Chasing Share Price (Why Stock Picking Is Really For Chumps Today!)

The stock market has become a casino - a rigged one where the house always wins.

General Electric is no more.  The last two divisions were spun off as GE Aerospace and GE Vernova, the former making the iconic GE jet engines and the latter, power systems.  GE Health was spun-off last year.  What the heck happened to this storied old company and why?  The latter part is easier to answer, and many are now pointing the finger at Jack Welch, once lauded as a visionary, but now viewed as a villain.  He literally ran the company into the ground chasing the almighty share price.

But how did this happen and why is it happening to companies all across America?  Simply stated, Wall Street became obsessed with share price and would do anything to keep the line going up, even if it meant faking it.  As a result, a number of poor incentives were created, which in the long run, meant that companies were gutted for short-term gains.

Stock Options were a big part of the problem.  Executives were offered huge tranches of shares at fixed prices.  If a CEO is offered a million shares at $10 a share, and he can drive the share price up to $20, he ends up with a $10M payday as a result.  Bear in mind that share price is based on market perception, which can be driven by real profits and earnings just as easily as it can be by faked-up accounting practices (such as employed by Enron).

Share price, as we have seen with "meme" stocks, can be hyped up on the Internet with a pump-and-dump scheme.  Pump-and-dump schemes are illegal, of course, but the fines are laughably small. As I noted before, one famous New Jersey teenager was caught up in one, and when the SEC came knocking, he said, "do you take a check?" as the fine they hit him with was probably 10% of what he made in his scam.

Pump-and-dump involves using someone else's company as a mechanism for fraud.  Stock options merely incentivize executives to pump-and-dump their own company's stock.  So you hype up the expectation of future profits or future technology, while burying the real truth in boring quarterly and annual statements that most retail investors never read.  But those retail investors are the ones causing spikes in share prices.

The executive who has stock options is only incentivized to keep the company solvant until the day their huge stock options actually vest.  After that, they don't care - they wait for the Board of Directors to remove them, and get paid in a pre-negotiated "Golden Parachute."  It is like playing at a casino where you never lose and take no real risks.

There are other ways to juice the share price.  Layoffs are one way to boost the share price as Wall Street looks favorably upon them.  Overnight, you have cut your overhead and increased your profitability by the same amount.  So if  you lay off 10% of your staff, you might cut your overhead by 5%, which in turn makes the balance sheet show a 5% gain in profit.  That's a lot.  Of course, in the long term, such layoffs may be harmful, not only for employee morale, but for R&D needed to keep the company competitive.  You might be able to "float" selling last year's product for a while, but eventually, your competition will steal away your business.

Stock Buy-Backs are a weird way to boost stock price and were once deemed illegal, as they were outright share price manipulation (and still are!).  By purchasing back your shares, not only do you increase the share price (momentarily) by making each remaining share worth a larger percentage of the company, but you skew the demand curve for the shares, such that other buyers have to pay more - a lot more - to compete against you.  Oddly enough, many companies do buy-backs not when their share price is low, but when it is high.  Later on, when the dust settles, people realize what a shitty deal they made - for the shareholders.  But timed properly to coincide with their stock option vesting, it helps boost the payday for the CEO.

The problem with stock buy-backs is obvious - the amount of ready cash available for the company to use for expansion or R&D is diminished.  The company has fewer reserves to fall back on.  Often, the buy-backs are financed by debt - which is the number one killer of old-line companies.  Amazon didn't destroy brick-and-mortar, onerous debt did.  Stock buy-backs trade long-term stability for short-term gains, for shareholders and those with stock options.

Boosting Profits is one way to boost share price - and an incentive to "cook the books" to make it appear the company is more profitable.  This is what destroyed Enron - if the company ever had a real business model to begin with.  Techniques like "Mark to Market" can show phantom profits for contracts that have not been executed or investments owned that have gone up in value.  But real profits have to be realized to be real.  Otherwise, it is just "profit on paper" and that money can't be spent.

Profits can also be boosted in other "legitimate" ways, such as layoffs as discussed above.  Or, you can gut the content of an old-line product and  keep selling it based on brand awareness before consumers catch on.  For at least a few years, you will show a spike in profitability, before the reputation of your product is ruined.  By then, you've cashed on on tens of millions of dollars in stock options and moved on.

