Category: Business

The Dark Pattern

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WARNING: LONG POST

The Book of the Week is “The Dark Pattern, The Hidden Dynamics of Corporate Scandals” by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage, published in 2025. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the authors listed the various goings-on that inevitably lead to a scandal at a big-name corporation. They cite several real-life examples such as Theranos, Boeing and Uber.

Although the authors have European names and do college-level teaching in Switzerland, this book covered American companies and reflected the American mentality. It is difficult, if not impossible to fact-check propaganda spouted by American companies because they manipulate the media.

Prior to the scandal, the media crow about how the CEO is doing a great job in enriching the company’s shareholders. Leadership (that is toxic and heading for trouble but the public doesn’t know it) is enhancing shareholder value (yay!). Until it isn’t. After breaking news of the scandal, the media pile on about the company’s seamy underbelly that led to the failure.

Scandals erupt again and again due to human nature– fear and greed are the two major motivators that cause most of the trouble in the world. Moral failure gradually occurs on a colossal scale throughout the organization, because if it really were only a “few bad apples” there wouldn’t be a scandal. Here’s how it happens.

A large number of employees are eventually brainwashed into rationalizing away their bad behavior, through:

  • ethical shift (baby steps which gradually take one down an unethical path, until matters come to a head; breaking one taboo makes it easier to break more of them);
  • pluralistic ignorance (getting influenced by how others react in an unclear situation);
  • evaluation apprehension (fear of getting publicly judged for speaking up);
  • bystander effect (not reporting bad behavior because one thinks others will do it);
  • euphemistic labeling;
  • what-about-ism;
  • minimizing, ignoring or misconstruing the consequences;
  • dehumanizing the victims to make it easier to harm them.

The human resources department covers the employer’s legal ass by establishing an “ethics hotline” for employees. It is a joke because employees are reporting the bad behavior of their bosses to the very perpetrators of that bad behavior! The bosses will be vengeful– harassing those employees, shutting them up, or firing them.

When interdepartmental rivalry within the company is taken to the extreme, one of two things happen: the company has a scandal, or a group of workers will leave to form a company that competes against their former employer.

The usual cliches apply: The fish rots from the head down; if the truth makes you angry, you’re living a lie; and just another case of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Anger from perceived unfairness will lead to additional vicious office-gossip, and an even more hostile work environment.

Excessive greed led to: 346 deaths in two plane crashes in 2018 and 2019; attendant trauma, lawsuits, hearings; a few heads’ rolling; an attempt to move on, so as to forget all that unpleasantness. Never mind learning from it.

Such was the case with Boeing, whose CEO James McNerney, made approximately $290 million between 2001 and 2016.

Boeing was aware of its software bugs in its plane mechanics. It was cutting costs to the bone in the name of profit. It deemed training pilots in a simulator or in the actual upgraded plane, too expensive.

Boeing also forgot to tell the FAA about that issue. The understaffed, underfunded FAA (a federal agency which is supposed to regulate airline safety) changed its language and became besties with Boeing. “By 2018, Boeing already certified a stunning 96% of their own work [doing the FAA’s job.]”

Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos was a spellbinder, and became a cult leader. She was able to fund her pipe dream because her family and friends were wealthy. The social networks of the wealthy, trust one another even when they lack direct knowledge of a technical subject, such as medicine or investing (like with Bernie Madoff), so they throw their money at the opportunity, blinded by greed.

Uber slapped the new name “gig economy” on an old idea, but became successful because the concept was ready for the technology of the times. The problem was, Uber’s purely libertarian culture got it into legal trouble. A corporate culture of pure libertarianism means zero-sum, cut-throat competition. One independent-contractor’s gain means another’s loss.

After the fact, there is: displacement of responsibility and blaming the victim.

Read the book to learn additional lingo of psychology describing more details of the above, and about other corporate scandals.

The Lords of Strategy

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The Book of the Week is “The Lords of Strategy, The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World” by Walter Kiechel III, published in 2010. This wordy, redundant volume showed how: times have changed; capitalism has become leaner and meaner; and in one way, American society has stayed the same since the Era after WWII.

