Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
"the above-ground infrastructure associated with Ventilation Shafts
would typically be behind tree-lines and therefore screened from view from B-W Parkway"
Yes, because I would hate to see some ugly buildings when driving along the Parkway in my car.
Excuse me but wasn't part of what Boring Co was doing different from everybody else is reusing the dirt removed from the tunnels and turning it into bricks? But now they're going back to disposing it? pic.twitter.com/f7SFeh30iM
"DUE TO LIMITED SIZE OF THE WASHINGTON, D.C. LOOP STATION LOCATION, INITIAL OPERATION OF THE LOOP SYSTEM WOULD BE LIMITED TO 1,000 PASSENGERS PER DIRECTION PER DAY." pic.twitter.com/n45iug1Bzh
Due diligence in Boring Co's EA means they list their competitor transit modes between DC and Baltimore, which they say include regularly-scheduled bus and rail service that are "inexpensive, reliable" and "frequent" for a cost starting at $8. pic.twitter.com/dnslTrkiJY
TBC DC-Baltimore Loop would pass through several aquifiers. The tunnels themselves would be fairly shallow, 30 to 44 feet down. pic.twitter.com/vwZGXthtne
Twitter was pretty much wall-to-wall Games of Thrones this weekend. Though the show does still have a marketing budget, it's safe to say the buzz is now mostly self-sustaining, unlike most of its competitors. Walking Dead did that. As did the Voice. Possibly the Americans.
GoT's impressive social media presence got me to thinking about this post from a few years ago.
As previously mentioned Certain business models limit you to certain marketing approaches.
For example, the standard model for scripted cable series is to run
weekly for about three months usually following long story arcs with
start dates varying from show to show. This model lends itself to
promotion through blogs and social media and it may not be a coincidence
that original, scripted shows have increased greatly in popularity and
influence over the past dozen years along with social media. When it
works well, these shows can create a powerful weekly cycle of buzz and
feedback starting with Twitter traffic during the actual broadcast and
building from there.
The sheer volume of tweets, posts and podcasts we're talking about is
astounding and it's made even more valuable because it bypasses our
normal anti-advertising filters. These are people we know recommending a
show. What's more, there's a tremendous social norming aspect. Watching
the show become part of what's expected.
Keeping that in mind, think about the Netflix direct-to-binge model. Social media thrives on having a critical mass of people sharing a common experience. With a shows like House of Cards,
the kind sustained build-up you see with a Game of Thrones is
impossible and even an ordinary discussion requires you to find a group
who are at same point in the viewing.
Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer of Netflix, responds to this concern with a truly extraordinary statement:
“No one has ever watched anything on Netflix that they couldn’t watch
all at once,” Sarandos said. There was no interest in changing that
model for a new group of originals. But that not only meant changing
consumer behavior, it also meant dealing with the realities of today’s
social network environment.
Sarandos called it a “different style of watercooler etiquette.” Rather
than having to deal with the weekly conversation that is produced,
viewers need to ask each other which episodes they’re watching and
dealing [sic] with that. Still, the strategy seems to be paying off, as
viewers are continuing to tune in.
(quick aside: "paying off" implies improvement over what would have
happened otherwise. By this standard you could argue that having
disgusting bathrooms "pays off" for a filling station as long as someone
still buys gas there.)
Sarandos is saying that part of the company's strategy is to get viewers to engage in less
word of mouth promotion. That's an amazing position, hoping that people
will refrain from conversation until everyone has had a chance to catch
up on all thirteen hours of a show. Of course, by the time that happens
(assuming it ever does), the show will be an old topic for the people
who watched it when it first came out.
In an age where social media is generally considered the inevitable wave
of the future, Netflix is launching a programming model based on people
talking less about their shows. It's possible that there's some method
to the madness here.
Of course, it's also possible these people haven't thought this through.
This essay from Joi Ito makes a lot of points that will feel familiar to regular readers (mistaking S-curves for exponential when discussing technological progress, the rise of cult-like thinking -- what we've been calling magical heuristics). Lots of other good stuff as well, which is pretty much what you'd expect from the director of MIT’s Media Lab.
The notion of singularity – which includes the idea that AI will supercede humans with its exponential growth, making everything we humans have done and will do insignificant – is a religion created mostly by people who have designed and successfully deployed computation to solve problems previously considered impossibly complex for machines.
