The shoe-shine kid’s great-grandson. And creme eggs.

There’s an old story about an American investor who, on his way to work one fine winter morning, was having his shoes shined by, well, a shoe-shine kid.ⁱ A good shoe-shine kid, being in the service industry, knows that he can garner a healthier tip if he proves not only effective in his craft, but amicable and perhaps even unexpectedly useful in other domains.ⁱⁱ With this in mind, this particular shoe-shine kid, while buff-buff-buffing away, started talking to the investor about stock picks. Seeing right through the advice itself, the investor saw what the advice meant in the grander scheme, and what it meant to him was that the stock market was overheating and ready to blow the roof off. If a boy of 12 was talking about finance, then the barriers to entry were too low and too much emotion was inevitably baked into the system. Taking this message to heart, the investor thanked the boy for his services, (probably) tipped him well, and began reducing his exposure to the Wall Street hype machine.

The year was 1928, less than a year before Black Tuesday, and the investor’s timing couldn’t have been better. As you can surely tell from his level of attunement with the universe, this investor wasn’t just any old Joe, he was Joseph Kennedy Sr., and his son, John F. Kennedy Jr., would go on to become arguably the greatest American President of the 20th century.

Since I made for the fiat market exits over 2 years ago, seeing the writing on the wall for myself, I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the following story is a similarly valid signal of a similarly over-hyped market. The following is from The Guardian’s BUSINESS section and the article is entitled Shellshock! Cadbury comes clean on Creme Egg chocolate change :ⁱⁱⁱ

Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Monday 12 January 2015 will go down in confectionery history as a bad day. A hurtful day.

Wait a minute, what does confectionary history have to do with business ? This is like saying that computing history has something to do with astrology or that raising rabbits has something to do with furniture design. But given that this is just the opening sentence, let’s give author Adam Gabbatt a chance to explain himself a bit further before completely jumping down his throat.

The day when it was revealed that Cadbury’s Creme Eggs have changed for ever. No longer shall the egg shell be made from delicious Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate. It will instead be made from disgusting, foul, vomit-inducing “standard cocoa mix chocolate”.

Uhh. Seriously ?! I’m not saying that “standard cocoa mix chocolate” sounds overly appetising to me either, but how on God’s green earth is this kind of insufferable grovelling over a fucking mass market candy coming out of the same country that once boasted of its constantly illuminuated empire ??! This is sad.

“It’s no longer Dairy Milk. It is similar, but not exactly Dairy Milk,” said a spokesman for Cadbury, which was bought by the US giant Kraft in 2010 and is now owned by Mondelez, with a flippancy almost as hard to stomach as this new, Frankenstein’s monster of an egg is bound to be.

What Kraft/Mondelez/USG is doing, of course, is rationalising the debasement of its currency and the resulting destruction of the quality of any and all physical goods that it touches. “Rubber chicken is just as good” and “473 ml of milk is just like half-a-litre” and “cows like living in disease-riddled warehouses,” etc. This is par for the course wherever Americans stick their fat fingers. This is why, for the love of mankind, their bureaucrats, agents, and assets must be hung by their guts for all the world to see.

The combination of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and whatever it is that goes into the cream/creme that forms the centre of a true Cadbury Creme Egg is one of the all-time great double acts. Would you separate Laurel and Hardy so lightly? Bill from Hillary? Romeo from Juliet? Bell from spigot? Of course not. It would be outrageous, not to mention unfair.

When a business section article is so willfully ignorant as to be above the basic research needed to figure out WTF is inside some stupid fucking chocolate that’s apparently the crowning jewel of the British Empire, you have to shake your head. I mean really, if it’s that important, do a little fucking due diligence, Adam.

The only thing unfair here is that The Guardian pays this derp a salary of any mention. Even if it’s just worthless fiat toilet paper he’s earning, it’s too much. He should be shining fucking shoes, if not outright starving, because he has no place being taught words without also being taught thinking.

The Cadbury Creme Egg was a rare thing in this modern age. Its subtle blend of delicious chocolate and sweet, creamy/cremey yolk was a throwback to the days when chocolatiers took pride in their work.

No Adam, the Cadbury Creme Egg was never a rare thing and never a throwback. Just because a rich uncle once gave you a Lindt chocolate, doesn’t mean you know shit about ye olde anything. Five hundred million of any physical thing, which is the number of creme eggs that Cadbury makes every single year, materially guarantees that it will be shit on a stick – and so it is with this sickly sweet candy. No wonder Brits have such awful dental hygiene, they eat two-thirds of the world’s annual production…

Without the Dairy Milk shell – and I say this without having tried the new product, obviously – we are left with nothing less than an abomination. This new Creme Egg is a Creme Egg that is barely worthy of the name.

Adam obviously didn’t try the new thing before up-chucking words all over his keyboard. Obviously ! Hey, why not spout off on something you know nothing about in a place you have no business being while using words you have no understanding of ? Everyone else is doing it, why can’t you ? Because reasons, amirite ?

Already, this egg announcement is threatening the stability of the UK government. What havoc will this monster wreak next?

Indeed, if this effect were really a cause, what effect would it have ? I mean, let’s imagine for a moment that BMW were to only make leatherette seats going forward, because, y’know, the real thing is too expensive and no one will notice the difference anyways,^iv how fragile is your socialist democracy that this would have an impact on anything ? This dumb fucking confection isn’t threatening anything in the exact same way that Dogecoin isn’t threatening anything. Get over yourself.

But just for shits and giggles, I’d love to grant Adam his final conjecture, if only because it would mean that Bitcoin is going to have an easier time than I ever imagined.

Here’s to fiat governments being as useless as its notions of business.

And here’s a nickel, kid. Keep the change.

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1. This was, of course, back when most boys over 12 or 13 were required to work to support their families and themselves. Back before “child labour laws” prevented kids not inclined to erudition and academia from getting too close to the flames of science, politics, economics, and everything else good in this world.↩
2. This is something that Jamaicans haven’t the foggiest clue about.↩
3. The comments on the original article are good for a chuckle :) ↩
4. Given that luxury cars are doing nothing if not moving down-market this last decade or two, to where consumers can barely tell the difference between that brown water Tim Hortons sells and legitimate coffee, the carmakers aren’t in the least bit mistaken.↩