Jacking Dividends is another way to goose the share price and some companies have been known to increase dividends even as the company is losing money

The problem with chasing share price, particularly by using short-term means, is that the market constantly adjusts share price based on profitability or perception thereof.  So, for example, you lay off 10% of your employees, the share price might show an increase of, say, 5% or more, based on the expectation that profits will go up by a corresponding amount.  Problem is, you can't do this over and over again.  It is a one-time trick, and usually a sign of poor management - either because the company was horrendously overstaffed, or because management is throwing away their brain trust.

Similarly, you can use one-time accounting tricks to make the company appear to be more profitable on paper, but they just raise the expectation for the next fiscal quarter.  Gotta keep the line going up!  And you can't keep the line going up, forever.

Closely held companies - other than those owned by "Venture Capitalists" - can do things for the long haul and not have to worry about satiating the needs of shareholders and Wall Street.  They can concentrate on real profits and long-term viability, and make decisions accordingly.  Such a company might endure short-term losses to invest in new technology.

Tesla, as a private company, could invest in EV technology, while other public car companies were afraid to invest.  Once they demonstrated the technology worked, they went public and made some shareholders (one in particular) fantastically wealthy, at lest on paper.  Only then did the public companies (worldwide) jump on the EV bandwagon, causing the EVglut and price war we see today.

Of course, other privately held companies are taken private by VC firms just to set them up for a subsequent IPO.  Juice up the valuation by spinning off divisions, lay off a ton of people, run away from your pension obligations - and then sell the polished turd that remains to Johnny Q. Public in an IPO.  There is no shortage of suckers thinking they will get rich this way.

Part of the problem for GE was that Jack Welch went on a buying spree, buying everything from NBC to GE Capital.  I once had a lease from GE Capital, when I had to install a new unitary rooftop A/C unit on my office building.  I made all the payments for three years and then they sold me the unit for a dollar.  I wonder if they would have repossessed if I stopped paying.  The cost of removing the unit would have exceeded the remaining payments.

GE Capital got caught up in the same problem - pushing the line up.  To keep showing "Mark to Market" profits, they had to keep making deals - deals that looked good on paper, but were actually poor risks.  They got caught up in the subprime mortgage mess - loaning money to people who had no intention or means to pay it back.  They sold a plethora of long-term care policies for the elderly, not realizing how long the elderly can live and how expensive long-term care can be.

In the short-term, if you count these mortgages as "Paid" and these long-term care polices as profitable, you look like a superstar.  But it is just a way of taking credit for profits that might be made in the future, if at all, often after you are long gone or even dead.  The whole thing exploded and a storied old-line American company is no more - dragged down (again) by unmanageable debt.

So, what's the point of all of this?  Only that stock-picking is for chumps.  Yes, you can get lucky once in a while, with a share price that goes up.  It is like winning at the casino - it encourages you to keep gambling, and eventually your losses will far exceed those random gains.

Young people - young men in particular - once they get a "good paying" job, are tempted to speculate in the market.  And there is no shortage of people online who will encourage you to do this.  I've seen this again and again - people touting how such-and-such stock is "going places" - "just last week, it went up 10%!  Jump in before the train leaves the station!"  And people like to be winners and fantasize about making it big in the market.  But like any good casino, the only real winners are the ones controlling the games and that's not you.

The best "luck" I have had in the market has been by leaving money in Equity/Income funds (that comprise stocks that pay dividends and make real profits, not paper ones) and in buying individual stocks that pay dividends and actually make things and real profits.   But even with the latter, I was a babe in the woods, not understanding the real fiscal condition of the company I was buying shares in.  Were they cooking the books? Buying back stock?  Loading up the company with debt?  We mere mortals have neither the skills or the time to fully understand these things.

The worst way to invest is based on share price, particularly companies where the share price is shooting up for no apparent reason.  The game is fixed, and not in our favor!  Never play a rigged game - and all gambling is rigged.  Gambling is not investing!

