SEC documents detail scores of fraud allegations against Andreessen-backed Coinbase

People are complaining to the SEC?
That is not what you want ahead on your IPO.

From Mashable:

Life savings lost. Desperate cries for help. Allegations of fraud.

In the six years since its founding, the San Francisco-based exchange Coinbase has established itself as one of the most trusted places to trade ether, bitcoin, litecoin, and bitcoin cash. It's also run up its share of critics: namely, its customers.

In 134 pages of complaints filed to the SEC and the California Department of Business Oversight obtained by Mashable following a five-month FOIA process, a picture emerges not of a responsible actor in the cryptocurrency space opening the market to new investors, but rather a company overwhelmed by and underprepared for its own success.

And the consequences — as expressed by Coinbase's own customers — are enough to give even the most diehard crypto-enthusiast pause.

Money gone and no one home
A recurring theme in the SEC complaint files Mashable obtained is the seeming disappearance of a would-be trader's money, and what is portrayed as an aggressive nonchalance on the part of Coinbase in response to the loss.

Notably, the SEC redacted the complaints to remove personally identifiable information. This, while an understandable privacy measure, makes it practically impossible to reach out to the complainants for follow up. As such, we'll mostly let their words speak for themselves.

And there are a lot of words.

One complaint, filed in January of this year, is typical of the frustration expressed by many.
"I have sent 17,023.00 from my Coinbase account to another Coinbase account on 12.21.2017," it reads. "The other Coinbase account never received the funds as of 1/16/2018. I have contacted Coinbase over 7 times and all they say is that they have so many issues, they will get back to me and it is been a month."...

...MORE

 If interested see also:
Jan. 31
"Coinbase Strategy Teardown: How Coinbase Grew Into The King Midas Of Crypto Doing $1B In Revenue"

March 6
"Announcing Coinbase Index Fund"
Coinbase, and the things Coinbase is doing seem to be a more realistic way for Andreessen Horowitz to make money out of Bitcoin than their 21.Co. (see below)...

April 9 
Andreessen Horowitz Investee Coinbase May Buy Andreessen Horowitz Investee Earn.com (né 21.co)
Ha!
That's one way to exit.
Earn.com was not mentioned in April 4's "Crypto M&A: "Three Startups Coinbase May Have Its Eye On"" because it's such a Tesla/SolarCity-cousins-shouldn't-marry type of deal.
Yet here we are....

And many more but that's such a nice progression we''ll stop here. Use the 'search blog' box if interested in more.

"Beijing Wants to Rewrite the Rules of the Internet"

From The Atlantic, June 18:

Xi Jinping wants to wrest control of global cyber governance from the market economies of the west.

It’s never been a worse time to be a Chinese telecom company in America. This evening, the Senate is set to vote on whether to restore a ban on U.S. company sales to prominent Chinese telecom player ZTE, a penalty for its illegal shipments to Iran and North Korea. The bill also includes a measure that would ban U.S. government agencies from buying equipment and services made by ZTE and Huawei, one of its competitors, to tackle cyber threats to U.S. supply chains. Meanwhile, a revelation that Huawei was among the companies with whom Facebook had data-sharing agreements, which allowed device makers to access user data and that of their friends, sparked fears that the Chinese government now possesses a treasure trove of sensitive data on U.S. citizens.

ZTE and Huawei have become flashpoints in the Trump administration’s confrontation with Beijing over cybersecurity, investment, trade, and technological leadership. All this comes as the administration slapped tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods last Friday. But amid the hysteria surrounding these two companies, we may be missing a less obvious but potentially more impactful challenge: China’s ambitions to radically overhaul the internet.

In late April, just days after the Commerce Department announced the denial order against ZTE, Xi Jinping, the president of China, gave a major speech laying out his vision to turn his country into a “cyber superpower.” His speech, along with other statements and policies he has made since assuming power, outlines his government’s ambition not just for independence from foreign technology, but its mission to write the rules for global cyber governance—rules that look very different from those of market economies of the West. This alternative would include technical standards requiring foreign companies to build versions of their products compliant with Chinese standards, and pressure to comply with government surveillance policies. It would require data to be stored on servers in-country and restrict transfer of data outside China without government permission. It would also permit government agencies and critical infrastructure systems to source only from local suppliers.

China, in other words, appears to be floating the first competitive alternative to the open internet—a model that it is steadily proliferating around the world. As that model spreads, whether through Beijing’s own efforts or through the model’s inherent appeal for certain developing countries with more similarities to China than the West, we cannot take for granted that the internet will remain a place of free expression where open markets can flourish.

China has been open about its intentions to change how the world addresses development. As part of that vision, for over a decade, it has advocated for something its leaders call “cyberspace sovereignty” as a rebuke to established actors in internet governance like the United States, Europe, and Japan. To advance this model, Xi created a powerful government body to centralize cyber policy. In addition to passing a major cybersecurity law, China has pushed through dozens of regulations and technical standards that, in conjunction, bolster the government’s control of and visibility into the entire internet ecosystem, from the infrastructure that undergirds the internet, to the flow of data, to the dissemination of information online, to the make-up of the software and hardware that form the basis of everything from e-commerce to industrial control systems. In a 2016 speech, Xi called for core internet technologies deemed critical to national and economic security to be “secure and controllable”—meaning that the government would have broad discretion, even without specific written regulations, to decide how it protects information networks, devices, and data.

China’s cyber governance plan appears to have three objectives....

...MUCH MORE 

"Tesla sues ex-employee for hacking, theft, and leaking to the press" (TSLA)

The stock is trading at $357.56 up $5.01 (+1.42%), a couple bucks below the 'magic line' we've looked at the last two days.
From the Verge:

Elon Musk claimed ‘sabotage’ earlier this week

Tesla filed a lawsuit on Wednesday alleging that a former employee hacked the company’s system and transferred “gigabytes” of data to unnamed third parties. The lawsuit may align with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s recent claim of “sabotage” by an ex-worker. 

Tesla’s lawsuit names Martin Tripp, a former process technician at the company’s Gigafactory in Nevada, as the defendant. Tesla claims that Tripp “unlawfully hacked the company’s confidential and trade secret information and transferred that information to third parties.” To do so, Tripp placed “hacking software” in the computers of three individual employees to routinely export confidential data, the company says. 

Tesla says that Tripp has already admitted to hacking its manufacturing operating system, and the company accuses him of making false statements to the media about the stolen information. The suit, which was filed in federal court in Nevada, was first reported by CNBC. 

Tesla claims that Tripp was the source of a news report about punctured battery cells at Tesla’s factory.

For example, Tripp claimed that punctured battery cells had been used in certain Model 3 vehicles even though no punctured cells were ever used in vehicles, batteries or otherwise. Tripp also vastly exaggerated the true amount and value of “scrap” material that Tesla generated during the manufacturing process, and falsely claimed that Tesla was delayed in bringing new manufacturing equipment online.

