Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

The Wound That Won’t Heal

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Have you heard of Microsoft, Meta, SAP, Target, Merck, or Walmart? Of course you have. Could you name the CEOs of any of those companies? Yeah, you could probably name at least two or three. And, for those you can actually name, can you articulate their political dispositions?

Probably not.

There’s a good reason for this. The first reason is: who cares? If I need to buy cough syrup, I’m not going to trouble myself with what the CEO of the maker of that cough syrup thinks about politics, family life, religion, or any other personal topics. I just want to stop coughing.

The second reason is: most CEOs are shrewd enough to know that there’s absolutely no value or benefit to them running around shrieking about their opinions on anything except their own company’s products and services. If the CEO of IBM thinks that there should be a special 5% universal tax to fund transgender surgery, they’re not going to go onto CNBC to chat about it, because they would be idiots to do so. It’s a longstanding tradition among business leaders to keep their traps shut and to stay in their lane.

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Bapple, Pink

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Any of you out there who have used Apple’s Siri know all too well that it gets about 10% of the words stone-cold wrong (often, weirdly, changing pronouns to the other gender) which can lead to some bizarre communications if you don’t double-check before sending. There have been instances I’ve wanted to schedule meetings with folks but instead told them what I was going to do to them with a fork. In any case, it seems Apple has realized that Siri sucks out loud, which is causing a big exec shakeup. I bought puts yesterday on the heels of my Sliced post.