Simple Steps, adnotated

So I wake up to see 15+ trackbacks in the queue, all from the same place. The first thing I know is they're not spam, it's just not fucking possible such deluge still passed the machinery. What then ?

As it turns out, that kid wrote a large article ; it's not unreadable, God knows I've adnotated much worse already. So... wouldn't you know it, here we are again with an article that started as a comment and then grew long. It borrows from both intellectual traditions (adnotations and comments) and so it's formatted in a bullet style uncommon here on Trilema -- apparently uncommon not for philosophical reasons but merely for lack of adequacy usually.

But, whatever, enough intro. Here we go :

• That "industrial ego" website is fucking hysterical, I'm basically asked to read the scroller bar of vast empty steppes.
• Anyway, not that salesmanship will ever be obsolete per se ; but "EMH"-based, 1990s flavoured, "democratic"/America-first, Danny De Vito-spoken ideas of salesmanship are definitely dead in the water. Purchase decisions in the new fascism are made centrally (and ineptly) by the New Bureaucrat, not by some diffuse "people" thinking about "their own money" -- there aren't anymore people ; nor enough money left to go around, so the state gets it all. The NB's of course sold to, like anyone else ; but he's both much easier to sell to, and much more unapproachable through any kind of rational, or reason-based process, than the (notoriously idiotic) "citizen" of ye olde America ever was.
• Moreover, even in the (by now almost fairytale-like) context whereby "America's not [quite] dead [yet] and here we areⁱ selling Glen Ross Farms or whatever" they've long killed the goose. The naivite of separating whats from whos and whatnot is an amusing echo of the Gilded Age, a time of shocking informational poverty and network scarcity, a rural world trying to turn itself industrial without (much) bloodshed. The idea that you met anyone in your life who at any point in their life didn't sell to deadbeats only is altogether dubious. Maybe you have, who knows what 1860s-born sourdough miners you met on their deathbed ; but you personally never found yourself in a world amenable to "qualifying leads". It was always a fantasy, just like the idea that "100% reserve" is a ploy to "safeguard" the mark's funds rather than outright a Murphy variant : nice I suppose, perhaps productive in its capacity to support youthful enthusiasm, but never ever factual.
• Which is, ultimately, the problem : a classroom-full of inept farmhands, stupid but stubbornⁱⁱ, managing to co-opt the "teacher" into inflating grades aren't, not ever, going to "meet their just deserts in an apocalyptic event, special-taylored for their all-important persons, whereby the God of Classrooms comes down from On High and punishes them mightily (but narrative-adequately) -- perhaps to wear dunce hats made of their own eyelids and copy down 'I am an ass' fifty-three billion times". That's not how reality works ; and the expectation to the contrary, however disguised still as naive, merely betrays the same infantile mental processesⁱⁱⁱ that result in infants falling over a lot : the misperception of fixity in the environment. The only thing that happens if some county allows corruption in its school to the degree of teacher-student collusion is the poor quality of education in that county, with all its attendant effects -- regrettable but subtle. There's no requirement of fair-play upon the universe to your benefit, there's no rule that phenomena need be visible (to your preferred viewpoint!) in proportion to their scale, there's none of that. The country just goes fucking under, lock stock and barrel, while clamoring being right and in the right and always right all along. No problem there.
• Peter Schiff's problem at no point in his life was that "all the unpaid police work USG requires (but doesn't pay for) made it unprofitable for him to serve foreign clients from the US". Maddoff managed just fine^iv, and for that matter look into the schmucks behind LTCM -- nobodies on a stick a la Robert Cox Merton for christ's sake. Does that anodyne douche look to you like some kinda Ford-Taylor combo, legendarily squeezing inconceivable efficiencies out of large, fully controlled operations ? Serving offshore clients was always profitable, and Barney Frank & co took, always took -- I personally saw him take -- extreme caution for it to stay that way. Peter Schiff's problem was, throughout, and will likely remain, the demo he aims to sell to : small, unsophisticated yahoos, ie the only set that could ever be confused into interest for his wares.
