Mallory's Camera

Of TaxBwanas, Curries, & Scamming

2022-04-10T12:54:48Z

Awwwwww. The kid is proud of his eccentric old Mum:

Also, the botanically-abled asakiyume informs me that the photo of a white flower I posted yesterday was a star magnolia, not a dogwood.

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My first TaxBwana client yesterday was a crazy woman, less interested in having her taxes done than in having an audience for her rant about how the Social Security Administration was fucking her over.

After listening to her for 10 minutes and politely—then, not so politely—attempting to direct the conversation back onto a more utilitarian track, I rose abruptly from the table and went over to Mary Ann, the site coordinator.

“Not working with that person,” I announced. “You’ll have to do it.”

Notice how I did not say, “Sorry.”

My tolerance for insane people is greater at the beginning of the season. Yesterday, however, was the very last day for the Saturday TaxBwana squad. I’d used up all my tolerance!

And I am a volunteer.

To me, that means TaxBwana-ing should be all about fun.

No fun to be had with that particular insane person—though I should note that it was not her insanity that turned me off but her bullying, abusive manner—which, no doubt, was related to her insanity but hey! its underlying etiology did not melt my heart since like I said, I’ve run out of tolerance.

Subsequent clients were all lovely and, even better than that, grateful. I closed out the day telling a woman who earns $11,000 a year that between child tax credits and earned income credit, the government would be handing her $10,000.

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Still raining by the time I got home.

So instead of tromping, I sat in the kitchen and chatted with Dev while he made a complicated potato curry. It smelled divine! He grinds his own curries. Must get him to reveal his specific spice recipe.

“What’s the most extreme thing you’ve ever eaten?” Dev asked.

I thought for a minute. “Probably a sheep’s head. And a sheep’s eyes. In Morocco.”

“Ah, yes, Morocco!” Dev said. “Good cooks! I ate camel once in Morocco.”

“What did it taste like?”

“Good. Like rehydrated jerky. A bit salty for Western tastes.”

“What part of India do your parents come from? Northern India? Southern India? Eastern India? Western India?”

“Western India,” Dev said. “Gujarat. The only state in India where alcohol is illegal.”

Gujurat, my oh-so-imperfect geography vaguely remembered, is near Pakistan. “Why? Because it’s an Islamic state?”

“No. Because Gandhi was born there. Also, it is officially a vegetarian state though they cannot enact that into law.”

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I should have remunerated, but instead I decided to watch more of The Dropout, which packs far more of an emotional punch than WeCrashed while traversing similar territory.

The startup world of WeCrashed is a lot more familiar to me because it’s Maria Wilhelm’s startup world.

In fact, though Anne Hathaway looks nothing like Maria Wilhelm except for the hair, her vocal mannerisms as Rebekah Neumann were so uncannily like Maria’s—particularly in that scene where she fires Elisha Kennedy, smiling, The chief branding officer should know the company’s mission—that I wondered for a few seconds whether Maria had been her model.

After all, Maria is in the showbiz world! It’s not inconceivable that Anne Hathaway had run into Maria at some point.

Far more plausible, though, that this is just a showbiz type. The Hollywood version of the female of the lethal narcissist species. Never raise your voice. Never lose your smile.

The Dropout packs a bigger emotional punch because it’s so much uglier.

Elizabeth Holmes has no grace. In addition to being a sociopath, she’s probably on the spectrum. You watch her rehearsing her pitch in mirrors over and over again. The pitch isn't just to potential clients; it's to all human beings. She practices lowering her voice! She practices the Lethal Smile (that comes so naturally to Rebekah Neumann.)

Holmes' transformation at the end of the third episode into a female version of Steve Jobs with a scarlet slash of a mouth reminded me of Norman Bates transforming into his mother at the end of Psycho.

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I will also add that when I first heard of Theranos’s “technology” 10 or 15 years ago, I was utterly mystified as to how it was supposed to work.

Because when you draw blood with a pinprick, red blood cells lyse!

Which means they release potassium.

Wouldn’t those elevated potassium levels throw off most diagnostic assays?

Oh well, I thought at the time. Smarter people than you have found the workaround.

Except, as it turns out, they hadn’t.

They weren’t smarter than me.

Just better scammers.

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Can Dance But Can't Hustle

2022-04-04T13:26:18Z

Dreamed about Ben! He was telling me he loved me, that it had always been me, that he’d just been too much of a schmuck and hopeless human to deal with those emotions constructively, but that now that he was dead, he just wanted me to know…

WTF?

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Meanwhile, it rained all day yesterday, so I stayed inside, remunerating and watching more of WeCrashed.

The remuneration is going s-l-o-w-l-y on account of it’s requiring some original thought, and that original thought must be buoyed by calculations.

WeCrashed got mixed reviews, but I think it’s great.

WeCrashed functions as a case study about the one quality that all successful entrepreneurs must have, which despite what the airplane bookshops tell you is not creative thinking, passion, or self-discipline but simply the ability never to pay the slightest bit of attention when other people say, “No”—a trait, by the way, that entrepreneurs share with sociopaths.

