Remember when Rupert Murdoch and 21st Century Fox bought National Geographic and we all gasped in horror and thought, “Well, there goes a distinguished brand,” and they went, “No, no, it’s all good, this infusion of cash will give us stability,” and we all gave them the suspicious side-eye and said we’ll wait and see? Remember that? I wouldn’t want you to have forgotten, since the latest news from National Geographic is all…
Employees across the National Geographic Society came into work Tuesday knowing only that they could expect “information about your employment status,” based on a vague email they had received from the organization’s president on Monday. By late morning, dozens of them had been laid off, including photo editors, an online science news writer, members of the TV channels, members of the digital NG Kids team, members of the legal team, administrative employees, and one higher-up position in graphics, multiple people who work there told me. It’s not yet clear how many layoffs there will be in total.
And they’re all biggest layoff in NatGeo’s history…
The National Geographic Society of Washington will lay off about 180 of its 2,000-member workforce in a cost-cutting move that follows the sale of its famous magazine and other assets to a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch.
The reduction, the largest in the organization’s 127-year history, appears to affect almost every department of the nonprofit organization, including the magazine, which the society has published since just after its founding in 1888. It also will affect people who work for the National Geographic Channel, the most profitable part of the organization. Several people in the channel’s fact-checking department, for example, were terminated on Tuesday, employees said.
Rupert Murdoch has a different definition of stability than I do, I guess.
Oh, and do you remember the fussy prudes who declared that my presence was going to poison the dignified reputation of NatGeo? I am amused.
No, wait, I am horrified.
I’ll admit, I’m surprised the whole department wasn’t let go.
John Small Berries @1:
My thoughts exactly.
Murdoch never has concerned himself with mere facts.
I feel sick
I have seen this multiple times in my life, and I still do not understand the “big corporation businessman” mind.
Whenever and wherever there are financial problems, the first response is always to compromise quality and ethical/legal integrity (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly by exerting pressure on the employees by giving them impossible tasks – it is for example currently under investigation which of those two happened during the VW emission fraud), and the second or complimentary response is layoffs. I have seen layoffs even in a case where the problem of lost revenue lay exclusively in the shift of raw material price and bad management decisions on the high-up level.
What you never ever see is businesman saying “times are bad, maybe we should not take so much money for ourselves for a few months or years and we could cut a few millions from our overly fat paycheck”.
There really should be legal limit to how much one person is allowed to earn and own. We are spiralling back to medieval feudal system.
Stunning niavity or pure trolling. Can’t tell.
@Charly #5 Agreed 100%.
People get outrageously rich by trashing company and human capital.
These are social parasites.
Charly / F.O.: Well, in most cases new CEOs who come in are acting entirely rationally, given what their incentives are. It’s mainly the quarterly focus on the stock price that makes it too easy to make decisions that might look good in the short term (heck, there were CEOs in the 90s and 200s whose entire shtick was that they’d come in and eviscerate companies) that are terrible for the long term health of the company. They may be horrible people to be able to do what they do, but I think it’s more a systemic problem.
And on that note – time to cancel my NatGeo subscription.
To start, it’s not clear that any useful definition of feudalism exists. The word is much like “fascist” in the sense that it is generally taken to mean so many different things (all of them bad) that it is impossible to nail down. But if we take feudalism to mean a system by which human rights are not inherent, and are granted to vassals by a feudal lord (whose power is hereditary), then freedom and capitalism are the two antidotes.
The problem with your point is that you first argue that a feudal lord for high wage earners is a good thing (someone who takes all the money and doles out only the amount they think is appropriate), but then you decry feudalism with your second sentence. If you want an authoritarian in charge telling people what they can own and how much they can earn (even though the entire history of human economics says this is a horrible idea) you cannot, in your very next sentence, denounce authoritarianism.
What evidence would you need to be persuaded that authoritarian economic systems like this (or like Venezuela, Cuba, China, or North Korea) are immoral?
@Penny L #9
And with this blatant lie you vaived any right for me to even try to engage with you seriously.
“Authoritarian”, another word used to death. And the first time I heard it used about economic systems. Novel.
Also, putting Venezuela, Cuba, China, and North Korea on one big pile. Super.
Penny L, as dishonest and wrong as ever on any topic you choose to spout your BS on in the past, it seems.
@5 Charly:
Labour is the only thing in a capitalist/consumer society that people seem to think has no value.
On the contrary, feudalism in general is actually fairly well defined (although there is some debate amongst scholars as to exactly which arrangements of mediaeval society are properly considered integral to “feudalism” per se, and which are merely co-existing, and there is a great deal of variation in the details over both space and time), and the specific legal details of the various implementations of it were rigorously well-defined and documented.
That is absolutely not what “feudalism” means.
This bears absolutely no resemblance to how any system of feudalism ever actually worked.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the topic is a reasonably good introductory overview of the subject.
