This $TSLA earnings call is stunning. No one could have imagined this circus.
This is a CEO of a 50B+ public company who sounds completely deflated after posting worst quarterly loss yet. And he's taking questions from a YouTuber while scolding press and investors. @TeslaCharts
"Cliff, good news for you. Both of your opponents came up with incorrect responses and what that means is that, even if you're wrong, as long as you didn't do anything foolish like wager everything, you're a cinch winner."
Your pissant questions about topics like margins, capex and profitability bore me, you are banished from the kingdom. Ask me something about SpaceX $TSLA
The literature shows that when a society believes that wealth is
determined by random “luck” rather than by merit, it demands more
redistribution. Adverse shocks, like earthquakes, strengthen the belief
that random “bad luck” can frustrate the outcomes achieved with merit.
We theoretically illustrate that individuals react to such shocks by
raising support for redistribution. We then present evidence of this
behavior by exploiting a natural experiment provided by one of the
strongest seismic events that occurred in Italy in the last three
decades, the L’Aquila earthquake in 2009. We assemble a novel dataset by
matching information on the ground acceleration registered throughout
the National Strong Motion Network during the earthquake with survey
data about individual opinions on redistribution collected a few months
later. The empirical analysis illustrates that the intensity of the
shakes is associated with subsequent stronger beliefs that, for a
society to be fair, income inequalities should be levelled by
redistribution.
...MORE (including the download page at the Universitätsbibliothek, LMU München)
What's that? Tesla? Meh.
You saw the options pricing going into earnings and, if you've been visiting the blog over the years you may also have the old-timey Brit nature show narrator on the soundtrack.
As the lions approach the wildebeest: "Sadly now, there can be but one outcome."
The straddle writers being the lions and the speculators being the wildebeest. The writers hedge in the equity so they at least pick up the vig but the absolute best outcome for them is a stock price close to unchanged and near a strike price. Early after-hours action: $302.75up $1.60. Why waste the pixels? Maybe more tomorrow but now a real Zuckster.
From The Atlantic May 1: Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand Journalism Either that, or he doesn’t care.
Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that he cares, really cares, about journalism.
“I
view our responsibility in news as two things,” he said in a
wide-ranging conversation with a small group of news editors and
executives assembled in Palo Alto for a journalism gathering known as
Off the Record on Tuesday afternoon. “One is making sure people can get
trustworthy news.”
The other, he said, “is building common ground
in society.” It turns out that “common ground” is suddenly Zuckerberg’s
preferred euphemism. (That, and “community.”)
“You’re not going to
be able to bridge common ground,” he said, unless you have a “common
set of facts so that you can at least have a coherent debate.”
And here’s where the contradictions flood in.
Zuckerberg
runs a media company that distributes news, but doesn’t have a proper
newsroom. He runs a media company that has—with Google’s help—dominated
the vast majority of digital ad dollars and eviscerated the journalism
industry’s business model, all while preaching about the importance of
journalism. He runs a media company that, he says, believes deeply in
the need to sustain independent journalism, but won’t pay publishers to
license journalistic content. And he runs a media company that has
decided to show its users less news from professional outlets—it’s
really not what people want to see, he says—in favor of more individual
opinions.
According to Zuckerberg, the way you find common ground—a common set
of facts—is not through professional news outlets, but via individuals.
And Facebook, with its 2 billion or so users, has plenty of them. But
while Zuckerberg said Facebook is now ranking news outlets by
trustworthiness—in person, he didn’t seem to distinguish among the
quality of opinions.
“I do think that in general, within a news
organization, there is an opinion,” he said. “I do think that a lot of
what you all do, is have an opinion and have a view.”...MORE
BlackRock Inc said on Monday it is hiring two specialists from Goldman
Sachs Group Inc to bolster its private equity business in New York,
according to a staff memo.
Steve Lessar and Konnin Tam will join the world’s largest asset
management company from Goldman Sachs this summer, according to the
document, which was seen by Reuters.
Each will be responsible for expanding BlackRock’s role within a
business that effectively enables investors in private companies and
funds that invest in such firms to resell their stakes to other
institutions. Normally, that money is locked up for years.
This market for “secondary” private capital saw a record $58
billion in transaction activity in 2017, according to investment bank
Greenhill & Co Inc, with money chasing better returns than exist
within public markets....
...Larry Fink is no fool, he knows where the big margins (highest fees) are
in asset management and it's definitely not in stocks & bonds,
BlackRock's traditional bread and butter business.
The social media titan says the rankings will determine placement in its News Feed feature.
― Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a meeting Tuesday with media executives that the company has begun implementing a system of ranking news organizations by trust, relying on user surveys to determine which news sources are “broadly trusted.”
News organizations that scored higher on the ranking would be promoted in Facebook’s News Feed, while those with lower trust scores would be suppressed, Zuckerberg said. The effort is part of Facebook’s pledge to “take a broader view of our responsibilities,” he said after a bruising year in which the platform has been criticized for being used to undermine elections, foment division and spread hate speech.
Zuckerberg’s remarks came after his keynote address at Facebook’s F8 developer conference, in which he unveiled a series of new features on the platform. He met with executives from The New York Times, BuzzFeed, Atlantic Media, CNN, News Corp., HuffPost and other news organizations at a conference of media leaders convened by The Information, a technology news site.
The usually reticent CEO has been on a charm offensive of sorts in the last month, testifying before Congress, granting extensive interviews to news organizations and speaking contritely and publicly about how the company he started in his Harvard dorm room has grown to have an unanticipated and highly negative impact on democracy across the globe.
Zuckerberg said that Facebook has a responsibility to help reduce polarization and help people find “common ground” and that a shared set of facts and a common understanding of truth is essential for democracy.
“It’s not useful if someone’s just kind of repeating the same thing and attempting to polarize or drive people to the extremes,” Zuckerberg said.
He said he hoped Facebook could help find sustainable business models for journalism...
Helpfully, in November 2016 the Washington Post pushed to the forefront of public consciousness the PropOrNot website, so Zuck's work is half-done before he even breaks a sweat.
Now it's a little more tricky to claim a worker isn't a staffer
The business models of Uber, Lyft, Instacart, TaskRabbit, GrubHub and
numerous other "gig economy" companies may need an overhaul following a
decision by the California Supreme Court to redefine when someone is a
contractor or an employee.
In a decision
this week that went against delivery company Dynamex Operations West,
the US state's top court ditched a key test for determining if someone
is an employee – and put its weight behind a simpler one that has the
knock-on effect of making it much harder to claim people working for an
organization are not employees.
Dynamex decided in 2004 that its drivers – who had
previously been employees – were now independent contractors. The
drivers sued and lost. They appealed and won in appeals court. The
company then appealed that decision. And now the Supreme Court has
decided: the appeals court was right and the drivers were employees.
The impact may be significant: if someone is taken to be an employee,
the company becomes legally responsible for ensuring they meet minimum
wage and overtime laws, offer unemployment insurance, rest breaks, pay
payroll taxes and so on.
That is not only an administrative burden that can
cost a business 20 per cent or more per employee but can also greatly
reduces a company's flexibility, likely requiring it to do more with
fewer people....MUCH MORE
DP World and Virgin Hyperloop One are collaborating to launch ultra-fast hyperloop for cargo.
DP
World Cargospeed is designed to deliver goods at speeds of up to 620
miles per hour and link to existing roads, rail and air infrastructure.
Hyperloop is a super-fast ground transport method first envisioned by Tesla founder Elon Musk, which promises to be faster than air travel but also cheaper.
International port operator DP World and Virgin Hyperloop One are
collaborating to launch ultra-fast hyperloop for cargo, in what they
hope will revolutionize both the speed and cost of commerce.
The project, DP World Cargospeed, will
be powered with Virgin Hyperloop One's technology to "enable ultra-fast,
on-demand deliveries of high-priority goods and can revolutionize
logistics, support economic zones, and create thriving economic
megaregions," according to the two entities.
Sitting beside DP World Group Chairman Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem in Dubai, Virgin Hyperloop One Chairman Richard Branson
told CNBC's Hadley Gamble in an exclusive interview on Sunday, "I think
that Virgin Hyperloop can play a big role ... From a freight point of
view, it's fantastically exciting."
DP World Cargospeed will aim to deliver goods at speeds of up to 620
miles per hour and link to existing roads, rail and air infrastructure. A
timeline for completion was not specified....MORE
From the blog of F. William Engdahl 26 April 2018:
In
the clearest sign to date, EU Ambassadors to Beijing have just released
a document critical of China’s vast Belt, Road Initiative or New
Economic Silk Road infrastructure project. All EU ambassadors excepting
Hungary signed off on the paper in a declaration of growing EU
opposition to what is arguably the most promising economic project in
the past century if not more. The move fits conveniently with the recent
Trump Administration targeting of China technology trade as tensions
grow
.