In the 1950’s, the major reasons American companies began to acquire other companies included:

  • Dividends paid by public companies were highly taxed, so instead of paying dividends to shareholders, a growing company that was sitting on a pile of cash would reinvest it by acquiring other companies.
  • There were antitrust laws prohibiting companies from acquiring others in their same industry, so the companies bought others in industries unrelated to their core competencies, or snapped up companies in their supply chain.

By the end of the 1960’s, companies were going bust because, blinded by greed and ego, the stupid corporate executives had no experience in industries unrelated to their own.

In the early 1970’s, management-consultants began to counsel their clients (who mostly manufactured physical products) on strategy. Also, Boston Consulting Group began to advise their consumer-goods clients to engage in deficit financing to grow their businesses. Corporate executives began to adopt an even more greedy mentality. Maximizing shareholder value became their main goal.

The author listed four game-changers of recent decades:

  • deregulation;
  • new technologies including computers, the internet, the maximization of computing power and simultaneous minimization of costs in connection therewith;
  • the way target-companies wised up after the hostile takeover-mania of the 1980’s; and
  • globalization.

As America has switched to a service-oriented economy in the last fifty years or so, the consultants have been forced to pivot to advise clients on human-resources, public-relations and technology. In the early 1980’s, a Harvard Business School professor did a study of senior executives at major U.S. corporations, and found that their game-changing stemmed not from bossing people around or speechifying, but rather, from infinite interactions with their social networks whose relationships they’d been developing over the course of years.

The author commented that when internet use was becoming widespread, there was a brief flirtation with socialistic entities arising from the open-source movement, including but not limited to: the Linux operating system, wikis, BitTorrent, and Napster. But the inclination of the American powers-that-be, to monetize everything, has largely put the kibosh on those.

Generation X and the Millennials have picked up the cudgel of capitalism and it remains to be seen how Gen Z is going to make a living. Having evolved rapidly in the last thirty years, the internet is currently plagued by creative destruction. But not to worry. There will be jobs in national healthcare, geriatrics, building charging-stations for hybrid vehicles, and harnessing renewable energy. Lying politicians (a redundant phrase) will say they “created” those jobs. Don’t vote for those politicians.

On the other hand, it’s deja vu all over again in American society. Nowadays, AI software is replacing consultants because: American management-consultants were mostly elitist, sexist, racist alpha-males in the “old boy network,” and AI software is created mostly by elitist, sexist, racist greedy alpha-males, still in the “old boy network” (but that network is slowly shrinking).

And the stereotypes about the consultants (and now AI software creators) are still true: They’re like seagulls– they fly in, leave a mess, and fly out; they show their clients a line graph that looks like a hockey-stick– that represents how their services will do financial miracles for the clients’ business, but the line graph has no correlation with reality.

Read the book to learn the details.

Red Carpet

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The Book of the Week is “Red Carpet, Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy” by Erich Schwartzel, published in 2022. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author described the interactions between the United States and China in connection with their movie and television industries, beginning in the 1990’s.

America seeks to profit in everything it does.

The Chinese government’s number one goal is to boost its national pride when selling video entertainment to end-users. The government therefore keeps a tight rein on the optics of its products– limits the stories of its public-private partnership’s shows to:

  • glorifying itself and its Communist Party history;
  • recounting its victimization at the hands of evil, Western powers and Japan with regard to militarism and trade in the 19th century;
  • glorifying superheroes who convey Communist ideology.

The Chinese government gets very offended when even one movie-line or one tweet implies that Tibet or Taiwan are not part of China. It censors story-characters who challenge authority, buck established order, or shake things up. It censors disparagement of China, adult themes of vice, religion, gruesome violence, ghosts and gays. China financially punishes the perpetrators– the entertainment companies. Because it can.

Another aspect of China’s video culture is rampant pirating of Western entertainment. Further, deals made with foreign countries to screen shows in China, are always financially superior for China. Contrarily, in various ways, China will curtail revenues for all parties if it sees that the foreign entities’ shows are too influential with Chinese viewers.

November 1994 saw the first American movies (made by Warner Brothers) shown in China. Even though in the next quarter century, foreign videos shown in China became China-fied, only Chinese people watch movies made in China. Americans aren’t watching movies made in China.

