Uber Comperitor Lyft Hires M&A Banker Qatalyst Partners

From the Wall Street Journal:

Hiring comes as highly valued startups find it tougher to raise funds from venture capitalists

Ride-hailing startup Lyft Inc. has hired Qatalyst Partners LP, the boutique investment bank best known for helping tech companies find a buyer, according to people familiar with the matter.

Frank Quattrone, the founder and executive chairman of Qatalyst, has contacted companies including large auto makers about acquiring a stake in Lyft, the people said. It isn’t clear whether Lyft is aiming to sell itself or raise new funding, or if it is open to both.

Lyft, the largest U.S. rival to Uber Technologies Inc., has tried to keep up with its larger competitor as both companies burn through capital to expand their ride-hailing services. The two San Francisco companies pour millions of dollars into subsidizing low-price rides and giving cash bonuses to new drivers, and both Uber and Lyft have said such spending has put them on a path to profitability.

Lyft has raised about $2 billion in funding, or less than one-sixth the total funds raised by Uber. Lyft was last valued at $5.5 billion by investors including auto maker General Motors Co.
 
Hiring Qatalyst, one of the most active Silicon Valley deal makers, may signal Lyft is open to a sale. Qatalyst ranks fourth this year among banks advising on U.S. acquisitions, working on deals totaling $33.7 billion, according to Dealogic. Those deals include a coveted role advising LinkedIn Corp. on its $26 billion sale to Microsoft Corp. , announced two weeks ago.

One potential buyer may be General Motors, which paid $500 million for a 10% stake in Lyft earlier this year and indicated that the ride-hailing service could be crucial to the future of automobiles. The two companies have since agreed to develop self-driving cars and to offer deals on rental cars to Lyft drivers....MORE

Recently:
"Lyft’s $5.5 Billion Plan for World Domination"
"GM, Lyft to Test Self-Driving Electric Taxis"

Following Up On Y Combinator's Universal Basic Income Experiment: They'd Like To Try Their Hand At Building New Cities

On May 31 we had: "Seed Stage Accelerator Y Combinator Developing A Basic Income Pilot Project" from Y Combinator's Posthaven blog. Here's the latest:

New Cities

We want to study building new, better cities.

The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success. A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities.

It’s more important than ever to think about how to do this. The need for new supply continues to increase significantly [1]. Many constraints related to where cities should be located (e.g. near rivers for trade) have changed. We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc. The internet itself allows for participation never before possible. Also, housing prices in many cities have become untenable and we need more housing in places people want to live.

Some existing cities will get bigger and there's important work being done by smart people to improve them. We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. Our goal is to design the best possible city given the constraints of existing laws.

There are many high-level questions we want to think through, for example:

• What should a city optimize for?
• How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?
• What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city's culture?
• How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential?
• How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city?
• How should citizens guide and participate in government?
• How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change?

And there are tactical questions we want to dig into, for example:

• How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city.
• How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live? Can we figure out better zoning laws?
• What is the right role for vehicles in a city?  Should we have human-driven cars at all?...

...MORE

The Elites Are Not The Problem, It's The People, Says German Elite

Reminding us of political consultant, strategist and gadfly Dick Tuck and the night he lost a California state Senate Democratic primary contest:

"The people have spoken, the bastards."

The first bit of this short vid is German President Gauck in an interview with German public service broadcaster ARD after he announced he would not be seeking another term:



Schoolboy German translation:

At the moment the elites are not the problem, the people are the problem.

Here's the complete interview (18 minutes).

HT: reddit

A couple days ago a writer at Medium used the "...bastards" quote but didn't give the reference. The backstory makes it all the better.

It Is Time For The Princess of Liechtenstein To Seize This Opportunity To Pursue Her Rightful Claim To Be Queen Of Scotland (and maybe England too, sorry Charles) RBS

After reading Izabella Kaminska's thoughts in this morning's "On the non-viability of an independent Scotland staying in the sterling zone" I asked a friend if there was any way around the conundrum.

He told me something I was not aware of, that Princess Sophie Elisabeth Marie Gabrielle had a legitimate claim to the Crown of Scotland "except for that whole Catholic thing". Then he said "Look it up". And I did.

Here's more, from The Express, November, 2011:

The 'rightful heir' to the Scottish throne

A GERMAN who became a princess after marrying into the little-known Liechtenstein royal family would lay claim to being Scotland's next rightful hereditary queen if laws banning Catholics on the throne were repealed.

Interior design enthusiast Sophie Elisabeth Marie Gabrielle, 44, will one day rule over the tiny European principality following a fairytale wedding to the country's Prince Alois in 1993.

But her family tree shows she is also part of the direct lineage of the House of Stuart, which was kept off the combined thrones of England and Scotland in the late 17th century then effectively ousted by the 1701 Act of Settlement that outlawed Catholic monarchs.

Last week the Scottish Parliament debated repealing the 310-year-old legislation, which eventually led to the Jacobite Uprisings, amid widespread belief it is now outdated and discriminatory on sectarian grounds.

It is unlikely that even if it were ever abolished by Westminster there would be a challenge to the current House of Windsor, but had the Act never existed, Sophie would now be a Scottish princess and would rule as Queen on the deaths of her elderly father and uncle.