Twenty-seven of the 28 EU ambassadors to China have just signed a
report sharply critical of China’s BRI development. Ironically, as if
the EU states or their companies did not do the same, the report attacks
China for using the BRI to hamper free trade and put Chinese companies
at an advantage. The document claims that the Chinese New Economic Silk
Road project, unveiled by Xi Jinping in 2013, “runs counter to the EU
agenda for liberalizing trade and pushes the balance of power in favor of subsidized Chinese companies.”
Two Models of Global Development
Chinese President Xi Jinping first proposed what today is the Belt,
Road Initiative, today the most ambitious infrastructure project in
modern history, at a university in Kazakhstan five years ago in 2013.
Despite repeated efforts by Beijing to enlist the European Union as a
whole and individual EU member states, the majority to date have
remained cool or distant with the exception of Hungary, Greece and
several eastern EU countries. When China officially launched the project
and held an international conference in Beijing in May 2017, it was
largely boycotted by EU heads of state. Germany’s Merkel sent her
economics minister who accused the Chinese of lack of commitments to
social and environmental sustainability and transparency in procurement.
Now 27 of 28 EU ambassadors in Beijing have signed a statement
suspiciously similar to that of the German position. According to the
German business daily, Handelsblatt, the EU ambassadors’ declaration
states that the China BRI “runs counter to the EU agenda for
liberalizing trade and pushes the balance of power in favor of
subsidized Chinese companies.” Hungary was the only country refusing to
sign.
The latest EU statement, soon to be followed by a long critical
report on the new Silk Road from the EU Commission in Brussels, fits
very much the agenda of the Trump Administration in its latest trade
tariffs against Chinese goods that alleges that Chinese companies force
US partners to share technology in return for projects in China.
Moreover, the EU Commission has just released a long report on China
in connection with new EU anti-dumping rules. The report declares that
the fact that China is a state-directed economy with state-owned
enterprises engaging in the construction of the Belt Road Initiative is
in effect “the problem.” China answers that her economy is in the
“primary stage of socialism”, has a “socialist market economy” and views
the state-owned economy as the “leading force” of national development.
The targeting of China’s state enterprises and of its state-directed
economic model is a direct attack on her very economic model. Beijing is
not about to scrap that we can be sure.
The latest stance of EU member states, led by Germany and Macron’s
France, is an attempt to pressure China into adhering to the 2013 World
Bank document, China 2030. There, as we noted in an earlier analysis, it
declared that China must complete radical market reforms, to follow the
failed Western “free market” model implemented in the West since the
1970’s with disastrous consequences for employment and stability. China
2030 states, “It is imperative that China … develop a market-based
system with sound foundations…while a vigorous private sector plays the
more important role of driving growth.” The report, cosigned then by the
Chinese Finance Ministry and State Council, further declared that
“China’s strategy toward the world will need to be governed by a few key
principles: open markets, fairness and equity, mutually beneficial
cooperation, global inclusiveness and sustainable development.”...
The CEO of a biomedical startup who sparked controversy when he injected himself with an untested herpes treatment in front of a live audience in February has died, according to an email sent to Live Science.
Aaron Traywick, the CEO of Ascendance Biomedical, was found dead at
11:30 a.m. ET on Sunday (April 29) in a spa room in Washington, D.C.,
according to a statement provided to Live Science by the Metropolitan
Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia. Traywick was 28
years old.
According to the website News2Share.com,
Traywick was found in a flotation tank. Flotation tanks are soundproof
pods filled with body-temperature saltwater that are used to promote "sensory deprivation."...MORE
That's pretty darn relentless. 92.18 last, down 0.07.
From Marc to Market:
Confident Fed Key to New Found Respect for the Dollar
There is a brief respite in the powerful short squeeze that has fueled the dollar's dramatic recovery. The greenback which was nearly friendless a month ago now has many suitors. It is higher on the year against all the major currencies but the yen (~2.6%), the Norwegian krone (~1.6%) and sterling ~0.9%). It is virtually flat against the euro.
The contrast between the Federal Reserve, which is likely to confirm its intention to continue to gradually guide US rates higher later today, and the ECB, which sound more cautious than confident, and the BOJ, which continues to press hard and refuses to even discuss an exit. Then there is the Bank of England, where Carney, and in fairness, some soft data, once again yanked the football away as it was about to be kicked. A rate hike next week now would be more disruptive than standing pat.
