"Why are some countries richer than others?"

From Cambridge's Simon Taylor's personal blog, Behind Blue Eyes:

The first part of my new MFin elective Understanding the World Economy and Financial System next term will explore the question, why are some countries richer than others?

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One of the most important, interesting but hotly contested questions in economics is, why are some countries richer than others? The world is astonishingly unequal; the life chances of a child born today depend overwhelmingly on the country of birth. One way of seeing this is to look at the earth sky at night. The variation in light broadly correlates with economic development (as well as relatively unpopulated areas of course).

(click to enlarge)

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The question is contentious because it can easily turn into a debate about racial or cultural superiority, or encourage deterministic theories of long term development. Equally, it seems unsatisfactory to say the current unequal outcome is an arbitrary result of random historic “stuff”. Any theory needs also to account for change – the “west” (Japan doesn’t fit very well into that label) has dominated global economic power for a century and a half but there is a steady shift eastwards currently going on. 

There isn’t a single, satisfying grand theory, but we can find a lot of causal explanations, which are not mutually exclusive, under the headings: geography, history and contingency (or sheer luck, if you prefer). 

Geography
The idea that the physical facts of a country or region, including climate, botany and the type of animals present, explains destiny, is a very old one. It would be surprising if geography had no role to play. But it’s too simple to say that this or that feature is good or bad for development. Rather, geography intersects with other forces. 

Jared Diamond’s brilliant Guns, Germs and Steel argues that there is a good reason why civilisation developed mainly in the Eurasian land mass rather than in the Americas or in Africa. The reason is a combination of the geographic orientation (east-west turned out to be more helpful than north-south) and in the luck of which animals and plants could be domesticated. Early civilisation required fertile river basins, the right climate and suitable plants for turning into agriculture.....MUCH MORE

We visited Professor Taylor in "The Political Economy of Cows: Udder Peoples Money".

And in"Rising monopoly power may partly explain US inequality and productivity slowdown"
His bloggy bio says:

Simon is the Director of the University of Cambridge Master of Finance (MFin) degree and a member of the finance and accounting faculty group at Cambridge Judge Business School. An economist and former equities analyst at JPMorgan and Citigroup, he teaches on financial markets and institutions, infrastructure finance and the world financial system. His new book on nuclear power in the UK was published in March 2016.

He also has a faculty profile at Cambridge Judge Business School > 

"Walmart’s late-mover advantage" (WMT)

This was originally posted at 13D in late October i.e. after the move began but before the recent gap-up verticality in the stock price:

FinViz

From XIIID Research:

America’s largest retailer came slow to the e-commerce game. That may have been a winning decision.

Expanding into e-commerce and fighting Amazon for sales, Walmart has unveiled a flurry of new tactics and acquisitions. Since snapping up Jet.com last year, the world’s largest retailer has partnered with August smart-home devices, purveyor of security cameras and doorbells, enabling customers to receive packages inside their homes while they are away. The company has just acquired Parcel, a New York City-based logistics startup for less than $10 million — an acquisition that will help it execute same-day delivery in New York City. And in November, Walmart will make it easier for customers to return their online and in-store purchases, using their mobile phones.

Walmart has been hotly criticized for being slow to the e-commerce game, and its online market share is significantly smaller than Amazon’s. But the contrarian view is that Walmart was wise to move slowly into e-commerce, given how hard it is to turn a profit. “Arguably, the greatest value from Walmart’s new acquisition strategy is that they are injecting a new mindset into the organization and jump-starting a cultural transformation that can pay vast dividends,” Forbes noted recently, adding:

“Yet mostly I am struck by the words of a venture capitalist who has been struggling mightily with how he was going to salvage a multi-million dollar investment in a “disruptive” online brand that has garnered gobs of good PR but is burning through cash with no end in sight.

As he reflected on Walmart’s most recently announced acquisition he told me this: ‘Now I wake up every day and thank God for companies like Walmart.’”

Indeed, since early 2016, when Walmart announced the closure of 269 stores as its profits and revenue stalled, the company has bounced back. Now, the very asset that once had analysts worried — many felt the company was “over- stored” — is working to Walmart’s advantage as a “New Retail” model takes shape. This new model, known as O2O, or online-to-offline, involves looping online, offline, logistics, and data into a single value chain.

To achieve it, Amazon is busy making costly investments into brick-and-mortar locations, as disruption from pure e-commerce runs it course (see WILTW, August 24, 2017). Walmart, meanwhile, is working in reverse, building a digital presence into its massive network of 4,700 stores. It is a network that puts 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart, giving the company an edge in a moment when other e-commerce giants are “embracing physical space.” As a point of comparison, just 44% of Americans lived within 20 miles of Amazon’s network as of last year, according to Motley Fool.

Speaking at a recent investor community meeting, Walmart e-commerce CEO Marc Lore was feeling bullish: “It’s really about leveraging the unique assets to play offense…The last two years was fixing the stores. Now we are planning to win.”

Walmart needs to move quickly to seize its advantage while it can. Practically speaking, that means turning Walmart’s stores into digital shopping destinations, no matter how customers shop. This means leveraging every big-box and digital asset, from the company’s fleet of 6,700 trucks to its pricing algorithm on Jet.com. Over the summer, those trucks and algorithms merged when Walmart began offering discounts on 1 million items sold online and picked up in stores — a program Walmart has been able to roll out at scale, in 1,100 stores, at no charge to the customer. As Retail Dive explained it:

“Wal-Mart is probably the most efficient distributor of retail goods in the world. The idea of passing on some of that efficiency to customers in the form of extra savings for those who choose to pick up online orders in stores is a sort of offline version of the philosophies Lore introduced at Jet.”

There are other signs that Walmart stores are evolving into “all-in-one” hubs for shopping, online distribution, and even financial services, with a special eye towards the places they serve....