They have found a perfect partner in digital computation, a seemingly knowable, controllable, machine-based system of thinking and creating that is rapidly increasing in its ability to harness and process complexity and, in the process, bestowing wealth and power on those who have mastered it.
In Silicon Valley, the combination of groupthink and the financial success of this cult of technology has created a feedback loop, lacking in self-regulation (although #techwontbuild, #metoo and #timesup are forcing some reflection).
On an S-curve or a bell curve, the beginning of the slope looks a lot like an exponential curve. According to systems-dynamics people, however, an exponential curve shows a positive feedback curve without limits, self-reinforcing and dangerous.
In exponential curves, Singularitarians see super-intelligence and abundance. Most people outside the Singularity bubble believe that natural systems behave like S-curves, where systems respond and self-regulate. When a pandemic has run its course, for example, its spread slows and the world settles into a new equilibrium. The world may not be in the same state as before the pandemic or other runaway change, but the notion of singularity – especially as some sort of saviour or judgment day that will allow us to transcend the messy, mortal suffering of our human existence – is fundamentally a flawed one.
As of this week, there have been 695 cases of measles in the U.S. across more than 20 states this year—the highest annual toll seen since the disease was declared extinguished in the U.S. in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Given that it’s only April and we’ve already broken a yearly record, it’s worth wondering: Just how much worse could things get?
Measles is a highly contagious virus, capable of infecting someone through airborne droplets left behind by someone else, even hours after they’re no longer present. But measles’ one major weakness is humanity itself. Humans are the only natural host the virus uses to reproduce and spread. That means if you can fully stop the chain of transmission between people—by vaccinating practically everyone who could be exposed to it, for instance—you can eradicate measles completely.
In the U.S., the eradication of measles was formally declared in 2000, thanks to a tremendous public health effort and a mandatory vaccination program. But since there are still parts of the world where measles happens regularly, even with vaccination, travelers have continued to catch measles somewhere else and bring it to the U.S. Because most Americans continue to be vaccinated against it at an early age, though, outbreaks and cases of measles since 2000 have largely been isolated.
The anti-vaccination movement, however, has provided the kindling for this resurgence in measles, according to Peter Pitts, former associate commissioner for external relations at the Food and Drug Administration and president and co-founder of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.
“This measles epidemic is a perfect storm of vaccine denialism, stupidity, and groupthink,” he told Gizmodo.
As has been widely reported, one of the major epicenters of the anti-vaxx movement was the pricier sections of the west side of LA, which brings us to...
David Wallace-Wells has been catching a lot of flack (most of it richly deserved) for his recent New York Magazine article
on climate change. It is a hugely troubling sign when the very
scientists you were claiming to represent push back against your
article.
This controversy illustrates a larger problem with science reporting at
the magazine. We already have a post in the queue discussing the
neutral-to-credulous coverage of topics ranging from homeopathy to magic
crystals to Gwyneth Paltrow's goop empire. The Wallace-Wells piece
takes things to another level and goes in a very different but arguably
worse direction. Rather than giving bad science a pass, he takes good
science and presents it so ineptly has to do it a disservice.
I am not going to delve into that science myself. The topic has been
well covered by numerous expert and knowledgeable writers [see here and here].
The best I could offer would be a recap. There are some journalistic
points I may hit later and I do want to highlight a minor detail in the
article that has slipped past most critics, but which is perfectly
representative of the dangerous way Wallace-Wells combines
sensationalism with a weak grasp of science.
Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in
pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the
planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will
likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the
National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many
as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe”
level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a
pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism
(as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which
does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.
No, David, no it doesn't.
I want to be painstakingly careful at this point. These are complex and
extraordinarily important issues and it is essential that we do not lose
sight of certain basic facts: by any reasonable standard, man-made
climate change is one of the two or three most important issues facing
our country; the effect of various pollutants on children's mental and
physical development should be a major concern for all of us; high ozone
levels are a really bad thing.
But the suggestion that ozone levels are causing an autism epidemic in
West Hollywood is both dangerous and scientifically illiterate. You'll
notice that I did not say that suggesting ozone levels cause autism is
irresponsible. Though the study in question is outside of my field, the
hypothesis seems reasonable and I do not see any red flags associated
with the research. If Wallace-Wells had stopped before adding that last sentence, he would've been on solid ground, but he didn't.
