Marc Andreessen Speaks: "Flying cars are closer than you think"

And speaks, and speaks...
You know how he is.

From the Verge, Nov. 21:

Marc Andreessen may be the most dedicated optimist in Silicon Valley. During a year when the public’s attention was often focused on international conflict, mass shootings, and a bitter election, the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has insistently pointed toward progress.

Until it fell silent in September, Andreessen’s hyperactive Twitter feed served as a guide to the good news: people rising out of poverty, the surprising durability of the US economy, and all manner of fast-growing tech products and services.

And then, on September 24th, the account froze. “Taking a Twitter break!” he tweeted, before deleting the rest of his tweets. He has never said why — and, when we met in his offices on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, he declined to say much beyond the fact that his seat on Facebook’s board had presented him with a conflict.

Plenty of subjects stress Andreessen out — he believes the next election will somehow be even more contentious than the one we just survived. But generally speaking, he is as optimistic as he’s ever been, whether the subject is job creation, the future of autonomous vehicles, or the remarkable progress in the quest to build flying cars.

The Interview

What’s made you feel optimistic lately?

A bunch of things. It’s honestly hard to not be an optimist in this job, because we get 2,000 founders a year who come in here, sit in that chair right there, and they just tell us everything. They unspool the future to us, and they’re optimistic or they wouldn’t be here. Then all the new ideas.

I wonder whether people outside a firm like this would be more optimistic if they could see and hear all of that stuff. I’m not sure. We’re at a very weird cultural movement. A lot of people are just fundamentally unsure and I think, to a certain extent, hearing more good news may just make people angrier.

Listening to these pitches, are there particular moments where you think, "Wow, within the next half a decade or so, life is going to change a lot more than it did in the previous five or 10 years?

The big thing happening in the economy that is not well understood is that there are two very different parts of the economy. There’s the part where there’s rapid technological change and very rapid productivity improvement. In that part of the economy, you would include things like media — podcasts versus radio is a great example of rapid technological change. Streaming versus broadcast TV and so forth. Retail is obviously going through massive productivity improvements and changes.

Manufacturing — the price of televisions has dramatically collapsed in the last 10 years, and the TV [you can buy] now for 400 bucks is like science fiction compared to what you could get 10 years ago. Cars are going through rapid productivity changes now. You’ve got these sectors that have gone through these massive productivity changes. They are characterized by rapidly improving quality, but also collapsing prices and rapid productivity growth.

You’ve got this other, second part of the economy that’s the exact opposite — where quality is not improving and prices are rising. There you talk about health care, where it feels like every year you pay 10 or 15 percent more and you get some new stuff, but you don’t get a lot of new stuff for the money. You talk about education, where the rising cost of a modern college education is just staggering. Actually, it’s funny — all forms of media are collapsing in price, other than textbooks.

Textbooks are rising in price exactly the same as college tuition, which is a good illustration of the difference between the two sectors. Construction, real estate — there’s been a lot of conversation recently about how we’re still fundamentally wedded to physical location way more than you would think at this point with the internet and everything else.

In the industries where there’s rapid productivity growth, everybody is freaked out, because what are people going to do after everything gets automated? In the other part of the economy, that second part, health care and education, people are freaked out about, "Oh my God, it’s going to eat the entire budget! It’s going to eat my personal budget. Health care and education is going to be every dollar I make as income, and it’s going to eat the national budget and drive the United States bankrupt!" And everybody in the economy is going to become either a nurse or teacher. It’s really funny, both sides of the economy get polar opposite emotional reactions.

I go through all of that to say that the tech industry has been able to build startups and new technologies against that first category but not that second category. Tech is super present in retail in the form of e-commerce, we’re super present in media in the form of internet, we’re super present in consumer electronics in the smartphone. We are very much not present, in what we would consider to be a healthy way, in education, health care, construction, childcare, senior care. The great twist on that is that second category — that’s most of the GDP. Most of the spending is most of the GDP, and these are the areas where we have not yet been able to crack the code.

The big thing happening in the valley right now is valley entrepreneurs are getting much more aggressive at starting tech companies in that second category. We are seeing a lot more startups going into, especially, health care, biotech, different applications on that side. We’re seeing a lot of startups going into education. We’re not so much seeing startups going into construction, but we’re seeing lots of startups going into the collaborative work: Slack and GitHub and telepresence and Skype and all of these things, that in theory, in the long run, will make geography less relevant and maybe solve the cost of housing and access to economic opportunity.

Financial services has had rising costs, not falling costs, which it really shouldn’t have — we’re seeing a lot of fintech startups going into that. It’s this reorientation, and the valley is still doing all of the first category things, but it feels like we’re now layering on a lot of the second categories.

That’s very exciting, in that we can have the impact in the second category like we had in the first category, which I think would be good. Of course, the other possibility is this is just pure hubris, and five years from now you’re going to play this back and you’ll be like, "Aha! Dot-com bubble 2.0. He was full of it and he didn’t realize it. The entire thing came crashing down." How audacious or insane is it to think that you could bring tech to health care or education? It’s probably 50/50....MUCH MORE

Possibly also of interest:

May, 2015 
Marc Andreessen In the New Yorker:
13,000+ words.
Oct. 2014 
New York Magazine's Million Word Interview With Mark Andreessen
It's not really a million words but man-o-mandingo the guy likes to talk.

And a podcast from June of this year exposes one of my pet peeves:

"Slight Pivot: Marc Andreessen isn’t admitting there’s a tech bubble, but he’s coming pretty close"--UPDATED

...The podcast has no transcript. 
 
One way around the time wastage of having to listen versus read is to speed things up to the point Mr. Andreessen sounds like  a bullet-headed chipmunk which, although not as fun as it might first appear, can get you to the 350-450 words per minute range most folks read at.
 
If you don't have the technical skills yourself, you can use these tips for desktop or iPhone to get to approx. 300 WPM. 

Update: "Supermodels And Other Productivity Measures"... 