 ...MUCH MORE

The foregoing is part of the reason we took issue with the otherwise lovely (even without Bess and Matt) DealBreaker last week::
"Goldman Sachs Downgrades Surging Walmart Stock Because Nobody Understands Walmart More Than Goldman Sachs"

The headline is cute, funny and wrong (remind you of anyone?)
WMT is running because their online operation is making them look like geniuses for picking up Jet.com for only $3.3 billion last year....

And via 13D, September 16:
The End Of Pure E-commerce (AMZN; WMT)

Related: "Wal-Mart Unveils ‘Store No. 8’ Tech Incubator in Silicon Valley"

Also at XIID:
Are regional fulfillment centers the new U.S. job-creation engine?

I'm thinking of changing the name of the joint to The Fulfillment Center.
Maybe get a couple Kiva robots, new age music instead of a squawkbox...

Gambling, Investing and Gaming Loot Boxes

Not being a gamer I have to make an effort to pay attention to what is going on in that sphere but from time to time the effort pays off.
A couple examples:

1) An awareness of NVIDIA three years ago at twenty bucks.
2) Understanding the non-acceptance of the current (and past) iterations of virtual reality.

There are other, not-so-directly capitalist features of gaming and the culture that an observer might be able to extrapolate to the wider world. One was gamer-gate with the online harassment and then the doxxing and attempted destruction of perps and innocents alike followed by the backlash to the backlash which foreshadowed the Hollywood and Washington sexual/power spectrum-disorder of discomfit/harass/assault/rape by a few years.

Another might be the growing concerns about 'Loot boxes' in games.

Loot boxes you say?
In a nutshell they are in-game purchases that speed you on your way through a game and it can add up to real money, micro-transaction by micro-transaction. Star Wars Strategies newsletter did a computation headlined:
"It will take 4,528 hours of gameplay (or $2100) to unlock all base-game content in star Wars: Battlefront 2"

The problem arises when players become so obsessed with progressing quickly through a game's various levels that they are no longer Homo Economicus or as noted in an October post:

In late September, in the course of her talk with Professor Dr. Lustig and his work on sugar and neurotransmitters she casually mentioned the idea that when discussing this stuff the whole concept of Homo Economicus as rational actor goes out the window.
Just mentioned it en passant, no biggie.

The 'she' is the Financial Times' Izabella Kaminska and the point she made may have serious implications for the online world.

It has gotten to the point that on Friday the UK Gambling Commission felt compelled to Issue a statement:

Loot boxes within video games

which addressed legality (legal) but also hinted at potential liability.

Five days ago (pre-UKGC press release) PC Gamer reported "Belgium's Justice Minister calls for loot box ban in Europe"

And trying to get in front of the rising tide of concern the co-founder and CEO of one of the larger publishers made a defense of the revenue stream while stating:

At least one decade ago, I began saying that the relationship we should strive to have with one another is the relationship between an entertainer and an audience. The relationship we need to avoid in our medium is like the relationship between a tobacco company and an addict

That's from WCCF Tech's Gearbox Boss Chimes in on Loot Boxes, Says Studios Need To Avoid Turning Gamers Into Addicts.

We'll be back with part two on some of the possible fall-out for platforms and apps.

This is the piece referenced in Saturday's "Gambling, Investing and Congratulations to Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times".

Media: "...Why Mashable Flamed Out"

Following up on "Bad news from Mashable, BuzzFeed, and Vice shows times are rough for ad-supported digital media" and "Is Venture Capital Destroying Online Journalism?".

From Digiday, Nov. 21:

Few images better capture the unfettered optimism and indignity of digital media than 2014 at South by Southwest, where a line of hoodie-wearing attendees snaked around the block at Mashable House, a pop-up lounge run by the tech news site, to get their picture taken with Grumpy Cat. Nearby, AOL “digital prophet” Shingy swung on a Mashable-branded wrecking ball.

It was also a good time to be at Mashable, when it was still true to its founding in 2005 by a 19-year-old Scot named Pete Cashmore as a blog about social media but showing big ambitions. Traffic was on the upswing. The company wasn’t making fistfuls of profits, but it wasn’t losing money, either. It had just closed its first round of funding, $13.3 million led by Updata Partners. Former New York Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts had joined the company to lead a more ambitious editorial agenda.

Success in digital media requires doing a million things right, though, and Mashable seems to have fumbled a number of them. Former employees and observers cite a loss of editorial focus and unique identity, lack of financial controls, an ill-executed shift to video content and hesitance to diversify revenue away from the fickle ad market. Mashable wouldn’t make executives available for this story.

BuzzFeed envy
All this time, people at Mashable were closely watching BuzzFeed, which like Mashable, started with a focus on light, sharable content, but had hired Ben Smith from Politico to build a serious newsgathering operation. The meme coverage that built Mashable was becoming commoditized. So Mashable used its new capital to hire Roberts and other pedigreed journalists.

Soon, there were stories on terrorism and Ukraine leading the homepage, a big change for a site better known for covering social media and internet memes. Whether it was the increased editorial resources, Facebook’s generosity or both, Mashable’s traffic soared to over 27 million monthly uniques in December 2015, according to comScore.

The shift was debated internally, though, and caused friction between Roberts’ new hires and pre-existing staffers.

“It came from Pete on down — ‘What’s going to be our version of Ben Smith?’” a former insider said. “’They got Ben Smith, so we need someone,’” said another, describing the philosophy. “’They started BuzzFeed Studios; let’s start Mashable Studios.’ I’m surprised they didn’t call it ‘MashFeed’ at some point.” But as an ex-editorial staffer said, the pivot to general news made Mashable a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none. Everyone was aware BuzzFeed was beating us on stuff, and the tech pubs didn’t take us seriously.”....MUCH MORE

Back in 2016 The New York Times was seeing some potential upside
"A Bright Side to the Financial Stumbles of Digital Media"

A Cold December Could Heat Up Wheat Prices

From Barron's Commodities Corner, Nov. 25:

A brutal cold snap in December is likely, according to some forecasters, and it could lift winter wheat prices higher than $5 a bushel, up more than a dollar from recent prices. A rally would aid the much-beleaguered farm economy, which has been hurt by steadily falling wheat prices since mid-2012.

