Bain Capital Explained By Tony Soprano

Tony Soprano explains private equity. Bain Capital and similar outfits gave "Private Equity" a bad name. Bain Capital and "Private Equity" are now synonyms for Vulture Capitalists and Corporate Raider.

Funny word, bain. According to Wiktionary it means “straight, direct, easy to deal with”. However, there is an alternative form of the word spelled "bane" that means "a cause of misery or death; an affliction or curse". Me thinks Mitt erred when when he named Bain Capital. Or maybe the misspelling was deliberate.

Of course, there is a problem with the companies that get taken over. If there wasn't a problem, they would not be subject to take over in the first place. The mistake they make is in allowing these land sharks in the door. They would probably have been better off just shutting down the company. That way at they might still have their pension funds, and the US taxpayer would not have to be picking up the bill. How much was that bill anyway, Mitt, ol' buddy?

There was a movie a while back called Other People's Money where Danny DeVito was a corporate raider. In that film he claimed to be the stockholders' only friend. The company was on the skids and it was not going to recover. The best that could be done would be to shut it down and sell off the assets. People may not have liked him or what he was doing, but at least he was up front about it, not like that slimy Mitt Bain.




The title for the movie may have come from the book. From Scott.

Post Hip Obscurity

From October 25th, 1942. What's that old line? An army travels on it's stomach? Click to embiggenate, unless you are using Google's Chrome, in which case, it won't and you still won't be able to read the priceless wartime advice.

I'm back

I drove to Denver and back over the weekend. I am a little tired.

Fire

There was a fire at an apartment complex in SW Portland last weekend. One apartment was pretty well consumed by the blaze. The heat from the fire warped the vinyl siding on another building about 50 feet away. I was surprised. The chain link is a temporary fence erected to keep the ghouls out.

1959 Goggomobil TS 250 Coupe

More Post-Hip Obscurity from Scott. More info here. Never mind the red color, it's not Italian, it's from Germany.

Update September 2015. Replaced missing picture.

Quote of the Day

From The Battle of the Crater: A Novel of the Civil War by Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, page 48.

I picked this book up from the bargain bin, I certainly wouldn't have paid full price for it. Newt Gingrich is one of my least favorite people. He ranks right down there with those blowhards on the radio. However, just because a man is your enemy does not mean he is an idiot. It is a reverse of the situation where famous entertainers lend their voices to foolish causes. I read something about Newt once that said he knew something about the Civil War, and so I picked up this book. It is not the greatest story, but it's not too bad, and it's about a subject of which I know little. And then we come to the above paragraph, and I'm thinking I haven't heard that idea before, so I mentioned it to my friend Jack who knows quite a bit more about history than I do, and he tells me that he had had the same idea, but had never seen anything written about it. I should go look up Charlemagne. I have heard of him, but that's about it.

Gun for the Day

I don't know anyone who would have a pocket big enough to hold this pocket cannon, except maybe Paul Bunyan, and he wouldn't really need one, would he?  Found in the back of this book:

Only a thousand copies were printed, and then the plates were destroyed. Most of the book appears to be about actual odd firearms. The last chapter is a series of fake advertisements for some very bizarre caricatures of Colt Revolvers. At first glance some of them are a little hard to distinguish from actual guns. I suspect that the pictures are not as clear as could be because the lighting was a little dim.