Beginning around 2014, China’s dictator Xi began to punish Chinse entertainment-industry dissidents. Between 2017 and 2020, America had 17 of the fifty highest-grossing movies of all time. China had 27.

China has begun to export its movies and TV shows to Kenya at a deep discount in order to push its ideology. But viewers enjoy American shows better. The younger generation yearns for the consumer goods they see on TV. Interestingly, Disney was one of the few American content-providers that didn’t portray Africa as a “lawless land of disease and despots.”

Read the book to learn many more details of how Hollywood became experienced at dealing with China in seeking to make money, while China played Hollywood, and how China is spreading its gospel to the African continent with the goal of world domination.

Let There Be Water

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The Book of the Week is “Let There Be Water, Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World” by Seth M. Siegel, published in 2015. For this redundant, wordy volume, the author obviously simply slapped together all his past articles on the subject, without regard to organizing them. His main message was: Hire Israel to provide expertise on water management– to save time, energy, and the earth!

Anyway, in Israel, all water ownership and usage is controlled by the government. Its socialist philosophy is: do the greatest good for the greatest number. Water is an essential resource for humans. Israel’s tiny geography and population allow its government to more or less dictate policies that minimize damage done by selfish, greedy people who hoard essential resources– much more easily than can a nation like the U.S.

In 1937, Levi Eshkol, Simcha Blass and their cronies co-founded and launched a water company called Mekorot. It became a capitalist entity in bed with Israel’s government, but profit can be a good motivator for spurring innovation, and improving people’s lives. Financial conflicts of interest can be forgiven in this case, as the water-entrepreneurs made significant positive contributions to the physical and economic health of the young nation, developing the best water-distribution method for farming.

Conservative Republican Americans would actually scream SOCIALIST!!! at such a system. It works in Israel. As is well known, such a system does not work in the United States because it encourages citizens to start entrepreneurial ventures via financial assistance while also taxing the super-rich on the back-end for having taken advantage of existing infrastructure and front-end incentives. In America, there is little to no taxing on the back-end for the super-rich.

Anyway, in 1949, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion struck a deal with Germany for the latter to pay WWII reparations for lost and stolen property of the Jews. Those funds, and donations by American Jews, through the next few decades, were spent on constructing water infrastructure, such as fault-tolerant water pipelines, environmentally friendly waterways, and waterfront tourist-attractions.

In the 1950’s, the Knesset began passing laws regulating the country’s water system. Israel’s geography, topography and meteorology are diverse from north to south, and present challenging desert-related conditions, so it’s complicated and expensive to deliver safe, reliable, available water to its citizens. The water experts found that recycling sewage by filtering it three different times and ways, made it potable. In 2008, the Israeli government began to make its people pay for the real cost of delivering their water.

Read the book to learn much more about Israel’s water expertise, and how it is changing the world.

No Way But to Fight

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The Book of the Week is “No Way But to Fight, George Foreman and the Business of Boxing” by Andrew R.M. Smith, published in 2020.

Born in 1949 in the Houston, Texas area, Foreman grew up in poverty in a large family. His future looked dim, as his schooling had been scant and his leisure activity had consisted of mugging people on the streets in the middle of the night.

Beginning in the mid-1960’s, president LBJ’s federal job-training program, called the Job Corps, arguably saved Foreman’s life. Various mentors who had acquired diverse life experiences- military veterans, counselors, coaches and teachers– supervised about two thousand troubled teens. Foreman learned about boxing, and won the first tournament he fought, in January 1967.

Foreman’s coach got him excused from the military draft for an undisclosed reason. As is well known, rival boxer Muhammad Ali became religious and resisted the draft. Through the decades, compulsory military service hindered plenty of careers of professional athletes, but they (Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis and Roger Staubach, to name four) didn’t make a public issue of it. The government wanted to punish Ali on behalf of those athletes– regardless of his ethnicity– because it was unfair to them, that Ali could continue to develop his career while their lives were disrupted or put at risk.

Ali obviously turned this into a civil rights issue, but other people considered him to be “cheating” as he was getting an unfair advantage over his competition. It is interesting to see how, through the decades, the conversation has shifted on how some Americans define “cheating” in professional sports.