Sadly, when this sort of stuff gets out of hand, eventually something has to give and it all blows up in our faces, much as it did in 2008.  The stock market is shooting up, profits are at all-time highs, and yet the average American isn't feeling the joy.  A few people are getting very, very rich, while a whole lot of others are stagnating.

Eventually, something has to give.

Brand Names Are For The Poor

Rich people don't need to advertise they are rich.

We were walking on the bike path the other day and found a pair of sunglasses that someone had set on a tree stump.  Apparently, someone had dropped them and a helpful Samaritan put them on the tree stump so if the person came back to look for them, they would find them.  I examined them for any identifying information (Zenni helpfully engraves your phone number on the temple) but saw that they were just non-prescription sunglasses with interlocking "G's" on the temples.  Gucci?

Funny thing, but on the way back we saw an old lady snatch them up and said, "Oh, you found your glasses!" and she gave us a guilty look and said "Uh, yea..." which told me she swiped them.  This is why the lost-and-found is a better place for this kind of thing than a tree stump.  But I digress.

It got me to thinking about brand names and why someone would pay extra for little logos on some inexpensive sunglasses.  I recall the clerks at the Patent Office had glasses with HUGE "D&G" gold letters on the side - along with other "designer" gear - all on a GS-2 salary.  I guess if you are living with Mom and Dad and your only expense in life is car payments, then you can blow the rest of it on bling.

It seems the poor and lower-middle-class are obsessed with brand names more than the upper classes.  The "strivers" seek the trappings of wealth and in the process, squander the real thing.  People put themselves in financial stress to have fancy things, and I know this because I've done it. And while it is nice to have fancy things, often the satisfaction is fleeting and in some cases, it can backfire as people will resent you for apparent flaunting of wealth.

It is funny, though, but if you meet really rich people, they don't have brand names plastered all over their possessions.  Their shoes don't say "NIKE" in bold letters or a colored trademarked swoop.  They don't wear clothes with the name of the "designer" in foot-high letters.  Their handbags don't have the initials of the "designer" all over them.  Rather, they wear fine things - and you can tell, too.  The clothes fit perfectly, likely because they were tailored. Their handbags just look expensive - fine leather, no corners cut, precision hardware.  They don't need a designer's name on it - they already know they are rich by dint of spending thousands (tens of thousands) on a handbag.

You can just tell.  When Mark worked at the winery and people would come from New York City or from Europe, he could tell right away.  Their clothes were just a bit different.  Even wearing blue jeans (and no, not fake-distressed torn ones - that's trash taste) you could just tell.  No logos or brand names adorned the pockets, no trademarked rivets or buttons, but they just looked expensive.

The same is true for other aspects of wealth.  The "striver" middle-class guy who thinks he is wealthy because he owns a small construction company, buys a "look-at-me!" mini-mansion in a neighborhood of similar mini-mansions.   The very rich live in real mansions in gated neighborhoods you can't get into.   They don't want to flaunt their wealth to the lower classes.  They want to enjoy their fabulous house in peace and quiet.

Across the channel from us is St. Simon's Island -  host to a plethora of look-at-me mini-mansions that sell for a million dollars or less.  When you ask residents where they are from, they reply, "THE island!" as if it was some exclusive retreat and not merely an upper-middle-class housing development.  When they say this to me, I reply, "Oh, you live on Sea Island?" and they get flustered, because that's the gated island where homes sell in the millions and residents keep their private jets at the airport.  That right there is the real difference between wanna-be wealth and real wealth.

And I suspect that the residents of Sea Island don't call it "THE island" or even advertise the fact they live there.  They don't need our validation or envy.  They already know they won.

So, what's the point?  Well, the very rich often got very rich by selling fake wealth to us plebes. I noted before that the poor are more likely to buy brand-name products, from laundry detergent to fancy cars to designer clothing.  The middle class shopped at Sears when I was a kid - buying practical things at moderate prices.  The middle class bought Chevrolets, and maybe upgraded to a Pontiac or an Oldsmobile when they got older.