With the euro straddling the $1.20 level, we note several technical levels converge in the $1.1920-$1.1935 range. There are many with long euro exposures that are trapped from higher levels by the speed of the move. The euro's recovery to $1.2030 brought in fresh selling. The dollar is knocking on JPY110.00. Above there we see initial potential into the JPY110.50-JPY110.65 area. Sterling is through the neckline of a possible double top (~$1.37), which should offer resistance now. It projects toward $1.30-$1.31 near the 50% retracement of the rally from the flash crash low (on Bloomberg) in October 2016. More immediately, support is seen near $1.3550, a retracement objective of the leg up since last November.
The Australian dollar has recovered from the brief push through $0.7480-$0.7500 area which had held last December. That put the Aussie at its lowest level since last June. It is possible that area corresponds to a neckline of a double top pattern (Sept 2017 and Jan 2018 ~$0.8100). If valid, the would suggest a measuring objective near $0.6850 or where it bottomed in 2016. While the other currencies are trending lower, the Canadian dollar has moved broadly sideways in recent days. With a couple of exceptions, the CAD1.2820-CAD1.2900 has contained the US dollar for the past seven-eight sessions. Asia's economic reports included Japanese auto sales, which rose (0.5%) for the first time since last September. South Korea reported higher April CPI (1.6% vs. 1.3% in March), led by food and transportation. The central bank targets 2%. The core rate, which excludes oil and agriculture, edged up to 1.4% from 1.3%. China's Caixin manufacturing PMI ticked up to 51.1 from 51.0. The market had expected a slightly softer report. New Zealand reported a drop in the unemployment rate (4.4% v. 4.5%), to a new nine-year low. The participation rate eased (70.8% vs. 70.9% and was initially 71%), and private sector wages slowed in Q1.
China's markets re-opened after a two-day holiday. The Shanghai and Shenzhen composites slipped fractionally, but the CSI 300 managed to eke out a small gain. An index of H-shares fell over 1%. The yuan declined by 0.5% and saw its lowest level in more than three months. The PBOC set the reference rate 0.44% lower, which is a little more than the market expected. Some observers seem to be seeing an implicit threat ahead of the talks with a team of senior US Administration officials, led by Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, and including Lighthizer and Navarro....
Marine salvage experts are floating a plan to tug icebergs from
Antarctica to South Africa’s drought-hit Cape Town to help solve the
region’s worst water shortage in a century.
Salvage master Nick
Sloane told Reuters he was looking for government and private investors
for a scheme to guide huge chunks of ice across the ocean, chop them
into a slury and melt them down into millions of litres of drinking
water.
“We want to show that if there is no other source to solve
the water crisis, we have another idea no one else has thought of yet,”
said Sloane, who led the refloating of the capsized Italian passenger
liner Costa Concordia in 2014.
South Africa has declared a
national disaster over the drought that hit its southern and western
regions after 2015 and 2016 turned into two of the driest years on
record.
Tough water restrictions are already in place and Cape
Town authorities have warned that taps could run dry altogether as soon
as next year if winter rains do not come to the rescue of the port
city’s 4 million residents....MORE
Just days after it began trading, WeWork's freshly minted $702 million bond issue is crashing as the massively over-subscribed junk bond issue sees dramatic buyer's remorse...
The high yield bond sold for par last week and is now trading with a
95 handle, which, as Bloomberg reports, stands in sharp contrast to the
outsized orders the company saw when it marketed its debt in primary
markets last week.
The company had initially sought to issue $500 million of the securities, but decided to upsize once the orders came pouring in,
a person with knowledge of the situation said. The seemingly odd-lot
number of $702 million was chosen in part because the company considered
it a lucky number, another person said.
WeWork’s deal underscored the risks investors have been
willing to take in the new-issue market as they struggle to find
high-yielding assets. The office-space leasing company joined a
wave of high-flying cash-burning firms that have managed to recently
tap debt markets, like Uber Technologies Inc. and Netflix Inc.
The bond was the most active in the U.S. high-yield market on Monday, Trace data show....
I just saw some of the comments in the Alphaville post to which we linked this morning: "Hey crypto bros! Journalism ≠ advertising" and, reading the crypto bros, I could think of nothing so much as Marlon Brando's thoughts on Burt Reynolds:
"He worships at the temple of his own narcissism."
If you have a moment do check out a few of the Crypto-comments to get a feel for....I'm not sure what exactly:
sdg
Funny enough, Jemima is basically proving CZ’s point with this terribly misinformed article.
“HODLing means you are not actually using crypto for payments, its original intended purpose. ”
Thinking crypto is just for payments displays a huge amount of ignorance. Has the author of this piece heard of smart contracts? Does she even know what they are? This piece indicates probably not.