The lawsuit doesn’t specify which media outlet Tripp leaked to, but earlier this month, Business Insider ran a story about scrap metal waste and punctured battery cells at Tesla’s factory, citing documents and former employees as sources...MORE

San Francisco Fed: "Economic Forecasts with the Yield Curve"

A repost from March 11.

From the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:

FRBSF Economic Letter

2018-07 | March 5, 2018

The term spread—the difference between long-term and short-term interest rates—is a strikingly accurate predictor of future economic activity. Every U.S. recession in the past 60 years was preceded by a negative term spread, that is, an inverted yield curve. Furthermore, a negative term spread was always followed by an economic slowdown and, except for one time, by a recession. While the current environment is somewhat special—with low interest rates and risk premiums—the power of the term spread to predict economic slowdowns appears intact.

---

One of the most pervasive relationships in macroeconomics is that between the term spread—the difference between long-term and short-term interest rates—and future economic activity. A negative term spread, that is, an inverted yield curve, reliably predicts low future output growth and indicates a high probability of recession (Rudebusch and Williams 2009). This relationship holds not only in the United States but also for a number of other advanced economies (Estrella and Mishkin 1997). The term spread is one of the most reliable predictors of future economic activity among a wide range of economic and financial indicators and, as such, is closely watched by professional forecasters and policymakers alike.

Over most of the current recovery, particularly in 2017, the yield curve has flattened. As of the end of February, the difference between the ten-year and one-year Treasury yields stands at only 0.8%. The Federal Reserve, which affects short-term interest rates, is continuing its path of monetary policy normalization. In its Summary of Economic Projections from December 2017, the median projection of the federal funds rate rises from its current 1.4% to 3.1% in 2020, even slightly overshooting its long-run projected value of 2.8%. Many observers and forecasters therefore expect the term spread to shrink even further, including the possibility that it could turn negative.

The question then naturally arises whether this development may signal a rising probability that a recession could begin. Some commentators have argued that the relationship between the slope of the yield curve and the business cycle may have changed due to the unique current circumstances, including the unusually low risk premiums holding down interest rates. This Economic Letter revisits and updates some of the empirical evidence for the predictive power of the term spread and addresses the question of whether this time may indeed be different.

The yield curve and the business cycle
The predictive power of the term spread is immediately evident from Figure 1, which shows the term spread calculated as the difference between ten-year and one-year Treasury yields from January 1955 to February 2018, together with shaded areas for officially designated recessions. Every recession over this period was preceded by an inversion of the yield curve, that is, an episode with a negative term spread. A simple rule of thumb that predicts a recession within two years when the term spread is negative has correctly signaled all nine recessions since 1955 and had only one false positive, in the mid-1960s, when an inversion was followed by an economic slowdown but not an official recession. The delay between the term spread turning negative and the beginning of a recession has ranged between 6 and 24 months.

Figure 1

The term spread and recessions

Note: Gray bars indicate NBER recession dates.

While historical circumstances differed for these episodes, the patterns of past yield-curve inversions were remarkably similar: The decline in the term spread was generally driven by a pronounced increase in short-term interest rates. Long-term rates, on the other hand, typically moved much more gradually and either increased slightly over those periods or even declined....MUCH MORE

HT: FT Alphaville's Further Reading post, March 7

Izabella Kaminska at FT Alphaville June 20, 2018

Izzy came back for a special Markets Live production:

Join us for Kaminska Live at 3pm, a Parliament TV watching party

And apparently wowed the critics:

"Kaminska, a master of any medium she chooses... Alphaville's livestream will be a case study of the craft."
-COLUMBIA BLOGGING REVIEW

"FT Alphaville has a lot under the hood, tight and fast".

-CAR AND BLOGGER

"Kaminska Live-It's a smash, number one with a bullet!"

-BlogBillboard

"FT Alphaville's Live Blog of Kaminska et al. is intelligent; To use a tired cliché, a must read."

-NEW YORK REVIEW OF BLOGS

"Mere months into her tenure, the team Kaminska has fielded is redefining what a business blog should be."

-EDITOR & BLOGGER.

Seriously, we are fans - and kudos to the FT/Alphaville staff. Here's

Kaminska Live: June 20, 2018 

Live markets commentary from FT.com

242 2 hours ago

By: Dan McCrum, Jemima Kelly

"The Onion is on a crusade against Mark Zuckerberg because it says Facebook is choking its traffic" (FB)

From Business Insider, June 15:

The Onion is in the business of making jokes about pretty much anything in the news. But this week, the satirical news site appears to have trained its fire on one particular target: Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Over the last two days, The Onion has published around a dozen articles ridiculing the social network and its founder, and it says there's more on the way.

Why? The Onion's editor-in-chief Chad Nackers told Business Insider that the comedy onslaught is because Zuckerberg has "repeatedly betrayed the trust of billions of people," and because Facebook is choking off traffic to The Onion's website.

"We have 6,572,949 followers on Facebook who receive an ever-decreasing amount of the content we publish on the network," Nackers said in a statement, calling Facebook an "unwanted interloper" between the publisher and its audience.

In other words, The Onion is on a mission. 

A multi-day lampooning

One of the first in the barrage on Thursday poked fun of the 34-year-old CEO: Mark Zuckerberg Insists Anyone With Same Skewed Values And Unrelenting Thirst For Power Could Have Made Same Mistakes.

The Onion's parody news article quoted a would-be Zuckergerg:

"'I know I screwed up, and I understand why you're all upset, but if you were a morally corrupt megalomaniac hell-bent on manipulating society to your twisted whims, you would have done the exact same thing,' said Zuckerberg, suggesting that people should put themselves in the shoes of a self-absorbed asshole with a warped perception of humanity who justified the exploitation of personal connections as a means of amassing unfettered influence and profits to truly comprehend why he made every completely fucked-up decision."

Another Onion article skewered Facebook's arguably cringey "Here Together" campaign: Facebook Users Ashamed Of Criticizing Company After Seeing Heartwarming 'Here Together' Ad Campaign.

After that came a flurry of more jabs at the Facebook CEO....MUCH MORE

Chips: Intel Will Have Graphics Processing Units by 2020 (INTC; NVDA; AMD)

From The Register, June 13:

Intel confirms it’ll release GPUs in 2020 
They sell like hot cakes so why wouldn’t Chipzilla want in?

Intel has confirmed it will start to sell discrete GPUs in the year 2020.

News of Chipzilla’s plans appeared in a post by analyst Ryan Shrout, who said that Intel CEO Brian Krasnich last week told an analyst event about the company’s plans.