Investors wishing to wager on such a move should buy March-dated futures contracts for Kansas City Hard Red Winter Wheat on the CME. Alternatively, they can purchase stocks of companies that benefit from higher crop prices, such as fertilizer makers Mosaic (ticker: MOS) and Agrium (AGU). Historically, plant-food prices have been positively correlated with grains’ prices.

What is likely to precipitate a wheat rally is crop damage, due to cold and dry weather in some key growing areas. Here’s how:

Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is expected to be harsh. Next month “is setting up for one of the coldest Decembers in the U.S. ever seen,” predicts a recent report from Shawn Hackett, of Hackett Financial Advisors and author of the Hackett Money Flow Agricultural Report newsletter.

He says that two weather systems will be responsible: “a near-record negative” (meaning cold) western Pacific oscillation, which will likely combine with a developing negative North Atlantic oscillation. These weather systems have a history of going through negative and positive phases that result in cold or warmer weather.

Hackett isn’t the only one forecasting a tough winter. “It should be much colder in all of the wheat-growing areas in the Northern Hemisphere this year than it was in the last two,” says Joe D’Aleo, chief meteorologist for agriculture at Weatherbell Analytics in New York. Ideally, winter wheat is planted and starts growing before cold weather induces the seedlings to go dormant. “Then what you want is snow to protect it from the deep freeze,” says D’Aleo. Snow forms a protective insulating layer over the ground, so the plants aren’t damaged.

This year, however, the presence of a La Niña weather system makes that unlikely. A La Niña forms in the equatorial Pacific off South America, affecting weather worldwide and bringing with it cool, dry air. (This weather phenomenon alternates with the better-known, hot-wet El Niño system.) La Niña’s dryness creates the problem because snow cannot form without moisture—hence, no insulation for the dormant wheat crop.

The key areas to watch are southwestern Kansas, Oklahoma, northern Texas, and eastern Colorado, notes D’Aleo, as they typically get lower snowfall than normal in a La Niña year. Brutal cold and the lack of moisture could combine to damage their winter wheat crop.

AT THE SAME TIME, the market looks primed for a rally from another source....MORE

Front natural gas 2.9850.

Shipping: "Insurer Ordered to Pay $1 Billion Over 2002 Prestige Oil Spill"

Tough call. Do you allow the boat into your port or end up with this?

Or both, which I'm sure is what was going through the minds of the civil and naval authorities when the already-leaking tanker requested refuge.

From gCaptain:

The sinking of the Greek tanker released an estimated 63,000 tonnes of foul-smelling black fuel along the Galicia coast and forced the closure of the country’s richest fishing grounds.

A Spanish court has ordered a British P&I insurer to pay a whopping $1 billion fine over the 2002 Prestige oil spill.

The single-hulled oil tanker Prestige broke in half and sank off the northwestern coast of Spain after being denied a port of refuge after a tank was damaged in a storm. The wreck is estimated to have spilled some 63,000 tonnes of oil, fouling Spain’s Galicia coast and closing some of the country’s richest fisheries. The incident is considered one of Europe’s worst-ever environmental disasters.

A Spanish court on Wednesday ordered the London Steam-Ship Owners’ Mutual Insurance Association, aka the London Club, which insured the ship, to pay up to $1 billion in damages.

The London Club said it was aware of the judgment and “remains concerned at the direction that the Spanish court has taken generally.”...MORE

BoE's Bank Underground on Cellphones: "Is the economy suffering from the crisis of attention?"

From Bank Underground, Nov. 24:

Smartphone apps and newsfeeds are designed to constantly grab our attention. And research suggests we’re distracted nearly 50% of the time. Could this be weighing down on productivity? And why is the crisis of attention particularly concerning in the context of the rise of AI and the need, therefore, to cultivate distinctively human qualities?


Are we losing our attention?
In a world of information overload, what do we pay attention to?

This question has become increasingly relevant in the digital age. With the rise of smartphones in particular, the amount of stimuli competing for our attention throughout the day has exploded. A survey from 2013 found that we check our phones 150 times per day, or roughly once every 6½ mins; a more recent study found that the average smartphone user spends around 2½ hours each day on his or her phone, spread across 76 sessions.

In the context of this huge cultural shift, our attention emerges as a scarce and valuable resource and the ‘attention economy’ has become a growing area of study (see, for instance, Terranova (2012)). Some models seek to explain how we allocate our attention online. The theory of rational inattention, meanwhile, starts with the assumption that information is costly to acquire, hence decision-makers may rationally take decisions based on incomplete information.

Another line of enquiry, and the focus for this post, stems from the claim that we are more distracted than ever as a result of the battle for our attention. One study, for example, finds that we are distracted nearly 50% of the time. This ‘crisis of attention’ is seen as one of the greatest problems of our time: after all, as the American philosopher William James noted, our life experience ultimately amounts to whatever we had paid attention to.

Might the crisis of attention be affecting the economy? The most obvious place to look would be in productivity growth, which has been persistently weak across advanced economies over the past decade (during which time, as it happens, global shipments of smartphones have risen roughly ten-fold).

How might distractions be weighing down on productivity?
The intuition is simple enough: our minds comprise the bulk of our human capital and what we direct our attention towards is integral to the ‘output’ of our mental activity. You would therefore expect the ability to pay attention to be a key input into productivity.

In the vast literature on the determinants of strong performance in the workplace, some studies consider the role of attention. But there is little linking these to productivity in the economy as a whole. Partly this is because observing inner states (attention) and mapping these to outcomes (productivity), taking account of other relevant factors, is inherently tricky. Yet there is mounting research that can help us start to address this question. My aim here, rather than giving a definitive answer, is to set out a framework for thinking about this issue. My contention is that distractions at work – whether from work emails, smartphone notifications or office noise – might cause weaker productivity via two main channels.