This article is written by someone who knows little about crypto, for readers who know little about crypto but want to feel good about their decision to stay out of it....
...sdg
Perhaps, but that is the original intended purpose for bitcoin. The idea that the original intended purpose for crypto in general is payments and only payments, is completely wrong.
I can't swear to the provenance of the piece below but it came to us via a gentleman with a bunch of letters from Harvard following his name who refers to MIT as "The trade school down the river".
If it had been ciphered onto an immutable blockchain the provenance question would be moot but it wasn't, that's life.
Anonymous: Fried, Frank got NSA's permission to make this report available.
They have offered to make copies available by contacting them at
<21stcen ffhsj.com=""> or (202) 639-7200. See:
http://www.ffhsj.com/bancmail/21starch/961017.htm
Received October 31, 1996
With the Compliments of Thomas P. Vartanian
Fried, Frank, Harris, Schriver & Jacobson
1001 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20004-2505
Telephone: (202) 639-7200
HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC
CASH
Laurie Law, Susan Sabett, Jerry Solinas
National Security Agency Office of Information Security Research and Technology
Cryptology Division
18 June 1996
With the onset of the Information Age, our nation is becoming increasingly
dependent upon network communications. Computer-based technology is significantly
impacting our ability to access, store, and distribute information. Among
the most important uses of this technology is electronic commerce:
performing financial transactions via electronic information exchanged over
telecommunications lines. A key requirement for electronic commerce is the
development of secure and efficient electronic payment systems. The need
for security is highlighted by the rise of the Internet, which promises to
be a leading medium for future electronic commerce.
Electronic payment systems come in many forms including digital checks,
debit cards, credit cards, and stored value cards. The usual security features
for such systems are privacy (protection from eavesdropping),
authenticity (provides user identification and message integrity),
and nonrepudiation (prevention of later denying having performed a
transaction) .
The type of electronic payment system focused on in this paper is electronic
cash. As the name implies, electronic cash is an attempt to construct
an electronic payment system modelled after our paper cash system. Paper
cash has such features as being: portable (easily carried), recognizable
(as legal tender) hence readily acceptable, transferable (without involvement
of the financial network), untraceable (no record of where money is spent),
anonymous (no record of who spent the money) and has the ability to make
"change." The designers of electronic cash focused on preserving the features
of untraceability and anonymity. Thus, electronic cash is defined to be an
electronic payment system that provides, in addition to the above security
features, the properties of user anonymity and payment untraceability..
In general, electronic cash schemes achieve these security goals via digital
signatures. They can be considered the digital analog to a handwritten
signature. Digital signatures are based on public key cryptography.
In such a cryptosystem, each user has a secret key and a public key. The
secret key is used to create a digital signature and the public key is needed
to verify the digital signature. To tell who has signed the information (also
called the message), one must be certain one knows who owns a given public
key. This is the problem of key management, and its solution requires some
kind of authentication infrastructure. In addition, the system must have
adequate network and physical security to safeguard the secrecy of the secret
keys.
This report has surveyed the academic literature for cryptographic techniques
for implementing secure electronic cash systems. Several innovative payment
schemes providing user anonymity and payment untraceability have been found.
Although no particular payment system has been thoroughly analyzed, the
cryptography itself appears to be sound and to deliver the promised anonymity.
These schemes are far less satisfactory, however, from a law enforcement
point of view. In particular, the dangers of money laundering and counterfeiting
are potentially far more serious than with paper cash. These problems exist
in any electronic payment system, but they are made much worse by the presence
of anonymity. Indeed, the widespread use of electronic cash would increase
the vulnerability of the national financial system to Information Warfare
attacks. We discuss measures to manage these risks; these steps, however,
would have the effect of limiting the users' anonymity.
This report is organized in the following manner. Chapter 1 defines the basic
concepts surrounding electronic payment systems and electronic cash. Chapter
2 provides the reader with a high level cryptographic description of electronic
cash protocols in terms of basic authentication mechanisms. Chapter 3 technically
describes specific implementations that have been proposed in the academic
literature. In Chapter 4, the optional features of transferability and
divisibility for off-line electronic cash are presented. Finally, in Chapter
5 the security issues associated with electronic cash are discussed.
The authors of this paper wish to acknowledge the following people for their
contribution to this research effort through numerous discussions and review
of this paper: Kevin Igoe, John Petro, Steve Neal, and Mel Currie.