Re: pet peeve, not the supermodels, the lack of a transcript

Hackers Crack Liechtenstein Banks, Demand Ramsoms"

This will get a few pulses racing.
From The Register:

Tiny country creates yuuge problems as crims threaten to expose 'tax evasion'

Hackers have days ago breached a Liechtenstein bank and are allegedly blackmailing customers by threatening to release their account data if ransoms are not paid.

Attackers obtained account data from Chinese owned Valartis Bank Liechtenstein siphoning information on clients including politicians, actors, and wealthy individuals across Germany and elsewhere, Bild am Sonntag reported.

Hackers are allegedly demanding up to 10 per cent of account balances paid in Bitcoin for the information to be withheld.

The attackers are threatening to release the information to authorities and media if ransoms are not paid by the seventh of December.

The bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Director Andreas Insam told Bild am Sonntag it has alerted the authorities and that investigations are ongoing.

Three letters published by the publication (paywalled) claim several gigabytes of account information and correspondence has been taken since October this year....MORE

Uber-for-Laundry Is Dead; Long Live Uber-for-Laundry

A few weeks ago I mentioned that one of the leaders of the California secession movement was a fairly successful VC who had some middle-round Airbnb and Uber on the books but unfortunately his Uber-for-Laundry deal, Washio, had folded.

And I thought we were done with the laundry
(forgetting about eDaixi for some reason) 

Now we read at the Financial Times: 

Electrolux gives ‘Uber for laundry’ idea a spin
Swedish appliance maker tests concept of sharing washing machines

Electrolux, the Swedish appliance maker, is exploring starting an “Uber for laundry” in which consumers would use their own washing machines to wash other people’s clothes.

Jonas Samuelson, the new chief executive of the world’s second-biggest white goods manufacturer, told the Financial Times that Electrolux was trying to overcome big hurdles to make the project work.

“We have a few fun ideas we are testing, like: how about a laundry Uber, where people share their unused laundry time? But there are enormous complexities such as what happens if the clothes come out and are ruined?” Mr Samuelson added.....MORE

Well yeah, there is that.

And as for the FT, at least I felt a twinge when I used the "folded" line in the original intro and tried to deflect with a self-deprecating "see what I did there?"

I detect no such shame/remorse/whatev from the pink'un for giving the "‘Uber for laundry’ idea a spin".

As for eDaixi, despite having done a Baidu/Tencent-led $100 mil. B round when we last visited in 2015, for some reason they raised $14 million last week.
But at least they're still alive.

And in case Electrolux has forgotten, the "Uber for ____" formulation is so two years ago:

Written by Jason O. Gilbert

December 12, 2014

There’s Uber for planes,
And Uber for jets,
An Uber for pills
And Uber for pets.

There’s Uber for dogs,
And Uber for cats.
Need a hot stone massage?
There’s an Uber for that.

An Uber for nails,
And an Uber for news.
And while your nails dry,
There’s an uber for booze.

There’s an Uber for kids,
And an Uber for maids,
There’s an Uber for hair
So you can Uber your braids.

There’s Uber for bikes,
And an Uber for gifting,
There’s an Uber for beauty,
If your face needs a lifting.

There’s Uber for house painting,
And Uber for car towing,
There’s Uber for clothes washing,
And Uber for lawn mowing.

...MORE (Quartz)

"Japan Is Aggressively Buying Up Oil And Gas Around The World"

From OilPrice:

This coming year could be a surprisingly exciting time for oil and gas developers.

Yes, energy prices are depressed right now. But not everyone sees that as a negative. In fact, private equity funds are still raising record amounts of capital for energy investments — with managers and investors alike seeing the current downturn as a prime time to pick up good assets for cheap.

Most of that PE money is earmarked for U.S. shale. But this week’s announcements from Indonesia state oil firm Pertamina, and Japanese government arm Jogmec, show that the spending spree may now be extending to global oil and gas assets.

ADVERTISEMENT

x

Pertamina had $700 million this year for acquisitions — and will likely have billions for the coming year. Jogmec is even more flush with cash — having arranged financial backing totaling $5.2 billion yearly for oil and gas M&A.

That’s a lot of cash now hunting for projects. So the question is — where in the world might these big players be looking?

Obviously, both firms are headquartered in Asia. Suggesting that this region would be a logical place to look for buyouts. But recent events show the focus here is likely to extend well beyond just Asian projects. Pertamina, for example, was decidedly Africa-minded this past year. Buying into projects in Gabon and Mozambique.

Jogmec also favored Africa — providing financial support for Japanese firms working in onshore Kenya. And stepping out even further by getting into frontier exploration in Greenland.

In fact, as the map below shows, Jogmec has a worldwide scope for oil and gas projects. Covering six continents where the company has supported projects through equity capital participation or financial guarantees.

That suggests Jogmec’s billions could theoretically be deployed almost anywhere in the world. Although a closer look at the company’s recent activities provides some deeper clues on where exactly it might be considering.

A little-known fact about Jogmec is that it also provides government-to-government support for petroleum activity. Including helping foreign governments conduct geophysical surveys over prospective areas in the onshore and offshore....MORE

Apparently Jill Stein Missed The Deadline For The Easiest Pennsylvania Recount Path

Of course she did.
Otherwise it wouldn't be 2016
Not that it was going to be easy for her but now she has to go to court and convince a judge to order a recount, see links below.
Much tougher than finding 3 voters per precinct for 9000+ precincts.

From the Washington Examiner:

Pennsylvania State Department says Stein missed recount deadline

Jill Stein has everything she needs to launch a presidential recount. She's got the cash, the grassroots fervor and the spotlight of an adoring media. But there's one thing she needs to overturn Trump's victory: a calendar.

Stein missed Pennsylvania's deadline to file for a voter-initiated recount. That blown deadline is a huge blow for Democrats who have pinned their hopes on recounts in the Keystone State, Michigan and Wisconsin.

"According to Wanda Murren, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State," the Philadelphia Inquirer reported Monday, "the deadline for a voter-initiated recount was Monday, Nov. 21."