The poor buys designer labels and would rather drive a secondhand Cadillac than a brand-new Chevy.  The very rich?   They drive cars where you say, "Gee, what kind of car is that?  Never seen one of them!" and you can't tell what it is, because it doesn't have logos and names plastered all over it.  One of the latest trends in ultra-rich transport is the under-the-radar transit van.  These are black high-top vans (Mercedes Sprinter, etc.) with black-tinted windows, luxury interiors and even a bathroom and bar.  Sort of like the stretch limousine of the 1970s, but less conspicuous and much more roomy.  And of course, they are chauffeur-driven.

As part of the lower classes, we squander our only real chance of accumulating real wealth by spending it on apparent wealth, trying to impress people we don't even know by showing off our brand name bling.  And we all do it, too - yes, me as well.

The very wealthy didn't "take away" our money, we gave it to them with our blubbering thanks.  And if you doubt this, bear in mind the richest guy in the world isn't Elon Musk, but Bernard Arnault, who you may never have heard of, but owns some of the most famous fashion labels in the world.

Every time you buy a designer label, you put a penny in his pocket.  Or a dollar.  Or ten dollars.

More Television Follies

So we finally broke down and bought a new television.  Everything has changed, once again.

We drove into Brunswick to dispose of the broken television.   I thought briefly of cutting it up with a circular saw with a masonry blade, and then throwing away chunks of it in each weeks garbage, but that seemed kind of tedious.  Besides, I am already doing this with two old air conditioners.  So we took it to the trash center and they charged us thirty bucks to dispose of it.  Right after, Mark gets a text saying that next week, they are having a free electronics disposal day, from 9 until noon, at the Winn-Dixie.  Day late, dollar short.

We went to Sam's Club and not surprisingly, they had a lot of Vizio televisions, which is now owned by Walmart, owner of Sam's Club.  I decided to get a mid-line Samsung 50" set which fits the space we had for the old television.  We have a Samsung sound bar and Samsung phones and they seem to work OK.  I spent far too much time trying to figure out if it had WiFi and a fiber connection for the sound bar.  Of course it did, but it was nowhere mentioned on the packaging and even the Samsung website sort of hid this data under "specifications" - buried under a lot of happy-talk about the stunning resolution and realistic picture whatever.

It was $347 which is not a lot of money - we've spent more than that on groceries at Sam's Club in one outing.  Bear in mind my Dad paid $500 for his RCA Colortrak back in 1975 and in 1975 dollars, $347 would be $60, or $30 less than Dad paid for his Sears black-and-white.  Yet, in the parking lot, as we were loading the television into the truck, a lady joked, "You can put that right in my truck if you want to!" as if it was some precious commodity instead of the equivalent of dinner out for four at a nice restaurant.   People are obsessed about televisions (and the price of gas).

So I attached the wall brackets, which required me rummaging through my stray fastener collection for a set of M16 metric bolts (or some such) and I found four mis-matched bolts or machine screws that did the job.

I plugged it on, connected the fiber optic sound connection, and inserted the dongle for the keyboard and mouse and..... more than an hour later, we have television.  How does your Grandma or Grandpa deal with this?  Do they wait for their grandson to come over, or do they call the "tech geeks" to set it up?  I'm a retired computer geek, but it was still daunting for me.

By the way, while my wireless Logitec keyboard worked on the set (in most cases) the mouse only worked in a few.  They'd prefer you use the remote, which is tedious. Sadly, our old Samsung sound bar was not "smart" and thus would not activate from the same remote.

The setup menu was extensive and required I sign into my "Samsung Account" which I last signed into maybe five years ago when I got my Galaxy 7 active.  So I had to look up the password for that, not finding it, and then looking up the password reset screen and reset that and then....  Next, I had to agree that Samsung could "backup my data" to help me and of course not harvest any data for their own usage.  Then, update the firmware - only 30 minutes there (time for dinner anyway) and.....

It loads the Samsung Smart TV page which is playing an episode of The Rockford Files.  At first, I thought this was a remake as the resolution was astounding.  I could read the words on the papers on Rockford's desk and see all the wrinkles on James Garner's face. It had the look of a soap opera and even the sound sounded better.  It was a bit weird.

I had previously posited that old NTSC 525-line video would not translate into the higher resolution of 4K, but apparently, they have found a way to do this - though pixel interpolation or perhaps from source 35mm original film.  No film artifacts, though!  Other "old" shows had a similarly disarming resolution.