We begin by carefully defining "electronic cash." This term is often applied
to any electronic payment scheme that superficially resembles cash to the
user. In fact, however, electronic cash is a specific kind of electronic
payment scheme, defined by certain cryptographic properties. We now focus
on these properties....
For years, the Central Intelligence Agency denied it had a
secret file on MIT professor and famed dissident Noam Chomsky. But a new government
disclosure obtained by The Cable
reveals for the first time that the agency did in fact gather records on the
anti-war iconoclast during his heyday in the 1970s.
The
disclosure also reveals that Chomsky's entire CIA file was scrubbed from Langley's
archives, raising questions as to when the file was destroyed and under what
authority.
The
breakthrough in the search for Chomsky's CIA file comes in the form of a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. For years, FOIA requests to the CIA garnered the same denial: "We did not locate
any records responsive to your request." The denials were never entirely credible, given
Chomsky's brazen anti-war activism in the 60s and 70s -- and the CIA's
well-documented track record of domestic espionage in the Vietnam era.
But the CIA kept denying, and many took the agency
at its word .... MORE
"It may be, then, that the descriptive power of the base
component is not quite equivalent to the extended c-command discussed in
connection with (34).
A consequence of the approach just outlined is that a descriptively
adequate grammar is unspecified with respect to a general convention
regarding the forms of the grammar.
Nevertheless, the theory of syntactic features developed earlier is
rather different from a descriptive fact.
In the discussion of resumptive pronouns following (81), the systematic
use of complex symbols is, apparently, determined by the system of base
rules exclusive of the lexicon.
So far, the natural general principle that will subsume this case is to
be regarded as the ultimate standard that determines the accuracy of any
proposed grammar...."
For
students, the Chomskybot can give you the same leg up in linguistics that
postmodern literature aficionados (and Richard Dawkins!*) have enjoyed
via the Postmodernism Generator:
Derridaist reading and Lyotardist narrative
Stefan N. H. Geoffrey Department of Politics, Oxford University
1. Textual appropriation and subcultural desublimation
If one examines Derridaist reading, one is faced with a choice: either
accept Lyotardist narrative or conclude that sexual identity, ironically, has
objective value. If Derridaist reading holds, we have to choose between
subcultural desublimation and the textual paradigm of context.
It could be said that the main theme of the works of Joyce is the role of
the reader as participant. Lacan uses the term ‘Lyotardist narrative’ to denote
the difference between society and narrativity.
However, in Dubliners, Joyce deconstructs subcultural desublimation;
in Ulysses, however, he denies Derridaist reading. Several theories
concerning the role of the writer as reader may be discovered....MUCH MORE
If Jeff Bezos is going to be a Washingtonian in the D.C. sense of the word, apparently he’s going to have to contend with the Washingtonian, a magazine serving the nation’s capital.
The former Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., scooped up by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. (Trulia.com Photo)
On Thursday, the monthly mag served up a look at the floor plans for the Amazon founder’s giant mansion, which he purchased in an exclusive neighborhood of the other Washington back in October — for $23 million.
Washingtonianreportedthat itfiled a
public-records request with the city’s zoning office to get copies of
the blueprints for a $12 million renovation and expansion that Bezos is
having done on the historic property.
The former Textile Museum is a 27,000-square-foot fixer upper in
D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood — home to the Obamas and Ivanka Trump. Two
homes, called the Pope and the Wood, dating back to the early 1900s,
comprise the property which is connected by a walkway.
Bezos, the world’s richest person, bought the Washington Post in 2013
for $250 million and the D.C.-Virginia-Maryland area is among the final
20 contenders for Amazon’s second headquarters.
Among the highlights of the floor plans — which you’ll have to peep at over at Washingtonian
— are a whiskey cellar and walk-in wine room, 25 bathrooms, 11
bedrooms, three kitchens, two libraries/studies, two workout rooms, two
elevators and a huge ballroom....MORE
Hey crypto bros! Journalism ≠ advertising
...As CZ explains in his tweet, he has recently learned that most journalists are forbidden toHODL, the crypto term that means to “hold” and conveniently exposes the contradiction at the heart of digital currencies: HODLing means you are not actually using crypto for payments, its original intended purpose. (The one time a HODLer might actually want to use such an inefficient, slow and volatile means of payment as crypto would be to pay for things online that they want to keep private, such as drugs -- which even bitcoin's earliest advocatescredit with its growth-- but CZ doesn't want to talk about that.)