Performance-enhancing drugs (regulated in international competitions but not terribly strictly in American professional sports) have quietly disappeared from the discussion in the United States, as a million conspirators have pushed gender-issues to the forefront– as the next form of cheating. That just shows how easily human beings can be brainwashed by propaganda!

Anyway, yet another turning point in Foreman’s career, occurred at the dawn of the 1970’s, when he met Dick Sadler. The boxing promoter was a rare bird– did business on a handshake and wasn’t as greedy as his competition.

Boxing through the 1970’s was a complicated business, considering all the stakeholders involved: the fighters themselves, their entourages, event-venues, event-broadcasting outlets, the various professional groups that organized the matches, and the political entities that regulated and taxed the aforementioned.

In the early years of his career as an amateur, Foreman was criticized for choosing to fight easy opponents. In March 1974, he was also labeled unpatriotic for scheduling a match outside the United States (in Venezuela), even after his tax-avoidance and financial-related divorce troubles had ended. The international media stories arising from that fight, smacked of the poor diplomatic relationship between America and Venezuela (for oil-related reasons).

Read the book to learn much more about the boxers of Foreman’s generation who began their careers in the 1960’s, the history of the industry through the 1990’s, and Foreman’s careers.

No Better Time

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The Book of the Week is “No Better Time– The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet” by Molly Knight Raskin, published in 2013. This short, slightly sloppily edited volume whose title exaggerates, described the brief life of a dot-com startup genius.

Danny Lewin was born in May 1970 in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. His family moved to Israel when he was fourteen. He enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, and then he moved back to the United States to attend school at MIT.

While in school, with a friend, Lewin helped develop a technological innovation within the big-picture innovation of the whole Internet. Initially, his dot-com business, named Akamai Technologies, provided the service of preventing of the crashing of the browser when: a video went viral or a website got overwhelmed with traffic, or a denial-of-service attack was launched against a website. Through algorithms, obviously, eventually, computer scientists discovered the required optimal number of servers communicating among themselves to maximize computing power to minimize latency and downtime.

In the second half of the 1990’s, worldwide usage of the Internet, a decentralized network of potentially infinite networks, was in its infancy. This meant, for ordinary users, downloading of data was extremely slow. Impatience was growing in leaps and bounds as time-saving devices (like office software) were, too; resulting in “irrational exuberance” over securities sold to the public that funded dot-com startups. The likely reason Akamai still exists today while so many other tech startups failed, is that there was an actual, valuable service behind it!

By spring 2000, after receiving ginormous funding from its IPO, Akamai’s customers’ servers collectively numbered more than 2,750 in more than one hundred fifty networks in forty-five nations. At the book’s writing, Akamai controlled between fifteen and thirty percent of the world’s Internet traffic.

Read the book to learn much more about Lewin, the people who helped him, and his startup.

Tangled Vines

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The Book of the Week is “Tangled Vines, Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California” by Frances Dinklespiel, published in 2015. The moral of this book’s main story is “Lawsuits followed and winemakers like Viader made mental notes never to be cavalier about the disposition of fire-damaged wine.”

According to the author, as of 2013, Americans drank the largest quantity of wine, 13% of all the wine of all the countries in the world.

In October 2005, a majorly evil crime was committed at the Wines Central warehouse on Mare Island in Vallejo. An assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern district of California– an expert in wine fraud and arson, and an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assessed the damage and investigated the site. The latter used an acceleration-detection canine, also called an arson dog.

The perpetrator committed: mail fraud (for shipping wine across state lines under a false name), interstate transfer of stolen property (because it wasn’t his wine to sell), arson, and tax evasion.

Fire destroyed millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of wine (stored in the warehouse) of mostly mom-and-pop wineries. As is usual in such instances, insurance claims of winemakers whose wine was covered, were denied, because the insurers contended that the wine was “in transit.”

In the single-digit 2000’s, Bill Koch of Koch family fame, didn’t spare a dime in finding out how he had become the victim of wine fraud. He employed investigators in various fields: ex-FBI agents, ex-Sotheby’s workers, a glass historian, and experts in cork and adhesives and labels. He sued the auction house and original seller of the wine.