Max-Emanuel Ludwig Maria Herzog is the current Jacobite heir to the throne, with his older brother Franz, the self-styled Duke of Bavaria, unmarried and childless.

Jacobite enthusiast Stelios Rigopoulos said that while the Stuart lineage still existed there is "no way" it could ever be given the opportunity to rule the United Kingdom again.

He said: "The Duke of Bavaria is aware of his Scottish heritage but he is not going to be putting any claim for the throne, come over and start a revolution. If anything I think he is quite bemused by it all.

"But because Princess Sophie is married to the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein and therefore to a very much alive monarchy unlike the lineage before her, it is creating a lot of added interest."...MORE

In my defense, I did know that the Prince of Wales is a blood descendant of  Vlad the Impaler and was quoted in the LA Times:

...Prince Charles noted that as a descendant of Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula,
"I have a bit of a stake in the country."

"It's in my blood," he said.

Despite His Dire Warnings Soros Did Not Short The Pound This Go-Round

He did however do a run-and-gun on the bookmakers.

I kid. The bookies got beat by little old ladies in the north of England making hundred dollar bets.
Here's the headline story from Barron's Focus on Funds:

Soros Didn’t Short The Pound Before Brexit Vote Despite Warnings

Billionaire investor George Soros is back in the investing game, and warned that the pound would suffer in a Brexit scenario.

Given that one of his claims to fame is his wildly successful short of the UK currency in the 1990s, Soros’s warnings were widely covered in recent weeks. But is this a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’?

According to Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua and Sree Vidya Bhaktavatsalam, Soros was long on the pound ahead of the Brexit vote.

In the days before the vote that marked a rupture between the U.K. and the EU, Soros had warned that the pound could slump more than 20 percent against the dollar as voters were grossly underestimating the true cost of Brexit. Sterling plunged 8.1 percent on Friday to its lowest level in more than three decades, and tumbled again on Monday.

“Now the catastrophic scenario that many feared has materialized, making the disintegration of the EU practically irreversible,” Soros wrote in a June 25 essay reflecting on the U.K. vote for Project Syndicate. “The consequences for the real economy will be comparable only to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.”

...MORE

Recently:
June 9 
Uh Oh: "A Bearish George Soros Is Trading Again "

"Oil Tumbles Amid Bad News For Glut As US Offshore To Hit Record In 2017"

There is just so darn much of the stuff around. And now there are wihispers that China is close to topping off their strategic reserve and Goldman cuts Britain's expected growth rate from 2% to maybe a couple ticks above zero and Canada's coming back on line and... you get the point, supply/demand and all that as the spec money flees.
WTI down $1.21 at $46.43; Brent $47.29 down a couple+ percent.

From ZeroHedge:

WTI Crude has tumbled back to a $46 handle this morning (from over $50 on Friday) with Brexit volatility weighing on every asset class and Nigeria and Canada restart production (following rebel attacks and wildfires respectively) but as OilPrice.com's Charles Kennedy notes companies pumping oil from the Gulf of Mexico will ramp up production in coming months, propping up American output, despite efforts to curb production and raise barrel prices.

The United States currently produces 8.7 million barrels a day - a half a million less than where the figure stood last year, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Low prices caused by the high output levels have kept oil exploration efforts at a minimum.

Around 500,000 more barrels of crude from Mexico’s namesake gulf will go online by 2017, according to analysis by the Wall Street Journal that included government and private sector sources.

"The projects are coming faster and sometimes bigger than expected,” Roger Diwan of IHS Energy told Dow Jones. "The ramp-up seems to have accelerated during low prices.”

A handful of sizable fields had been funded for construction years prior, when prices were higher. The projects completed construction as scheduled and will begin production in the coming months.

Once the fields become operational, the U.S. Department of Energy predicts offshore oil production will set a record in 2017 with 1.91 million barrels - 24 percent more than in 2015 - flowing out of surrounding bodies of water by next December.

The year 2009 held the previous record for highest offshore oil production rate, but British Petroleum’s spill in the Gulf of Mexico later that year caused a moratorium on the category of drilling.

Mexico has also begun efforts to encourage drilling in the Gulf. A total of 21 companies, including the Who’s Who of Big Oil, have registered to take part in Mexico’s deepwater oil auction to be held in December....MORE

Dear Silicon Valley: Forget Flying Cars, Give Us Economic Growth (Technology Review's 50 smartest companies)

From MIT's Technology Review, June 21, 2016:

Companies taking advantage of amazing new digital technologies dominate our list of 50 Smartest Companies. But despite impressive advances in artificial intelligence and automation, the economy remains in a troubling slowdown.

he headquarters of Alphabet’s X labs in Mountain View, California, is easy to miss. A simple yellow “X” marks the visitors’ entrance to the sprawling building that was once a large indoor shopping mall. But on a weekday in late May, the parking lot is bustling, filled with employees and visitors, as X’s pod-like driverless cars buzz about. Inside, various teams of mostly young people—the company won’t say just how many people are employed at the facility—work on “moon shots,” which Alphabet defines as transformative technologies that could have a huge impact on the world. Besides the driverless cars, publicly identified projects at X include Loon, an effort to use high-altitude balloons to deliver the Internet to remote regions of the world; Wing, which is building self-navigating drones for delivering stuff; and Makani, which is developing odd flying wind turbines tethered to a ground station.