Intel confirmed Shrout’s piece, telling us "We’re pleased to confirm our first discrete GPU is coming in 2020. As we’ve previously stated, our intent is to expand our leading position in integrated graphics for the PC market with high-end discrete graphics solutions for a broad range of computing segments."

Details remain scanty, but a move into GPUs would be entirely sensible for a few reasons.
Firstly, they’re selling like hot cakes and demand is so high they can sometimes be hard to find. Intel would be mad not to offer buyers another source given AMD and NVIDIA can hardly shove their kit out of a fab fast enough to keep up with demand.

Second, Intel recently discontinued its Xeon Phi co-processor line. GPUs would be a more-than-handy replacement for the Phi.

Third, GPUs are Just Becoming The Way Stuff Gets Done, especially in markets like AI, HPC and visualization in which Intel already plays. Not doing GPUs would therefore be stupid....MORE

"Reinsurance pricing outlook “very bleak” – Deutsche Bank"

From Artemis:

Absent further major losses hitting global reinsurance and insurance-linked securities (ILS) markets this year, the expectation now is that rates are likely to lose any ground gained at renewals so far this year and return to a slow softening trend in 2019, according to analysts at Deutsche Bank.

It’s no surprise really, given rate increases have decelerated again at the recent June 1st reinsurance renewal, with only loss affected accounts seeing any meaningful rises.

The gains made in January, as rates rose somewhat, were below the expectations of the traditional market at least, but these gains could be lost within a year if there isn’t a loss event that drains some of the capital from the marketplace.

Deutsche Bank’s equity analysts say that “the reinsurance pricing outlook looks very bleak” as a result, with an expectation that the market may not see any further rate increases to improve on those achieved so far in 2018.

They suggest that reinsurers which have touted the potential to improve their underwriting profitability in 2018 and beyond, on the back of the major losses from 2017, may now find that they and their shareholders are set to be further disappointed, absent any major industry losses.
The big four reinsurers have all expressed a desire to increase profitability over the coming years, not just due to better pricing after the losses but also thanks to greater efficiency.

In fact some of their targets imply improving underwriting returns at a level that some analysts are suggesting would require significant cuts to achieve.

Those efficiency efforts may become more urgent, as premiums earned in 2018 may be about the best they can hope for having mostly bulked up their property portfolios at January renewals this year.

Once those rate increases are earned through, there could be little in the way of increases left as pricing returns to a slow and steady decline.

If re/insurers efficiency efforts, such as headcount reduction and technology initiatives, aren’t seen to improve the bottom line swiftly enough, we could see them accelerated in order to make more immediate impact for their shareholders and to lower their overall cost bases....MORE

GE’s 111-year run in the Dow comes to an end (GE; WAG)

From MarketWatch:

General Electric, a member of the blue-chip index when it started and since 1907 continuously, booted in favor of Walgreens

General Electric Co. is losing an important title it has held for more than a century: Dow Jones Industrial Average component.

GE GE, -1.85%   , which was part of the Dow Jones index DJIA, -1.15%  when it was started in 1896 and had been a part of the blue-chip portfolio continuously since 1907, is being replaced by Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. WBA, +3.70%  , S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Tuesday afternoon.

“The U.S. economy has changed: Consumer, finance, health care and technology companies are more prominent today and the relative importance of industrial companies is less,” David Blitzer, managing director and chairman of the index committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices, explained in Tuesday’s announcement. “Today’s change to the DJIA will make the index a better measure of the economy and the stock market.”

GE has been removed from the index twice previously, but has been a constant presence since replacing Tennessee Coal & Iron in November 1907, the same month Oklahoma became the 46th state in the union. The other companies that were part of the index when GE entered in 1907, none of which are still members: Amalgamated Copper, American Car & Foundry, American Smelting & Refining, American Sugar, Colorado Fuel & Iron, National Lead, Peoples Gas, U.S. Rubber, U.S. Rubber 1st preferred, U.S. Steel and U.S. Steel preferred.

GE has fallen on hard times in recent years though, with a plunging stock price that broke an unwritten rule for the Dow: A component’s stock should not be worth less than 10% of the highest-priced stock in the index. GE closed at $12.95 a share Tuesday, which was less than 1/20 the price of a share of Boeing Co. BA, +1.28%  .

S&P Dow Jones Indices noted that GE’s plunging stock price factored into the decision as well...MORE

Also at MarketWatch:
What Walgreens stock replacing GE in the Dow Jones Industrial Average may mean

The 39 San Francisco high-rises at risk of collapse during a major quake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey

From Curbed San Francisco:

“Most of the structures, which were built between 1964 to 1994, are clustered around downtown, the Financial District, and SoMa” 

The U.S. Geological Survey released a gasp-inducing report regarding the structural security of dozens of San Francisco high-rises that could be in peril when the next major earthquake strikes.

New York Times reporter Thomas Fuller sifted through the USGS report to reveal the nearly 40 buildings in SF that could buckle following powerful earthquakes, like the one that hit San Francisco in 1906.

Most of the structures, which were built between 1964 to 1994, are clustered around downtown, the Financial District, and SoMa. The reason for concern: Many of the skyscrapers employed the use of a flawed technique that wasn’t remedied until after a major Southern California earthquake in the 1990s.

The faulty technique, known as welded steel moment-frame buildings, fuses together columns and beams rather than using the pricey and time-consuming bolts and rivets method, which was used in steel frame building in previous generations.

While the building code with said technique was rewritten following the Northridge quake, many of the buildings constructed using the welded steel moment-frame system have yet to be retrofitted.

According to the New York Times:

Engineers have known about a major defect in certain steel-frame buildings since 1994, when shaking from the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles fractured critical joints in more than 60 buildings, bringing at least one very close to collapse. The building code was rewritten to eliminate the flawed technique....

...MUCH MORE

"Pointy-Haired Bosses* are splashing AI about their organisations without a clue about why they're doing it,..."

From The Register, June 12:

Low AI rollout caused by dumb, fashion-victim management – Gartner
We're paraphrasing

Pointy-Haired Bosses* are splashing AI about their organisations without a clue about why they're doing it, says a senior Gartner analyst.

"As head of customer experience, the logic is: we have to deploy AI because everyone else is doing it. In fact, there's not a huge number of companies that are actually deploying AI," Jessica Ekholm told us.

Gartner estimates that only 4 per cent of CIOs polled in its most recent survey had invested and deployed AI, if you count chatbots as AI as Gartner does. Another 21 per cent of CIOs were experimenting with it.

The top use cases are around customer engagement, call centre support and digital marketing. That's 81 per cent of organisations giving the technology a steer.

Depressingly, the main motivator is saving money.

"To some extent saving costs has been the major proposition," confirmed Ekholm. "But to make it work there needs to be a business value proposition. The key point is the customer journey."
Two years ago Facebook and Microsoft kicked off a chatbot arms race, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella positioning "conversations as a platform" as the next era in human-computer interface.