Channel 1: The direct impact of distractions on the amount of effective time spent working
Surveys offer estimates of the time workers spend ‘cyberslacking’ – using the Internet and mobile technology during work hours for personal purposes. The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation finds that people typically spend one hour of their workday on social media – rising to 1.8 hours for millennials. Another survey, meanwhile, found that traffic to shopping sites surged between 2pm to 6pm on weekday afternoons....MUCH MORE

Capital Markets: "Events + Market = Potential for Combustible Price action"

From Marc to Market:

There are a number of events and economic reports in the week ahead that will help shape the investment climate in the weeks and months ahead. In recognition of the importance of initial conditions, let's briefly summarize the performance of the dollar and main asset markets.

After recovering from a five-month decline in September and October, the dollar has lost ground against all the major currencies here in November, save the Australian dollar. Benchmark 10-year bond yields are at the lower end of the ranges since over the last several months. The US two-year yield has risen, and the curve has flattened. In Europe, the 10-year yields have fallen more than 2-year yields, which has also resulted in curve flattening. US, Asia, and Emerging Market equities are near record or multi-year highs. European shares have underperformed in November after rallying in September and October.

United States

• Taxes: The Senate bill is currently expected to be brought to the floor on November 30. We expect it to come down to the wire but suspect the risk is that there are at least three Republican Senators of the 52 that will vote against the bill. It would not end the effort, any more than a similar defeat meant the Affordable Care Act is safe. Although the disappointment could spur a knee-jerk reaction, the medium-term implications may be constructive. If it does pass, we suspect it would provide fodder for the equity market and could spur a steepening of the yield curve.

• Powell Confirmation Hearings: The hearings will begin November 28. Investors think they have Powell's measure. Mild-mannered, clear speaking, gradualist who has never registered an official dissent on the FOMC. With extensive turnover at the Federal Reserve, there will be many proposals for a "new beginning," but look for Powell to represent a strong element of continuity. Changes in communication, and perhaps a press conference after every meeting, as the ECB and BOJ already do, would not be surprising. Little market reaction to his testimony means that Powell did a good job.

• Federal Reserve: There is at least seven Fed officials scheduled to speak in the coming days, including Yellen's mid-week testimony before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. The market remains confident of a rate hike next month. The January Fed funds contract implies a 1.39% effective average Fed funds rate. Recognizing that the first three days of the new year will be the year-end rate, which we assume to be 10 bp below the prevailing rate, generates an average effective rate for the month at 1.40%. By our reckoning, the market has one, and a half hikes discounted for next year. The Fed is signaling three, and at least one investment house says four. Will the next iteration of dot plots that comes at the conclusion of next month's FOMC meeting show the same thing? The Beige Book will be released on Wednesday in preparation for that meeting. The report may show a strengthening of the expansion, with some areas reporting tightening of the labor market.

• Economic Data: Two reports stand out: The revision of Q3 GDP and the measure of inflation the Fed targets, the core PCE deflator. The initial estimate of Q3 GDP is expected to be revised to 3.2% from 3.0%, with stronger consumption a key factor, though perhaps goosed by quick rebuilding related demand after the horrific storms. The PCE core deflator reached 1.91% last October and fell to 1.290% in August. This is the mystery of which Yellen speaks, and one in which her working hypothesis is that is it due to short-term one-off factors. The core deflator is expected to rise to 1.4% in October. The bond market will be sensitive to any surprise, and through it, the dollar.

EMU

• German Politics: The initial attempt to forge a coalition in Germany failed. The SPD, which has been the CDU/CSU coalition partner in two of the past three governments Merkel led, is reluctant to return to government. However, elections at this juncture could be disastrous as nothing has changed in the two months since it drew the least support in modern times. And to enter into government would make the AfD the largest opposition party. Investors seem to know two things. First, Merkel and the head of the SPD will meet Thursday to explore the possibilities of either a new Grand Coalition or a minority government. Second, the PMI and IFO survey data point to a reacceleration of the German economy here in Q4....MUCH MORE

Whatever Happened to Amazon Coin? (AMZN)

Going on five years ago Amazon introduced Amazon Coin to purchase apps for their Kindle. Here's the press release:
Introducing Amazon Coins: A New Virtual Currency for Kindle Fire

There was a small flurry of excitement, Amazon was giving them away as a sort of "loyalty reward" and then.....nothing.

We had a couple posts on the AC:
February 2013
Amazon is Introducing "Amazon Coins" Virtual Currency (AMZN)

"Currency" may be stretching it at this moment but the potential is there.

May 2013
"Amazon Coins Expands to France, Italy, and Spain – Submit Now for Amazon Coins worth Millions of Euros" (AMZN)

That was the headline at Amazon's Developer page.
I was reminded of this story while reading about Scotland coin. As far as I can tell AmazonCoin is the perfect cryptocurrency for.....Amazon.

But that was it. Apparently people still use them to buy apps though..
And then on November 1, 2017 DomainNameWire had a small story:

An Amazon coin? Amazon.com registers cryptocurrency domain names
Amazon.com registered three domain names yesterday related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies: amazoncryptocurrencies.com, amazoncryptocurrency.com and amazonethereum.com.

The domain name registrations might suggest that Amazon is getting ready to do something on the Ethereum blockchain or release its own cryptocurrency. However, I caution that Amazon is overzealous when it comes to defensive domain name registrations....MORE 

Later that day CoinDesk picked it up:

Amazon Subsidiary Registers Cryptocurrency and Ethereum Domains
E-commerce giant Amazon has registered three cryptocurrency-related web domains, online records show.

According to information from Whois Lookup, three domains – "amazonethereum.com," "amazoncryptocurrency.com" and "amazoncryptocurrencies.com" – were registered on Oct. 31. The domains are linked to Amazon Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. that has been attributed to past patent filings from the e-commerce company.
Phone numbers listed on the registration documents connect to Amazon's legal department, though a representative of that office could not be reached by press time. The registrations were first reported by industry news site DomainNameWire.