Inside, skateboards, bikes, and scooters are everywhere, as are machine shops and expensive analytical instruments. This postmodern industrial research center—part design studio, part tech incubator, and part science lab—represents Silicon Valley at its best: ambitious, creative, and fixated on radical new technologies. And while X may have been widely ridiculed for its failure to convince the world that people needed its Google Glass, its remarkable progress with driverless cars—which are common enough on the surrounding streets of Mountain View to attract little notice—could make us forget such missteps. But Alphabet’s X, with its heavy investment in resources and people, also reminds us just how difficult it is to commercialize radical new technologies and how few companies can afford such efforts.

Given impressive advances in artificial intelligence, smart robots, and driverless cars, it’s easy to become convinced that we are on the verge of a new technological age. But the troubling reality is that today’s advances are having a far from impressive impact on overall economic growth. Facebook, Twitter, and other digital technologies undoubtedly bring great value to many people, but those benefits are not translating into a substantial economic boost. If you think Silicon Valley is going to fuel growing prosperity, you are likely to be disappointed—or you’d better be patient. While the high-tech industry creates impressive wealth for itself, much of the country is mired in a sluggish economy. It might be that driverless cars and other uses of advanced AI will eventually change that, but for now these technologies are not radically transforming the economy.

Economists who study productivity, a measure of output per worker, tell us that from around 1994 to 2004 the Internet and advances in computation helped fuel rapid growth. But during the past decade we slid back to far slower improvements in productivity, hence stagnant economic growth. And the phenomenon is showing up in advanced economies around the world, with countries such as Italy and the U.K. particularly hard hit. Many people feel the results as flat or declining wages, and the consequences have almost certainly contributed to deep political unrest in many countries. According to Chad Syverson, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, U.S. productivity grew at a mere 1.3 percent per year from 2005 to 2015, far less than the 2.8 percent annual growth rate during the decade earlier. Syverson calculates that had the slowdown not occurred, the gross domestic product would have been $2.7 trillion higher by 2015—about $8,400 for every American.

No one really knows the reason for the slowdown. Perhaps we have run out of ideas that match the great inventions of the 20th century in economic importance (see “Tech Slowdown Threatens the American Dream”). Or perhaps we haven’t done a good job measuring how recent advances in digital technologies and social media have affected the economy: if Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are making us more productive, we don’t know because we can’t tally the true value of this free stuff. That’s possibly true, but even if it is, it doesn’t account for anything close to the measured slowdown in overall productivity growth. A more plausible explanation: it is proving difficult to convert recently developed digital technologies into meaningful changes in the economy’s largest sectors, such as health care, manufacturing, and transportation.

Even some of the strongest proponents of the idea that automation and digital technologies are going to revolutionize our economy are dismayed by the slow progress in implementing these advances. Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and coauthor of The Second Machine Age, says the process has been “disappointingly difficult.” He says that while there has been “a lot of progress in the underlying technologies” in the last few years, companies are finding that making the necessary changes is expensive and takes time. “It’s not trivial. It’s not like flipping a switch,” says Brynjolfsson. “And companies are struggling.

See the Rest of the Package  

50 Smartest Companies

Michael Mandel, an economist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., says the productivity slowdown is occurring in what he calls the physical industries, including manufacturing and health care. Such industries, which he estimates make up 80 percent of the national economy, account for only 35 percent of investments in information technology and their productivity reflects that, growing at only 0.9 percent annually. Meanwhile, productivity is growing by 2.8 percent a year in what Mandel calls digital industries, which include finance and business services. 

If that is what is going on, it leaves plenty of room for optimism. “As we learn to apply the new technologies,” says Mandel, “we could see growth in productivity speed up again.” Syverson agrees that while the IT gains of the late 1990s and early 2000s seem played out, he can “imagine a second wave.”

A material world
Our list of 50 Smartest Companies includes some that have used new digital technologies to destroy existing industries: Amazon, with its growing dominance of retail trade, and Facebook, with its inroads into the media. But it also includes examples of mature companies, like Bosch, a large German manufacturer using IT to meet its business challenges (we go to Allgäu, Germany, to visit a “factory of the future”). And it includes those pushing the limits of new digital technologies, as Baidu is doing in its effort to create autonomous cars and Alphabet with its remarkable advances in artificial intelligence....MUCH MORE

Nearly 400 Publishers Have Applied for Medium's Plan to Help Them Make Money

From AdAge:

Publishers Try Out Membership System on Medium

In early April, Medium, the platform founded by Ev Williams, made a pitch to the publishing community: come to Medium, and we'll help you make money. There's not a publisher these days that isn't looking for new revenue streams, so it's not surprising that nearly 400 publishers have applied to participate in the beta version of Medium's revenue program, according to figures provided by a spokeswoman for the company. (She declined to say how many applicants have been accepted.)

There are both advertising and consumer revenue opportunities available for publishers that either put their entire site on Medium, as The Awl and Bill Simmons's new The Ringer have done, or publish a Medium edition of their publication, like far more companies have done.