Read the book to learn about the kinds of people who are passionate about making and selling wine, how they became victims of one especially bad actor, and a few other incidents in the life of the California wine industry.

Character & Characters / Retail Gangster

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The first Book of the Week is “Character & Characters, the Spirit of Alaska Airlines” by Robert J. Serling, published in 2008.

Alaska Airlines (AKA) came into existence in the mid-1940’s with the buyout of Star Air Service. It faced stiff competition from Northwest Airlines, and Pan American– which was already monster-sized from: its contract with the federal government to deliver the U.S. mails, and exchanging many political favors.

Mostly, AKA transported passengers between the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. In early 1949, it completed a dangerous mission, flying about 140 Jews from Yemen to the airport in Tel Aviv, while an Arab bomb could have hit the plane anytime.

In the 1950’s, top executive Charlie Willis had such passion for and loyalty and dedication to AKA, that he borrowed $100,000 using his personal house as collateral, in order to restore the pilot-pension-fund shortfall, to keep his employer from going out of business. Beginning at the dawn of the 1960’s, he enabled his second-in-command-executive to engage in deficit spending. They broke the bank to do promotional gimmicks.

In the back of its model CONVAIR 880, AKA installed a stand-up beer bar, even though it replaced eight passenger seats. AKA generated goodwill by throwing parties it couldn’t afford for industry players, such as its own employees and trade associations. In the late 1960’s, it bought hotels and a ski resort. AKA was one of the very first airlines to provide in-flight movies and music. So it hovered near bankruptcy, repeatedly unable to meet its employee payroll. For years.

Commercial airlines, initially transporting wealthy passengers, employed stewardesses in sexy uniforms– with no or minimal training, and offered alcoholic beverages included with the airfare. With evolution came the organization of labor– of pilots, flight crews and ground crews. Alaska’s bush pilots who had gotten in on aviation’s ground floor, had become disenchanted with the changing times. Bob Ellis sold his tiny airline in Alaska because he was no longer having fun, was emotionally exhausted from the government’s imposition of regulations, and didn’t understand the need for union labor. He had treated his employees well.

The Civil Aeronautics Board, one of the government’s regulatory bodies, was soon to stop subsidizing the (small, financially struggling) regional airlines (including AKA) in Alaska. The consolidation of the industry in the 1960’s meant no more floatplanes, biplanes, and single-engine monoplanes. These were replaced with DC-3’s and other faster, technologically superior aircraft.

Competing airlines were growing in size, complexity, and needed economies-of-scale and scope. Bosses couldn’t afford to pay for their employees’ expensive personal problems as though they were in a small business anymore. There was backlash by the workers against this vanishing era. They no longer felt like a family.

In summer 1970, AKA’s Willis (rumored to be an alcoholic) was able to get a new air route: to the U.S.S.R. Ironically, AKA had to lease a Pan Am 707 in order to do it. Willis became a drinking buddy to his Aeroflot counterparts. The passengers, who flew to Siberia, consisted mostly of Native Americans from Alaska visiting family, missionaries, and businessmen. They were treated to flatware made of gold, caviar in their Caesar salads, wine, and Russian samovars. The flight attendants dressed in Cossacks’ attire, with bear fur hats. Unsurprisingly, the flights proved insufficiently profitable over the course of three years.

AKA suffered less disastrous financial losses when the oil industry in Alaska kicked into high gear, in the late 1960’s. Oil-pipeline construction around Prudhoe Bay in the North Slope area became all the rage. From the Seattle-Tacoma airport, the airline’s Hercules’ C-130 planes transferred cargo, including hazardous materials that could accidentally cause a lot of wrongful deaths and property damage: 25,000 pounds of dynamite, heating and fuel oil and big, heavy drilling rigs for ground vehicles, and heaters.

In the early 1970’s, many pipeline workers liked hunting, but they got drunk before they flew home. AKA allowed rifles on their planes, so they hired the equivalent of bouncers who served as ground-crew screeners, and had a locked-up special gun-rack section in the front of the plane.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Alaska Airlines’ role in the development of aviation, people, power struggles, technologies, and the tenor of its times up until the book’s writing.