Autism is frightening, mysterious, tragic. This has caused people,
particularly parents facing one of the worst moments imaginable, to
clean desperately to any explanation that might make sense of their
situation. As a result, autism has become a focal point for bad science,
culminating with the rise of the anti-vaccination movement. There is no
field where groundless speculation and fear-mongering are less welcome.
So, if ozone and other pollutants may contribute to autism, what's so
bad about the West Hollywood claim? For that, you need to do some
rudimentary causal reasoning, starting with a quick look at ozone
pollution in Southern California.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy selected a limit of 70 parts per
billion, which is more stringent than the 75 parts-per-billion standard
adopted in 2008 but short of the 60-ppb endorsed by environmentalists
and health advocacy groups including the American Lung Assn. The
agency’s science advisors had recommended a limit lower than 70 -- and
as low as 60.
...
About one-third of California residents live in communities with
pollution that exceeds federal standards, according to estimates by the
state Air Resources Board.
Air quality is worst in inland valleys, where pollution from vehicles
and factories cook in sunlight to form ozone, which is blown and trapped
against the mountains.
The South Coast air basin, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside
and San Bernardino counties, violated the current 75-ppb ozone standard
on 92 days in 2014. The highest ozone levels in the nation are in San
Bernardino County, which reported a 2012-2014 average of 102 parts per
billion.
Now let's look at some ozone levels around the region. West Hollywood, it should be noted, is not great.
But just over the Hollywood Hills, the situation is even worse.
Go further inland to San Dimas and the level is even higher…
Though still far short of what we find in San Bernardino.
If you look at autism rates by school district and compare them to ozone
levels, it is difficult to see much of a relationship. Does this mean
that ozone does not contribute to autism? Absolutely not. What it shows
is that, as with many developmental and learning disabilities, the
wealthy are overdiagnosed while poor are underdiagnosed. It is no
coincidence that a place like Santa Monica/Maibu (a notorious
anti-vaxxer hotspot) has more than double the diagnosis rate of San Bernardino.
The there's this from the very LA Times article by Alan Zarembo that Wallace-Wells cites [emphasis added]:
Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiologist at UC Davis, suspects that
environmental triggers such as exposure to chemicals during pregnancy
play a role. In a 2009 study, she started with a tantalizing lead —
several autism clusters, mostly in Southern California, that her team
had identified from disability and birth records.
But the hot spots could not be linked to chemical plants, waste dumps or any other obvious environmental hazards. Instead, the cases were concentrated in places where parents were highly educated and had easy access to treatment.
Peter Bearman, a sociologist at Columbia University, has demonstrated how such social forces are driving autism rates.
Analyzing state data, he identified a 386-square-mile area centered in
West Hollywood that consistently produced three times as many autism
cases as would be expected from birth rates.
Affluence helped set the area apart. But delving deeper, Bearman
detected a more surprising pattern that existed across the state: Rich
or poor, children living near somebody with autism were more likely to
have the diagnosis themselves.
Living within 250 meters boosted the chances by 42%, compared to living between 500 and 1,000 meters away.
The reason, his analysis suggested, was simple: People talk.
They talk about how to recognize autism, which doctors to see, how to
navigate the bureaucracies to secure services. They talk more if they
live next door or visit the same parks, or if their children go to the
same preschool.
The influence of neighbors alone accounts for 16% of the growth of
autism cases in the state developmental system between 2000 and 2005,
Bearman estimated.
In other words, autism is not contagious, but the diagnosis is.
[On a somewhat ironic note, I put the wrong name in the original version of this post.]
A big part of the dotcom boom was the idea that the surefire secret to success in the new economy was to have an online business, quickly line up tons of funding, bring in serious traffic and establish a strong brand through memorable, preferably edgy ads. (Thankfully, we've learned or lesson.)
Few companies took this idea further than Outpost.com.
The company expanded rapidly, taking advantage of the booming Internet. Revenue increased from $1.9 million in the year ended February 29, 1996 to $22.7 million in the year ended February 28, 1998.
In 1997, Money Magazine rated the site as "Best Site for Computer Equipment". Outpost.com raised $2.7 million in venture capital in 1997, at which point the site had 25,000 visitors per day and 1.3 million customers. The company secured another $22 million in financing in 1998, and raised another $70 million from its initial public offering. Outpost.com opened a warehouse in Ohio that could guarantee next-morning domestic delivery and worldwide delivery within 48 hours. Outpost provided next-day shipping on all orders, regardless of size, up until 2001.