At this time, it's not entirely clear what purpose the domain names will serve....MORE 

And that's where it stands.
For now this is just a heads up for our loyal and long-suffering readers but down the road this could get interesting.

UPDATED - Gambling, Investing and Congratulations to Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times

Update below.
Original post:

Last week the Throgmorton Restaurant came up in conversation and later I was googling around for it and ended up at the Wikipedia page for FT Alphaville and started screaming like a lunatic: "Would you look at this! Look at this!"
Being the only person in the room the response I received was muted but this is what I saw:

FT Alphaville is a daily news and commentary service for financial market professionals created by the Financial Times in October 2006.^[1] The founding editor was Paul Murphy he was succeeded in 2017 by Izabella Kaminska....

Ha!
There had been no announcement (that I saw) at FTAV regarding who Mr. Murphy's successor would be (he's now doing deep-dive investigations), and not being easily convinced of pretty much anything I had to visit Alphaville's Meet the Team page and son-of-a-gun, words fail but for a sincere: Well Done Izabella.

Now, with that introduction I am going to do something I very rarely do, copy out more than a sentence or three from the FT itself vs. copy-n-paste from the the online flagship which we do at least weekly. I'll explain why after the jump. Here is Ms Kaminska writing at the Financial Times, November 21:

True investing is not the same as gambling
In the face of the cryptocurrency fad, regulators need to underscore this distinction
Izabella Kaminska 

Just when you thought the proliferation of gambling adverts on British TV, billboards and cyber space couldn’t get any worse, it did. The breaking point for me came after coming across an advert for Foxy Bingo. This features American actress Heather Graham contorting awkwardly as she lip syncs to a broad English accent inviting people to place a £5 bet. The opportunistic celebrity endorsements grate, especially in light of the infantile nature of much of the advertising material. The ads — with their whizzy graphics, cartoon-like characters and storybook references — often purposefully target young people. But the issue at hand is arguably bigger than that. As gambling advertising proliferates to ever greater extremes — fuelled in part by the UK’s 2005 Gambling Act, which allowed for unfettered market liberalisation in the past decade — it threatens to skew the public’s perception of the value it brings to society. Worse than that, it begins to blur the lines between bona fide investing activity and gambling, while opening the door to new gambling fads which seek to pass themselves off as real investing activity. Britain, notoriously, does not tax capital gains on gambling proceeds. The rationale for this is quite straightforward. Gambling is a zero-sum activity — meaning that for every winner there is an equal and opposite loser, plus losses can be attributed to fees and commissions taken by the bookies in hand. If the Treasury was to tax gambling windfalls it should also, so the logic goes, provide tax credits to the losers. Overall this would render any taxing activity a wash. This is not the case for true investing activity. When done right, this sees capital allocated to projects that create a positive sum windfall for all involved.

As sound as this logic is, however, secondary effects come into play which must be considered. Incentives matter. When investing proceeds are taxed but gambling ones are not, the overall share of capital being allocated to one activity over the other is likely to be affected to the detriment of the economy at large. This is especially the case when zero-sum gambling-like activities, such as spread betting, are promoted on financial networks or in the media in the guise of investing services. The question to ask is: what happens to capital allocation when our gambling addiction gets so entrenched that we stop being able to distinguish real investing activity from gambling? We may be about to find out. In the past year spread betting and contracts for difference houses have begun moving with fervour into servicing the latest gambling fad in town, the cryptocurrency boom. These contracts, which allow retail investors to bet on market moves without owning assets directly, have proved particularly popular, fanned in part by advertising campaigns run across public transport networks, the internet and beyond. Unlike spread bets, gains generated by trading contracts for differences are taxed....MUCH MORE

Three quick points:

1) the reason I copied out so much of her piece was I am without tech support and not sure how to use the FT's sharing tools and needed to get the meat of her argument out should the link not work.

2) As an aside, the line "These contracts, which allow retail investors to bet on market moves without owning assets directly..." is pretty much the definition of a bucket shop's operation.

3) I am going to use this post as a jumping off point for a post on Monday that may take Izabella's thoughts on a tangent that might be consequential for the big internet platforms (he said modestly).

And why did I end up at Alphaville's Wikipedia page? The FTAV Long Room!:

..."The Long Room" is named after a dining room of a City of London bar/restaurant on Throgmorton Street^[2][3] that used to be frequented by stockbrokers, bankers and insurance brokers when the London Stock Exchange was located on Threadneedle Street.^[6][7]

Which had a couple of the search keywords for what had been my target:

Throgmorton Restaurant
The Throgmorton Restaurant, situated at the heart of London's business centre between the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England, was opened on 15 October 1900. Lyons had secured an 80-year lease on a property in Throgmorton Street in 1897 from the Worshipful Company of Drapers and spent £30,000 in building the restaurant and offices above.....MUCH MORE

Wrapping up: good luck to Ms Kaminska in her new position and to Mr Murphy in his.
(although for some reason I am picturing Paul heading up the Zambezi to rendezvous with Joseph Cotterill and continuing on to Lubumbashi DRC to do some ambush journalism on....damn, that's a screenplay) 

UPDATE: Here's part I of the promised piece:
Gambling, Investing and Gaming Loot Boxes

"10 of the most-funded startups to fail in 2017"

 From TechCrunch, September 2, 2017:

Startups rise and startups fall. 2017 has seen some prominent startups go under. From Jawbone to Beepi to Yik Yak, these companies raised major cash before they ultimately shut their doors.

What follows are 10 of the best-funded companies to close in the first nine months of 2017. Together these companies raised a combined $1.7 billion from venture capitalists and banks.

Ultimately not all is lost. Experience is gained and lessons are learned. Founders and developers and marketers and sales people move on with the knowledge that can only be gained by working for a struggling startup.

There are still a few months left in 2017, and more startups are bound to fail before the end of the year. But as companies fall, more jump up in the spirit of entrepreneurship.