Allied with Clinton's camp, Stein can still mount a legal challenge. While the chances of litigation are uncertain, the vote tally is clear. Trump beat Clinton in Pennsylvania, a feat not accomplished by a Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984....MORE

This blogger had all the details of the various routes to a recount a week ago, here's the latest from Billy Penn:
How the Pennsylvania recount is going so far in Philly (not good)

2016.

"Consumer Reports calls Tesla Model X ‘flawed’ but do they even matter?" (TSLA)

The stock is higher by $1.10 at $197.75. First up, Teslarati:

Consumer Reports finds the Model X more showboat than functional calling it “fast and flawed” in its latest review of the electric crossover SUV. CR complains about the iconic Falcon Wing doors calling them “prone to pausing and stopping.” The review continues, “But beyond the brag-worthy magic [of the Falcon Wing doors], the all-wheel-drive Model X 90D largely disappoints,” CR says.

“The big windshield is neat but not tinted enough to offset the brightness of a sunny day and wind noise is excessive.”

But among the negative sentiments by CR, Tesla’s Model X production numbers are on the rise and the vehicle continues to establish its role in the luxury SUV segment. As of last month, Model X held 6% of the U.S. large SUV market and #8 in the large luxury SUV category, edging out Porsche’s Macan and Cayenne, the Land Rover R-R Sport, and Infiniti’s QX80.

Bolstered by a series of Model X over-the-air software updates aimed at addressing early issues related to the doors, Model X owners are seeing a 92% reduction in reliability concerns over the past year. The vehicle was also recently awarded the ‘Golden Steering Wheel’ for best SUV....

...MORE

And from Consumer Reports, Nov. 23:
2016 Tesla Model X Review: Fast and Flawed
More showboat than functional, the electric Tesla Model X has plenty of high-tech gimmicks but forgets about the ‘U’ in SUV

The Model X’s rear doors rise like wings to reveal two “floating” rear seats. This fully electric luxury SUV also has a jet-fighter-like canopy windshield and power front doors, and can park itself.

But beyond the brag-worthy magic, the all-wheel-drive Model X 90D largely disappoints. The rear doors are prone to pausing and stopping. The second-row seats can’t be folded, limiting cargo-carrying ability. The big windshield is neat but not tinted enough to offset the brightness of a sunny day, and wind noise is excessive.

Despite its 5,400-pound weight, the X has warp-speed thrust, hitting 60 mph in just 4.9 seconds.

Driven sedately, our test car’s 90-kWh battery provided about 230 miles of range. The agile Tesla corners more like a sports sedan than an SUV, but its ride is too firm and choppy for a $110,000 car.

The interior is striking in its minimalism. Most vehicle functions are controlled via the giant, responsive touch screen, but you need to take your eyes off the road to use it....MORE

"International Criminal Court to Prosecute Business and Human Rights"

From Lexology via Farmlandgrab:

International Criminal Court to prosecute business and human rights

Herbert Smith Freehills LLP

Lexology | 2 November 2016

In what many NGOs are calling a warning shot to company executives and investors, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicated it will prioritise cases involving the destruction of the environment, illegal exploitation of resources and land-grabbing.

Following recent calls for international tribunals – including the ICC – to investigate corporate involvement in land-grabbing and environmental destruction committed during peacetime, the ICC's Office of the Prosecutor published a policy paper outlining its intention to prioritise these cases.

Currently the risk of a company or its executives being prosecuted at the ICC for these crimes seems remote; there are serious practical and jurisdictional hurdles to any prosecution actually taking place. Nonetheless, the reputational risks for a company of being associated with an investigation into any of the crimes that fall within the ICC's jurisdiction – genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity – could be devastating.

While the ICC has no jurisdiction to prosecute companies, individual company executives can in principle be investigated in connection with corporate complicity in widespread environmental destruction or land-grabbing amounting to a crime against humanity. Such an investigation (and any resulting prosecution) would, however, face a number of considerable legal hurdles.

Hurdle 1 – individual criminal responsibility: Where corporate involvement in land-grabbing, widespread environmental destruction or illegal exploitation of natural resources amounting to an international crime is alleged, it must be established that the relevant executive at that company bears individual criminal responsibility for that crime. This poses considerable practical and evidential hurdles, particularly where the alleged corporate involvement is indirect.

Hurdle 2 – Jurisdiction: the ICC has a limited personal, geographical and temporal jurisdiction. It can only exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed after 1 July 2002 by an individual in the territory of a State Party to the Rome Statute or by nationals of a State Party. Presently, this excludes countries such as the USA, China, India and most of South East Asia, and a number of African states have recently signalled their intention to withdraw from the Court.

Hurdle 3 – Admissibility: The ICC is a court of last resort. Even if the relevant company executive is a national of a State Party, the Prosecutor will only declare a case admissible if the national courts of that State Party are unwilling or unable to prosecute the crime themselves.

Caution: the indirect risks for companies
Although the chances of direct investigation or prosecution seem remote at present, there remain a number of risks for companies in this area....MORE

"China’s Ball of Money Is Rolling Back to Commoditie"

From Bloomberg:

Hot money has come full circle 

In China, money flow is tightly controlled and capital markets are relatively underdeveloped, meaning the economy works like squeezing a balloon.

You press it in one place, and it bulges in another. Policy-maker moves to cool one expansion only serve to inflate another.

Now that "gyration of bubbles," according to Société Générale SA’s chief China economist Wei Yao, has been heating up the commodities market again.

Earlier this month, thermal and coking coal futures hit a record high since their debut in 2013 while zinc soared to the highest since 2011. Steel rebar, nickel, tin, iron ore and rubber futures also climbed to multi-year highs.

It's also interesting that buyers are piling in to get their hands on more obscure commodities such as glass, which is traded on the nation's futures exchanges, and garlic.
Data compiled by the Commerce Ministry in Beijing shows the price of the bulbs soared to record high or 14 yuan per kg, a rise of more than 80 percent from a year-ago.

