Good afternoon. It is I Gigi the parti poodle here to introduce another one of my novelist’s blogs. Today my novelist is going to discuss one of my most favorite subjects: money. I love the smell of currency. It’s like the fragrance of fresh air intertwined with something dirty. You may not think poodles have much interest in finance. You are grossly mistaken. We need collars, leashes, beds, veterinary visits, food, little stuffed weasels and treats, treats, treats. You don’t think we believe these things grow on trees, do you? Absolutely not. That is why I, much like the great mushers overseeing their dog sled team, crack my whip and get my subservient to bring home a paycheck. Not to mention how much I love to watch my stocks and mutual funds widen and expand much like that dullard Maltese. But enough about my tastes. Here is my novelist.  

This week I read an article about a college student who, last June at the age of twenty took his own life because he believed he had a deficit of $730,000. Perhaps you have heard this story. The money was a negative balance in his investment account. The company he had his investments with was also the investment company known for being a large player in the whole Reddit fiasco where companies that weren’t worth much suddenly had stock being purchased at an unbelievable pace. I see the value in that situation but let’s stick to this part of the story. The young man panicked when he could not get ahold of the company which did not have phone support. Because let’s face it, online chat is so much better when you are trying to figure out why you are suddenly $730,000 in debt.

I could go on for hours about how phone support for Americans regardless of the company should be based in America and follow an around the sun model meaning you should get phone support in America during the morning and through the evening and then at night and the early morning hours like say four AM you should get support in somewhere like say Ireland, especially if you are doing tech support. That is not how most support models are set up. The reason they should be set up this way is a support desk is an entry level position into a company. And it’s a position that helps you learn how said company works and provides a place to start learning the product or technology the company is in the business of making. Thus, you would pull your best and brightest off the desk and start having them work up the ladder filling jobs in house which creates a more knowledgeable employee which in turn helps to create a stronger company and hopefully a stronger economy without outsourcing labor from foreign nations. This costs more in the initial stages and pays off much bigger in the long run provided the company doesn’t waste its finances creating more and more overpaid management jobs, bureaucracy, and a weaker product.

Apparently these financial bozos thought it would be a good idea to have no phone support at all for a financial company no less. People go to business school for four to ten years to learn about the intricacies of the stock market. If it takes that long to understand complex investing why would anyone think a video game and a whole lot of lure would allow a twenty-year-old to cultivate the same knowledge?

Apparently, the company’s logo looks suspiciously like Pied Piper from Silicon Valley and if you watch the show’s entire run you know how that turned out. And this company strives to be the Joe Camel of the twenty first century. Big phallic nose and all. And who is their target customer? Why inexperienced zoomers and millennials of course! Especially college kids who are intellectually bright and financially dim.

I decided to run a little experiment of my own. As you know psychopaths have speech patterns which involve disfluencies (um and uh), subordinate conjunctions (because, so that, therefore, etc.) and repeated words as in saying the same word twice like the-the. All humans do these, but a psychopath does them more frequently. So, I decided to watch a few videos of one of the executives in the company being interviewed because, let’s face it, narcissists (psychopaths are always narcissists) crave attention. I watched four different interviews done at different points in time and counted how many combined disfluencies, subordinate conjunctions and repeated words said executive had. In the first interview which was four minutes the count was 36. In the five-minute interview the count was 28. And in the twenty-nine-minute interview the count was 254. For reference, I clocked a known psychopathic minister during two separate sermons at 100 both times. The sermons were around the same length as the twenty-nine-minute interview. I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but 254 sounds suspect to me. His favorite word was “um” and his second was “uh”.  If you want to read more about Wall Street reptiles like this sweetheart, you can read Snakes in Suits: When Psycopaths Go to Work by Dr. Robert Hare.

Our education system (if I can even call it a system) is run by brilliant individuals who have not figured out that psychopaths want three things: sex, food, and money. That’s pretty much it. Everything else is incidental. A lot of folks want to believe evil human beings want power. No. They want sex, food, and money. Power is just a way to attain these three things. When I hear someone say the creep who harmed them wanted power over them, I rage inside and look at them like they are stupid. Again, psychopaths don’t care if they have power over their mark or not. They don’t care about human beings at all. All they care about are sex, food, and money. If power is a way to take that from you that is the tactic or strategy, they will use. Evil people are always thinkers never feelers despite what some misguided idiots want to believe.

And yet the education system refuses to teach two basic skills to thwart making someone a mark: self-defense and financial responsibility. Probably because most of the education system doesn’t know how to teach these things because they tend to be individuals who are logistical or idealistic who, by the way are likely the most common marks for financial and sexual abuse.

Might I also add intelligent, educated people are notoriously terrible with money. Professionals are some of the worst. You can read about how many brilliant individuals cannot figure out how to pull and not push open the door marked PULL as well as screw up their finances in the famous book The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley Ph. D. and William D. Danko Ph. D.. You can also watch my Stream of the Week below which I re-watched this week and it chilled me to the bone as much as it did on first viewing.

My Books

You can check out my books Chicane and the first three books in my Musicology book series Musicology: Volume One, Baby!, Musicology: Volume Two, Kid!, and Musicology Volume Three, Twist! on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback editions. You can also check out Musicology’s web site at www.musicologyrocks.com and vote for who you think will will Musicology!!!

STREAM OF THE WEEK: MAXED OUT: HARD TIMES, EASY CREDIT, and the ERA OF PREDITORY LENDERS (2006)-YouTube

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Gospel of Mathew 7:15, King James Version”. When I read the article about the young man who took his life whom, by the way, my whole heart goes out to, I remembered this important documentary on how lousy we Americans are with credit. That doesn’t mean all Americans suck at handling money and many save and pay off credit cards in full every pay period on time and invest wisely. But a lot of Americans don’t and are easily sucked into financial preditory traps which are much more daunting than I realized. This documentary does a good job of showing some of these traps and how fragile Americans are and how easily it is to get sucked in. It covers not only the individual citizen but our nation’s attitude as well. You may see a few familiar faces in this film such as Louis C.K., Robin Leach and Elizabeth Warren. But honestly, the non-celebrities are more fascinating and their stories more riveting.

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