"Bots are the new apps," the SatNad told developers at the 2016 Build conference. "People-to-people conversations, people-to-digital assistants, people-to-bots and even digital assistants-to-bots. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come."

Facebook thought so too, and pointed to its enormous consumer reach (of two billion users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger) to persuade businesses that it was the best channel through which to engage people. But Facebook's M messenger ran into trouble, with a reported 70 per cent failure rate. M was later repositioned as an experiment before being taken out the back and shot in January.

We did find one area where chatbots work well, and it's an interesting one....MORE

Tesla Down 23 Bucks (TSLA)

Sometimes you get lucky.

June 18
Posted by climateer at 5:42 AM 
"Tesla short-sellers have been getting creamed, but they're still betting against Elon Musk anyway" (TSLA)

In pre-market trade the stock is down $2.87 (0.80%) at $355.30. Note the prices the stock stalled at on prior up-moves:

FinViz

$347.24 down $23.59 (6.35%)
More to come.

Next on Humblebrag:

Stocks--I'm a genius! Housing--I'm a genius! Commercial real estate--yes, well, I suppose the evidence is overwhelming...

Sandia National Lab to Install First Petascale Supercomputer Powered by ARM Processors (Masayoshi Son smiles)

Softbank's chairman paid quite a bit to get his hands on the crown jewel of British high tech.

From Top500:

Sandia National Laboratories will soon be taking delivery of the world’s most powerful supercomputer using ARM processors. The system, known as Astra, is being built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and will deliver 2.3 petaflops of peak performance when it’s installed later this year. 

Astra rendering. Source: HPE

“Sandia National Laboratories has been an active partner in leveraging our Arm-based platform since its early design, and featuring it in the deployment of the world’s largest Arm-based supercomputer, is a historical moment not just for us, but for the industry as we race toward achieving exascale computing,” said Mike Vildibill, vice president, Advanced Technology Group, HPE

Astra will be based on HPE’s Apollo 70 system and will be comprised of 2,592 dual-socket nodes, containing 145,000 cores – by far the largest such system the company has delivered. If it was up and running today, it would easily make it into the upper fifth of the TOP500 list.

Each node will be equipped with two 28-core Cavium ThunderX2 processors running at 2.0 GHz. These aren’t the biggest or the fastest of Cavium’s newest ARM processor, but represents something of a sweet spot in price-performance. In aggregate, the compute nodes will draw 1.2 MW of power, which translates into a respectable energy efficiency for a 2.3-petaflop machine.

Local storage will be supplied by Apollo A4520 enclosures, providing 350 TB in the form of an all-flash Lustre appliance. Because of the relatively small capacity and high performance, it will primarily be used for operations needing extreme I/O bandwidth – things like burst buffering and file checkpointing.

Prior to the Astra announcement, most of the other action with regard to ARM-powered HPC was taking place in the United Kingdom. HPE had previously announced that three UK universities (Edinburgh, Leicester, and Bristol) had ordered Apollo 70 clusters, but each of these systems will be outfitted with just 64 nodes and will top out at a mere 74 teraflops. As far as computational capacity goes, the closest thing to Astra is Isambard, a 10,000-core Cray XC50 supercomputer using these same ThunderX2 processors. It’s set to be deployed at the Great Western 4 (GW4) Alliance, a research consortium of four UK universities (Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter).

Astra’s delivery is the first production deployment of the of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Vanguard Project. The project’s mission is to ensure a viable HPC ecosystem is established for ARM technology within the NNSA and the larger DOE community. Besides Sandia, a number of other national labs are involved in the project, including Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Los Alamos....

...MORE

Keeping in mind the new Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge turns over at 200 AI-tuned petaflops this latest 'puter is more about offering a different supercomputer architecture, what with the tech Cavium licenses from ARM.

Recently:
"IBM builds world’s most powerful supercomputer to crack AI" (IBM; NVDA)

“What the f--- is happening to our business?’: As ad execs hit Cannes, New Yorker scribe Ken Auletta’s new book chronicles the industry’s various existential crises

From Business Insider, June 16:

As hundreds of high-powered advertising and media executives descend on Cannes this week for a flurry of meetings, marketing stunts, and boozy yacht parties, there's an undercurrent of deep uncertainly about the industry's future.

As well chronicled in New Yorker writer Ken Auletta's new book, "Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else)," advertising faces a crisis at every turn. People are asking scary questions such: "Do ad agencies have a reason to exist?" "Is TV advertising — and interruptive advertising — nearly over?" "Do consumers hate us?"

Business Insider spoke with Auletta about his experience writing the book and his take on the state of affairs in adland.

Mike Shields: In your career, you're written a lot about media and tech. How much did you really know about the ins and outs of how the ad business really operates?
Ken Auletta: Not enough. One of the attractions of doing this book. Covering the media for a long time, if you adopt the Watergate mentality of follow the money, you say, my god, you've gotta look at advertising. There's the piggy bank for much of the media. And I don't just mean legacy media. I mean Facebook, Google, the internet.

The other reason I do what I do is visiting another planet, and finding the natives and how they operate. And for me I was visiting a new planet. The advertising-marketing planet. And so for me that intellectually was a challenge.

Shields: Was there anything that really surprised you in your reporting?
Auletta: Among the things that surprised me was how fast the disruption was happening. I was stunned by the idea that 20% of Americans use ad-blockers. And a third of Western Europeans have ad blockers on their cellphones. Those are huge numbers.

And [another surprise was] how the cellphone becomes a real impediment to advertising. It's such a personal instrument. It's like your wallet or your purse. You don't lend it to anyone. And suddenly people are pinging you. Before you read what you searched for, we want to divert you for 20 second or 25 seconds. It really is annoying. So people are really turned off by ads as an interruption. And that was a punch in the nose.

Obviously you watch television, and you kept getting bombarded. You're interrupted 19 minutes or so every hour.

Shields: Right. But TV was sort of built that way.
Auletta: The thing that makes it more annoying, even though it was built that way, is you can turn to Netflix, let's say, and you can watch what you want without commercial interruption, and you can watch as much of it as you want. It just accentuates your feeling of being interrupted....

...MUCH MORE

Insurance: Property Casualty Looks to Be Extremely Profitable This Year (TRV; CB; ALL; AIG)

If the lowered hurricane forecasts come to pass* and the U.S. tornado numbers continues their decade low trend the P&C folks stand to make some serious coin on the weather related stuff.
Here are the tornado numbers season to date:

And the current sea surface temp anomalies via Environment Canada:

Granted there a a couple big if's in the opening sentence. It's possible there could be an EF-5 tornado in downtown Oklahoma City next week but that's not really the way to bet.