Glass futures in Zhengzhou ran up to the highest in more than two years on Nov. 11 amid heavy trading.

Fundamental issues of declining supply and rising demand are partly to blame, but market watchers reckon that an uptick in trading volumes smacks of speculation, likely nudged by tightening measures in property markets.

"It's possible that some of the money is coming out of housing markets, especially from the first- and second-tier cities where tightening measures have been imposed to curb the property bubble,” said Aidan Yao, senior emerging Asia economist at AXA Investment Managers, in an interview....MUCH MORE

HT: Reformed Broker

Recently:
Nov 22
"Goldman Overweights Commodities for First Time in Four Years"
Nov. 15
China Property Speculators Pile Into Garlic

It seems as though the Chinese garlic market has some periodicity to it and may have a tradable anomaly or two. Links below....

Oct. 20
If You've Noticed A Perma-Bid In Commodities, You're Not Imagining It 

Ag Equities: "Enough Fawning Over Deere" (DE)

Here's the last nine month's price action via FinViz;

Friday's close: $103.92 +1.75
From Bloomberg Gadfly:

Deere & Co. investors bought the rumor. Now they're buying the news, too.

The maker of tractors, planters and other agricultural equipment reported fourth-quarter earnings per share on Wednesday that soundly beat analysts' expectations, thanks largely to cost cuts. Deere also said 2017 sales and net income won't drop quite as much as had been feared. It was a solid showing all around --  but was it really spectacular enough to justify a spike of as much as 11 percent in the stock?

Years of surplus harvests have pressured crop prices and forced farmers to cut back their budgets, spurring three straight years of sales declines at Deere -- the longest slump since at least the 1980s. The $32 billion company's better-than-expected outlook for 2017 signals that the agricultural equipment market is starting to stabilize and that perhaps the worst of the revenue rout is over.

But here's the thing: Deere was already trading as if a recovery was nigh. At the start of the week, the stock traded at about $92 a share, its highest price since August 2015 and about 7 percent higher than analysts' average 12-month price target. After Wednesday's gains, it's now trading at a record. The negative spread between the stock price and analysts' average price target hasn't been this wide in at least a decade.

Who's Wrong Here?

Deere's surge has left anlaysts' average price target in the dust...

...MORE

Hans-Werner Sinn: "Europe’s Secret Bailout"

From Project Syndicate:

MUNICH – While the world worries about Donald Trump, Brexit, and the flow of refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries, the European Central Bank continues to work persistently and below the public radar on its debt-restructuring plan – also known as quantitative easing (QE) – to ease the burden on over-indebted eurozone countries.

Under the ECB’s QE program, which started in March 2015 (and will likely be extended beyond its scheduled end in March 2017), eurozone members’ central banks buy private market securities for €1.74 trillion ($1.84 trillion), with more than €1.4 trillion to be used to purchase their own countries’ government debt.

The QE program seems to be symmetrical, because each central bank repurchases its own government debt in proportion to the size of the country. But it does not have a symmetrical effect, because government debt from southern European countries, where the debt binges and current-account deficits of the past occurred, are mostly repurchased abroad.

For example, the Banco de España repurchases Spanish government bonds from all over the world, thereby deleveraging the country vis-à-vis private creditors. To this end, it asks other eurozone members’ central banks, particularly the German Bundesbank and, in some cases, the Dutch central bank, to credit the payment orders to the German and Dutch bond sellers. Frequently, if the sellers of Spanish government bonds are outside the eurozone, it will ask the ECB to credit the payment orders.

In the latter case, this often results in triangular transactions, with the sellers transferring the money to Germany or the Netherlands to invest it in fixed-interest securities, companies, or company shares. Thus, the German Bundesbank and the Dutch central bank must credit not only the direct payment orders from Spain, but also the indirect orders resulting from the Banca de España’s repurchases in third countries.

The payment order credits granted by the Bundesbank and the Dutch central bank are recorded as Target claims against the euro system. At the end of September, these claims amounted to €819.4 billion, with the Bundesbank accounting for €715.7 billion, which was 46% of Germany’s net external assets at midyear. Since the beginning of the year, both countries’ combined claims have increased by €180.4 billion, or €20 billion per month, on average. Conversely, the Target debt of the Southern European countries – Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (GIPS) – amounted to €816.5 billion.

For the GIPS countries, these transactions are a splendid deal. They can exchange interest-bearing government debt with fixed maturities held by private investors for the (currently) non-interest-bearing and never-payable Target book debt of their central banks – institutions that the Maastricht Treaty defines as limited liability companies, because member states do not have to recapitalize them when they are over-indebted....MORE

Questions America Wants Answered: Jack and Jill Edition

From xkcd:

The very earnest folks at Explain xkcd haven't finished today's wiki yet.

"North Sea Oil Might Not Be Dead Yet"

From the American Interest:
Here’s some much-needed good news for the UK’s energy interests: oil companies operating in the North Sea are finding new ways to trim costs and—surprisingly—continue to turn a profit in the region’s maturing fields. The FT reports:

Average operating costs in the UK North Sea have fallen 45 per cent since the crash from $29 per barrel to about $16, according to Oil & Gas UK, the industry group. Much of the savings have come in the form of worker lay-offs, and service providers being forced to accept lower payments from producers. But more efficient ways of working — from simplification of well designs to pooled procurement of ships — have also played their part.
“We’ve seen improvements around the world in productivity … but possibly the most impressive has been in the North Sea,” says Simon Henry, chief financial officer of Royal Dutch Shell.

This is a pattern similar to what we’ve seen in America’s shale industry: firms that had perhaps grown comfortable with a prolonged period of $100+ per barrel crude have been forced to take a long, hard look at their operations and identify areas in which they’re capable of trimming the fat....MORE

Currencies: "Corrective Forces Seen in Asia, Subside in Europe"

The euro is at 106.31, the dollar index at 101.23, both recovering somewhat.
From Marc to Market:

As soon as markets opened in Asia, the greenback was sold, and corrective forces that had been nipping below the surface took hold. The euro, which had finished last week below $1.0590, rallied nearly a cent. Before the weekend, the greenback had pushed to almost JPY114, an eight-month high,  before closed near JPY113.20. It was sold to almost JPY111.35 in early Asia. Sterling extended last week's gains and briefly poked through $1.2530, to reach its highest level since November 14. 