1/10

Beepi 

Shut down in February 2017
Raised $148.95 million in 5 Rounds from 35 Investors.

Beepi is a textbook case of a startup with a good idea — a marketplace for people to sell and buy used cars, which would be vetted, processed and delivered to the new owner by Beepi, bypassing the costly overhead and commission structure of car dealerships. And there was some solid execution — strong customer service was a big selling point. But ultimately the company was run badly.

It had been valued as high as $560 million in previous rounds of funding, after raising money from 35 investors, including Yuri Milner, Comerica, Redpoint, Foundation Capital, Sherpa Capital and Fabrice Grinda.

But Beepi, a source tells us, was run with the wrong priorities. One ex-employee said Beepi was burning through around $7 million a month when it had its peak of 300 employees (before laying off 200 in December as part of its bid to sell to Fair.com).

7/10

Jawbone
Shut down July 2017
Raised $590.8 million in 14 Rounds from 19 Investors; $400 million in debt financing.

After a multi-year struggle to maintain relevance in the consumer wearable market, Jawbone began liquidation in July 2017.

It was a long, drawn-out ending for Jawbone, which has origins dating back to the late-1990s. Its once-mighty Jambox speaker business was already out of the picture when we reported the company’s pivot earlier this year — and the company appears especially hard hit by the ongoing decline of the wearable industry.

In all, the company appears to have raised around $951 million over the years, from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, JP Morgan, Mayfield and Khosla, and several traditional lending banks such as BlackRock.

Not all is lost, though. With an injection of capital from a new, unnamed investor, some of the driving forces behind the original company are forming a new business called Jawbone Health Hub.

4/10

Quixey

Shut down in May 2017
Raised $164.9 million in 4 Rounds.

Quixey launched as a mobile search company based out of Mountain View but later branched out to making a digital assistant for apps.
The company raised $164.9 million and, at one time, had a valuation north of $600 million. Yet, as the company was building its digital assistant, so was Apple and Google and startups like Viv, which Samsung would eventually acquire.
Once upon a time the company touted its ability to help users find content within their apps, eventually saying it has developed technology that can take you straight from the search results to personalized actions like showing nearby friends in Facebook or bringing up your own playlist in Spotify.

...MORE

Jawbone is the one I don't get, that's a lot of money. Beepi and Quixey?  Hell we were making fun of those kinds of monikers over 2 1/2 years ago in 2015's "Silicon Valley Is a Big Fat Lie":

Comparing the geniuses of old Silicon Valley, for example (ca. 1993), Nvidia, "Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVID)", who make the chips that will go into the world's fastest supercomputer with the list of names currently on offer:

Bitly, Borkly, Barnly, Molestly, Strinkingly, Happily, Crappily, Maply, Morply, Dottly, Dootly, Godly, Angrily.

And you almost want to cry. See also after the jump...

***Jump***

-Gawker (it's dead, Jim)

"Shale Hedges Threaten Oil Rally"

From Oilprice via Wolf Street, Nov. 24: 

Surge in hedging puts downward pressure on the oil futures curve.
By Nick Cunningham, Oilprice.com:

The 20 percent increase in oil prices since September led to a wave of hedging by U.S. shale drillers eager to lock in future production at prices not seen in years. The flip side of that hedging wave is that locking in prices could cut the price rally off at the knees, ensuring that more supply will be forthcoming in the next few quarters.

Shale drillers were hesitant for much of the year, but kicked their hedging programs into high gear after oil prices posted strong gains beginning in September. “The past three months have seen a significant increase in oil hedging, with the volume of new positions more than twice the volume of Q3 hedges that rolled off the books,” Standard Chartered wrote in a recent research note.

The volume of oil hedged for 2018 increased by 29 percent over the past three months. Meanwhile, natural gas prices have barely budged, and the lack of price movement kept gas hedging at a minimum, the bank said.

Interestingly, about 90 percent of the incremental hedging that has occurred in recent months came from just a relatively short list of 20 active companies. Hess Corp. topped the list, adding 115,000 bpd of new hedges for 2018. Pioneer Natural Resources came in a distant second with an additional 59,000 bpd of hedged production for next year.

The wave of hedging has showed up in exchange trade data for WTI. The number of open contracts that have yet to be settled has jumped by nearly a quarter since June, according to Reuters. “The reason is producer hedging in USA as well as the funds all being very bullish. Shale producers will use WTI as a hedging instrument and not Brent,” Oystein Berentsen, managing director for Strong Petroleum in Singapore, told Reuters in an interview earlier this month.....MORE

"Saudi Arabia's Great Gamble"

From The National Interest:

The crown prince's goal is to cut Iran down to size and make it accept Saudi hegemony in the Persian Gulf.

The current inheritor of Caliph Yazid bin Mu’āwīyya’s political mantle is Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), the impetuous crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who is also thirty-three years old. He seems to be currently promoting a fight to the finish with the Shia in the Middle East just as Yazid did in 680 CE. Keeping in mind the balance of forces in the region, especially between Saudi Arabia and the leading Shia power Iran, he has chosen the Lebanese Hezbollah as his first target. He seems intent on repeating the story of Karbala by destroying Hezbollah, a military pigmy compared to the armed might of Saudi Arabia, just as Yazid’s forces had destroyed Hussein’s miniscule band of followers in the seventh century.

The forced detention by Riyadh of former Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, is but the first shot in this battle. Hariri’s main crime in Saudi eyes was that, while being bankrolled by Riyadh, he accommodated Hezbollah as part of a national unity government in Lebanon. Hariri did so in order to minimize sectarian antagonism that had been once again growing in the country thanks to the sectarian color in which the Saudis and their Western supporters had painted the civil war in neighboring Syria and to Hezbollah’s participation in that conflict on the side of the Assad regime. Moreover, excluding Hezbollah from government would have made Lebanon ungovernable given Hezbollah’s military strength, which is miniscule when compared to Saudi Arabia’s military strength yet has surpassed that of the Lebanese army. It also would have put into jeopardy the political support that Lebanon commands among the Lebanese Shia, who form just under half of the Lebanese population.