Medium aspires to play a big role in the publishing ecosystem, offering publishers both a technical lifeline (in the form of a sleek, easy-to-use platform, and back-end support) and a set of options to make money. Whether Medium is able to become the power player -- and journalism savior -- it seems to want to become depends on how many publishers actually take the company up on the offer its making.

Participating publishers can run links to promoted posts from advertisers at the bottom of articles and share a cut of the revenue with Medium.

Publications are also free to sell sponsorships on their own. The Ringer has a deal with Miller Lite, and there's a "Presented by Miller Lite" banner at the bottom of article pages.
A handful of publishers have also been testing out Medium's membership program, in which certain pieces of content are locked, available only to paying readers.

Serious Eats (a food site), Femsplain (a community for women) and Film School Rejects (movies and television) are the earliest three brands to experiment with membership on Medium, and all report being pleased with the early returns.

The default price for a publication membership on Medium is $5 per month, but Amber Discko, Femsplain's founder, said her members are allowed to give as much as they'd like beyond that. (Film School Rejects starts memberships at $3 per month.)...

...MORE

"Even if Brexit Vote Wins, there may be No Brexit: Daiwa"

A smart piece of analysis from the day before the referendum.

That's not to say there won't be serious effects in both the short and medium runs, I mean we're already seeing a fair degree of whackitude but as mentioned over the weekend there are a lot of constituencies who will do just about anything to prevent an actual exit. Of course one has to be aware of the risk of confirmation bias...

From Wolf Street:

Daiwa Capital Markets, the investment banking arm of Daiwa Securities Group in Japan, issued a laundry list today of the biblical catastrophes that a Brexit will cause to the pound sterling, global equity markets, global futures markets, credit spreads…. It would “cause serious economic/market damage,” and “hardest hit, of course, would be UK financial assets.” And it would trigger a recession.

So the Leave vote would cause a lot of bloodletting among Daiwa’s constituents and globally. The Leave vote would be to blame. We get that. But it gets more complicated:

And while it may be expected that, after the initial knee-jerk response, some of the risk-off sentiment would quickly dissipate in most other markets, the likely economic and political fallout in the UK would affect asset prices there for a considerable period.

So the rout of UK stocks, bonds, home prices, etc. would continue. There would be QE and rate cuts in the UK in response to this rout and to a “sharp slowdown in its aftermath.”

A vote for Brexit “would usher in political uncertainty” of biblical proportions: Prime Minister David Cameron might have to go, given how he’d botched this situation, and his successor – Daiwa points at Boris Johnson – “would likely end up regretting taking the job.”

The note went after the Leave folks with a vengeance:

The Leave campaign, whose whole proposition centered on a set of, at best, dubious claims, have set out no plan whatsoever for how they would separate the UK from the EU.

Some members of the campaign (and hence the Cabinet post-Brexit) have claimed that they would be in no hurry to enact the Article 50 process that would trigger formal negotiations with the other 27 countries to extricate the UK from the EU. Instead, they have threatened to unilaterally withdraw from parts of the EU Treaties, something that would be a flagrant breach of international law and would risk retaliatory action from the rest of the EU.
At the same time, Johnson would face a House of Commons where there would still be an overwhelming majority of pro-EU MPs (and a pro-EU upper chamber), meaning that passing the enormous amount of legislation required to extricate the UK from the EU would likely prove impossible. This would be particularly true if a vote to Leave was only marginal.

OK, as American, I have no opinion on how Brits should vote. But Daiwa says, it might not matter how they vote: There may be no Brexit even if the Brexit vote wins.
If the people vote for Brexit, the subsequent politics are going to be very messy to a backdrop of chaotic financial markets, crashing asset prices, a swooning currency, a recession, and a second independence referendum in Scotland that would allow it to remain in the EU.

All of it would be decorated by “a clear message” from the EU “that the UK will not be able to negotiate a special deal with the EU on trade.” Daiwa’s note added:

In particular, full membership of the Single Market would require the UK to:

• Continue to pay its dues to the EU (meaning the £350mn per week the Leave campaign have falsely claimed the UK gives to the EU would not be available for the myriad things the Leave campaign have said it would spend it on instead)
• And accept free movement of people (breaking the Leave campaign’s most effective campaigning tactic that leaving the EU would allow the UK to “control its borders”).

Faced with reality, rather than rhetoric, and a realization that the promises of the Leave campaign cannot be fulfilled without causing enormous economic damage, buyers’ remorse may well set in, and pressure would likely grow for a second referendum.

So next time, the people would have a chance to correct their error and get the answer right.

If Daiwa’s cynical take on post-Brexit political developments in the UK turn out to be close to reality, it won’t be the first time that a referendum in the EU, after people voted the “wrong way,” would essentially be squashed.

In 2005, the French and Dutch voted against the European Constitution. It was scuttled alright. But it was replaced by the Treaty of Lisbon, which amended the treaties that form the constitutional basis of the EU.

In June 2008, Ireland, as obligated by its constitution, held a referendum to ratify the Treaty of Lisbon, and the people voted against it! That was the wrong answer. After the euro debt crisis began to engulf Ireland, the referendum was held again to give the people a chance to correct their error and get the answer right. And they did....MORE

Agricultural Commodities Rebounding

	Last	Chg
Corn	399-4	+5-2
Soybeans	1096-2	+17-6
Wheat	467-6	+2-6

From Agrimoney:

AM markets: ags stage rebound, as focus returns to weather

Was that it?