• Schiff aside, selling financial products directly is the bane of sense in general, the exact equivalent of going about fires to discuss philosophy with the attendance, or trying to read poetry in the courtroom. People handle their philosophy through intermediaries because there's a lot of it and any point can upturn the whole and it generally doesn't fit into the time slots they have available. The reason there even is a judge presiding over courthouse meetings is to manage those timeslots for everybody. Even if I ever heard of this Schiff character (which is moderately likely, intel makes very detailed briefs), and even if "I" subscribed to his whatever (which is impossible, because), nevertheless you can't call me right as I'm hitting on some shop clerk girly / having a future lady in waiting sniff the socks of some girlfriend of hers^v to ask me if I have any money. I don't even carry a phone, the girls do (and haven't for very long before everyone else followed suit). It's like walking around the walls at night, biding your time to throw over bricks attached to letters addressed to Kale Kartanou because you've never heard of Esther Handali : the very act disqualifies you from any suspicion of sense (whether it also qualifies you for beheading, on the strength of your apparent passion, or not). Plainly put, if you're not selling your innovation in finance to money managers, you're not selling an innovation, you're scamming consumers -- just like the people calling up Joe Schmoe to tell him about the fuel efficiency doohickey. Da fuck they want with him, he doesn't have Harald Krüger's number anymore than they do. Takeaway : if the aliens land in front of you and they say anything besides "Ta-ke-us-to-yo-url-ead-err" to you, walk away. If it's with "We... are... the...aaa...lienssss" it's a show&dance number, not an alien encounter, and this irrespective of the costumes.
• The point about the competitive edge is at best naive. My guys routinely opened bank accounts within the hour through the entire timeperiod you discuss, which is not something I ever actually needed. Nor does anyone conceivably ever need such -- unless they're moving stolen merchandise or something warehouses can always be arranged long in advance. You see, people with money generally know what they're doing with it. What room for spur of the moment activity is there ? Prior to his notorious haircut, the hated Hungarian warned the BoE, and weeks in advance. This entire "secret meats in secret sauce moving at the speed of light" story... what can I tell you. We've heard it before -- remarkably more often from court proceedings than anywhere else.
• If that Ashe character is as smart as you depict him, he "focused first on registered agents" for the aforestated reason, not because you lot, being poorer than prison rats, had no access to as much as a quiet room. His approach to that focus, however, was entirely misguided. The way to focus on registered agents is in person, over lunch. If you can't buy the guy lunch you can't sell him your product, so focus on actual contacts first. Then, once you've built that, you're absolutely not going to even consider working for Schiff-mobiles (whether your name's Julian or not), because... holy shit, it's harder than dating, nobody builds a stable of sluts to just give them away at lame parties with timid accountants. Not even the scotches-famous geometra Calboni. The difficulty of having made those contacts in the first place informs you (or whatever, the investment banker) as to their relative value, and protects them from hare-brained schemes -- which is why the system stably works this way, and how blacks stayed non-people for a century post Lincoln.
• Incidentally, did anything ever come of any of the girls in smile-n-dial-23.jpg ? Did they ever as much as get a name ? Anything ?
• As to the "calling back", I really can't conceive wth were you lot thinking. Why not just get a phone line hooked to an answering machine, if nothing else ? Who the fuck cold calls off shitty infrastructure anyway, why not try and run a restaurant kitchen on dull knives and duct tape.

1. "Here we are now,
   Entertainers,
   Feeling stupid
   But contagious..." [↩]
2. Hey, ever seen The Asphalt Jungle ? For that farm boy in there, that's it, everyone you met or knew, "trying their best". [↩]
3. I can't find now where I explained that infants and small children have this problem whereby they see things in place and expect they're fixed there, wherever seen, so they end up constructing mechanically impossible arrangements. [↩]
4. The list of assorted "countesses" and other princesses that didn't even know how much money they had with him is longer than whatever nostalgia file you're talking about. [↩]
5. Yeah, that's right -- I'm never in public except for hunting. Because why the fuck else would I ever go slumming, if I'm not there to buy the Marliyn at seventeen then why am I there ? "Travel" ? Why do you go to the forest -- and don't tell me "I live there". [↩]