Platolum Alloys + Prussian Retailers = Practical Thinking? (August 30, 2023)

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
I’m reading the investment column in Victory Streak and there’s two things I don’t understand. I can’t tell if they’re meaningless or if it’s because I have absolutely no familiarity with finance...


[*]In the subhead “Platolum Alloys + Prussian Retailers = Practical Thinking?” what does ‘Prussian Retailers’ refer to?
[*]The last line of the article: “remember oil and carpets, two industries that enjoyed temporary fortune, then plummeted.” This has the cadence of a joke or an idiom... but it’s inscrutable to me. Anyone know what it’s referencing?






In case you were wondering, Colonel Blair did invest in platolum and it went pretty well! From the Kilrathi Saga scrapbook:




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Original update published on August 30, 2023
 
I assume oil is a TNGesque quip about silly 21st century people and their silly fossil fuels, but I'm not sure where carpets fit in, I don't think Big Carpet has ever been a thing?
 
Textiles were a big trade during the Middle Ages and early modern period, and I think oriental rugs are still popular today. It's kind of an odd choice for a "bust" item; I would have chosen something like tulips.
 
Yeah, with tulips you know exactly the reference immediately... but it's done in a such a manner that it feels like that's what you're *supposed* to get from 'carpets'. But either they missed the mark or did an exceptionally good job of coming up with the kind of reference that /could/ exist centuries from now... or I'm overthinking all of this.

(My guess for Prussian is that there was some element of the article that would've indicated that that ended up on the cutting room floor... it just doesn't make any sense otherwise.)
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Yeah, with tulips you know exactly the reference immediately... but it's done in a such a manner that it feels like that's what you're *supposed* to get from 'carpets'. But either they missed the mark or did an exceptionally good job of coming up with the kind of reference that /could/ exist centuries from now... or I'm overthinking all of this.

(My guess for Prussian is that there was some element of the article that would've indicated that that ended up on the cutting room floor... it just doesn't make any sense otherwise.)
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I don't know what they were thinking but carpets in the last 10 years definitely have been out of style in new construction. If you want a carpet it's all area rugs now for you. But if it's a joke referencing something specific, I'm at a loss as to what that would be. It could just as easily been the writer's preference (carpets harbor dirt and bugs, yuck) or even some in-office origin drama inside joke about some controversy about the office carpet (or a new office's lack thereof).
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Yeah, with tulips you know exactly the reference immediately... but it's done in a such a manner that it feels like that's what you're *supposed* to get from 'carpets'. But either they missed the mark or did an exceptionally good job of coming up with the kind of reference that /could/ exist centuries from now... or I'm overthinking all of this.
Click to expand...
If you grew up within an hour of Dalton, GA you would absolutely be *supposed* to get that reference; anyone else, not necessarily. The wall to wall carpeting industry in the US was hyper focused within a small area of North Georgia and they had huge, explosive growth starting in the 1950s in the neighborhood of 120% to 130% annually for decades. When the market slowed, hundreds of manufacturers ended up being bankrupted or consolidated into about a dozen total by the 1990s.

If one of the writers was from Dalton or had family there, they would have known about the contraction, but I don't recall it being a national story for any length of time, and it was barely mentioned in my college economics classes in Columbia just a few years later and only 4 hours away.

A History of the U.S. Carpet Industry

eh.net eh.net
 
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