Certainly, investors started off the week with a bigger appetite for risk assets – and especially for agricultural commodities - than that with which they ended last week, when the tremors from the UK's Brexit vote shook markets worldwide.

Shares rose on Asian markets, adding 2.4% in Tokyo and 1.4% in Shanghai.

OK, gold, the flagship safe haven bet (and viewed by some investors as a proxy for farmland prices), maintained its upward run – but with gains of 1.5% in early deals came nowhere near its 4.8% jump on Friday, the biggest one-day gain since January 2009.

 But the dollar, another rock for investors in troubled times, eased back a fraction, shedding 0.1% against a basket of currencies.

And that helped lure commodity bulls from their Brexit-resistant bunkers, with oil, viewed by many commentators as the flagship raw material, adding 0.5% to 48.64 a barrel, for Brent crude as of 09:35 UK time (03:35 Chicago time).

Pound lighter

Sure, for investors in Europe and the UK, the Brexit issue has not gone away, as evident in currency moves within the region.

The euro shed a further 0.5% against the dollar, to E1.105 to $1, failing to break back above the 200-day moving average lost in the last session, but also failed to come anywhere near the intraday lows seen then either.

And sterling lost a further 1.85 to stand a little over £1.34 to $1, again keeping a bit of distance from Friday's 30-year low of £1.3224 to $1.

The currency moves bode well for prices of European agricultural commodity contracts, eg London cocoa and Paris wheat.

Chicago futures bounce

Indeed, they could get a double boost, factoring in also the draw from a sprightly start to US-traded ags, with Chicago grains seeing an extension of the late buying noted in the last session, which saw futures close well above intraday lows (and even in positive territory for spot Chicago wheat).

Chicago wheat futures for July added a further 0.9% in early deals on Monday, taking it to $4.59 a bushel, with the better-traded September lot gaining 0.9% to $4.69 ¼ a bushel....

...MUCH MORE 

Also at Agrimoney:

Three ways to profit in agriculture from Brexit
The good, the mixed, the worrying - three Brexit effects on world ag
Brexit - what does it mean for agriculture and global markets? 

"Trading Suspended in Barclays and RBS as UK Bank Shares Cash" (BARC; RBS)

RBS off another 14.71% at 175.10; BARC down 10.75% at 137.35.

From City AM:

Trading in bank shares was suspended this morning as the value of UK lenders tumbled in response to the vote to leave the EU.

Financial giants Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) both fell more than ten per cent by mid-morning as markets increasingly turn on stocks perceived to most at risk from prolonged uncertainty over the UK's relationship with Europe.

The fall was so steep at the FTSE 100 banks it triggered circuit breakers on the London Stock Exchange, which automatically bring trading to a five minute halt if a stock falls by more than eight per cent from its opening price.

Barclays is currently down 10 per cent on Friday's close at 138p, while RBS is down by 14 per cent. The fall follows sharp losses of around 20 per cent for both banks during trading on Friday.

Other London-listed stocks to suffer the fate of having trading halted were FTSE 100 housebuilders Taylor Wimpey, insurers Legal and General and FTSE 250 challenger bank Virgin Money....MORE

And speaking of the 250 (market caps 101 to 350 on the list), FT Alphaville points to: 

What lurks beneath (the Footsie)

Sure, the FTSE 100, that non-barometer of corporate health in the UK, was down another 1.35 per cent at pixel — off 83 points at 6054. And there are some big falls amongst some well known constituents: M&S and Next are down circa 15 per cent apiece, for instance.

But Brexit reaction is most visible in an index more truly representative of domestically-focused British business. So take a look at the FTSE Mid 250:

...MORE 

"Elon Musk's new company is developing robots to do your housework"

Sure you've got your rockets and your electric vehicles and your solar installers but what would really tie it all together?

From Science Alert. June 22:

TAKE MY MONEY.

For most people, housework is the absolute worst, and it’s kinda weird how in 2016, we still don’t have anything remotely like Rosie the robot maid, who vacuumed the hell out of the Jetsons’ house.

Well, it might finally be our time, because multitasking entrepreneur Elon Musk just announced that his new robotics firm, Open AI, will be developing 'domestic robots' that can perform basic household chores.

To accelerate the process, Open AI will be developing the robots based on technology that already exists - basically, it’s going to be taking off-the-shelf robots and customising them to do housework.

"There are existing techniques for specific tasks, but we believe that learning algorithms can eventually be made reliable enough to create a general-purpose robot," Open AI says in a blog post.

Open AI launched back in December 2015, and is headed up by Musk and Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator - a US company that provides seed funding for startups. Since then, it’s secured US$1 billion in funding from tech heavy-hitters such as PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel.

The idea behind the non-profit is to bring artificial intelligence to our everyday lives, rather than keeping it locked up in robotics labs around the world.

"We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely," the company announced at its launch. ...MORE

Roger that, extend human will, spirit of liberty, over.

