this moment in pop culture.

California is on fire, again 2025 Jan 10
Linked is a set of phenomenal photos of Pacific Palisades burning to the ground by LA-based Ethan Swope (who is still a student). It's stunning, shocking, horrifyingly beautiful stuff – the best I've seen of this latest round of fires.

Meanwhile, in other fire-related things, a firefighting plane had to be grounded after hitting a drone flying where it shouldn't be, and this person on Bluesky who is a fire scientist and former firefighter created this thread about why these fires are so big (we gave them fuel) and burning so many structures (we like plants next to our homes). Also, check out Tag Christof's Flickr stream for more fire photos.

Burn, baby, burn.

'He looked at me with hate in his eyes’ 2025 Jan 7
The story of how Jewish photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured photos of Nazi Joseph Goebbels before and after Goebbels learned Eisenstaedt was Jew.

California High-Speed Rail Almost Begins Laying Track 2025 Jan 7
I voted for the California High Speed Rail back in 2008, as a joke. Now, seventeen years and five billion dollars later, they are laying the first rail tie ... except not really. And people say bureaucracy is slow and inefficient.

[Governor] Newsom said that officials were "finally at the point where we can start laying track over the next couple of years," after work clearing the way between San Fransisco and Los Angeles was completed. ... Services are expected to start between 2030 and 2033.

Of course, this is a touch hyperbolic. Getting the rail corridor is the difficult, slow, costly part of the project. Actually laying the rail comes last. Quoth this reddit:

To start: when you're building a train line, putting down the tracks is one of the last things you do. Just like how you can't lay down tracks for a subway until all the tunnels are dug, you also can't lay down tracks for a bullet train until you've built out all the bridges, viaducts, etc. Once that's done, actually laying the tracks is fairly simple by comparison.

The FBI warning on tapes/DVD is because of porn 2025 Jan 4
During that weird time in the 70s when porn became... not quite art, but something more than just porn, the San Francisco pornographer brothers Art and Jim Mitchell used their legal expertise to place restraining orders against everyone bootlegging their infamous Behind the Green Door video (the title a reference to a 1956 pop song about a private club). A Texas judge ruled that porn was for some bullshit reason exempt from copyright law, and therefore the Mitchell brothers had no case. They appealed. Quoth the SF Gate in 1999:

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Mitchells, a decision that led to the brightly colored FBI warnings seen at the start of rented videotapes today, a contribution to our national culture for which the Mitchells are rarely thanked.

Well then. Thank you, Mitchells. Also Jim later shot and killed Art for being a drunken belligerent mess, so there's that, too.

Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House 2025 Jan 4
Scott Alexander (pseudonymous author of high-readership blog Slate Star Code/Astral Codex Ten) is insightful and clever, if a bit "too online" for me to subscribe to outright. He's a psychologist by training and that's where he started blogging, but in the past decade his blog's contents have wandered anywhere and everywhere, with posts lengthy and frequent enough I don't understand how he would have time left enough to actually see patients.

Anyway. The post I've linked here is his book review of Tom Wolfe's 1981 critique of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, which has nothing to do with psychology (except, you know, the psychology of spaces, man) but is fascinating anyway. Fascinating because I don't possess the stamina to read a book-length Tom Wolfe critique of anything, but also because Alexander doesn't just regurgitate Wolfe's points but actually dissects them, prods them, pokes them to see whether they hold up to scrutiny. I can't say whether Alexander's being fair to the source material (as, again, I ain't reading that, and I know zilch about modern architecture) but I can say that I like that he's churned it into something which I can digest, and thus feel enlightened by despite doing none of the work of having to actually *shudder* read the damn thing. Thanks, Scott!

Everyone Involved In Pizza's Preparation, Delivery, Purchase Extremely High 2025 Jan 4
It's been over twenty-six years since The Onion (America's Finest News Source) published this brilliant headline and it has been bouncing around in my brain every single day since.

Map of the Universe 2025 Jan 3
The scale of the universe we live in is so incredibly massive it is difficult to comprehend. Here's an interactive website which tries to help.