As IF Times

link Restaurant with No Weapons, No Concealed Firearms Sign Robbed at Gunpoint.

It sure is crummy when a good plan goes awry.  Sure, it makes sense to some; simply post a prohibition against something and voila, problem solved.  As long as two things are present: firstly, that people can actually read and secondly that people give a flying flick about what’s on the sign.  It may have just occured to the owners of this restaurant that posting a no guns sign at their premise is as useful as a no poop sign for dogs at a fire hydrant.  To the crooks who robbed the place at gunpoint, the proprietors may just as well have placed a neon arrow at the register saying “take me, I’m yours”.

But this logic is lost on much of that segment of society who believe that waving their “I’m a Vegetarian” t-shirt will prevent them from being eaten by a lion in the wild.  A similar gesture of stupidity is occurring now in another context, that involving the fate of 300 odd girls in Nigeria being held captive by a terrorist Muslim group whose name sounds amusingly similar to the band that sung “Whiter Shade Of Pale” from the 60’s.   The brilliant campaign that has been thought up is to use Twitter and mount a social media campaign: specifically, hashtag, bringbackourgirls:

pleading celebs

Undoubtedly, the pressure brought to bear by celebrities and social media will convince the armed militants to give up their control of the poor girls.  The consequences of not complying are too fearsome to consider.  What if they get unfriended?  If only someone had the foresight to place a no kidnapping sign at the girls’ school at the time.  They wouldn’t be in the pickle they’re in now. Also, this same social media campaign aims to shame the men who would be potential buyers of these girls as slaves:  “Real men don’t buy girls”.  Boy, I bet the market for buyers of the girls has dried up completely.  Given that the terrorists have threatened to sell the girls off at $12 apiece, why doesn’t someone just offer to take the entire bunch for $3000 on a bulk discount?

Increasingly, the delusional are living in a bizarro world of theoretical benigness and faux moral piety wherein the intrusion of harsh reality is an affront to be dismissed contemptuously. Those that choose to live in reality are shamed at best or at worst, demonized, even criminialized for actions that offend the delusional.  And of course, woe be to any who would willfully or unwittingly say something that is deemed to be offensive by the PC gestapo.   Even the normally brash Mark Cuban had to backpeddle a bit when he candidly stated that if he saw a black kid with hoodie walking his way, he’d cross the street.  Apparently, “black kid in a hoodie” was dog whistle speak for Trayvon Martin.  Cuban used to have more cojones, but now is bowing  to the PC police too.  Mark, Mark, Mark.

Putting up signs and imagining that bad things won’t happen to good people is an admirable life philosophy…if you’re an 8 year old girl.  Usually, people grow out of that stage of naivete and become adults.  It’s not clear to me why the views of the delusional have become mainstream, but I suspect it has something to do with the state of protracted adolescence that’s epidemic in the West.  The bemusement turns to despair when you realize that it’s the delusional people who are in positions of influence and that adolescence for them is a permanent state.

link Facebook Inc NASDAQ:FB Market Cap Surpasses that of Amazon.

When you review the top stock market darlings over the past year or so, (with the exception of Tesla Motors ) one common theme stands out conspicuously.  The high fliers are companies tied to “social networking”.  Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn and of course the recent $19 billion dollar acquisition of What’s App. All of these are companies are expected to be advertising bonanzas for ad sellers to their websites.  In many respects, Google and Apple are also tied into social networking.

In essence, these stocks are extending the high school experience and capitalizing on it in ways never before imagined by the cool kids.  They are gossip stocks, preying on people’s apparent need to know what everyone else is doing.  Everyone has become Gladys Kravitz.  The difference is that now, the circle of snooping is much larger and someone gets paid to allow people to snoop.  Imagine this same business model in a time before the internet if you wanted to snoop on the activities of football captain “a” with head cheerleader “b”.  Your best pal would spill the beans, but before doing so, recites an ad to have a Coke or buy a Chrysler.

This is the core business model of the gossip stocks.  The companies all provide a means to socially interact among other people digitally, since typing letters on a small screen is the most natural way to communicate.   In order to do so, you have to navigate billboards that advertise purses, shoes and electronics as well as virility and baldness cures.  The billboard people pay untold millions of dollars to the gossip companies for providing the eyeballs.  Someone’s very smart…or maybe not.  I’ve never heard of anyone making a purchasing decision based on a banner ad on their Facebook page, but then again, I’ll have to check that on Twitter.  Don’t people just ignore them?  Aren’t they like the toss away fliers you get when entering a Costco?

It’s amusing to survey a brief sampling of the total market capitalization of some of the best known American corporations and compare them to the high flying gossip stocks.  First, we list the gossip stocks:

Facebook   105 billion dollars

Twitter   30 billion dollars

Zynga   4 billion dollars

LinkedIn  23 billion dollars

Now some notable well known corporations:

Google   404 billion dollars

Apple  468 billion dollars

Exxon 416 billon dollars

IBM  199 billion dollars

Coca Cola  163 billion dollars

Microsoft   315 billion dollars

McDonalds  96 billion dollars

Kraft Foods   32 billion dollars

General Motors 58 billion dollars

With the exception of perhaps Google, the companies listed in the second grouping have been around for decades, have deeply rooted infrastructures, employ armies of people and produce some of the most well known and consumed products in the world.  These dinosaur companies are on their way to becoming eclipsed by the new gossip industries.  It may be only the beginning.  Imagine what happens when someone invents a way to communicate merely by voice.