I had to add some apps, though, such as PlutoTV which for some reason would load slowly but not play anything.  Perhaps this was by design?  Stay in the Samsung universe!  Paramount didn't pay us!

What was really disconcerting was that they showed a lot of "channels" on Samsung SmartTV and the one I was looking at was channel 1005.  No more "500 channels and nothing on!" anymore.  Much of these were news channels, including some pretty odious ones - beyond Fox, even.  I have no interest in watching my blood pressure go up.

I am still waiting to see how this affects my data usage.  We watched Disney+ in high-res and it streamed through our poverty hotspot without any glitches (we do have "data saver" enabled, though).  So far, so good.

All that being said, Mr. See falls asleep in front of the television and we have come to the conclusion that we really can't watch more than an hour every night.  And really, there isn't much on.

Besides, we have shit to do.  I am still working on the split system (post-termite) and Mr. See is gardening and wants to get back to pottery once I finish his A/C unit.  And there is always the volunteer work at Goodyear - a doorknob falls off or a little-old-lady get stuck in the elevator.

So, overall, we are pleased with the purchase, so far.  It is interesting this brave-new-world of streaming, which I was eager to get into early on (using a laptop hooked to a flat-screen television) nearly a decade ago.  Actually, I got involved in a Patent case (as an expert witness) involving an early streaming system, back in the 1990s - but it was too early for the technology to take off.

For a long time, streaming meant one of two things: Netflix and YouTube, the latter being limited to funny cat videos. People thought Netflix would dominate the market and for a while it did. But today we have a plethora of streaming services, most of which are struggling to make a profit while at the same time offering little in the way of content.  I suspect there will be a shakeout down the road.

Today streaming is no longer the province of hobbyists or computer geeks, but mainstream technology.  You buy a television and you stream - once you get the set set-up, it is as painless as falling off a log (now that's a mixed metaphor!).  I suspect many folks today will stream and still pay for Cable television service (in addition to internet service) and not even realize they are no longer using the Cable TV portion.  The streaming services have copied the "look and feel" of a cable menu to the point there they are indistinguishable.  I suspect that the Cable part of CableTV might disappear in a few years.

It is interesting to see this technology finally come of age. Now I just need to figure out what to do with my Netbook.  I used it to stream as our old "dumb television" only got YouTube and Netflix, on its own.  I guess it might be handy for streaming in the camper.

We'll see.

Evil Thoughts!

What is to prevent a manufacturer from programming a piece of hardware to deactivate after so many hours of usage?

I took the back off our dead television just to see if there was some obvious sign of the failure mode.  Most likely the power supply, I'd guess.  For the last few years, it had been making weird lines on the screen, just for a while, while warming up.  So we were prepared when it died.

I looked at all the circuit boards - power supply, IR interface, WiFi card, and main processor, and nothing looked amiss.  We will take it to the electronic recycling center later today (it won't fit in the garbage can).

But looking at all of this, I got to thinking, what if you could program the main processor to just stop working after, say, 10,000 hours of use?  It would force the user to upgrade.  And why not do this with other products like cell phones?  How do we know this isn't happening already?

Apple is famous for pushing "updates" to iOS onto older phones that essentially bricks them.  Windows gets slower and slower with each "update" and putting Windows 10 or 11 on an older machine running 7, will slow it to a crawl.  Sadly, Microsoft set Windows to auto-install Windows 10 automatically, unless you specifically disabled it.  A friend of mine has an older HP (!!) laptop that ran Windows 7 just fine, but is slower than paint drying with the "update" to Windows 10.  Well, that and McAfee slowed it down.  Have you ever tried to remove all of McAfee from a computer?  It just seems to keep coming back!

So maybe we are already at this point - planned obsolescence can be programmed into a product, rather than merely designed into it.  A car manufacturer could guarantee its car for 100,000 miles, at which point, it would shut down or drive itself back to the dealer for scrapping.  With the way leasing is going, it isn't that far-fetched a fantasy.