Mr Goldberg should have been introduced to Mr Murdochs “hands off” ownership of The (London) Times.
I wonder how long before Nat. Geo. becomes another TLC.
Rupert Murdoch and friends have been wrecking pretty much all of the English-speaking democracies in the world for decades now. I’m rather more worried about that “distinguished brand” being ruined.
I… try, you know? Try not to give into the rage, try to believe in reasoned dialogue, try to believe that violence never solves anything.
But, I would so grab Rupert Murdoch by his old-man turkey neck and squeeze until the eyes popped from his evil, shitmongering head. Knowing as I did so that he’d won and I was one step along to helping make the world a worse place, just the way he wanted. :-(
#12 / WilliamGeorge: Well, labour is a lot more liquid as a cost than, say, infrastructure. So if you’re looking for short term cost cutting to try to boost the quarterly stock price, that’s the first place to go – if you’re operating in an economy like the US’s where laying people off is essentially free.
I’d turn your statement around and say that corporations by nature don’t care about things that aren’t internalized costs – that goes from the cost of helping people who’ve been laid off to find new jobs, to the cost of infrastructure usage, to the cost of carbon emissions.
Penny L, time for you to quit showing your ignorance to those who are smarter than you. You are nothing but an apologist for overweening corporate greed and your distrust for the integrity of science with your post.
If you want to change the behavior of CEO’s you need to change their incentives.
Income from stock market transactions should be taxed as normal income, at the same rate.
Then reduce the tax on dividends to half, or zero.
The only way to generate dividends is to increase profit. Which means to grow the company, invest in infrastructure so workers can be more efficient, invest in R&D to be ahead of the competition, etc. Things which will require more than press releases or gutting companies to create news to cause the stock price to jump.
Change the incentives, show the CEO’s how they can get their income at a lower tax rate, and you’ll change their behavior. We know it works because we’ve watched this happen in the opposite direction over the last 35 years.
My dystopian prediction: National Geographic Swimsuit Issue in 2017. It’s probably too late to do one for 2016. They might even find some TV weather presenter to wear a suit to give it a veneer of sciencyness.
Since everyone beat me on the Rupert Murdoch couldn’t give two shits about fact-checking” angle, I’ll go with “How long until the animals on NatGeo start stacking people?” (Now, if you’re old like me, you might actually get that reference.)
*attacking* people. Although the other might be interesting too.
jimmyfromchicago:
Oh, I do. Who can forget Fox’s series, from their scitech department, natch.
Whatever the official definition is –if you look at the actual results of societies afflicted with feudalism then a good working definition would be- rule by clueless parasites.
A smart parasite would care for the health of its host. It can and has happened. Unfortunately everyone is mortal and the next generation of parasite is just as likely to be clueless as anyone else so dynasties quickly peter out.
The only thing that is surprising about this is that people actually BELIEVED things would go down differently this time.
I’ve been through so many M&As that I can no longer be bothered to get riled up. When one is announced, I quietly start taking personal items home, get my network humming and jump at the first good opportunity.
I grew up on National Geographic. My last 2-year subscription expired the month after they announced their sellout.
I did not renew, and I won’t. Those in charge failed their mandate to the society and I will not reward that. Sad to see it go, but oh well.
This is the normal outcome from a corporate take over. They profits of the acquired do not pay for the debt incurred in the purchase. Tax policies do favor this kind of action and a change would probably help. As long money is the goal, the sole gauge of success we will have problems of the effects on society. Changing the incentives will help at least for a while but I suspect that there will be other different problems develop.
Clearly the goals are not in what I would call the noble family (not of the nobility) of honor, truth, knowledge, respect for self and respect by others strength of character.
What should we expect for our society when all other motivations are boiled away leaving mere greed alone as the measure success when even fame alone is not enough unless it is accompanied by vast wealth.
uncle frogy
@Caine #23:
Is that the same department which brought us “When Things Fall Off Shelves” and “When People Trip Up”? Or maybe I was just dreaming it…
Are not synonyms. Have a nice day.
Rest in peace my yellow-bordered friend…
Should I not learn from those who are smarter than me? Should I not engage my betters in debate so that I myself might become so enlightened?
I’m trying to recall the last time I read any comment of yours that was constructive or added something to the debate – any debate – and I’m coming up empty. If you’d like to, you know, make a reasoned argument, we can talk. Until then fuck off.
So interesting that neither you nor anyone else in this thread would appear to want to answer the question I posed: “What evidence would you need to be persuaded that authoritarian economic systems like this (or like Venezuela, Cuba, China, or North Korea) are immoral?”
That type is system is exactly what you’re proposing with this comment: “There really should be legal limit to how much one person is allowed to earn and own.” All of the countries I listed have this feature – except for the politically connected of course. They can own and earn as much as they like, kind of like a feudal lord (even though that is an inexact parallel).