Hezbollah is seen by the Saudi regime as a surrogate for its real enemy, Iran, with which it is locked in a no-holds-barred contest for dominance in the Persian Gulf. MbS’s actual goal is to cut Iran down to size and make it accept Saudi hegemony in the Persian Gulf. Just as Hussein’s refusal to accept Yazid’s authority was seen as a challenge to the latter’s religious and political legitimacy in the seventh century, today the Wahhabi House of Saud feels its religious legitimacy is at stake as long as Iran, the leading Shia country, which also projects itself as the model Islamic state, refuses to accept it as the predominant power in the Persian Gulf and the exclusive fount of religious authority within Islam. As was the case in the seventh century, issues of political power and religious legitimacy have become inextricably intertwined in the Saudi-Iranian rivalry today.

However, there is one major difference. Iran is a major power in its own right with potential nuclear capability weapons and not a ragtag band of a few dozen followers of Imam Hussein. Moreover, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves account for one-fifth of the world’s reserves and it can outspend Iran many times over in the short run, its recent attempts at buying influence in the region have ended in failure. These failures include its support for the largely Sunni Islamist opponents of the Syrian regime who have been almost wiped out by Assad’s forces supported by Iran and Russia. Also, Saudi Arabia’s attempt to isolate and quarantine tiny Qatar has not only failed, it has forced Qatar into Iranian arms....MUCH MORE

"How AI Could Change Amazon: A thought experiment" (AMZN)

From Digitopoly, October 3:

[This post originally appeared in HBR online on 3rd October, 2017]
by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb

How will AI change strategy? That’s the single most common question the three of us are asked from corporate executives, and it’s not trivial to answer. AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. As advances in AI make prediction cheaper, economic theory dictates that we’ll use prediction more frequently and widely, and the value of complements to prediction – like human judgment – will rise. But what does all this mean for strategy?

Here’s a thought experiment we’ve been using to answer that question. Most people are familiar with shopping at Amazon.  Like with most online retailers, you visit their website, shop for items, place them in your “basket,” pay for them, and then Amazon ships them to you. Right now, Amazon’s business model is shopping-then-shipping.

Most shoppers have noticed Amazon’s recommendation engine while they shop — it offers suggestions of items that their AI predicts you will want to buy. At present, Amazon’s AI does a reasonable job, considering the millions of items on offer. However, they are far from perfect. In our case, the AI accurately predicts what we want to buy about 5% of the time. In other words, we actually purchase about one out of every 20 items it recommends. Not bad!

Now for the thought experiment. Imagine the Amazon AI collects more information about us: in addition to our searching and purchasing behavior on their website, it also collects other data it finds online, including social media, as well as offline, such as our shopping behavior at Whole Foods. It knows not only what we buy, but also what time we go to the store, which location we shop at, how we pay, and more.

Now, imagine the AI uses that data to improve its predictions. We think of this sort of improvement as akin to turning up the volume knob on a speaker dial. But rather than volume, you’re turning up the AI’s prediction accuracy. What happens to Amazon’s strategy as their data scientists, engineers, and machine learning experts work tirelessly to dial up the accuracy on the prediction machine?

At some point, as they turn the knob, the AI’s prediction accuracy crosses a threshold, such that it becomes in Amazon’s interest to change its business model. The prediction becomes sufficiently accurate that it becomes more profitable for Amazon to ship you the goods that it predicts you will want rather than wait for you to order them. Every week, Amazon ships you boxes of items it predicts you will want, and then you shop in the comfort and convenience of your own home by choosing the items you wish to keep from the boxes they delivered.

This approach offers two benefits to Amazon. First, the convenience of predictive shipping makes it much less likely that you purchase the items from a competing retailer as the products are conveniently delivered to your home before you buy them elsewhere. Second, predictive shipping nudges you to buy items that you were considering purchasing but might not have gotten around to. In both cases, Amazon gains a higher share-of-wallet. Turning the prediction dial up far enough changes Amazon’s business model from shopping-then-shipping to shipping-then-shopping.

Of course, shoppers would not want to deal with the hassle of returning all the items they don’t want.  So, Amazon would invest in infrastructure for the product returns — perhaps a fleet of delivery-style trucks that do pick-ups once a week, conveniently collecting items that customers don’t want.

If this is a better business model, then why hasn’t Amazon done it already? Because if implemented today, the cost of collecting and handling returned items would outweigh the increase in revenue from a greater share-of-wallet. For example, today we would return 95% of the items it ships to us. That is annoying for us and costly for Amazon. The prediction isn’t good enough for Amazon to adopt the new model....MORE

So, What's the Online Experience Like These Days?

From Digiday, Nov. 24:

...How would you describe the current digital advertising user experience?
People are still bombarded with ads, their computers stuffed with tags and cookies. They have autoplay video, with the sound off by default if they’re lucky, and all these things affect the page-load speed. In a real-life situation it’s the equivalent of throwing soapy water under a customer, or hitting them with a bat while they walk through a store. They’re then stalked all the way to the bus stop or inside their car, and told to buy products they’ve likely just bought. It’s a parallel reality that premium publishers have allowed to develop. It’s a shame, because trusted quality publishers are so vital today for societal and democracy reasons, and for the new generations....MORE

So you're saying there's room for improvement? Alrighty then.

Elaine Would Prefer That Amazon Not Move to San Francisco (AMZN)

From Elaine's Idle Mind, Nov. 14:

Go Away Amazon

In the middle of a self-declared housing emergency, the San Francisco Bay Area Council has respectfully submitted this bid inviting Amazon to build HQ2 here.

NOoOOoooooOOOOOO!! Why would you do that??

We already have Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Uber, Lyft, Tesla, Twitter, and about 99% of the Russell 2000. Are we trying to make the rest of the country resent us more than they already do? Because I don’t think that’s possible.