After the dot-com bubble burst, the company fell on hard times. In 2001, the company entered into a merger agreement with PC Connection but then terminated that merger agreement and the company was sold to Fry's Electronics for $21 million including the repayment of $13 million in debt from PC Connection. At that time, the company had 1.4 million customers and 4 million visitors per month to its website.
The company reported Wednesday that automotive revenue in the first quarter fell 41% to $3.7 billion from $6.3 billion in the previous quarter, a far steeper drop than expected for sales of all its electric-cars — the Model S, the Model X and the Model 3.
Total sales, including Tesla energy and battery storage products, fell 38% to $4.5 billion from $7.2 billion.
The sales slump in turn slammed the company’s bottom line. The company turned unprofitable again after two rare quarters of positive earnings. The net loss was $702 million, after a $139-million profit in the previous quarter. (The first-quarter loss was close to what the company recorded in the year-earlier period — $709 million — when it was grappling with fundamental manufacturing problems.) Scarce cash got even scarcer. Cash on hand dropped from $3.69 billion at the end of last quarter to $2.2 billion. That included paying off $920 million in convertible bonds.
Operating cash flow turned negative — a net $640 million going out the door over the three months versus a positive $1.23 billion in the previous period.
Tesla shares, down about 22% for the year through Wednesday’s close, were up slightly in after-hours trading Wednesday, to about $259 a share.
...
Where the money for such projects will come from is unclear. Musk was asked why he doesn’t raise money through a debt or equity sale. Musk said he’d rather focus on efficiency first. “I don’t think raising capital should be a substitute for making the company operate more effectively,” he said. “I think it’s healthy to be on a Spartan diet for a while.”
Without an infusion of equity or debt, major expansion would require healthy cash flow. But cash flow has gone negative. Capital spending, which funds assembly lines and other manufacturing operations, has been declining. It fell from $325 million in 2018’s fourth quarter to $280 million in 2019’s first quarter. The number topped $1 billion in the third quarter of 2017 and has fallen with each quarter.
Not surprisingly for those who have been following his career, rather than tamping down expectations, Elon Musk has responded with even more incredible promises (from a couple of days ago:
Tesla’s aim is to create a fleet of self-driving cars that can be used as robot taxis in what Musk is calling the “Tesla fleet.” The company will manage the apps and software. Tesla owners could let their cars out for robo-taxi use, with the company keeping a percentage of the revenue. Tesla would also operate its own robo-taxi fleet.
“We expect to deploy the first robo-taxis with no one in them next year,” Musk said Monday. “I’m confident we’ll get regulatory approval somewhere.”
Make no mistake. Musk is talking about level 5, fully autonomous vehicles, something that, as far as we can tell, no one is even close to. Most researchers put this functionality at least a decade away, which is why the focus has shifted to finding ways to get the most out of level 4 AVs.
Even by his standards, this is an audacious claim, but the stakes are stunningly high. The valuation of Tesla has always been based on a combination of hype and the "real life Tony Stark" persona and there are still investors who want to believe (as well as those who don't).
The range in target prices for Tesla stock is almost bizarre, reflecting wildly different opinions about Tesla’s growth prospects. The stock closed trading Monday at $262.75 a share, down 3.9%.
The Ark Invest money management group sees Tesla trading at $4,000 as self-drive technology becomes more popular. Ives puts an “outperform” rating on Tesla, with a 12-month price target of $365.
At the other end of the spectrum, Garrett Nelson of CFRA recommends Tesla stockholders sell, with a target price of $225 a share. And short sellers have set a target price as low as zero.
I suspect that a lot of the visionary pronouncements and proposals about giant underground slot car racing sets and brain-computer interfaces we've been hearing about recently have less to do with the projects themselves and more with maintaining a futuristic aura around Musk, and thus propping up the stock a little bit longer.
It worked for a long time but even in the hype economy, there are limits.
More good work from Timothy B. Lee on the Tesla beat [emphasis added]:
Tesla is less than two years away from full self-driving, CEO Elon Musk said in an interview
with MIT researcher Lex Fridman published on Friday. And he said Tesla
was far ahead of other companies working on self-driving technology.
