I think it would have been hard to recover but yeah when Lampert got involved it was all about the financial engineering rather than the operations. I bought the shares around then but sold soon after, turned off by the conflicts and the lack of focus on ops.

Our obligation is to personal profit at the expense of everything else.

This is empirically the default operational behavior. It should always be assumed as opposed to our current strategy of always being baffled and shocked that it happens.

We could be serious about this and restructure incentives away from naked kleptocracy to avoid it.

I mean we never will, but we could...