There were no fundamental developments that sparked the move.  However, as we had noted, the dollar's technical condition was stretched.  The key macro considerations remain intact.  Barring a surprisingly poor jobs report at the end of the week, the Federal Reserve is on track to hike rates in a few weeks, and the prospect is for fiscal stimulus next year, even if the precise details are not known.  Meanwhile, the combination of European politics (Austrian election for President and Italy's referendum this weekend) and the prospects for the ECB to extend its asset purchases program, with possible tweaks to the rules to address the scarcity of some securities (including securities lending rules) undermines weighs on the European complex. 

The buying enthusiasm for the euro faded, and in the European morning, the euro had given back nearly half of the day's gains.  A move below $1.0620, and especially $1.0580, may signal the end of the correction.  The euro did close higher in the last two sessions.  We've seen the widening interest rate differentials to be a key force, and note that even today, the two-year and 10-year US premium is slightly wider.  

The dollar began to recover against the Japanese yen in the Asian session and continued through the European morning.  It was more than a yen off its lows by late-European morning turnover to approach JPY112.50, the area that offered support before the weekend.  The US two-year premium is slightly wider, but the 10-year advantage is a touch smaller.  Boost by utilities and financials, the Topix added 0.35% to extend its advancing streak for a 12th consecutive session.  Although it recovered from earlier losses, the Nikkei was not as fortunate.  Its minor loss snapped a seven-day advance.  

Sterling cannot get out of its own way.  It rose in four of last week's five sessions but is giving back those gains today.  From the high set in Asia to the low in the European morning, sterling shed nearly a cent and a quarter before finding support near the pre-weekend low.  It has not traded below $1.24 since November 23....MORE 

As he said on the 26th: Dollar Correction may be at Hand, but likely Brief and Shallow

"If we find ET, don’t talk to it, says the man who wants to find ET"

Well duh, even yours truly, stuck here (along with you and everyone else) "In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way" figured that out.*' **

In Other News: Possible Evidence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Ignore them. Do not wave back.... 

From Deepstuff:

The question of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has been asked by people for many years.

But if we hear something, should we answer? In the absence of any signal from them, should we try to make our presence known?

One of those asking these questions is Stephen Hawking, the British cosmologist with many deep thoughts and a good sense of humour.

Unlike many celebrity scientists, Hawking’s provocative, news-grabbing statements almost always have some content worth pondering.

Hawking is part of a Breakthrough Listen project to develop more sensitive radio receivers and listen in on the alien civilisations of the cosmos.

There is another project called Breakthrough Message to design a digital message that could be transmitted from Earth to an extraterrestrial civilisation. The message should be “representative of humanity and planet Earth”.
The program pledges:

[…] not to transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilisations.

But Hawking wants us to listen, and not to talk – use our ears, not our mouth. He wants us to eavesdrop but not join the conversation. He wants us to keep our head low.

That sounds like a reasonable idea. Better safe than sorry. But in the spectrum between, paranoia and unjustifiable fear on one side, and reasonable caution on the other, where does keeping your head low fit in?...MORE

*And it's not even a proper spiral arm, just a blob of stars between two real spiral arms, the Perseus and Sagittarius arms:

-from Atlas of the Universe

**Apologies to Monty Python, I know they meant their song to be upbeat and uplifting but it just depresses me.

"The automation of creativity: scary but inevitable"

First they came for the journalists and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a journalist.

Then they came for the ad agency creatives and I did not speak out-
Because I was not an ad agency creative. (see below)

Then they came for the financial analysts and I
said 'hang on one effin minute'.

The Drum is all things marketing, Teads is venture-backed video advertising.

From the Drum, Oct. 27:

The Drum’s latest documentary, produced in association with Teads, ‘The Automation of Creativity’ explores the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advertising.

Automation will claim 50% of all jobs in the next 30 years, according to Rice University professor Moshe Vardi, but creativity is impossible to automate, right? Adland will surely escape this robot advance?

Such a binary argument fails to take into account the huge leaps artificial intelligence (AI) and other such technologies are making. Why, when it is being used in film-making, music and even journalism, should advertising avoid the onslaught?

Vardi, who specialises in computational engineering, told the American Association for the Advancement of Science: “We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task.”

Automation is set to transform this industry, and arguably for the better. Already we see in the media space the rise of programmatic trading, with many believing it will become the de facto model in coming years. But is tech also the future of creativity? As datasets get ever bigger and algorithms more intelligent, is it not naive to believe creative direction in advertising will remain a human-only pursuit?

In a quest to understand the role of AI in advertising, The Drum, in partnership with video advertising marketplace Teads, has launched a documentary, the Automation of Creativity, which was shot in Tokyo, London and Amsterdam.

The film explores how AI is beginning to impact the role of human creatives.
Martin Talks, founder of consultancy Matomico and former FCB digital chief, says: “There is a certain feeling in the creative industries that it won’t happen to us. That is not the case. AI is already having an impact on the advertising and creative industries – the robots are most definitely coming.

“The defence to that is really pushing ourselves more on creative, as brands and agencies. Clients need to be bolder and stop asking for big ideas while only funding small ones.”

Take the Cannes Lions festival. This year, the feeling was less that adtech had dominated the conversation as it had the previous year, and more that data-driven creativity, big data and technology are starting to shape conversations.

Among the big winners was J Walter Thompson’s ‘The Next Rembrandt’ – a 3D printed painting consisting of 148m pixels distilled from all 346 of Rembrandt’s paintings. The project saw a group of art historians, material researchers, data scientists and engineers take on what many considered a controversial challenge – teaching a machine to think, act and paint like Rembrandt.