And maybe, like with HP printers, we would just rent everything.  You'd pay so many dollars a month for a television, and if you stopped paying, it would stop working.  There would be advantages to this, of course, in that if the television broke, they would replace it with a new one - provided you kept paying.

This is, in a way, how smart phones work for many people who have "plans" in place.  If they pay (through the nose) a monthly fee, they get "unlimited" data (up to the limit, then it slows down) and a "free" phone upgrade every few years.  The telcos sell the old phones to resellers and I buy them on eBay.  My Galaxy 7 Active is getting long in the tooth, as it will no longer run some newer apps.  But I spent less on that phone than some people pay for a month of cell service!

But the point is, people are already conditioned to trading in their electronics every few years.  And for a long time, it made sense, as advances in technology meant that a computer from even a few years ago was woefully obsolete.  As time progresses, well, these improvements in technology become less and less.  In fact, some generations of cell phones haven't sold well simply because people were happy with their old phones and the new ones simply weren't much better to warrant an upgrade.

So why not make them shut off after so many hours of use?

Like I said, it is an evil thought.  But I suspect it is a thought that has occurred to some marketers and even Engineers and certainly CEOs of certain companies.  We seem to be moving to a business model where people don't own anything but instead "subscribe" to products and pay monthly fees.  It is a flawed model, from the consumer's point of view, as when you actually own something, it is possible to take care of it and make it last longer, or simply decide to forego "upgrades" if last years' model is working OK for you.

With so many products having embedded electronics, even the simplest of appliances can be made to quit after so many uses.  Other than for things like a hammer or an anvil, makers could program everything from light bulbs to lawn mowers to simply quit after so many hours of use.  The mechanics of it (or should I say, electronics) are trivial.

Of course, there could be push-back from this type of marketing and there already is.  People who know and understand what is going on, would never buy (lease? rent? borrow?) an HP printer as the CEO of that company has flat-out said they want to move to a pay-to-print subscription model.  Screw that.  Sad, too, as it will hasten the demise of the printed page, which is already dying on the vine.

But others, particularly those that are techno-phobic, may prefer such a model. They always have the newest and latest equipment, and never have to worry about repairs or breakdowns. Just call the nice man at the company and they send you a new one!  Be sure to update your payment options!  

In a way, it would be like Japan, which for years had a stringent three-year inspection protocol for automobiles that was nearly impossible to pass. This was by design.  As a result, no one kept a car more than three years and the domestic auto industry flourished.  It did make the cities look modern and neat - you never saw broken-down, rusted, oil-burning "junkers" on the road there.  And used cars could be exported to nearby right-hand-drive countries.  (My understanding is, that since then, they have lengthened the time between inspections somewhat).

Of course, the ultimate option is to consume less and that sometimes means consuming nothing.  We tend to think we "need" things like smart phones or televisions or computers, but fail to recall a time when these things did not exist.  Sadly, our society is making it harder and harder not to engage with technology.  Some employers demand to know your cell phone number (and require you own one, as a term of employment) and your social media accounts (and "none" is not deemed an honest answer, hence I am unemployed). You literally cannot work or shop these days, in some instances, without some technology.

Well, let's just hope it doesn't come to having "kill switches" in our technology (if they are not there already).  And maybe I should keep my evil thoughts to myself, lest the powers-that-be get any ideas!

Brand Names

Brand names don't mean much as they used to.

Back in 1965 or thereabouts, my Dad lost another job due to his volcanic temper.  He would get pissed-off and tell the boss what he thought of him.  So he temp'ed at some place in Manhattan for a year or so (back to Booz-Allen?) while we lived in a rented house near Old Greenwich.  As a little kid, age 4, it meant nothing to me - I was pretty oblivious to the stress that no doubt my parents were facing.

He finally got a job with Bell & Howell (no relation) as an Assistant Junior Vice President or something, and we moved to Illinois.  Back then, Bell & Howell was a major manufacturer of camera equipment, in particular, movie projectors.

It is kind of interesting that my Dad was sort of into the imaging business at the time.  Before then, he worked for ITEK which made camera equipment for spy planes.  I inherited a book from him about photo interpretation from World War II using stereo images.  It was quite fascinating.