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Adam Neumann and the fall of WeWork has been widely ridiculed in the press, which holds it up as a cautionary tale of hubris and over-reach. But Neumann escaped with a personal fortune of $1.3 billion, so I don’t see the hubris there.

No, the hubris was all on the part of the investors—and forgive me if I don’t cry for JP Morgan Chase, Benchmark, or SoftBank. They’re all still in business. A little bit poorer but not substantively so, given the scale of their financial operations.

The WeWork business model was a mess from the start. Co-working spaces? Not a bad idea. But why would you lease the buildings they’re in rather than own the buildings they’re in? The business model really doesn’t work as a profit-generating scheme unless you own the buildings because the rental price of commercial real estate in “desirable” cities like New York is outrageous to begin with, and once you make the necessary capital improvements and frivifications that support the WeWork franchise, those landlords essentially have you over a barrel—you can’t get out without being on the hook for more capital investments.

The only thing you can do to protect yourself is to negotiate excessively l-o-n-g commercial leases—which did become one of WeWork’s primary strategies.

But then what happens if you want to get out of those leases?

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Maria, my boss at ICM Breakpoint, had a modus operandi that was identical to Adam Neumann’s—with the extra added oomph that she was an exceedingly beautiful, seductive woman who could (and did!) sleep with all her investors.

And she had vision!

At least two of the revenue-generating schemes she saw in her Magic 8-Ball paid off handsomely in subsequent years: video on demand and social media.

But they didn’t pay off until 10 years after Maria had us all scrambling around to put them in place!

When I was making all those cold calls to Mark Burnette’s production team—Hiya Mark Burnette peon! Say! Could I borrow a few thousand reels of “Survivor” B-roll?—the Internet was still turtling along at 800kbps! How could you stream video on demand on that?

Maria never took, “No,” for an answer!

She tried to teach me that trick—for a while there, she saw me as a protegee—but I was constitutionally incapable of learning it.

When people say, “No,” to me, I automatically assume they’re rational human beings with justifiable reasons for saying, “No,” and I accept it.

Can dance but can’t hustle, in other words.

After Jeff Berg got tired of funding Breakpoint and pulled the plug, Maria danced over to notoriously curmudgeonly producer/director James Cameron’s shop where she now holds some inflated title or other.

And I sit here at my computer, looking forward to another exciting day of remuneration.

Life!

Still, I suspect I’m happier than Maria. In her rare, unguarded moments, when she wasn’t trying to sell something to someone, she was an exceedingly tortured soul.

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The Third Sex

2022-04-02T11:47:19Z

Morgan sent me the link early in the morning.

Since I woke up in an unusually reflective mood, I thought, What the hey! I’ll read it.

An hour later, I was absolutely stunned.

Whoa, I thought. This is it. This is that paradigm shift. This is the thing that will float to the top of the murk, that one fact that 1,000 years from now when everything in our present tense is cataloged under the heading “Second Dark Age,” people will look back upon.

Here’s the piece: https://jme.bmj.com/content/46/11/743

Synopsis: A non-binary 12-year-old wants to delay puberty indefinitely.

Not because they want to align with chocolate, vanilla, or any of the gender flavors in between.

But because they want to remain genderless.

The article appears in an ethics journal, so most of it consists of arguments about medical freedom, pro and con, but really, it’s about a lot more than that.

Is this another example of body mods, similar to piercings, tattoos, etc?

Or is this about the laboratory creation of a third sex? A third sex with a strikingly different brain—since many of the developmental transformations that signal emergence into what we define as “adulthood” are biochemically catalyzed by puberty?

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The article’s implications continued to follow me throughout the day, loaning a float-y, science fiction-y feeling to a 24-hour stretch that was otherwise quite rote and ordinary.

It rained; I remunerated—half-heartedly.

I fixed my vacuum cleaner!

It had broken several months before; I’d gone so far as to cruise the Internet for a replacement.

I have no mechanical aptitude whatsoever, so it really kinda shocked me when I sat down—in something of a dissociative state because that article—and began disassembling the vacuum cleaner and then figured out a way to put it back together so that it started working again.

I now have a clean floor! Which is good since Sybyl the cat has commenced her annual spring shed.

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In the afternoon, the Internet went out, so I had a long conversation with Dev who is the current inhabitant of the downstairs apartment.

Dev is going to the Culinary Institute because cooking is his passion.

His other passion is gaming. He is a professional gamer who’s been flown to Dubai multiple times to compete in the XXX World Championships (XXX being the placeholder for various games whose names he told me but I forget.)

Dubai is like a pleasure dome on the planet Venus. Incredibly futuristic. Incredibly hot.

Dev is also a Physician Assistant. “Yeah, I did that for the parents,” he said, making a face and rolling his eyes. “Indian parents, you know.”

But Dev hates healthcare.

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In the evening I watched the first episode of AppleTV’s WeCrashed, which is really well done and totally fascinating.

My old ICM Breakpoint boss-cum-mentor Maria had a lot in common with Adam Neumann.

I hadn’t realized before that Maria is a type.

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