It appears the (so-called) parody site "Bored Elon Musk" was real after all:

Retractable hidden rooftop umbrella that keeps you dry while you open your personal umbrella. pic.twitter.com/3tubXIxbh5

— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) December 24, 2014

Analytics for phone calls that let you track down how the clown who just called you found your number.

— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) June 2, 2016

200 meter tall tether ball transportation system for moving employees around large office parks. pic.twitter.com/h65RxsjV5A

— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) September 16, 2013

Eye tracking blog platform that does not allow comments to be posted until entire article is read.

— Bored Elon Musk (@BoredElonMusk) June 10, 2016

"Senior Merkel ally says London should be allowed Brexit rethink"

This fits the thesis that the likelihood of an exit is actually pretty low.

From Reuters:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief of staff has said politicians in London should be able to have the chance to think again about the consequences of leaving the European Union.
"Politicians in London should have the possibility to reconsider the consequences of an exit," the RND newspaper network on Sunday quoted Merkel's chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, as saying.

If Britain really left, that would be "a difficult watershed with many consequences," RND quoted Altmaier as saying. Of course Britain could apply to rejoin the EU later, RND reported him as saying, "but that would take a long time."

(Writing by Paul Carrel, editing by Emma Thomasson)

Previously:
 
An Astounding Amount of Information About The Brexit Vote and Its Aftermath--UPDATED

I'm more and more coming round  to the view that there will be no exit.

From the scheming and dreaming anti-democracy eurocrats to the million people demanding a do-over to self-appointed elites like Tony Blair you just have so many constituencies that "couldn't-care-less-what-the-vote-was-the-break-up-is-not-going-to-happen".

However...
Should one want to know more, the hundreds of entries at the FT's Westminster Blog Brexit Live are a hell of a resource....  

Evans-Pritchard: "The sky has not fallen after Brexit but we face years of hard labour"

There is no guarantee that the referendum leads to an exit so a lot of the commentary is speculative.

That said, there is a greater-than-trivial chance that "the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

Oh wait...*

Climateer Line of the Day, Robo-Advisor Edition

On Friday, in the midst of the worldwide decline in equity markets Barron's referenced an A.T. Kearney study from earlier in the week:

"It turns out that most investors just want 

to pay lower fees for traditional financial 

advice from a human advisor...."

- Invasion of the Robo-Advisors Hits a Snag

That may be even more true after this story from Barron's confrères at the Wall Street Journal gets more widely disseminated:

Robo Adviser Betterment Suspended Trading During ‘Brexit’ Market Turmoil 
Retail customers weren’t notified of halt that lasted from 9:30 a.m. to noon

June 24, 2016 
7:31 p.m. ET
Betterment LLC, a pioneer in the world of automated investing, made an unusual move and suspended all trading Friday morning as markets were roiled by the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union....

The Hack That Could Take Down New York City

From New York Magazine, June 19:

The Big Hack: A scenario that could happen based on what already has.

On December 4, 2017, at a little before nine in the morning, an executive at Goldman Sachs was swiping through the day’s market report in the backseat of a hired SUV heading south on the West Side Highway when his car suddenly swerved to the left, throwing him against the window and pinning a sedan and its driver against the concrete median. A taxi ran into the SUV’s rear fender and spun into the next lane, forcing a school-bus driver to slam on his brakes. Within minutes, nothing was moving from the Intrepid to the Whitney. When the Goldman exec came to, his driver swore that the crash hadn’t been his fault: The car had done it.1

Moments later, on the George Washington Bridge, an SUV veered in front of an 18-wheeler, causing it to jackknife across all four lanes and block traffic heading into the city. The crashes were not a coincidence. Within minutes, there were pileups on 51st Street, the southbound BQE, as far north as the Merritt Parkway, and inside the Midtown Tunnel. By nine, Canal Street was paralyzed, as was the corner of 23rd and Broadway, and every tentacle of what used to be called the Triborough Bridge. At the center of each accident was an SUV of the same make and model, but as the calls came in to the city’s 911 centers in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the operators simply chalked them up to Monday-morning road rage. No one had yet realized that New York City had just been hit by a cyberattack — or that, with the city’s water system, mass transportation, banks, emergency services, and pretty much everything else now wired together in the name of technological progress, the worst was yet to come.2

A third-year resident in the emergency room at Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights walked through the hospital as a television was airing images from the accident on the George Washington Bridge; that meant several crash victims would soon be heading her way. When she got to her computer, she tried logging into the network to check on the patients who were already there, but she was greeted with an error message that read WE’RE NOT LOOKING FOR BITCOIN THIS TIME....

...MUCH MORE 

Artificial Intelligence Algos To Read, Understand and Comment On News Stories

This seems efficient.
Combine the story-writing programs* with the commenting programs and just cut the humans out completely.
From New Scientist, June 20:

AI just got a big boost in its ability to understand the news

Soon you could be chatting with your computer about the morning news. An AI has learned to read and answer questions about a news article with unprecedented accuracy.

Creating AI systems that can learn in the background from humanity’s existing stores of information is one of the big goals of computer science. “Computers don’t have the kind of general knowledge and common sense of how the world works [from reading] about things in novels or watch[ing] sitcoms,” says Chris Manning at Stanford University.