And oddly enough, my career as a Patent Attorney would encompass imaging systems, from Cable television scramblers, to VGA controllers, to MPEG encoding, and so on and so forth.  A real shame I never had the opportunity to sit down and discuss this stuff with my Dad as we might have found ourselves having similar backgrounds.

Then again, even though our basement in Illinois was full of dusty photo equipment, my Dad hardly knew which end of the camera to point at the subject.  When he worked for Bell & Howell, he oddly enough bought a Kodak "Super-8" movie camera and projector.   Go figure!

Anyway, I digress.  Decades later, I am reading Smithsonian magazine, which is full of ads for "Gov't Gold!" and other ripoffs, and I see this ad for some sort of cheesy radio or something, made by "Bell & Howell" and I was intrigued, so I looked it up on Wikipedia.  The company, as a consumer products maker, is long gone, (as is ITEK and Kodak and so on) in this digital camera age.  What remains is a licensing group that licenses its name to various manufacturers.

Apparently, baby boomers still remember the name and recall the company's storied history, so selling stuff in Smithsonian with the Bell&Howell name has some traction.  I doubt anyone born after 1960 remembers much of the brand, though.

The other day, we went to watch Disney+ after paying $13.99 for one month of service.  There really is nothing to watch on Disney+ anymore, but it is too late to get my fourteen bucks back. I went to turn on our decade-old Sharp branded 48" flat screen, and it didn't.  It just would not turn on.  I tried replacing the remote batteries and even using the manual switch on the side and...nothing.  There is power to the power cord, but the set is dead.

So I guess we have to get a new one, and today, televisions in the 50" class are pretty cheap - under $300 in many cases, sometimes far less.  But what to get?  Brand names don't seem to mean much anymore, other than in a negative sense.

VIZIO has the lowest prices on televisions, but I remember vividly when we bought the Sharp, seeing a bunch of VIZIO televisions on a cart by the service desk at the wholesale club.  "Did someone order ten televisions?" I asked the service desk employee.  "No," they replied, "These are all returns!"  Then, she whispered, "Never buy a VIZIO - we get the most returns on them!"

Well, that was a decade ago, so maybe they have changed.  And maybe they are not a bad product, just that they didn't do enough "burn-in" to cull the infant mortality sets from their output.  I heard a rumor that they were bought by Walmart and another rumor that the sets will play ads even if you are not watching anything.  Or something along those lines.  It is all about ad revenue and e-commerce, not about selling hardware. So I guess they can sell at a loss and make it up in terms of sales of e-trash on Walmart.com.

Or something like that.  I just want a tee-vee.  Although the last week has been interesting, not watching the tee-vee.  Not consuming is always an option.

I logged onto the Sam's Club website to see what they have to offer and there is a hierarchy of brands - and sizes.  Back in the early days of flat screens, a small (30") set was like $500 and a "huge" 48" set was a few thousands.  Within a few years, a 48" set was $500 and a 60" set was thousands.  Today, they are nearly eight feet if not longer, and still cost thousands, but a 50" set (which is the size of our wall) is only a couple-hundred bucks.

Why someone spends thousands on a television that, in three years' time, will cost only a few hundred dollars, is beyond me.  If you can wait a year or two, the cost drops by a factor of ten.  Imagine paying $100,000 for an EV and then a few years later, they cost only $10,000?   Well, that is not quite what is happening in the EV market, but pretty damn close.  We are in the beginning stages of an EV price war, as every manufacturer has geared up to produce these, but people aren't buying, at least not at the staggering prices that they commanded, up until now.

It pays to wait, and if you want to be on the "bleeding edge" of technology, you pay top dollar.  Five years ago, I contemplated converting my golf cart to Lithium-Ion power, but there was no easy or cost-effective "plug and play" solution.  Today, a 48V Lithium-Ion battery pack is cheaper than buying six AGM batteries.  It pays to wait.

But getting back to televisions, which one to buy?  At the lower end is the VIZIO stuff, which you see hapless people trying to stuff into their hatchbacks at Sam's Club (measure, first!).  Some of these televisions are so big, they have trouble fitting into a pickup truck!  I saw one guy drive off with one over the tailgate - no doubt it took wing like a mattress, on I-95.