The second Book of the Week is “Retail Gangster, the Insane, Real-Life Story of CRAZY EDDIE” by Gary Weiss, published in 2020.

Currently fading from Americans’ memory, is “Crazy Eddie.” Launched in the mid-1970’s, it was a retail chain of electronics stores in the northeastern United States. The company became known for a spokesman who flooded all kinds of advertising media with emotionally-charged screaming, that Crazy Eddie’s prices were insane. The repetitive repetition of this singular message worked. Eddie projected an image of success that fed on itself.

However, from the start, the store’s top executive– Eddie Antar– committed financial crimes. He had selfish, greedy intent, unlike the aforementioned Alaska Airlines executives, who were merely big spenders out of unbridled optimism and honest ineptitude.

Starting in 1984 when the company sold shares to the public, Eddie and his key employees (mostly his relatives) engaged in securities fraud. They had ongoing, frantic bursts of activity in which they: “…stuffed cash in the ceiling, stole store sales-taxes, [plus, they falsified inventory records] and defrauded insurance companies without a second thought. They did not expect to be caught, and if the Antars had any doubt on that score, they had only to look to City Hall for inspiration.” New York City’s government had committed exactly the same kinds of accounting fraud for years and years, beginning in the 1960’s. As the behavioral-economics cliche goes, “The fish rots from the head down.”

By 1987, Crazy Eddie had 2,250 workers in 32 locations from Philadelphia to New England. Read the book to learn a slew of details on the fates of Eddie, his families, and his businesses.

Life in the Trash Lane

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The Book of the Week is “Life in the Trash Lane, A Sports Agent’s True Story” by Mel Levine, published in 1993. This sloppily edited volume described a bygone era in terms of the financial aspects of “amateur” sports in America. Only “professional” athletes could receive compensation in the form of money or gifts from work-related people and entities. College players were considered amateurs.

The author began a career as a tax attorney and business investor, but also became an agent for college football players on their way to the pros. He offered his services as an agent, CPA, lawyer, and financial planner. Initially, representing big-name athletes boosted his ego. The author hired various scouts called “bird dogs” who would help him acquire clients who had barely started college but were perceived as talented players. On the surface, sports agency looked lucrative, but it was actually a cutthroat, sleazy business.

The convention in the late 1980’s was for agents to advance expenses to the professional hopefuls, and then, if the players made the pros, the agent was paid about 5% of the athlete’s earnings. The author paid for their cars, insurance, housing, gifts for their significant others, legal fees, etc. (a clear NCAA rule violation). The author continued to run afoul of the strict NCAA rules, but he rationalized that all of the other agents were doing so, too, and he needed to stay competitive. Many times, he was almost busted.

The author was suckered into paying big bucks to numerous players he represented, but they never paid him even in cases when they made the pros. The players owed him thousands and thousands of dollars, but he developed a version of Stockholm syndrome– acting as a father figure to a few of them, and remained fiercely loyal because he felt an escalation of commitment.

In May 1986, one of the author’s clients had an accident in the expensive car paid for by the author. Two major Miami newspapers’ stories on this prompted the question of how the athlete could afford such a car. The car was likely provided by his agent, or his college– the University of Miami. If so, the NCAA violation would end the player’s career before it started, and the scandal would ruin the reputations of the agent, the school, and many others.

The author cooked up a scheme to get a slew of parties out of trouble. He shredded all the paper contracts of his rule-violating clients, and claimed he was running a car-leasing operation; the athletes’ parents were leasing the cars for them [like everyone really believed that (!)].

The author told of another client who was nothing but a boondoggle, but the author stuck by him for years, anyway. By 1987, “He was damaged goods for a [National Football League] team to expend a valuable draft choice on a kid with a bad ankle, drug problems, legal problems, and a dishonorable discharge from BYU was more than any of them would bear.”

As can be imagined, the sports agency business will keep commercial litigators in business forever, as its seamy underbelly consists of an orgy of litigation. The author dismissed yet another client’s transgressions: “At worst, he blew up a Porsche (quite by accident), got arrested in New Jersey for carrying a concealed weapon and unfortunately got into a fight or two. No big deal.”

Read the book to learn about a slew of other details of the conduct of sports agents and their clients of the late 1980’s.