"To me right now, this seems 'game, set, and match,'" Musk said. "I
could be wrong, but it appears to be the case that Tesla is vastly ahead
of everyone."
Musk told Fridman that Tesla customers would need to keep their hands
on the wheel "for at least six months or something like that." But he
predicted that soon—"maybe even toward the end of this year, I'd be
shocked if it's not next year at the latest"—Tesla's self-driving
technology will become so good that "having a human intervene will
decrease safety."
Musk has maintained an optimistic mood about Tesla's self-driving
progress at the same time that other industry CEOs have been tamping
down expectations. (Musk is congenitally optimistic on this topic—in
2015, he predicted that fully self-driving cars would be ready within two years, declaring it a "much easier problem than people think it is.")
...
"Tesla Autopilot is not yet even close to where Waymo was 6 years ago," wrote Brad Templeton, a longtime self-driving car evangelist who advised Google during the early years of its self-driving car program.
By 2012, Google had developed highway driver assistance software that
had capabilities similar to recent versions of Autopilot. Google
considered selling this technology as a standalone product but decided
there was too much danger of drivers becoming overly reliant on the
technology—and failing to properly monitor it.
So Google pivoted to developing fully self-driving cars that would
never need customers to take control. By 2015, Waymo was confident
enough in its technology to allow a blind man to ride through
residential streets in Austin, Texas. But more than three years later,
Google's project—now rechristened Waymo—still hasn't launched a fully
driverless taxi service.
At this point, regular viewers should be able to fill in the the missing dialogue without much trouble. Musk is a huckster, and like most of the best of the breed, he has the gift of believing his own line. His natural lack of talent as an engineer (he really is shockingly bad at this) may actually give him an advantage here -- that Dunning–Kruger boost of confidence can make a pitch even more convincing.
You can almost imagine the conversation with the genuinely gifted engineers at Tesla as they tried to explain the many problems with that were almost solved compared to the handful that were still years away from resolution, patiently walking him through the subtle distinctions and spelling out the difficult trade-offs required to get an autonomous vehicle ready for the road.
The real tip-off is "much easier problem than people think it is." If you've ever had a job that required presenting complex technical or analytic concepts, you've probably had that moment where you realize that your audience missed all of those fine but important point and drew exactly the wrong conclusions.
Of course, your audience probably didn't use those conclusions to justify the viability of a multi-billion dollar company.
Not just Netflix, of course. For any of the numerous companies with both huge valuation and sky-high price to earnings ratios, healthy growth and a couple of decades of solid profitability aren't enough to justify the level of investment. These companies have to be unprecedented, spectacular successes that completely dominate their industries.This is one of those facts that everyone knows but few spend much time thinking about, at least few of those in the business press.
Personally, I hope that Netflix has a long and lucrative run -- the more players, the better -- but it's important to remember that the bullish argument for the stock price requires blowing Disney out of the water, and right now, the house of mouse is looking rather substantial.
At this point, I don't think that Musk actually expects to get any real money out of the DC to Baltimore tunnel proposal directly, but he has got to shore up his visionary credentials and he has to do it fast.
Demand for Tesla cars appears to have stalled. Stores are being closed. Inventory is piling up. Prices are being cut.
Panasonic,
the company’s closest business partner, abandoned plans to expand
operations at Tesla’s giant battery factory in Nevada unless car sales
pick up.
Although Tesla posted
consecutive quarterly profits late last year, Musk has prepared Wall
Street for a loss when first-quarter 2019 earnings are announced April
24.
The controversial chief executive also faces contempt charges from
the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had agreed to settle SEC
stock fraud charges after tweeting falsely last August that he had the
funding to take Tesla private. In the settlement, he agreed not to tweet
material information about the company without prior vetting. A federal
judge said the settlement could be clearer, ordering both sides to put
on their “reasonable pants” and revise the agreement.
Amid
the bad news, Tesla’s volatile stock has fallen from a year-to-date
high of $347.31 a share to 273.26 on Thursday, a 21% decline.
The valuation of the company was always driven primarily by Musk's carefully cultivated "real life Tony Stark" persona, and that persona is starting to fade just as the company's debts are coming due. He absolutely has to keep the show going.
Aaron Gordon of Jalopnik has an insightful review of the latest act.