And regarding hurricanes, despite the cooler than average sea surface temperature anomalies in the "main development zone" for the long-haul hurricanes that start their run off the coast of Africa and the slightly cool area east of the Yucatan peninsula, this is no guarantee for the height of the season come August-September.

And then there are the earthquakes....

*Recently:
Re/Insurance: "2018 hurricane forecasts reduced on lower Atlantic temperatures"

"Rotor sail helps Finnish ferry Viking Grace reduce fuel consumption"

Depending on how high the low-sulpher rules push the price of bunker fuel there might be a lot more of these coming.

From Metropolitan.fi:

Rotor sail helps Finnish ferry Viking Grace reduce fuel consumption

Passengers traveling on the Baltic sea on the Viking Grace vessel can now observe a 24 meter high spinning tube on deck. The structure is a rotary sail, a first of it's kind installed on a passenger ship.

The rotor sail is installed on the Grace is built by a Helsinki based company Norsepower. The cylinder shaped sail uses the wind as propulsion, and reduces the need for the main engine. Viking Grace deployed the sail on the 12th of April 2018.


Use of the rotary sail takes advantage of the Magnus effect to fuel and emission savings. The pilot project hopes to save 300 tons of LNG fuel each year. Carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by 900 tons.

In addition to reduced strain on the environment, the rotary sail is a strong financial incentive. On the Grace the Norsepower sails are projected to yield the shipping company Viking Line with savings of 180,000 euros annually. Profits out of thin air.

Norsepower is also working together with Maersk shipping company. One of the company's oil tankers will get two 30 meter rotor sails later this year.

The sails are expected to result in fuel savings of up to 20 percent for the Maersk pilot vessel project, but the average savings are said to be around 10 percent on global shipping routes....

...MORE, including video

Tourists in San Francisco: "I'm Not Coming Back"

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

'Am I in the bad part of town?' Tourists shocked by what they see on San Francisco streets

It's something many San Franciscans see on a daily basis, outside their homes or offices and during their commutes. For better or for worse, locals are used to walking by crime scenes, have seen open injection drug use, and have witnessed mental health episodes firsthand.

But when a tourist lands at SFO, guidebook in hand, that reality can be shocking.

"Is this normal or am I in a 'bad part of town?' Just walked past numerous homeless off their faces, screaming and running all over the sidewalk near Twitter HQ and then a murder scene. Wife is scared to leave hotel now," wrote an Australian Reddit user Wednesday.

That person isn't alone. On Sunday, another tourist from Canada asked the San Francisco Reddit community, "Why is this city so terrifying?"

"I'd been there for probably less than a day, just wandering around the center, and already seen more than enough poverty and suffering to cause me wanting to leave desperately," wrote another visitor from London in 2017. "I saw many people talking to themselves, or to things that weren't there. Even in a Macy's, and there weren't any police officers to help them or do anything about it."

Anyone who has hosted friends or family from out of town may have had to field similar questions.
Just those three Reddit posts garnered more than 650 comments, many of which were helpful suggestions (other neighborhoods to explore, safety tips, and more).

But the city's own visitors' bureau is struggling to come up with a good explanation for horrified tourists....MORE

Related:
May 22
So, What's New In Silicon Valley?
From the San Francisco Chroicle
"Palo Alto pastor resigns after nasty tweets about city: 'An elitist sh-- den of hate"
Huh, same 'ol, same 'ol.

Feb 22
San Francisco: "UN expert decries homeless conditions in Bay Area as ‘cruel,’ ‘unacceptable’"
You may have seen the story.
The UN's special rapporteur on Adequate Housing has been jet-setting around, Mexico City, Mumbai, S.F., documenting what she sees:

“In Mexico City, I visited a low-income settlement that had been moved by the city onto empty land near a railway line,” [Farha] said. “They had no running water. They stole electricity.” The camp was noisy and dangerous. She noted that the camp in Mexico is virtually identical to those she visited in Oakland, including the Wood Street and 23rd Avenue encampments....

The above snip is from the East Bay Express reprinted in Curbed San Francisco.

Curbed has had one of the most impressive series on the situation of any major media.
There's the January 22 piece  we used for the headline which wraps up with:

After her trip to the Bay, Farha headed out to assess conditions in LA, an errand she told the East Bay Express she dreaded after observing encampments here.

Additionally they had coverage a week later with "How SF tourism industry deals with the homeless crisis":
“I actually think it’s the worst it’s ever been”

February 12's "San Francisco backs new law to intervene with severe homeless population":
“This is a public health issue and needs to be treated as such”

February 19's "Some SF streets filthier than world’s poorest slums, says UC Berkeley professor"
So kudos to Curbed.

Someone else who's been pointing out various aspects of the culture that is San Francisco is Elaine Ou who we linked to last summer in: San Francisco's Dirty Little Secret
And again in November's "Elaine Would Prefer That Amazon Not Move to San Francisco (AMZN)".

As I noted the first time we linked to the Curbed headliner:

It's a deliberate policy decision by the municipal and county government. More on that point next month....

Still not ready to do that but I thought we should update with the nod to Curbed. And earlier:

Bonhams Auctioneers Has Allegedly Installed Sprinklers To Douse Homeless Outside the Building
It seems they got the idea from the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
Now, the auctioneers may think they are offering the homeless a cool, refreshing shower but boy the optics are bad.

From Curbed San Francisco:   
SF Luxury Auction House Allegedly Turns Sprinklers on Homeless [Update] 

...Using a sprinkler system to remove homeless people from structures is not a new idea. In 2015, the San Francisco Roman Catholic Archdiocese got into hot water after it was discovered that they were using sprinklers to regularly douse people camping overnight in the doorways of St. Mary’s Cathedral.... 

When youv'e lost the Catholics...

Whoa: "In China, a picture of how warehouse jobs can vanish" Google Likes (GOOG; JD)

From Axios:

JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce gargantuan, has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots.

What's going on: Welcome to the creeping new age of automation. When the talk turns to Chinese big tech — rivals to Google, Amazon and the rest of Silicon Valley — the names usually cited are Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. But scrappy JD, with a respectable $58 billion market cap, is investing aggressively to be added to the pantheon. 

Its secret sauce, executives said this week in Beijing and Shanghai, is logistics — its creation of China's first east-to-west, north-to-south package delivery business, able to deliver a purchase the same day almost anywhere in the nation, as long as it's ordered by 11 a.m.

But to get faster and more reliable, just as important is automation: From smart warehouses that process orders, to self-driving trucks and drones to deliver them, JD's research and development team is working on ways to eliminate costly workers.

Why it matters: This is the future. Like JD, its fierce e-commerce rival Alibaba has also built an entirely automated warehouse, showing how retail will probably be done in years to come everywhere including the U.S. and Europe.