Created for banking client ING with Microsoft, it won 16 Lions including Grands Prix in Cyber and Creative Data, and a prized Innovation Lion.

2016 also saw the arrival of the world’s first artificial creative director, AI-CD ß. Created by McCann Erickson Japan under its Creative Genome Project, it might have been a headline grabber but has already been pressed into commercial action for Mondelēz Japan with a campaign for Clorets Mint Tab.

Shun Matsuzaka, the creative planner behind the initiative, says he was inspired by the thought that the industry – for all its talk of data-driven creativity – felt immune from the rise of AI when other creative industries such as film, music and publishing were actively exploring its potential. “Why are we not doing it in the ad industry?” he asks.

A decade’s worth of award-winning work has been inputted into its database and tagged by hand. The team then created algorithms to set the creative direction, with AI-CD ß tasked to crunch its dataset from client briefs.

A third campaign that got the ad world thinking was a digital poster by M&C Saatchi, Clear Channel and Posterscope for fictional coffee brand Bahio.

Billed the world’s first AI advert, the premise was that the poster could ‘read’ the reactions of its audience and adapt accordingly. Fed an initial ‘gene pool’ of images and copy, with 22 ads created in each generation, at each stage the poster assessed the success, or otherwise, of the ad, identifying winners to iterate in its next generation....MORE

Pizza by Drone? That's So Last Month: Domino's Is Training Trackable Delivery Reindeer

From Mashable:

Domino's Japan is training reindeer to deliver holiday pizza. Yes, really

Of all the U.S. traditions Japan has adopted, Christmas might be the biggest. And now one company is taking it to the next level by rolling out pizza delivering reindeer.

No, it's not the special eggnog messing with your eyes, you read that right, Domino's Japan is currently training reindeer that will pull sleds packing fresh pizza around the country.

Aside from the obvious attempt to connect Santa Claus with pizza, the idea for the reindeers came about as a way to continue to be able to deliver pizzas during snowy weather, when a bike is less practical.

Each reindeer-powered sled will be equipped with the company's GPS Driver Tracker, a system which allows customers to watch delivery people in real time as they make deliveries.

In the case of the reindeer deliveries, the icons on the app's map (below) will be changed to reindeer icons beginning in December....MORE

HT: MetaFilter who also have more e.g.

The company says they’re learning their new jobs on the grounds of a driving school

Taking them out for a few Lapps around the track, eh?

*backs away slowly*

"The game isn’t to build anything that might last, but to secure just enough money to land unharmed when the crash finally happens"

From the Atlantic, Nov. 22:

Watching the World Rot at Europe's Largest Tech Conference
Notes from a writer’s visit to Web Summit

Web Summit is Europe’s largest tech conference, and a terrifying place in which to get lost. In this vast grazing-ground for investors and entrepreneurs, thousands stampede in what looks like panic through the three vast halls of Lisbon’s FIL exhibition center. People are clogged up everywhere: Cigarette smoke drifts from the hundred-turreted human chimney outside every doorway, great impassable bogs of attendees clot around the start-up booths, long and desperate lines coil out from the bathrooms and the instant-coffee stations and the promotional virtual-reality headset displays.

Outside, backed by the fading white tubular ’90s-futurism of the exhibition center, two long and ceaseless streams of people rush into and out of the summit, guarded by Portuguese cops gripping assault rifles and pacing short, tetchy distances. As long as you move in the direction of the crowd, it’s possible to breathe, but if you stand still for even a moment it becomes vertiginous.

Across dozens of stages, various electrified prophets announce the coming of a new world. One is showing, through a chart of human population, that all of history prior to the Industrial Revolution, its wars and empires and art and thought, is entirely irrelevant; humanity learned its purpose in the 19th century, which is to innovate; more is always better. Another is rapturously announcing that you can “interact with a virtual bartender” over Facebook Messenger. Why? It’s not clear. Everything is precisely itemized, the 20-minute time-slots and the numbered booths, but nothing seems to quite make sense: structure without order, system without restraint. This is where the future goes to be born—as always, in the “formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of monstrosity.”

There are, broadly speaking, two different ways of thinking about technology. The first is strictly functional: You look at what a tool does, how it interacts with other tools and helps its user achieve their aims. A hammer drives in a nail; a virtual bartender is interacted with over Facebook Messenger. Web Summit is a grand exposition of all these new tools; here you can find the things that might be making all our tasks easier for decades to come.

In the second, broader, more materialist account, technology is seen as regulating relations between people. A hammer doesn’t just drive a nail, but builds a wooden house in which the distinct family unit can wall themselves off from the world; a virtual bartender keeps you in that house log after dark in a silent city full of humming unearthly-white screens. As Marx writes in The Poverty of Philosophy, “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist”; as Lewis Mumford argued, the machine isn’t so much an ordinary if complex object as it is a mode of organization; the first such mega-machines, in ancient Egypt, used human bodies as their working parts, and their products are still here today. In our own society the products are ephemeral, and its structure is one of increasing chaos. You can watch that chaos roiling through an exhibition center in Lisbon. Web Summit is a hyper-concentrated image of our entire world, and the panic and confusion that is to come.

You can go further. In the accounts given by philosophers like Bernard Stiegler, the human stands on the point of vanishing entirely; we become something incidental to a total technological system. As he points out, a human being without any technological prostheses is nothing, an unsteady sac of flesh defined only by what it doesn’t have: no shelter, no protection, no society. We create tools, but technical apparatuses and their milieus advance according to their own logic, and these non-living objects have their own strange form of life. Our brains developed to control our hands; human consciousness itself was only the by-product of a technical evolution that moved from flint-knapping to the hammer to the virtual bartender; its real job isn’t to perform any particular task but to perpetuate itself.  “Robots,” he writes, are “seemingly designed no longer to free humanity from work but to consign it either to poverty or stress.”