My point was not to debate feudalism, but to expose the immorality of your argument. It has been tried. It has failed. And it has had disastrous consequences for just about everyone (except the 1% and the politically connected).
Well, I’m not personally interested in trying to defend the proposition that “[t]here really should be legal limit to how much one person is allowed to earn and own” on the grounds that I don’t actually agree with it.
I am in favour of a rather steeper rate of progressiveness in the tax code than either the US or the UK has at present, and in particular increased taxation on unearned income (investment income, inheritance, and so forth), but that’s a rather different proposition, and used to be relatively uncontroversial up until the mid to late 1980s. If you want to argue that the tax regimes we actually had for the majority of the terms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were in the same category as those of “Venezuela, Cuba, China, or North Korea”, well, I don’t think there’s much point in continuing the discussion.
I’m also not really sure what on Earth you mean by “authoritarian economic systems”. All economic systems are basically authoritarian, in that they depend on the authority of government for their legitimacy, and to enforce property ownership and contract law. Nobody that I’ve ever encountered before uses an authoritarian / libertarian axis to analyse economic systems, and I don’t think it’s really appropriate. The more usual axes of classification are by ownership form (public / private) , or by allocation mechanism (central planning / market allocation). Wikipedia has a reasonably good introductory article on the general topic: Economic system. I’m not sure that anybody here is arguing in favour of a centrally-planned, communist economic model. Most people around here seem to be in favour of a mixed economy of more-or-less the form we currently have, with some fairly minor tinkering to restrain the worst excesses that result from the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a relatively small proportion of the population. I don’t think that anybody is proposing Soviet-style forced collectivisation, and if you can’t tell the difference between that and arguing for a higher top rate of marginal taxation, then again, there’s really not much point in trying to discuss anything.
Penny L, no need to adress me. You blatantly lied, therefore I am not going to even bother to read your drivel in the future. Go wank yourself into a coma if you will, but I am not interested in watching it.
______________________
@Dunc #31 I agree with yours
which is essentially the limit I had in mind. I did not see it as necessary to overly elaborate, but i do not advocate policies that say “nobody is allowed to gain or own more than *insert arbitrary number* of *insert arbitrary thing*”. But there should be some contextual limit that would lead to more fair and equal (id est Gaussian or Weibull) distribution of wealth and incomes. A strong progressive tax is, in my limited knowledge, the best way to achieve this because it sets a movable ceiling above which the profitability of sucking money/assets for yourself decreases because most of it goes back to the system anyways.
Progressive taxation (althought perhaps still to weak for the richest and for some types of income – i am in no way expert) is used in Germany, and I while it might be just a coincidence that Germany has both low Gini index and high GDP per capita, it might be actually one of the reasons for this
Shorter Charly: I don’t want to engage in a debate which might cause me to rethink some of my faith-based beliefs.
Charly was – although they might be recanting a bit now – “There really should be legal limit to how much one person is allowed to earn and own.” Once you set hard and fast limits on what people can own and how much they can earn, you’re essentially centrally planning the economy.
Nice try, but you can’t morally equate Venezuela’s economic system with that of Australia or New Zealand. Once you go beyond using government to enforce contract law and start using government to proscribe economic inputs or outputs you get more authoritarian – and less efficient, less moral, and much worse for the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
We can argue about tax rates – the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world – but it’s probably well beyond the scope of the OP.
Not really, no. Central planning is about the allocation model of the economy, not the ownership form. You can have centrally planned economies with unlimited private wealth, and market economies with limited private wealth. The two issues are orthogonal.
That’s not what I was trying to do. I was trying to point out that “authoritarian” is an unusual adjective to apply to an economic system of whatever stripe. Authoritarianism is orthogonal to economics. OK, you can argue that central planning is more authoritarian than a market-based economy, but I think it confuses more issues than it clarifies. You can have very authoritarian political arrangements, but with private ownership and market-based allocation – Pinochet’s Chile, for example.
My last words to you Penny L: if you count yourself as a skeptic, you certainly should learn what non sequitur means. Because I said I am not willing to discuss this with you specifically, because you demonstrably lied – that is for everyone to see. From that you simply cannot draw this conclusion:
That is just your assertion about me. You cannot say that I have any faith based beliefs at all, because you do not have any data to support that conclusion. Which makes you a liar again, albeit this time around perhaps not so blatantly as the first time.
I am not sure I remember that correctly, but your nym rings a bell and I think I have read what you spouted in other topics on this site when libertarian views were dissected. I have definitively read what libertarians in general spout over the internet, and I have rethought many positions over the course of last few years. In fact, just ten years ago I voted for “equal tax” and now I advocate strongly progressive taxation. Because I educated myself a bit and I thought things through.
I am just not willing to discuss anything much with unashamed liars, because trying to reason with dishonest people is a waste of time and space.