CZ seems to have been told about the concept of the conflict of interest. It's a real thing! See this from the Financial Times' own code of conduct:
A
conflict of interest may occur when our interests or activities (or
those of our family or friends) affect our ability to make objective
decisions for FT Group. This includes personal relationships with
another employee if you have influence over their salary or career path.
We either avoid these situations and/or are transparent about them and
ensure they are approved at the appropriate level.
That's right! Journalists at “MSM” outlets such as this one are told to avoid situations in which they feel their ability to report fairly is compromised....MORE
Which raises the question "What exactly was going on here" (March 24, 2016):
That time I defaulted on Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway
Back in October, 2015, Bloomberg’s Tracy Alloway and I struck an OTC futures deal over a teeny, tiny vial of crude oil, which Tracy for some reason felt compelled to nickname “Williston”.
I now plan to default on this contract (a ladies’ agreement, witnessed by “the world” due its publication on Bloomberg) and this is a public notice explaining my reasons for doing so.
The terms of the contract — henceforth known as the “Williston contract” — were agreed as follows by email:
The contract was structured on Oct 16, 2015 and agreed a price of $49.78 for oil to be delivered in March.
The delivering party pre-agreed to take on the full cost of delivery. (She promised to walk it over to the FT’s office in New York, rather than deliver to Cushing Oklahoma.)
Tracy’s theoretical profit on the contango deal (which this contract was designed to hedge) — bar any basis risk between WTI and North Dakota Light Sweet — was expected to be $2.25 a barrel.
Since the quantity of the oil being dealt was a small fraction of a barrel — about 1 litre — Tracy’s spot acquisition price was deemed 24 cents in October. At $49.78 per barrel, my contract covered a promise to pay approx 31 cents for the oil in question. Her expected profit from a performing hedge was expected to be about 7 cents.
It is now March 24, and WTI oil is trading at approx $38.78 per barrel at the time of writing.
Tracy is in the money on the trade, having wisely hedged her crude in October. I, the counterparty to her hedge, owe her 31 cents in value, in exchange for the delivery of the Williston container to the FT’s office as soon as the transaction is settled. That’s a profit for Tracy no matter what.
Except...
I’m not going to pay her. Instead, I’m going to brazenly default in full view of the world.
I still can't get the picture of Didi Chuxing's President, Liu Qing
(anglicized to Jean Liu), commenting on Travis Kalanick and Uber's
efforts in China as cute. Then when Uber proclaimed the $3.5 billion
investment from the Saudis she laughed and said she had more than that
on the way.
Didi then announced the completion of a $7.3 billion fundraising.
Uber better be on top of their game in Southeast Asia because they weren't in China and got run out of the country....
Well, we know how that turned out. Side-note: she was being treated for cancer at the same time she was kicking Kalanick's backside.
From Reuters:
BEIJING/DETROIT (Reuters) - China’s Didi Chuxing, already disrupting the
global ride-hailing market and taking on U.S. rival Uber, has its
sights set on an even bigger potential prize: designing and getting
built its own dedicated fleet of Didi cars.
The firm has put together teams of automotive designers and
engineers, and is now looking to work with established car makers to
develop “purpose-built” vehicles, people close to the company told
Reuters, a move that could shake up the auto market in China and beyond.
The move underscores how tech firms, from software makers for
self-driving vehicles to car-sharing platforms, are disrupting
traditional automakers such as Ford Motor and Nissan, amid major shifts
towards electric cars and pay-per-use models.
In response, some
global automakers are now starting to bill themselves as “mobility”
companies that do more than just build and sell vehicles.
Didi
officials say the disruptive change sweeping the industry means there is
a clear mutual interest in new players like itself and traditional
manufacturers working together to develop and improve ride-hailing and
sharing platforms.
“Traditional automakers have different
skillsets and understanding of the market, and those are all valuable to
us,” Kevin Chen, general manager of Didi’s automotive service platform,
told Reuters in an interview.
“It’s not like only we understand the customer. We are open to every form of cooperation.”
Didi
is China’s biggest ride-hailing company, cementing its dominance when
it bought out Uber’s operations in the country in 2016, and is preparing
to launch car-sharing and other on-demand transport services.
It
currently uses regular passenger cars, but says as it moves forward it
sees a need for more dedicated “purpose-built” vehicles. Many would
likely be electric vehicles, either all-electric battery cars or plug-in
electric hybrids....MORE
‘This time, it's a totally different story as the country has all the right ingredients…’
Washington sent Beijing a signal last week when it announced a ban on
US exports of key components to Chinese telecoms equipment maker ZTE.
