Category Archives: Business

Business, Politics

Fighting A Short Seller and Looney Tunes

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Just a quick update on a some news related to a previous post about SHORT SELLING, Hacking and Short Selling for Fun and Profit.

St. Judes Medical is fighting back against the short seller Muddy Waters Capital LLC who claims that they have evidence that a cardiac pacemaker manufactured by St. Judes can be hacked. St. Judes filed a lawsuit on Sept. 7 against the short seller seeking damages and disbursement of profits from their short holdings.  Here a LINK to a Wall St. Journal article with details on the lawsuit.

The unfortunate problem is that even if St. Judes prevails in court their reputation may already be irreparably damaged.

Additionally similarly to the effect of the ONE (now discredited) report that fuels the LETHALLY dangerous stupidity of the “Anti-vaxxer” movement amongst young mothers and old panderers such as Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, there may be a fallout against devices like those made by St. Judes by an uninformed public.

Okay, I can’t just let go of Jill Stein’s position on Anti-vaxxing, a position which may be vexing to a logical person.  She argues that “all concerns” have not been addressed.  This is Rees’ Maxim, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.  She says we MAY not have evidence because the Food and Drug Administration, FDA and Centers for Disease Control, CDC are paid stooges of big drug companies.  Just another Looney Tunes presidential candidate.

No offense to Looney Tunes.  The Looney Tunes characters are more insightful than our current crop of candidates!

Th, th, th, that’s all folks!

Business, Culture, Philosophy

Backup Plans

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When I was working in the corporate world I led a new product development team.  During the course of developing a product for an “unnamed” customer we had a new Program Manager (PM) named Gary, assigned to our team.  I had known Gary, from a previous life when I was working as a software consultant many years ago.

I brought Gary up to speed as to where we were and what the plan of execution was. After giving the lay of the land to PM-Gary he asked me a question that almost every PM asks, “What’s your backup plan?”.

“Backup plans are for losers”, is what I told him.

I almost laughed at the shocked look on his face. I doubt anyone ever said that to him before.  I will tell you that I stand behind my statement. As I explained to Gary, if I didn’t think my plan was going to succeed I wouldn’t be executing that plan. My goal was and is success and failure is not an option.  My advice is,  “Plan for success.  Don’t plan for failure”.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, how you envision your goal is how you will execute it.  If you have a backup plan, you are giving yourself an option to fail and you will most likely fail.  If you envision success, you’re on the path to success.  This is not to sound Pollyanna about progress.  Projects and plans will fail.  Course corrections (pivots as they are called) will occur.  In many cases the plan will radically alter during the course of execution.  However, no matter what happens, your mindset needs to be success.

Gary had my statement “Backup plans are for losers” written on the top of his office whiteboard.  It was still up there when I left the company.

Business, Government

Hacking And Short Selling For Fun And Profit!

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Here’s an interesting video. It’s pretty boring and filled with techno mumbo jumbo, so you may not want to watch it all the way through, BUT the big takeaway is it shows a hack to remotely crash a St. Jude Medical pacemaker.

https://vimeo.com/180593205

Sheesh you MIGHT be able to kill someone by remote control. There is a BIG MAYBE that I discuss below.

Okay it took over over 3 hours to hack into the device. I suspect the time indicated was just run time to allow a brute force attack as it looked like an open loop attack (one-way from the hacking device to the pacemaker). It might have crashed the pacemaker in less than 3 hours. An attack could be executed while someone was sleeping, which would allow plenty of run time.

Now for the truth in lending part. It’s hard to tell if this is a real threat. The company that released the video is Muddy Waters LLC which makes money by taking down companies and SHORT SELLING their stock as it plummets. St. Jude Medical is in a $25 Billion acquisition deal by Abbott Laboratories which means lots of “gamblers” are betting on the stock. Stock prices generally rise during the speculation time of a big takeover. If you take a short position and the price tumbles after this inflationary jump in price, cha-ching, big buck$ are made. With a $25 Billion dollar deal, BILLION$$ can be made with a huge short position.  This sort “investment behavior” is why I ranted earlier that the SEC needs to stop short-selling-gambling. You can read my earlier rant here.

To get my political musings in, think about which presidential candidate is in bed with big Wall Street money.  Do you think she will call for trading reform?

Second truth in lending.  There may be a real concern about a hack.  The company, MedSec, published their research that the St. Jude Medical devices have security flaws.

Third truth in lending.  MedSec has a financial deal with Muddy Waters to license their research and to share in profits derived from their research.

What a convoluted arrangement of money shifting and back scratching!

This reminds me of the great junk bond days.  Ruin good companies and make money!  The gamblers just found a new way to play their game.

And we wonder why we don’t have good jobs in this country…