Katharine Graham: The Washington Post | Hacker News Reader

Katharine Graham: The Washington Post

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She met Buffett herself, saw his genius, and made him her professor. He’d bring 20 annual reports to board meetings, teaching her line by line.

Yeah, uh, that's not all she did. She and Buffett apparently had a long-running (and public) affair, which in part led to Susan Buffett separating from him and moving to San Francisco.

Between this and the brutalization of railway workers, I have a more negative view of Buffett personally. But somehow he has a very positive reputation. Why is that?

Probably some modern interpretation of noblesse oblige. If a rising tide lifts all ships, great and small, then Buffett is the rain man. He’s probably the closest anyone came to making trickle down economics more than just a theory as an individual in business. He made a lot of folks very wealthy simply by making investing boring and easy through his focus on value investing.

I don’t know much about him, but I know Berkshire Hathaway. He didn’t even found it; he took it over by monetary force. He knew who worked their ass off and who just talked shit. He came across someone who wronged him in a business deal at Berkshire Hathaway before he ran it, and he literally drove the prior owners out of their own company over it. He says it was the biggest mistake he made, which leads me to believe he is generally a serious person, but he’s also principled. He’s a case study on overcoming yourself in order to make better decisions.

His business sense may not be as learnable, but I have tried to apply his lessons to my own life, and I didn’t have to pay anything for that.

Best as I can tell, (wannabe) investor types celebrate his accumulation of wealth. I appreciated his public statements about tax policy, rising inequity, etc. Otherwise, I was ambivalent about Buffet.

Until I listened to Acquired's episodes.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/berkshire-hathaway-part-i

Buffet is a rentier. He does not create wealth; he merely transfers it.

His most successful strategy is to find tranches of underutilized capital, and buy a controlling interest. Which he then ladders up to buy yet more tranches. Most famously Geico.

It's fair to say that I'm far less impressed by this strategy than Acquired's hosts.

Rentier is distinct from the raider (aka private equity) play of buying controlling interest in a corporation, looting it, loading it up with debt, and then unloading the resulting dumpster fire.

So at least Buffet isn't actively destroying jobs and wealth. As far as I know.

Money, also they fake I drink X coke a day while knowing he can pay for any medication or doctor in the world. The humble rich is a facade to stay in power.

There's no magic medication or doctor that can do much to compensate for a bad diet, including excess sugar. Plenty of wealthy people have died of type-2 diabetes. But one or maybe two Cokes per day isn't a problem for most people.

I was wondering how one "made Buffett her professor" without him wanting to teach in the first place

but that solves it

Can you add this info to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Personal_life? I never knew that.

That's not all she did, but it's true that she needed a crash course in business, and learned quickly. She inherited the Post, she did not build it.

Why is this down-voted?

They leave things like these out to engage people like you, it’s a discussion generator.

What level of privilege do I have to reach to have falsehoods be labeled 'discussion generators'?

Which falsehood are you referring to?

It may be perhaps splitting hairs, but this definitely seems like a case of "lying by omission" to me.

"She met Buffett herself, saw his genius, and made him her professor." would give any normal person reading this a completely false understanding of what actually happened.

I just couldn't tell if there was a dispute about Graham and Buffett's affair. The stuff I read was pretty specific; like, she'd toss him her house keys when he arrived at parties.

ended a strike? that's not something to praise...

They provoked the strike on purpose by giving the workers an unacceptable contract. The aim was to wreck the union (they succeeded). They prepared in secret for two years for this.

Here's an account: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wash-post-busted-pressmens-un...

A lot of Americans have been tricked into thinking that worker's rights are a bad thing. The Washington Post, owned by none other than Jeff Bezos, greatly contributed to this sad state of affairs.

I at least appreciate that Bezos is now transparent with his transactional beliefs, instead of trying to wrap them in some bullshit moral superiority.