To get a step closer to this, last year, Google’s DeepMind team used articles from the Daily Mail website and CNN to help train an algorithm to read and understand a short story. The team used the bulleted summaries at the top of these articles to create simple interpretive questions that trained the algorithm to search for key points.

.

Now a group led by Manning has designed an algorithm that beat DeepMind’s results by an impressive 10 per cent on the CNN articles and 8 per cent for Daily Mail stories. It scored 70 per cent overall.

The improvement came through streamlining the DeepMind model.  “Some of the stuff they had just causes needless complications,” says Manning. “You get rid of that and the numbers go up.”

 Design trade-off
“It makes sense,” says Robert Frederking of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “Making something more complicated doesn’t make it better.”

There’s a trade-off in AI design: if an algorithm is complex, it’s more powerful, but to perform well it needs more data to learn from, says Frederking. Simpler AI can train quickly with smaller amounts of data.

Manning says there’s not much more a computer can learn from this particular data set. To prepare the hundreds of thousands of articles for AI readers, DeepMind used a program to go through them and assign the same label to nouns and the pronouns that reference them. But this program inevitably confused some pronouns. Fresh nouns and pronouns labelled in a new data set would be needed to keep AI reading improving.

The advantage of using Daily Mail and CNN articles was that there’s so many of them, says Julia Hockenmaier at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign....MORE

According to the Financial Times' "MailOnline and the next page for the ‘sidebar of shame’" The MailOnline pumps out 750 stories per day.

* We have quite a few links in "Robot Writing Moves from Journalism to Wall Street".

Totally Not Brexit: How To Plate Food

If you can do this you have found your calling.

From Sad and Useless:

Low Budget Gourmet Meals

...MORE

HT: MetaFilter


Also at Sad and Useless: How to Pass Time on the Train 

Brexit: Elon Musk Is Not Going To Invite Izabella Kaminska To Fly To Mars (plus guys in wigs)

Mr. Musk, in a 'tell' that he may be coming under some stress, said earlier this month:

"Most likely the form of government on Mars would be a direct democracy, not representative"  

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

And this is where Ms. Kaminska risks her chance at interplanetary travel.
In a series of posts on referendum day she pointed out one of the problems with direct democracy e.g.

Now imagine a world where every dispute is settled with a plebiscite and a 50.0000001% majority. Ahhhh Blockchain.

— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) June 24, 2016

Here's more, from The Diplomat, June 25, 2016:

The American Founding Fathers Had it Right: Direct Democracy Is a Dead Duck

David Cameron should have heeded Alexander Hamilton’s skepticism of ‘pure democracy.’  

“When legend becomes fact, print the legend”–in the lead up to the June 23^rd referendum on Great Britain’s membership in the European Union the majority of UK media appeared to have adopted the advice of a conniving reporter in the legendary Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: British tabloids have fed the public a steady stream of half-truths and distortions  painting the picture of an undemocratic out-of-control bureaucratic behemoth in Brussels that needs to be discarded as quickly as possible, lest it grabs the last remnants of ancient British liberty.

As a consequence, throughout the run-up to the Brexit referendum, it was impossible to have informed public debates on the costs and benefits of Britain’s membership in, or exit from, the European Union. The voices of reason were further drowned out in the echo chambers of social media platforms that only reinforced pre-existing opinions held by voters on the Brexit—destroying any chances of genuine dialogue.

Indeed, the whole spectacle of a referendum—a “device of dictators and demagogues,” in the words of Margaret Thatcher—underlined a salient point: our soundbite culture, combined with political populism, renders direct democracy in the form of a referendum entirely unsuitable as a tool for deciding complex policy issues.

This is not a new revelation. Some of the American Founding Fathers were vehemently opposed to direct democracy. They feared the consequences of an uninformed public formulating a country’s policy on a particular subject, realizing that one of the most important preconditions for direct democracy, i.e. a rational discussion of the issue where all points of view are carefully weighed, would not be possible amidst demagogy and the “tyranny of the majority,” as John Adams put it.

For example, Alexander Hamilton believed in America but not in Americans when he said in a June 1788 speech defending the ratification of the U.S. Constitution: “That a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity.”

Hamilton participated in the American Revolution, an event that left him with a deep fear of mob rule and made him question the wisdom of the masses after witnessing revolutionary excesses in New York City (including witnessing how a mob tried to lynch the headmaster of his university). As a result of his experiences, he firmly believed throughout his life that it was often necessary to leave the public in the dark during important political deliberations. Participating in the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Hamilton observed: “Had the deliberations been open while going on, the clamors of faction would have prevented any satisfactory results.”

Indeed, the issue of ratifying the U.S. Constitution was so heatedly debated that it led to a copy of it being burned during a Fourth of July parade in Albany, which resulted in bloody riots that left one dead and over a dozen wounded. One opponent to the constitution, according to Ron Chernow in his book Alexander Hamilton, went as far as to say that “rather than to adopt the Constitution I would risk a government of Jew, Turk, or infidel.” The media contributed its fair share in inflaming public opinion in the nascent American Republic. In the early 19^th century, one Federalist newspaper, The Wasp, chose as its motto: “To lash rascals naked through the world,” by which it was referring to its political opponents.