Whatever illusion of predominance we had is fading: For others, like Benjamin Bratton, the real political subject is no longer a human individual but a “user,” which can be any kind of biological or digital assemblage. With production automated according to algorithmically generated targets, with the vast majority of all written language taking the form of spam and junk code, this system has less and less use for us—even as a moving part—with every passing day.

Web Summit is where humanity rushes towards its extinction.

This would explain a few things. For instance, what do any of the companies exhibiting at Web Summit actually do? Much of the conference space is given over to these start-up exhibitors; each of them gets a meter of wall and a plug socket for their laptop, along with a big sign in which they announce their ambitions in terms that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Of course, the tech industry has its own specialized discourse, so while one company announces that it “brings the next generation of B2C, B2B, B2E platforms to a high qualified partners network supported by a great business model,” you can make the vague assumption that all this gibberish might actually mean something to someone somewhere.

Similarly, with TrackingDoc, tagline “selling is a game,” which lets you “discover how people engage with your sales documents.” It’s a strange kind of language, all modifiers bleached lifeless by cliché, employing the most grandiose terms (‘discover,’ ‘transformational,’ ‘revolution’) to describe what tends to be a new way of doing paperwork, spinning precariously on the edge of meaninglessness, but it’s still language.

But what about the firm calling itself (for unknown and possibly unpleasant reasons) Kwanko, announcing simply that “data is the new performance?” Or Lapa, which claims without any other information to be “transforming the way people search and protect all the things they can’t live without?” 

Or CrowdT, a “crowdfunding platform using apparel to raise funds?” This isn’t meaning, in any of its usual senses, something that exists to be understood, but the zombie signifier, words building and feeding on each other to form a system terrifyingly self-sustaining and utterly opaque....MORE

HT: The Browser

Fed Gov Lael Brainard: "The 'Gig' Economy: Implications of the Growth of Contingent Work"

From the Federal Reserve Board:

Speech

Other Formats

84 KB PDF

 

Governor Lael Brainard
At "Evolution of Work," a convening cosponsored by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the Freelancers Union, New York, New York
November 17, 2016

The "Gig" Economy: Implications of the Growth of Contingent Work

I would like to thank Bill Dudley and Sara Horowitz for inviting me to participate in today's conference. The subject we are tackling today--the evolution of work--is a particular interest of mine and is a matter of great importance to the Federal Reserve. The Congress has mandated the Federal Reserve to implement monetary policy so as to promote maximum employment and stable prices. Our dual mandate recognizes the importance of work in enabling people to contribute to the financial security of their family and the prosperity of their community and the country overall. Moreover, there is a long-standing recognition that secure and dignified work provides a key sense of purpose and worth. Understanding the changing nature of employment in today's economy is not only central to the mission of the Federal Reserve, but also goes to the core of who we are as providers for our families and productive members of society.¹
 
In contrast to traditional work arrangements, in which an employee has a durable employment relationship with a single primary employer, a large and growing proportion of the workforce is working through contracting, temporary arrangements, on-call arrangements, or as freelancers being hired for episodic "gigs." Broadly speaking, contingent arrangements are more transitory than traditional arrangements, in the extreme consisting of a single transaction or gig. They often provide considerably greater flexibility than long-term employment contracts, allowing workers and employers to move in and out of work relationships easily. Depending on the nature of the employment relationship, this enhanced flexibility could have benefits and costs that accrue to workers and employers very differently.

Although they have always been a feature of the American economic landscape, there has been a sharp increase in the prevalence of contingent working arrangements over the past decade, and it is too early to tell how much of this acceleration is a cyclical phenomenon associated with the Great Recession or reflects a structural trend. The growing share and variety of contingent work has important implications for policy and puts a premium on data and research exploring this topic. For monetary policy, the growth of contingent work affects the way we assess maximum employment and the way we interpret important labor market outcomes, such as the level of part-time employment and aggregate hours worked. Depending on the contractual arrangements, it may also have important implications for economic security and the behavior of households as consumers and savers. Richer and timely data and analysis could help guide employers, workers, and public officials toward outcomes where benefits and risks are better understood and managed.

What Do We Know about Contingent Work?
Official measures of the changing nature of work have not kept pace with the evolution of the economy. But thanks to some cutting-edge researchers, several of whom are present today, there is a growing foundation of analysis.

Last year, Larry Katz and Alan Krueger conducted a version of the Contingent Worker Survey (CWS) to track alternative and nonstandard work arrangements using the RAND American Life Panel.² Their findings are striking: Over the past decade, contingent workers have increased by roughly one-half and now make up 16 percent of the workforce. This rapid increase is in marked contrast to the preceding decade, when contingent workers remained at a relatively stable 10 percent of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) CWS.³ They conclude that all of the net growth in aggregate employment in the decade leading up to 2015 can be accounted for by contingent work arrangements, which means there has been no net employment growth in traditional work arrangements. Given that this period spanned the Great Recession and the first five years of a slow recovery, it naturally raises the question of how much of the large recent shift toward contingent work is attributable to cyclical factors, as opposed to structural forces that may be here to stay.⁴
 
Long before the advent of firms such as Uber and TaskRabbit, ‎many individuals worked in contingent arrangements, such as freelancing and contracting, and it is these groups that have increased their share of the workforce most notably over the past decade. The largest increase in contingent work over this time has been among workers whose services are contracted out by another company, which rose from 0.6 percent to 3.1 percent of the workforce. There was also a large increase in workers who are independent contractors, consultants, or freelancers, whose share grew from 6.9 percent in 2005 to 8.4 percent in 2015. On-call workers expanded from 1.7 percent to 2.6 percent of the workforce.⁵ 

...MORE 

"Would You Pay $21.4 Million for a Giant Artwork Made for East German Secret Police?"

Maybe.
If you were this lady:

Here's the headline story from artnet:

A German art historian has discovered a huge work in stained glass, previously installed in the Stasi (secret police) headquarters in former East Berlin and is staging a pop up exhibition during Art Basel Miami Beach with the intention of selling the work for $21.4 million.

The 65-foot screen was originally installed at the Stasi headquarters in Berlin.

