From Tamara to Vietnam

I think I finally understand the thing about Tamara now. I just wasn't getting it before.

Corporations, however, are a lot more complicated than that. I think you're right that it was better when families ran the businesses, and some of them still do. When a company "goes public", a lot of things change, and not always for the better. The reason a company sells stock in the first place is to raise capital, usually because they want to expand their operation. After the initial offering, the stocks are traded back and forth between people who have little to do with the operation, except for the board of directors who, between them, usually own a controlling interest (more than 50% of the stock). Many directors are on the boards of more than one company, so they must literally have more money than they know what to do with. Either that or they just like to manipulate things, like they were playing a grown up version of Monopoly. I don't know how much loyalty they have to the companies they rule, but I'm guessing "not much" because they will buy and sell them with alacrity, again, like a game of Monopoly. The rest of the stockholders are indeed just in it for the money but, when they think a company's profits are destined to grow, they bid up the price of it's stock, and vice versa. There is another class of stock traders called "bottom feeders". They will buy stocks of a distressed company, figuring that it has no place to go but up. I understand that, when General Motors was going through their bankruptcy, people were still trading their stock, even though it was almost certain that it would soon become totally worthless. I'm not sure what the motivation was behind that, but I certainly don't know everything there is to know about the stock market.

Customers may initially be drawn in by advertising but, if it's a product that they will run out of and have to buy more, like food, they won't keep buying it if they find out that they don't like it for some reason or another. A lot of advertising, both commercial and political, seems to be designed to appeal to people who aren't very smart. I suppose that's because there are more of them than us and the advertiser wants to get the most bang for his buck. I'm not sure if this is true for the political stuff, but commercial advertising is also driven by the desire to be remembered. An ad may be cute, funny, or just plain stupid. They don't care if you like the ad or not, just so long as it catches your attention and causes you to remember the name of the product. This was told to me a long time ago by somebody who had some experience in the advertising business, and I have no reason to doubt his word.

I think you're right that Russia was a mess before, during, and after Communism. I'm not sure why, but it might have something to do with their climate. That's one place where global warming would be an improvement. Also, it's so big, and has lots of different ethnic groups, kind of like us, only more so. Canada seems to be getting along just fine, although it's hard to tell because they seldom show up in our news media. Europe, on the other hand, has been in financial hot water for years now. Some people blame it on the European Union, and they may be right. People have been trying to unite Europe under one flag for centuries, and it has never worked for long. The current system is certainly more humane than their past history of constant warfare, but it remains to be seen if it will hold together in the long run.

I don't think that Sergeant Kaminski and I could have saved Vietnam all by ourselves, there would have needed to be many more like us, and maybe there was, but they were outvoted by the others. I've been thinking about that training exercise I told you about ever since it was dredged up from my memory banks, and there were a number of reasons why it went wrong. Fifty guys is big group to do escape and evasion, usually it's not more than a half dozen, and there's probably a reason for that. Our mission was to evade the enemy, not to engage them. Once our cover was blown, however, we needed a Plan "B". Sergeant Kaminski seems to have come up with one on the spot, but he was unable to communicate it to the rest of us in time because we were spread out all over the woods, which we needed to be for Plan "A". The main fault lied will the idiot who chambered that round. It was a distinctive sound that any GI would have recognized, and the forest had been really quiet up to that point. Maybe the exercise could have been planned better in the first place, but it still wouldn't have been idiot proof. Few thing are.