The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Cory Doctorow
- Language: English
- Genre: Technothrillers
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- Size: 2 MB
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Avalon is a chocolate-box town on an enchanted island, twenty-two miles
from the Port of Los Angeles. Catalina Island: the redoubt of the Wrigley
chewing-gum fortune, acquired by William Wrigley Jr. in 1919, and
developed as the chic spot for Hollywood’s smart set.
For years, starlets, leading men, producers, and directors plied the
channel on wooden ships out of Long Beach, drinking cocktails on the
three-hour crossing, vomiting discreetly over the railings.
They caroused at Old Man Wrigley’s “Casino”: the largest building on
the island, a twelve-story art deco roundhouse with a ground-floor cinema
with its own pipe organ, and, above it, the largest ballroom in the USA,
known to a glamour-hungry nation as the source of a weekly broadcast live
from “high atop the Casino on beautiful Catalina Island.”
The one thing the Casino didn’t have? Gambling. Wrigley fancied
himself a sophisticate, and his casino took its name from the Italian word
for “gathering place.” The fact that this confused everyone who visited, for
the rest of time, only reinforced Wrigley’s superiority.
There was no gambling at the Catalina Casino, because gambling leads to
crime, and there’s no crime in Avalon. That’s what the tourist brochures tell
you. It’s what the four thousand year-round locals tell you. It’s what the
two-thousand-odd beautiful people who own summer homes on the island
tell you. If you’re one of the members of the thirty-five-thousand-strong
July Fourth weekend crowd, you’ll come home and tell it to your friends.
There’s no crime in Avalon.
Scott Warms brought me to Avalon in 2006, one year after he sold InterPoly
to Yahoo! and became a millionaire at twenty-three. Scott had been forced
into the sale by his investors, and I’d helped him, a little, untangling their
creative accounting so he didn’t get crammed at the sale time and lose the
equity he’d bargained hard for at twenty-one, when he founded the
company.
Scott didn’t want to work at Yahoo!, and truth be told, Yahoo! didn’t
want Scott working there. But Scott’s Yahoo! shares wouldn’t fully vest for
three more years. He was already a millionaire, but if he hung in—or got
fired—he’d be a decimillionaire. Corollary: if he quit, he’d lose tens of
millions of dollars. At twenty-three years of age, three years felt like an
eternity to Scott, but he had plans for those remaining millions—$20 mil if
Yahoo!’s share price held, maybe more if it went up.
So Scott and Yahoo! were playing chicken. He wanted them to fire him,
but not for cause, and so he became an expert on California employment
law—Scott could become an expert on any subject in six months. California
employment law only took him two. He made sure that he engaged in
precisely as much fuckery as the law allowed and not one nanogram more.
Which is how he ended up on Avalon. Scott was formally a vice
president, as was typical for the CEOs of the dozens of companies Yahoo!
bought with billions pumped into it by SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. That
meant that he was entitled to five weeks of paid vacation every year, which
no Yahoo! exec came close to taking. Not even the French ones.
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