• JD says its objective is not to eliminate workers but to get faster and more reliable, and that it will shift its warehouse people to other jobs.
• Its new mantra is "retail as a service," in which it will sell the efficient methods it's developed to other companies....

...MORE

And from Reuters:

Google to invest $550 million in Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com

Previously:
Meanwhile in China: JD.com To Pursue Underground Maglev Network
"After Losing China, Jeff Bezos Really Wants to Win in India" (AMZN)
Logistics: "The biggest company you may not know all that much about"

"Tesla short-sellers have been getting creamed, but they're still betting against Elon Musk anyway" (TSLA)

In pre-market trade the stock is down $2.87 (0.80%) at $355.30. Note the prices the stock stalled at on prior up-moves:

FinViz

From CNBC:

• Elon Musk insists Tesla does not need or want to raise equity or new lines of credit this year, but Goldman Sachs predicts it will need to raise $10 billion by 2020.
• Tesla short-sellers say the company should, but can't, raise the capital it needs to pay off debts, fund operations and thrive in the long term.
• Bears also believe the electric car maker is too risky for large investment banks to underwrite billions.

It's been a rough few weeks for investors betting against Tesla, one of the most-shortedstocks in the United States.

Tesla stock has rallied almost 17 percent since the company's early June annual shareholder meeting at which Chairman and CEO Elon Musk promised profitability in the third quarter. Shares kept trending higher this week, rising slightly after Tesla announced plans to lay off 9 percent of its workforce. Musk added $25 million worth of shares to his personal holdings.

Those with a positive outlook on the electric vehicle maker see Tesla's restructuring as a push for profitability. But the bears see the layoffs as yet another sign Tesla is in the middle of a cash crunch and believe it won't be able to raise the capital it needs to pay debts and fund operations.
Here's why:

Costly ambitions

Musk has maintained that Tesla does not need to raise equity or new lines of credit this year. But Goldman Sachs predicted Tesla will need to raise $10 billion by 2020 to keep going.

Darius Brawn, a hedge fund veteran who previously worked as a portfolio manager for SAC and Citadel, told CNBC he thinks $10 billion is a conservative estimate. He cites Tesla's plans to ramp up its Model 3 production, build new factories, make a new Roadster, Semi trucks and a Model Y vehicle, and to embark on large-scale production of its glass solar roof tiles.

Brawn, who has shorted Tesla personally, points out that it's highly unusual for a growth company to cut its planned investment spending, as Tesla did last quarter from $3.4 billion to under $3 billion.
Tesla's accounts payable stood at $2.6 billion as of March 31.

Without raising additional capital, Brawn said, the electric vehicle maker has enough cash to last for only a few quarters. He bases his estimates on its expected cash flow from operations, stated capital expenditure plans and credit agreements....

...MUCH MORE, including Chanos video.

Professor Damodaran on "User and Subscriber Businesses: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly!"

From Musings on Markets:

In a series of posts over the course of the last year, I argued that you can value users and subscribers at businesses, using first principles in valuation, and have used the approach to value Uber riders, Amazon Prime members and Spotify & Netflix subscribers. With each iteration, I have learned a few things about user value and ways of distinguishing between user bases that can create substantial value from user bases that not only are incapable of creating value but can actively destroy it. I was reminded of these principles this week, first as I wrote about Walmart's $16 billion bid for 77% of Flipkart, a deal at least partially motivated by shopper numbers, then again as I read a news story about MoviePass and the potential demise of its "too good to be true" model, and finally as I tripped over a LimeBike on my walk home. 

User Based Value

My attempt to build a user-based valuation model was triggered by a comment that I got on a valuation that I had done of Uber about a year ago on my blog. In that post, I approached Uber, as I would any other business, and valued it, based upon aggregated revenues, earnings and cash flows, discounted back at a company-wide cost of capital. I was taken to task for applying an old-economy valuation approach to a new-economy company and was told that that the companies of today derive their value from customers, users and subscribers. While my initial response was that you cannot pay dividends with users, I realized that there was a core truth to the critique and that companies are increasingly building their businesses around their members. 

Consequently, I went back to valuation first principles, where the value of any asset is a function of its cashflows, growth and risks, and adapted that approach to valuing a user or subscriber:

To get from the value of existing users to the value of an entire company, I incorporated the value effect of new users, bringing in the cost of acquiring a new user into the value:

I applied closure by consider all corporate costs that are not directly related to users or subscribers in a corporate cost drag, a drag because it reduces the value of the business:...

...MUCH MORE

"Keep your hands on the f*cking wheel! New Tesla update like being taught to drive by your dad" (TSLA)

From The Register, June 14:

Plus: Brit driver claims Autopilot almost took car off the road

An update to Tesla's Autopilot software earlier this month has caused headaches for drivers of its electric cars – with one user alleging he was almost driven off the road by the robotic assistant.

The patch, 2018.21.9, contained a number of tweaks to address safety concerns with the Autopilot software, which Tesla trumpeted as the first step on the path to fully self-driving cars.

Users, unfortunately, have often bought into the dream a little too wholeheartedly and failed to read the small print. Drivers should keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road – because Autopilot isn't an actual autopilot. It's more of a jumped-up cruise control at this stage.

Due in part to some high-profile incidents caused by users relying a little heavily on their electronic buddy-under-the-hood, the new software now nags drivers every 30 seconds to keep their hands on the wheel.

Drivers have found this somewhat vexing, with one getting an explanation from His Muskiness himself:...MORE

Shipping’s 2020 Low Sulphur Fuel Regulation to Hit Airlines

Via gCaptain:

From the window of a jet plane, it can be hard to see ships crawling across the seas. Yet what’s burning in those engines thousands of feet below may determine the fate of airline profits in the next few years.

In about 18 months’ time, the world’s oil refineries are going to have to supply shipping companies with better-quality fuel to comply with international regulations agreed back in 2016 in a nondescript building on the banks of the River Thames in London.

While the regulators’ target was to lower sulfur emissions from ship fuel, it’s becoming increasingly clear there will be an accompanying — and significant — impact on the supply of jet fuel, the aviation industry’s single biggest expense. The trouble is, there’s profound disagreement about whether the result will be a glut or a shortage of the fuel.

“These rules are going to impact airlines,” said Mark Maclean, managing director at Commodities Trading Corporation Ltd., which advises on hedging strategies. “The impacts will not be isolated only within the shipping industry, these changes will affect the entire oil and middle-distillate complex,” the part of refining that includes jet fuel and diesel.

From Jan. 1, 2020, the world’s ships will need to consume fuels containing less sulfur under the 2016 rules set out by the International Maritime Organization, part of the United Nations.
Oil refineries are likely to face an initial demand surge from shippers for diesel-type products when the rules kick in. Diesel is critical in determining the cost of normally more-expensive jet fuel, so if that historic price relationship holds, then the aviation industry’s fuel bill could surge as well.