During Trump I, WaPo was all "Democracy Dies In Darkness". Trump II is all about "Hey, we don't do presidential endorsements anymore" and "our opinion pages are only about defending personal liberties and free markets".

It does seem like WaPo has become very vanilla, and unwilling to run anything controversial during T 2.0. I switched to the US version of The Guardian, largely due to WaPo's anti-Palestine bias and feeling like I was just being spoon-fed information that wasn't actually useful. I didn't feel like that 2 years ago, but I guess change is a constant.

It's not simply always good or always bad. Sometimes unions get too powerful for the general good of the population. Workers rights come at a cost to non-workers and the general population. Do you really want to ban intermodal shipping containers to protect watersiders' rights to work inefficiently? That's an example of where unions were trying to rent-seek from the rest of the economy. Newspapers had similar problems with their printers and associated workers having probably too much power through their unions. If printer/etc. unions had their way, there'd be no internet news because that "stole" their jobs and their workers rights.

A lot of Americans have also been tricked into thinking that capital is evil and labor is always right no matter what.

I suppose when inequality in the us is not at an all-time high, I will worry about that less.

Not nearly enough. Too many are still siding with the Bezos and Musks of the world rather than with their coworkers.

Depends on how you end it? If the workers are satisfied, then it’s probably a positive negotiated outcome for everyone.

We should talk about the details of this particular strike then.

I don't know anything so I'm just copying from wikipedia, they could have a bad analysis:

The 1975–1976 Washington Post pressmen's strike was a strike action by The Washington Post's pressmen. The strike began on October 1, 1975. The Washington Post hired replacement workers to replace the union in December 1975. The last unions supporting the pressmen's strike returned to work in February 1976.

And then from the "Aftermath and Impact" section:

The outcome of the strike was viewed as a victory for the Post and a defeat for the labor unions involved.[6][9] The Post was estimated to save $2 million in 1976 as a result of hiring non-union pressmen.[4]

On October 2, 1976, to commemorate the 1-year anniversary of the start of the strike, a crowd of over 1000 supporting the pressmen met at McPherson Square. They proceeded to the Post's headquarters, where they burned Graham in effigy.

This doesn't seem like the worker's thought it was positive for them.

The replacement workers probably thought it was positive.

Until they started wondering why their pay and benefits was worse than they people they replaced, and when the management would decide that they could be replaced by even cheaper workers.

That you had to make up a fictional story to make your point says a lot.

I'm concerned that you're not trolling. If you do mean this in earnest - do you truly believe that this was positive for all future workers? Do you not see how this is bad for the organization as a whole from a systems perspective?

Like I said, I hope you're trolling, but I also know there's plenty of people who have drank so deeply from the rabidly pro business kool-aid so hard they're drowning in it.

Business owners doing everything they can to pay workers as little as possible is the thing you call out as a fantasy? Buddy.

Why do you always take the side of techno-oligarchs? Do you not understand the very basic reasons why strikebreakers are bad? Are you really this deeply brainwashed or just trolling?

sometimes it is

What is the criteria?

Ordinarily I'd take the side of labor. But there could exist times when unions make unreasonable/unfair demands. So - when those happen, then I'd take the side of management for outlasting the union.

Not trying to necessarily argue or strawman, just want to point out that the only time I’m aware of (though likely not the only time in general) this happening is police unions. The first one started in the Pacific Northwest, and used their power and leverage to keep the union alive. At a city meeting, the iirc chief put a Manila envelope down for each city board member with their photo and personal information inside - address, family, etc, and put his gun down on top of one. The city decided not to disband the union.

Memory is a bit hazy but I think they did disband it once before then and the ex-cops were such a nuisance that the city went back on it.

I’m doing a poor job of explaining, and the Behind the Police series does much better - the point is, this is my most notable example of a union getting too powerful but quite frankly there isn’t much we can do about it.

Another day, another "labor good! capital bad!" comment containing no actual insights whatsoever

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