China didn’t need the message — they got it years ago. And, despite
still being dependent on US imports, it looks like that will change
faster than anyone expected.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping commented Wednesday
during a visit to the three Gorges Dam that “China must rely on its own
efforts” to innovate, the country was putting its money where his mouth
is.
On Thursday it was reported
that China’s state-backed semiconductor “big fund” was near to closing a
US$19 billion investment round for a second fund to boost local chip
makers. The news comes amid reports that the ban slapped on ZTE has
prompted China’s leaders to speed up their efforts to become
self-sufficient in semiconductor manufacturing.
China’s investment in chips is estimated by Credit Suisse to already total about US$140 billion.
That is according to a report in Nikkei Asian Review
on Wednesday that detailed the reasons why the current leaders in the
sector, Intel, Samsung and TSMC, may be given a run for their money.
More than just competing with the top dogs, China’s upstarts are aiming
to topple them.
“It’s totally different from decades ago when China suffered through a
frustrating experience to build semiconductors out of nowhere,” Mark
Li, an analyst at Bernstein Research was quoted as saying. “This time,
it’s a totally different story as the country has all the right
ingredients, including a massive market and strong local makers of
smartphones, TVs, PCs, and automobiles … . It could be just a matter of
time for them to bear fruit.”
The first disruption could come as soon as next year, according to
Nikkei, targeting the markets for NAND flash and DRAM memory chips. The
NAND market is controlled by a select group, including Samsung, Toshiba,
Intel and Western Digital. DRAMs are controlled by an even smaller
group, which coupled with strong demand has driven up prices....MORE
Allcargo Logistics Ltd. is emulating Uber Technologies Inc. to boost its business of sharing marine containers.
A unit of the Mumbai-based Allcargo, ECU Worldwide, which aggregates
orders from clients, plans to use Uber’s model to make it easier for
clients to book marine freight.
Allcargo, which reported a drop in profit in four of the past five
quarters, is betting on technology to revive volumes and take on
overseas rivals such as DHL Worldwide Express in Asia’s third-largest
economy. The time may be right for the company as India’s logistics
infrastructure improves. The nation jumped 19 positions to 35 in the
World Bank’s logistics performance including infrastructure, customs and
timeliness.
“Internet companies like the Ubers of the world have successfully
converted their aggregation model with robust technology
infrastructure,” Allcargo Chairman Shashi Kiran Shetty said in an
interview last week. “The idea is to help its customers to make it
simple to conduct their business with ECU Worldwide, from any corner of
the world through their devices.”
Allcargo — which claims to be India’s largest integrated logistics
services provider in the private sector — has seen its shares fall 31
percent this year, while profit dropped about 30 percent in the three
months ended December. ECU accounts for 80 percent of Allcargo’s
revenue.
“The Uber modeling in consolidated cargo logistics is an ambitious
and innovative move,” said Mathew Antony, managing partner of
Mumbai-based Aditya Consulting, an advisory firm specializing in
infrastructure, logistics and real estate industries....
Cet
amendement a pour objet d’interdire certaines pratiques commerciales
trompeuses pour le consommateur, qui associent des termes comme
« steak », « filet », « bacon », « saucisse », à des produits qui ne
sont pas uniquement, ou pas du tout, composés de viande. Sont plus
généralement concernées les dénominations faisant référence à des
produits d’origine animale, notamment le lait, la crème ou le fromage.
Ainsi, une préparation à base de viande
et de matières végétales, comme le soja, très rentable pour le
producteur par rapport à un bifteck pur bœuf, peut faire l’objet d’une
présentation « marketing » qui donne l’impression au consommateur qu’il
consomme uniquement de la viande. De même, certains produits végétariens
ou végétaliens recourent, de façon tout à fait paradoxale, au
vocabulaire carné pour mettre en avant leurs produits : « goût bacon »,
« merguez vegan », « substitut de saucisse »… Un principe d’équivalence
entre une saucisse pur porc et un « substitut de saucisse » végétarien
est ainsi imposé au consommateur....
From Grist:
France declares that ‘vegan bacon’ is not a thing.
The parliament approved a ban
last week on borrowing terminology from animal products to market foods
not made of animals, like “vegetarian sausage” — apparently because
they confuse shoppers into thinking that soy milk, for instance, is really milk milk.
“It is important to combat false claims,” tweeted National
Assembly member Jean Baptiste-Moreau, who proposed the ban, in French.
“Our products must be designated correctly: the terms of #cheese or
#steak will be reserved for products of animal origin.”...MORE