Other Founding Fathers concurred with Hamilton’s skepticism. In the tenth essay of the Federalist Papers, written in defense of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison argued for representative democracy over direct democracy in order to protect the individual from what Edmund Burke called the “swinish multitude:”

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. (…)  The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. (…)
[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. 

...MORE

An Astounding Amount of Information About The Brexit Vote and Its Aftermath--UPDATED

Update below.
Original post: 
 
I'm more and more coming round  to the view that there will be no exit.

From the scheming and dreaming anti-democracy eurocrats to the million people demanding a do-over to self-appointed elites like Tony Blair you just have so many constituencies that "couldn't-care-less-what-the-vote-was-the-break-up-is-not-going-to-happen".

However...
Should one want to know more, the hundreds of entries at the FT's Westminster Blog Brexit Live are a hell of a resource. Here are a couple of the early Friday posts:

12:14pm
Sarah O’Connor 

Another vignette from a stunned City of London, via our roving reporter Naomi Rovnick:
A commodities broker, who declined to be named, having a small beer and
a cigarette at a cafe in Broadgate Circle, said:

“This morning between 7 and 9 there was no liquidity. It was more difficult than usual to get prices, extremely hard. We saw general panic to start and now reality is returning to markets. There is now a sense of relief as people thought this morning that the FTSE would have dropped more. Now our markets have returned to normal, liquidity is coming back to the assets we trade, but all eyes are now on the US market open.”

12:15pm
Emily Cadman 

The French are starting to talk tough on the consequences for British banks of the Brexit vote Michael Stothard reports.
Frédéric Oudéa, president of the French Banking Federation, the European Banking Federation and Societie Generale, said the vote will have “significant consequences for the city of London”.
He said banks based predominately in the UK would be most affected by the vote, which could prompt the ECB to try and drive euro trading activities – today done largely in London- back to the continent.

“The deal [between the ECB and the UK] has clearly changed now”.

He said banks moving staff to the continent will not dawdle.

“The banks that are only in the UK will not be able to wait… If they are moving 500 or 1000 people, it takes time,” he said.

French banks would be some of the least impacted by the vote because they are already in the eurozone, he said, predicting there “will not be a quick or large move” of staff out of London....

Here's the last post from Friday:

11:30pm
Mark Odell

 

It has been a momentous day in British and European politics with repercussions felt around the world as financial markets were hit sharply. The UK is set to quit the EU after 43 years but it will happen under a new prime minister, after the incumbent David Cameron said he would stand down by the time of his Conservative party’s annual conference in October.
The EU has said it will begin planning for a Brexit as early as next week and is pushing London to trigger Article 50, the so-called release clause.
Meanwhile, the break-up of the UK is also back on the agenda after Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party, which rules Scotland, says she will prepare for a new referendum on Independence.
Most of the country had turned against the EU with only London, Scotland and Northern Ireland delivering big wins for Remain.
We are going to close this blog for the night and will return on Saturday morning UK time.

...MUCH MORE

UPDATE: I forgot to include the link for today's liveblog, "Brexit live: EU calls for new PM in ‘days’".

How Russia Tamed Inflation

As noted in the intro to June 10's "Bank of Russia Cuts Rate First Time Since July as Risks Fade":

Considering what she has had to work with, sanctions, oil prices etc., the central bank's performance has been as good as one could hope for....

From Forbes, June 23:
Russian Inflation Is (Mostly) Back To Normal

In the period after the 2008-09 financial crisis, for the first time in its post-Soviet history, Russia’s Central Bank moved towards a policy of explicit inflation targeting. People in the West tend to think that a central bank setting interest rates to help increase or decrease the change in prices as “normal,” but while this certainly seems like the most effective way to conduct monetary policy, it is by no means the only one.

The early results of this policy were solid, if not spectacular: prices still grew at a rate (around 6%) that would seem excessively high in developed markets, but were significantly lower than at any other point since the beginning of Russia’s market transition. However the Russian Central Bank, while generally regarded as a well-run and effective institution, is not omnipotent, and forces entirely beyond its control (the war in Ukraine and the resulting sanctions, a massive decline in the price of oil, and a large decline in the value of the ruble) started to push prices higher towards the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015. Consumer prices in 2015 grew by almost 13%, higher than at any other point since the Central Bank made the switch to inflation targeting.  

At the end of 2014, in an urgent bid to stem the ruble’s free-fall, the Central Bank dramatically hiked rates from 10.5 all the way to 17%. At first this didn’t appear to have much of an impact (in January 2015 alone, prices grew by about 3.8%) but with a little more hindsight the situation looks a bit different. In the first five months of this year, prices grew at the slowest pace since 2013. It’s always possible that oil plummets and the ruble resumes its downward march, but at the moment it looks like the threat from inflation is largely in the rear-view mirror.

Now, this “success” hasn’t come without costs. While the Central Bank has gradually ratcheted down most of its hike (including a cut from 11% to 10.5% on June 10th) businesses were understandably wary of borrowing when rates were at 15 or 14%....MORE

Ms Nabiullina has given herself some leeway to continue decreasing rates and should probably shave a few hundred points off the official rate. Of course she probably knew this long before it occurred to me.
See also:
Nabiullina named Euromoney Central Bank Governor of the Year 2015