Thilo Holzmann discovered the work among his uncle’s possessions, who had bought the 65-foot wide stained-glass piece in 1990, one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the division between East and West Germany. Weighing three tons, the work had been stored away in a shipping container and simply forgotten about.

The screen was designed by Richard Otfried Wilhelm, now 84, who was the chief master of glass for public works in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and was commissioned in 1979 by Erich Mielke, the head of the East German Ministry of State Security, to be installed in the Stasi headquarters.

A major assignment for Wilhelm, “…it was crucial that it be both artistically outstanding and politically powerful,” he told the New York Times.

The huge screen stood in a large room at the headquarters that is now the Stasi Museum. It depicts Lenin and flying doves, a common symbol used by the communist regime. It was a huge undertaking that involved 16 glaziers and took two years to complete....MORE

If you didn't recognize her, the woman in the top picture is Anetta Kahane, the ex-Stasi agent that Chancellor Merkel tasked with monitoring hate speech on Facebook.

I'm no expert but she looks like Hollywood's idea of what an ex-Stasi agent should be.

Computers: "Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich—Then Vegas Made Them Pay"

Digg is letting their computer geeks/gurus choose today's content and this was one of their picks.

SHHHHH…..THE DIGG EDITORS ARE SLEEPING IN

The Digg Developers Are Running The Front Page Today

19 diggs Digg Original

The editorial team gets to run the show 364 days out of the year. But today, the developers finally have control. And they want you to see the Digg no one else gets to see.

From Wired, October 2014:

John Kane was on a hell of a winning streak.
 On July 3, 2009, he walked alone into the high-limit room at the Silverton Casino in Las Vegas and sat down at a video poker machine called the Game King. Six minutes later the purple light on the top of the machine flashed, signaling a $4,300 jackpot. Kane waited while the slot attendant verified the win and presented the IRS paperwork—a procedure required for any win of $1,200 or greater—then, 11 minutes later, ding ding ding!, a $2,800 win. A $4,150 jackpot rolled in a few minutes after that.

All the while, the casino's director of surveillance, Charles Williams, was peering down at Kane through a camera hidden in a ceiling dome. Tall, with a high brow and an aquiline nose, the 50-year-old Kane had the patrician bearing of a man better suited to playing a Mozart piano concerto than listening to the chirping of a slot machine. Even his play was refined: the way he rested his long fingers on the buttons and swept them in a graceful legato, smoothly selecting good cards, discarding bad ones, accepting jackpot after jackpot with the vaguely put-upon air of a creditor finally collecting an overdue debt.

Williams could see that Kane was wielding none of the array of cheating devices that casinos had confiscated from grifters over the years. He wasn't jamming a light wand in the machine's hopper or zapping the Game King with an electro­magnetic pulse. He was simply pressing the buttons. But he was winning far too much, too fast, to be relying on luck alone.

At 12:34 pm, the Game King lit up with its seventh jackpot in an hour and a half, a $10,400 payout. Now Williams knew something was wrong: The cards dealt on the screen were the exact same four deuces and four of clubs that yielded Kane's previous jackpot. The odds against that were astronomical. Williams called over the executive in charge of the Silverton's slots, and they reviewed the surveillance tape together.

The evidence was mounting that Kane had found something unthinkable: the kind of thing gamblers dream of, casinos dread, and Nevada regulators have an entire auditing regime to prevent. He'd found a bug in the most popular video slot in Las Vegas.

As they watched the replay for clues, Kane chalked up an eighth jackpot worth $8,200, and Williams decided not to wait any longer. He contacted the Silverton's head of security, a formidable character with slicked-back silver hair and a black suit, and positioned him outside the slot area. His orders: Make sure John Kane doesn't leave the casino

Kane had discovered the glitch in the Game King three months earlier on the other end of town, at the unpretentious Fremont Hotel and Casino in downtown's Glitter Gulch. He was overdue for a lucky break. Since the Game King had gotten its hooks in him years earlier he'd lost between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands annually. At his previous haunt, the locals-friendly Boulder Station, he blew half a million dollars in 2006 alone—a pace that earned him enough Player's Club points to pay for his own Game King to play at his home on the outskirts of Vegas, along with technicians to service it. (The machine was just for fun—it didn't pay jackpots.) “He's played more than anyone else in the United States,” says his lawyer, Andrew Leavitt. “I'm not exaggerating or embellishing. It's an addiction.”

To understand video poker addiction, you have to start with the deceptively simple appeal of the game. You put some money in the machine, place a bet of one to five credits, and the computer deals you a poker hand. Select the cards you want to keep, slap the Draw button, and the machine replaces the discards. Your final hand determines the payout.

When the first video poker machine hit casinos in the 1970s, it was a phenomenal success—gamblers loved that they could make decisions that affected the outcome instead of just pulling a handle and watching the reels spin. The patent holder started a company called International Game Technology that debuted on the Nasdaq in 1981.

IGT's key insight was to tap into the vast flexibility offered by computerized gambling. In 1996, the company perfected its formula with the Game King Multi-Game, which allowed players to choose from several variations on video poker. Casinos snatched up the Game King, and IGT sold them regular firmware upgrades that added still more games to the menu. On September 25, 2002, the company released its fifth major revision—Game King 5.0. Its marketing material was triumphal: “Full of new enhancements, including state-of-the-art video graphics and enhanced stereo sound, the Game King 5.0 Multi-Game suite is sure to rule over your entire casino floor with unprecedented magnificence!” But the new Game King code had one feature that wasn't in the brochure—a series of subtle errors in program number G0001640 that evaded laboratory testing and source code review.

The bug survived like a cockroach for the next seven years. It passed into new revisions, one after another, ultimately infecting 99 different programs installed in thousands of IGT machines around the world. As far as anyone knows, it went completely undetected until late April 2009, when John Kane was playing at a row of four low-limit Game Kings outside the entrance to a Chinese fast food joint at the Fremont, smoke swirling around him and '90s pop music raining down from the casino sound system......MORE