Refining Puzzle
How it plays out in practice hinges on the way refineries make jet fuel and — critically — how much flexibility they’ll have to adjust their output once the new rules enter into force.
Jet fuel is made in one simple refining process, meaning that if more crude gets distilled to make diesel, then there will be an unavoidable surge in jet fuel supplies too. Several traders say that could result in a surplus.

But not everybody agrees. For one thing, increased amounts of jet fuel will be blended into fuel oil to meet the more stringent sulfur specifications, according to Jan-Jacob Verschoor, a director at Oil Analytics and a chemical engineer by training who previously worked at Royal Dutch Shell Plc. Refineries will also have some flexibility to maximize diesel production to the detriment of jet fuel output, more than negating any ramp-up in overall crude processing, he said....MORE

Recently:
June 14
Shipping: CEO of Third Largest Fleet Says "We're All Going to Go Bust"
June 11
Shipping: The New Low Sulpher Rules Will Have A Huge Impact On the Oil Business (shipping and world economy too)

CryptoKitty Trading Volume Collapses: Andreessen, Union Square and Climateer Hurt Worst

Nooooooooooooooo

From Business Insider, June 16:

Top investors gambled $12 million on the blockchain equivalent of Beanie Babies. Now, sales are plummeting.

• In March, investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures gave a total of $12 million to CryptoKitties, a blockchain game for digital collectibles.
• According to data from blockchain analytics sites, the number of CryptoKitties transactions are a fraction of what they were in December.
• CryptoKitties cofounder Bryce Bladon says the livelihood of CryptoKitties can't simply be measured by the number of transactions that happen in a month, and that people's behaviors have changed as the price of processing a transaction has increased.

When investors gave $12 million to a startup called CryptoKitties in March, many raised their eyebrows at the news.

CryptoKitties, which describes its product as one of the world's first blockchain games, uses blockchain technology to collect and "breed" digital cats. Users can buy colorful, googly-eyed cats, some of which cost thousands of real-world dollars, to trade and "breed" more digital cat offspring.
It's a bit like blockchain-based Beanie Babies.

Like Beanie Babies, CryptoKitties are considered collectibles. Their novelty lies in the fact that owners can prove that they possess sole ownership of the Crypto Kitty they've purchased. In December, it was reported that one particular Crypto Kitty sold for around $155,000.

But it looks like CryptoKitties itself could be in danger of becoming a short-lived novelty.
According to data from blockchain analytics sites Bloxy and Diar, the number of CryptoKitties transactions has fallen drastically in the last 3 months.

The number of CryptoKitties transactions decreased in June by 98.4% compared to its peak of 80,500 transactions back in December 2017, according to data from Bloxy. The game is still among the most popular options for ethereum-related gaming, but public interest in buying and selling them seems to have waned significantly in recent months....MUCH MORE

Previously:

April 14 
This Might Be Important: "New technology could wean the battery world off cobalt"
I've mentioned our general policy on publishing battery breakthroughs: Don't.
There are so many announcements of this material or that manufacturing process or this chemistry or that theoretical approach that if we posted them there would be no room for CryptoKitties (below).

April 14 
"How we made $100K trading CryptoKitties"
Not us, we're HODLers, this guy:... 

March 22
Matt Levine's Meow Culpa—CryptoKitties, An Exegesis
Following up on Thursday's "Matt Levine Writes About CryptoKitties..."
FT Alphaville's Matthew Klein directs our attention to Mr. Levine's Friday Bloomberg View column....

March 22 
Matt Levine Writes About CryptoKitties ("this column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners").
While we haven't heard Mr. Bloomberg explicitly state that he is in favor of CryptoKitties, it is difficult to see how he could argue with the comfort they bring as an antidote to the hurley-burley of daily life.*
Not to mention the "CryptoKitties as an asset class" angle....

*You can see the evolution of our thinking from November 2017's "Kittens On the Blockchain Is NOT the Future I Was Promised" to March 7's "The Blockchain Is Just Another Way To Make Art All About Money":

At least I'll always have my CryptoKitties. Besides being cute as can be, I was told:
CryptoKitties Sales Hit $12 Million, Could be Ethereum’s Killer App After All 

Through March 11's "Elaine Thinks About Signaling and Destroys My CryptoKitties Dreams":

Her piece was written a couple weeks ago i.e. at least two cryptocurrency price tumbles ago.
Think of a waveform, but not the smooth, soothing shape of a sinusoid. Rather think of a faux quasi-periodicity with just enough regularity to trigger a mirage of pattern recognition, just enough to suck you in, across the event horizon of speculation into the madness of Hunter S Thompson:...

"Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre—dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino. Big strike in Silver City. Beat the dealer and go home rich. Why not? I stopped at the Money Wheel and dropped a dollar on Thomas Jefferson—a $2 bill, the straight Freak ticket, thinking as always that some idle instinct bet might carry the whole thing off. But no. Just another two bucks down the tube. You bastards! No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing.... 

 -Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Excuse me, I have to take a moment

"Marxism Has Cornered the Junk-Bond Market"

Some interesting statistics here.
From Bloomberg Prophets, in this case Jim Bianco, Feb. 25, 2017

Passive investing doesn't discriminate between individual winners and losers.

In 2016, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. offered a powerful critique of passive investing.
In “The Silent Road to Serfdom: Why Passive Investing is Worse Than Marxism,” they wrote that “a supposedly capitalist economy where the only investment is passive is worse than either a centrally planned economy or an economy with active market led capital management.”

Hyperbole aside, the team led by Bernstein’s head of global quantitative and European equity strategy, Inigo Fraser-Jenkins, has a point. If capitalism is supposed to reward good ideas and punish bad ones, how does a binary passive investment of “in or out” that doesn’t discriminate between individual winners and losers accomplish this? Granted, passive investing has provided superior returns over active investing in recent years, but is it the best way to allocate capital resources? Although passive investing has not created any stress in the markets yet, the high-yield market is one area where there could be problems during volatile times.

Consider the chart below. The blue line shows the dollar value of daily high-yield cash bond trading. The green line shows the daily trading value of the roughly 25 exchange-traded funds that own high-yield securities. BlackRock’s iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG) and Barclay’s SPDR High Yield Bond ETF (JNK) account for about two-thirds of this total.

The red line in the bottom panel shows high-yield ETF dollar volume as a percentage of the cash market. ETF trading volume is currently at a new high at about 27 percent of the underlying cash market. This measure was under 2 percent after the financial crisis in 2009.