Midline are brands like "Phillips" which I put in quotes, because like Bell&Howell, it is just a licensing company now, in the consumer products field.  A "Phillips" television is made in China, just as my "Blue Ridge" split system is a poorly disguised Midea.   This does not mean it is a bad product, only that brand names mean little.

Speaking of which, the Chinese seem to attach a lot of weight to brand-names, even if they have no connection to the product.  GM sells more Buicks in China than in the USA (and until recently, accounting for the majority of GM's profits!).   Mao rode around in an old Buick straight-8 ("Fireball") Limousine as did Chiang Kai-sheck.  But the Buicks of today have little or nothing in common with the Buicks of 1949.

But the Chinese apparently love brand names and often attach great importance to numbers as well, as a form of superstition.  Perhaps it is an Asian thing - long before "LG Electronics" renamed itself, it was "Lucky Goldstar" and made microwaves with that dorky name proudly displayed on the front.  People in Asia bought them for the brand name.  People in America bought them despite the brand name.

So maybe that explains why so many "Western" brands are being licensed by Asian companies.  They place reverential value on the name in their home country, and perhaps hope that Western audiences will have some fond memories of the name as well.

Regardless, if I buy a "Phillips" television it won't be because I have fond memories of the Phillips light bulbs or radios or televisions I bought back in  the 1980s, but because it is not a VIZIO.

At the top of the heap are companies that actually design and make (albeit in China) the products that bear their name. SAMSUNG seems to be the top line at Sam's Club, with the largest sets, highest resolution (something called OLED, I don't know what that means and no longer care), and highest prices.  I will probably skip that as well, as although Samsung makes quality products, they are priced accordingly.

Speaking of resolution, one thing I learned doing Patents on video technology is that resolution isn't what it first appears (sorry for the pun).  We do not "see" things but rather assemble images in our brains.  So having every inch of a display rendered in 4K is just overkill, as we can't really "see" it all at once.

At the wholesale club, they have these huge televisions on display, front and center, playing sample videos of aquariums with colorful fish or, oddly enough, someone frying bacon.  Bacon looks really gross in 4K on an eight-foot screen.  Most of what we watch is not at 4K resolution.  Old television shows are still resolved at the 525-line NTSC format, just convered to MPEG.   It annoys me, but Didney+ automatically tries to stream at the highest resolution, which is pointless for us on our old non-4K television.  Not only that, it chews up your data plan pretty quickly (and can cause interruptions).

Television has been referred to as "The Talking Lamp" and in a way, it is.  It is a visual medium, yes, but mostly audio.  There is little need for "high-res" imagery or even jumbo screens, if you really think about it.

But I digress.  Yet again.

As a Trademark attorney (or former one) the point of "brands" was to indicate the source of goods or services.  They exist so consumers can make informed choices about their purchases, and prevent or expose counterfeiting in the marketplace.  When a brand is merely a licensed label, slapped on a product, well, it has no real meaning, even if we subliminally attach some phantom "goodwill" to it.  It sort of defeats the whole purpose of branding and Trademarks.

Even storied companies fall down this hole.  GM sells cars from all over the world, so your "Buick" could be made in Michigan, or merely a re-branded Korean product with no real connection to the American brand.  Your "Chevy" pickup might be assembled in Mexico with a Ford transmission.  And as solid as a company may appear, the last few decades have revealed that even storied old brands are one bad quarter away from bankruptcy at any given moment.

Even companies that still "make" their products can screw the pooch.  HP was a well-regarded electronic instrument maker.  If you were of a certain age, you cut your teeth on an HP oscilloscope and other lab instruments.  You may have programmed an HP computer.  And the HP "Laserjet" was an industry standard.  Today?  They make cheesy ink-jet printers that require a subscription to their ink.  There is literally no point in buying one.

So where does this leave the consumer?  Adrift in a sea of knock-offs and deadnamed companies who are just offshore shells licensing a nearly worthless Trademark.  You can no longer go to the store and grab a product off the shelf without considering its quality, but instead relying on the brand-name as an indicia of value.

It is freaking exhausting.  And increasingly, it means that getting a good value in the marketplace is more a matter of luck than anything else.