What if I proposed digging two 35-mile tunnels that would begin and end right next to two train stations that currently have service between one another? And this tunnel would be right underneath an existing highway? But this tunnel would be used to skim cars along tracks at speeds no one has achieved yet? And it would move fewer than two trains’ worth of people per direction per day?
...
This is no small caveat. 35 miles is a really long tunnel, and they’re not just digging one, but two of them. The report claims a digging time of less than two years, which would be an unprecedented achievement orders of magnitude [Not quite, but still a lot -- MP] faster than any other tunneling project to date, as Kevin DeGood, Director for Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress pointed out:
Reuters: “Boring says it would take between 12 and 20 months to dig the [35.3 mile] tunnels.”
For comparison, a 35-mile twin-bore tunnel through the Swiss Alps took 17 years to build. Yes, digging through the Alps is much harder than the soil beneath Maryland, but not that much harder.
And, for the record, it takes high-speed trains 17 minutes to travel through the tunnel, or only two minutes longer than the proposed travel time in Musk’s DC-Baltimore route.
...
Instead of talking about those things, The US and Maryland DOTs are investing actual resources to study this pointless tunnel and openly advocate for its construction. In a statement accompanying the report’s release, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine L. Chao talked up the potential benefits (heavy emphasis on “potential”):
The publication of a draft environmental assessment for this unique project demonstrates the Department’s commitment to preparing for the future of transportation across all modes.
All modes?! It’s a car in a tunnel! That mode exists!
I'm afraid there's less to this story than meets the eye. All snark aside, astrology has been a popular and profitable segment of the economy for a long time and an app that delivers horoscopes makes perfect business sense. Unlike, for example, a model based on buying movie tickets than reselling them at a loss.
As an Aquarius, David Birnbaum is naturally skeptical of astrology. But as an investor, he has zero doubts about the business potential of the $2.1 billion “mystical services market.” It’s an area that he has been trying, unsuccessfully, to invest in for nearly two decades.
Mr. Birnbaum researched lots of astrology start-ups in the Web 1.0 era but concluded then that they were not good investments. “They were pretty much just marketplaces sending traffic off to random astrologers,” he said. “They were definitely shady.”
This year he finally backed one: Sanctuary, an app that can be described as “Uber for astrological readings.” For $19.99 a month, you can receive a monthly one-on-one chat consultation with an astrologer. (The app also provides free daily horoscopes.)
Mr. Birnbaum’s decision to back a horoscope company through Five Four Ventures, the incubator he runs, “gets a lot of grins” from people in the finance world, he said. But they get it. Astrology is having a cultural moment, and for investors, that translates to dollar signs.
In recent years astrology traded its psychedelic new-wave stigma for modern Instagrammy witch vibes, and those vibes are very popular with millennial women. This means there’s money to be made. Start-ups — professional, non-shady ones with interesting business models — are bubbling up, eagerly raising funding from people like Mr. Birnbaum.
Scott Lemieux points us to this from the New York Times
The offering, which could value Uber at around $100 billion, is expected to reverberate through global financial markets and to solidify the company’s position as one of the most consequential technology firms of the past decade. The share sale would be the biggest since the Alibaba Group of China began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014, and would peg Uber’s value at more than four times that of United Airlines’ parent and double that of FedEx.
But the prospectus renewed questions about how sustainable Uber’s business actually is. The company said in the filing that it lost $1.8 billion in 2018, excluding certain transactions, on revenue of $11.3 billion. And the prospectus also showed that its rocket-ship trajectory for revenue growth was beginning to slow.
While I appreciate the dry understatement of describing an annual loss of almost two billion in terms of questions about sustainability, I'll have to go with Lemieux's summary:
I mean, I’m as happy to pocket the subsidies offered by venture capitalists as the next urban dweller. But the fundamental problems of Uber’s business model remain as ineluctable as ever. They haven’t solved the problem of offering prices low enough to get a lot of customers while paying drivers enough that they’ll be quickly available for prospective riders while making money. And the barriers to entry will remain low enough — and the ability of riders to use other modes of transportation if prices get too high present enough — that “drive your competitors out of business and jack up the prices” can’t actually work for the industry either.
For about a dozen years now, I've been saying that one of these days Watts is going to gentrify. Back then, the response I got from residents of the neighborhood was polite disbelief. A few years later, it was "well, maybe someday."