In other words, more than 25 percent of high-yield trading is ETF-related. For comparison, less than 6 percent of investment-grade trading is ETF-related. ETFs of other markets, such as small caps, domestic stocks, emerging markets or gold, make up less than 2 percent of their respective cash market. Because of high-yield ETFs’ unique size relative to the underlying cash market, junk bonds would be one place where passive investing could distort individual prices.

The next chart shows a 66-trading day rolling correlation between the option-adjusted spread, or OAS, for the major high-yield sectors and the one for the broad high-yield index. The black line shows the average of these 11 measures. Starting in late 2014, about the same time high-yield ETFs’ influence started to grow, the average correlation of the sectors to the high-yield market rose from less than 0.5 to above 0.8.

...To update Karl Marx’s famous dictum, “From each according to ETF flows, to each according to their index weighting.”

...MUCH MORE 

Driverless Hotel Rooms: The End of Uber, Airbnb and Human Landlords

Expanding on some of the ideas in Friday's "Ogilvy & Mather UK Vice-Chair Rory Sutherland on Driverless Showers".

From Hackernoon:

How driverless vehicles can enable on demand accommodation for one night or 1000, and at rates 10x cheaper [sic] than your rent bill

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to begin our descent into Sydney. Please fasten your seatbelts and place your trays in the upright position. Local time is 8:42pm and a humid 27 degrees. Our flight crew wishes you a Happy New Year, and we hope you fly with us again in 2025.”

Screeech. You’ve landed. Time to relax those butt cheeks.

It was only this morning you booked this flight, and now you’re on the other side of the planet. Amazing. You’re nervous but excited to visit Australia for the first time. One week to explore the city and five weeks on a new design project. When that project match showed up in your feed you claimed it in two seconds. You’ve already earned 24,000 $design in the peerism economy.

Ping. “Need a room?”.

You hadn’t booked any accommodation yet. “Yes please”, you respond.

“Just out the front, number 420”.

You giggle, then follow the augmented directions leading to a sleek driverless hotel room. It’s about the size of a mini bus but without the seats, steering wheel and engine. A giant transparent panel stretching the length and height of the vehicle greets you on approach. The panel opens and you step inside.

Inside is everything you’d expected. On the left, a couch seat that folds into a queen-sized bed with the push of a button. To the right, a small kitchenette with electric stove, running water, sink, microwave and bar fridge. Behind that is the detachable bathroom module with toilet, shower and wash basin.

“Hi there, welcome home. Hungry?”

“I could go some pad thai and a beer thanks”, you respond.

“That’ll be here in 6 minutes. Want a quick tour of the city?”

“Nah early one tonight. Let’s checkout Bondi beach tomorrow”, you say.

Your room begins driving itself towards Bondi and a live map displays on one of the side panels. You sit back and relax with some Netflix on the other side panel. Exactly 6 minutes later, a drone lands on the roof and lowers your order through a compartment in the ceiling. If you need to order any package you simply ask the room and a drone arrives; it even does laundry!

“Arriving at Bondi Tower 7”.

You look up at a lego-like modular skyscraper reaching high above the moonlit clouds. Your room docks with an electric skate and is elevated thirty stories up before slotting into a window-facing position. One of the side panels opens smoothly to reveal a large adjoining living room module.

Extra modules are optional and can be requested ondemand: an extra bed, private gym, spa, snackbar, office and more. On various levels of the tower are cafes, restaurants, retail stores, entertainment areas, communal kitchens, laundromats, a gym and even a cinema. Luxury living at $30 per night.

You fall asleep as your driverless hotel room recharges itself ready to take you on an extensive tour of the city and beaches tomorrow. Your six week experience will be personalized to your precise ondemand preferences including invites to local communities, events and interest networks.

“Goodnight”.

Crisis of Car Manufacturing

The image above is a screenshot of the thousands of new, unsold cars sitting at a dock in a town named Sheerness in the United Kingdom. This is one of hundreds of locations where new cars sit empty and unused. And while auto manufacturers typically keep a 60 day supply, US manufacturers hit a record high of over 4 million unsold vehicles in their inventory in 2016.

The issue of overproduction is a common crisis in Capitalism where more goods are produced than there are customers to consume them. In a free market this should result in prices dropping until the excess supply lowers to meet demand. But what typically happens is that manufacturers either artificially restrict supply or resort to simply destroying the unsold goods.

Vehicle manufacturing faces a unique challenge with oversupply because the production lines are very expensive to initially setup and very expensive to stop. When a vehicle production line is down it costs $22,000–50,000 per minute in lost revenue and wage costs. So you can bet that if a particular car model isn’t selling, they’ll continue to produce until the next year’s model.

The inevitable reality of ondemand self-driving cars poses a huge looming existential risk to the entire auto industry.

With nearly 1.3 billion vehicles on the planet and more than 94 million new cars rolling off the production lines each year, the auto industry looks rather similar to a runaway AI paperclip maximizer; consuming vast resources to sell thousands of various car models, which we then park idle for 95% of the time.

However if on demand driverless vehicles come to fruition then your $10 Uber ride suddenly becomes a sub-$1 ride anywhere in the city. At that point the appeal of owning a car will diminish for most of the population, thus creating a massive oversupply of unwanted human-driven vehicles.

Given the forecasts of 2 billion vehicles on the roads by 2040, and considering driverless vehicles need only be idle while recharging, we can roughly calculate that only 100 million on demand driverless vehicles will be required to replace all 2 billion human-driven vehicles.

In other words, when every auto manufacturer begins producing the high-demand self-driving cars it will take just one year to reach oversupply.

How and to where will auto manufacturers pivot to stay alive?

One of many IDEO Automobility Moving Spaces concepts

Modular Driverless Rooms

The key concept to grasp with driverless cars is that they truly redefine all of our assumptions and preconceived notions. Combustion engines are replaced by two small electric motors, the dashboard and steering wheel are unnecessary, and safety features are redundant when the cars don’t crash.

Driverless vehicles are simply rooms sitting atop an all-electric drivetrain and rechargeable battery pack with a few extra visual, laser or radar sensors.

Tesla Powertrain

In a Tesla Model S there are only 18 moving parts compared to the 1500 in an average internal combustion engine vehicle. As such it’s predicted that by 2025 all new vehicles produced will be 100% electric and cost much less than the cheapest combustion engine vehicles sold today.

This opens endless possibilities to re-imagine vehicles as moving rooms able to cater to a vast array of human experiences and activities:

• the driverless office
• the driverless boardroom
• the driverless gym
• the driverless bedroom
• the driverless bathroom
• the driverless cafe
• the driverless cinema
• the driverless shop

These rooms need not be used in isolation either. They can be dynamic, modular and interconnected with other driverless rooms via an ondemand request. Tap a button or speak a request, and moments later you can have a bathroom or gym module drive itself to your location and autonomously connect to the office module you’re currently working from.....

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love my post on driverless van homes!

...MUCH MORE