The GOP’s Romneybot 2000 made headlines on Friday when, at a rally at Otterbein University in Ohio, it encouraged students to hit their parents up for loans. “We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” said the robot.
What has not been as widely reported, however, is that the robot appears to have malfunctioned during the speech. Instead of giving a rousing speech laced with references to current pop culture that the students could relate to, the bot apparently experienced an AI synapse misfire and delivered what appeared to be a Powerpoint presentation about office supplies instead.
Unfortunately, the presentation was so boring that it lulled at least one student to sleep. Here’s a snippet from the transcript. WARNING: Do not read it while driving or using heavy machinery:
ROMNEY: Words are easily malleable, but facts, they’re stubborn.
And so I would suggest that in campaign ahead, and in the campaigns of various officers running for various positions ahead, that you consider not just the brilliance of their words, but also the facts of their record and what they have done. And that will be the best predictor, I believe, of what they will do going forward.
I have several examples of the disparity between appearance and reality or appearance and fact that I might have mentioned to you, some from my business experience.
I remember when we had someone come to my office — as you may have known, in my prior work, I was both in the business of helping start businesses known as venture capital, as well as in the business of acquiring businesses and trying to make them better.
This wasn’t with my own money, of course. It was with money entrusted to me by pension funds, college endowments and the like. And on one occasion, someone came in. His name was Tom Stemberg. He had the idea for a store that would sell office supplies at a discount.
He said that office supplies were sold at a huge markup and that he would have a big store that sold office supplies cheap. And with that concept in mind, we went to various experts and asked their opinion as to whether this was a good investment opportunity. Not one of them said yes. Everyone said it was a bad idea.
And the reason they said was that in the world of business, the trend has been away from individuals having to run out and manage various aspects of the business on their own, and instead having more convenience and being able to focus on the mission of the business. So the idea of people having to leave their offices to go buy office supplies, as opposed to just having someone come deliver it from a big warehouse, that wasn’t a good idea.
This superstore idea wouldn’t work. And that was the appearance, in part the sense was that there wasn’t enough savings to be had. People didn’t buy that many supplies per person. Well, then we went out to get the facts. We sent a team of our colleagues out to go talk to businesses in the environment around what would be the first store.
And they told us how much they purchased annually per person in office supplies. As I recall, it was about $1,500 a year in office supplies. And, frankly, the savings on $1,500 a year for a white- collar employee on office supplies wouldn’t justify folks going out and shopping.
So we took that to the entrepreneur and said, you know what? It doesn’t look like this idea is going to work and no one thinks it will work either. And he said, you know what? Those businesses don’t know how much they’re spending on office supplies. Go back and get their invoices.
Ask them to let you look in their files and see what they’re actually spending. So we did. And what we found was they were spending a lot more than that they thought on copy paper and toner and supplies and software and so forth.
And so, after a lot of analysis, we decided that we would invest in this office superstore. It’s called Staples and now employs many tens of thousands, I think 90,000 people on a worldwide basis. Appearances do not always equal reality.
It looks like the guy to Mitt’s left is the next to go. The ones with their eyes open did much better than I would have.
But why Mitt continues to trot out this story when the Washington Post Fact Checker in January found little in it to credit Romney with creating jobs is a mystery. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/mitt-romney-and-100000-jobs-an-untenable-figure/2012/01/09/gIQAIoihmP_blog.html
And Romney’s story leaves out an important concern: “Bain may have provided management expertise or money when others would not, but a company such as Staples — one of the biggest contributors to Romney’s job figures — was largely the brainchild of entrepreneur Tom Stemberg. Stemberg presumably should get most of the credit for inventing a killer new business category. (Left unsaid, of course, is all the jobs that might have been lost at small stationery stores unable to compete with the low prices of Staples, Office Depot and so forth.)”
But one more point: what does picking good venture capital investments have to do with being president? To Republicans, who want to “run government like a business” it’s unquestioned that the two things are the same. The rest of us know they couldn’t be more different. And if anyone doubts that being a business shark prepares one to be in charge of the government, please come to Florida. We’d like to introduce you to a spectacular failure we call Gov. Rick Scott.
Obama + UNC + Fallon = Viral
Romney + Otterbein + Staples = Zzzzzzzzzzzzz
I’d eat shit before I’d vote for mitt.
Bamboo Harvester, that’s very catchy. It’s crying out to be embroidered on a pillow.