Similarly, in neighboring Inglewood, the same type of thing is happening. A new NFL stadium and plans for a new basketball arena for the Los Angeles Clippers have made Inglewood the new target for developers who are swooping in, buying up properties, and pushing out older residents who have lived there for years.
In some instance, as Angel Jennings reports for the Los Angeles Times, tenants have been given notice that their rents will more than doubled—although no new improvements have been made to the units they are living in. In cases where the rent is not being raised, tenants are simply being given 60-day notices to vacate the premises as new owners take over.
In a city with no rent-control or rent-stabilization laws, there is little that anyone can do to stop this from happening to residents—about 25 percent of whom are black and over the age of 55, according to the Times.
In one instance, Tomisha Pinson—who lives next door to site where the new stadium is being built for the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers—told the Times that she received notice that her $1,145 monthly rent would be increasing to $2,725 for the two-bedroom apartment she currently lives in.
...
Currently, blacks and Latinos make up 42 percent and 51 percent of Inglewood’s population, respectively. Gentrification could change all of that. Two-thirds of the city’s residents are renters, and with no rent-control laws in place to prevent what is currently happening, the city is an attractive investment to those looking to cash in on all the new entertainment construction.
I'll probably be coming back to connect some more dots -- it's a complicated story -- but there's been an interesting development in the streaming television industry which doesn't quite jibe with the some of the assumptions that are essential to the standard narrative.
Specifically, the future of television is the Netflix, single-tier, all-you-can-eat model. No ala carte, no ad-based approaches. The services that survive will bell the ones that create the most compelling (i.e. buzzworthy) original content. There is a reasonable chance that this will end with Netflix holding very close to a monopoly over the world market for movies andd television.
Both investors and journalists have embraced these assumptions, and their support have propped up the whole enterprise, but other than that, there has never been much evidence in support and more than a little that seems to go against them.
We've already discussed the rise of the terrestrial superstations starting with Weigel's MeTV. This model, based on ad revenue, older established programming, and minimal spending on original programming, has proven extraordinarily profitable.
With that in mind, the advent of Pluto TV (joining services like Amazon's Freedive and the evil but generally competent Sinclair's Stirr) is worth noting.
As its competitors rush to launch Netflix-style subscription streaming services, Viacom is making a bet on free programming.
The company is paying $340 million in cash to acquire free streaming service Pluto TV, which it plans to use as a distribution outlet for digital programming from brands like Awesomeness and as a marketing tool for its portfolio of media brands. The deal is expected to close during the first quarter of the year.
"As the video marketplace continues to segment, we see an opportunity to support the ecosystem in creating products at a broad range of price points, including free," CEO Bob Bakish said Tuesday in a statement announcing the purchase. "To that end, we see significant white space in the ad-supported streaming market and are excited to work with the talented Pluto TV team, and a broad range of Viacom partners, to accelerate its growth in the U.S. and all over the world."
I've always been fascinated with cross-pollination
The music started in the hearts and drums, from another land
Played for everyone, by sons, of the motherland
Sendin out a message of peace, to everybody and
Came across the oceans in chains and shame
Easing the pain, and it was without name
Until some men in New Orleans on Rampart Street
Put out the sounds, and then they gave it a beat
I`m talkin' 'bout Jelly Roll, King, and Satch
I`m talkin' 'bout the music that had no match
Yes the music, and it was born down there
We`re gonna use it, so make the horn sound clear
It`s jazz music...jazz music
Yo, the music that Pops, and other cats made
It stayed, cause people love when they played
To the North, it took a riverboat shuffle
To the big cities, with lots of hustle and bustle
To Chicago, and to the Apple too
This was a scene, that our forefathers knew
Go get your crew, I know they`ll get into
The jazz music... jazz music
The music called jazz had the razzamatazz
It had the flavor, and a lot of pizazz
The big band beat was very neat and unique
The swing was king, it made you tap your feet
There was Benny and Duke and of course the Count Basie
The melody was smooth and yes, very taste
There was Hap, The Prez, and Lady Day and
Dizzy Bird and Miles, they were all playin'
They brought it to the people of the foreign lands
Back across the oceans and the desert sands
Where it echoes in the distant sounds of drums
And it rises with the sun on days begun
This is the music, that we give tribute to
They gave it to us, that`s why we give it to you
The jazz music, the jazz music
The jazz music, uh, uh, uh