Amazon promises to create 50,000 new jobs. We don’t need more jobs! Our unemployment rate is so low, it’s negative. Like, people are commuting from three hours away just to work here. Heck, our unemployment rate is so low, even homeless people have full-time jobs.
(Or maybe our housing situation is so messed up that even full-time workers can’t afford the rent here.)

Here’s an artist’s rendering of the proposed site of HQ2:

The conceptual rendering looks lovely from afar, but if you zoom in to the street level, you might see something like this:

Right. San Francisco’s suggested location for HQ2 is Hunter’s Point, home of the largest homeless population in the city. Maybe Mayor Lee hopes that Amazon will pave right over them?

...MORE 

World Economic Forum: "Welcome to 2030. I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Better"

From those wonderful folks who bring us Davos, Existence as a Service!
Yes you can now purchase your existence for periods as short as one hour using WEFcoin and  the EaaS platform...

From the WEF via Futurism, Nov. 18:

This article is part of the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils.

For more information watch the What If: Privacy Becomes a Luxury Good? session from the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2017.

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things seem never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.

“Environmental problems seem far away”
In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.
Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

The death of shopping
Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.....MORE

"Dollar threatened by six years of weakness - Morgan Stanley "

The story is from RT so it's probably just Russian dezinformatsiya , or maybe that's what they want us to think and it's actually true but in diving down that rabbit hole we may be approaching the 'wilderness of mirrors'* where we become contrarian to the contrarians.

And that way lies madness.
But it might be profitable.

From Russia Today, Nov. 18:

One of the world’s leading financial services companies Morgan Stanley has predicted six years of weakness for the US dollar amid strong global growth, which may eclipse any positive influence from interest rate rises by the Federal Reserve.

“The dollar has topped out in January this year, and we are very likely to look into a dollar weakening trend for the next six years to come. The key driver for the US dollar is not rate expectations, but how the global economy is performing and what is the global demand for funding,”
Morgan Stanley’s chief global currency strategist Hans Redeker told Bloomberg.

The analyst recommends investors to short the dollar against the euro and currencies of emerging markets as growth gathers momentum. The dollar’s rally against the yen will halt at 117 in the first quarter before it drops below 108 by the end of next year, said Redeker.

The firm is making its forecast as investors’ attention to the dollar reflation trade is growing while US tax reforms have achieved some progress and the Fed has determined to gradually raise rates. A potential hike in December along with three more in 2018 would have only “tactical impact” on the US currency, according to the analyst.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index has climbed 3.8 percent since dropping to a more-than-two-year low in September. It is still down by more than seven percent this year....MORE

*Attributed to James Jesus Angleton when he was the Chief of U.S. counterintelligence at the CIA and attempting to discern which of two Soviet spies, Golitsyn or Nosenko was telling the truth.
Angleton ended up pretty much certifiable.

Plus, the term, meaning 'nothing is as it seems', was actually lifted from T.S. Elliot's 1920 poem Gerontion:

...These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations...

So that's that.
Or is it?

Understanding Online Writing

Although the author focuses on Facebook, the template he provides can be applied in analyzing anything written on the web, from a 140 280 character tweet to a 13,000 word interview with Marc Andreessen to this Climateer Investing blog post.

From Wait But Why, July 8, 2013:

7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook

The memory is vivid.
New Year’s Day, 2013. I’m going about my afternoon pleasantly, when I open my email and a friend has forwarded me what she calls a particularly heinous Facebook status from her news feed, written by someone we’ll call Daniel. It read:

2012 was a biggg year for me. I left my amazing job at NBC to move back to Chicago. I started dating my angel, Jaime Holland. I started yoga (thanks Jake Fisher & Jonah Perlstein!). I wrote an album with Matthew Johannson. Wrote another album I’m proud of. I got to hang with Owen Wilson, and worked with Will Ferrell on an amazing project. Had a conversation about Barack Obama with David Gregory. Danced. Joined a kickball team. Won a couple awards. Helped my sister plan her summer trip. Swam a lot. Golfed a little. Cried more than you would think. Read The World According to Garp. Saw Apocolypse Now. Went to Miami for the NBA Finals. Drank the best orange juice I’ve ever had with Davey Welch. Tweeted. Went to amazing weddings in Upstate New York. Drank a ridiculous amount of milk. Learned how to make sand art. Saw a great light show. Saw the Angels and Lakers. Fell in love with Jawbone Up. Cooked with Jaime. Gardened with Jaime. Watched Homeland with Jaime. Wrestled with Jaime. Laughed for hours with Jaime. Fell in love with Jaime’s family. Worked on a play. Played World of Warcraft. Did some improv. Played a ton of the guitar. Really just had a wild, amazing year. What a world.

By the time I finished reading, I realized that my non-phone hand was clutching tightly to my forehead, forcefully scrunching my forehead skin together. I had the same facial expression I’d have on if someone made me watch a live event where people had their skin slowly peeled off.
It was everything bad about everything, all at once.

But instead of distancing myself from the horror, I soaked in it. I read it again and again, fascinated by how something could be so aggressively unappealing.

It made me think about what makes terrible Facebook behavior terrible, and why other Facebook behavior isn’t annoying at all. It comes down to a pretty simple rule:

A Facebook status is annoying if it primarily serves the author and does nothing positive for anyone reading it.

To examine this a bit, let’s start by discussing the defining characteristics of statuses that are not annoying.

To be unannoying, a Facebook status typically has to be one of two things:
1) Interesting/Informative
2) Funny/Amusing/Entertaining

You know why these are unannoying? Because things in those two categories do something for me, the reader. They make my day a little better.
Ideally, interesting statuses would be fascinating and original (or a link to something that is), and funny ones would be hilarious. But I’ll happily take mildly amusing—at least we’re still dealing with the good guys.

On the other hand, annoying statuses typically reek of one or more of these five motivations:
1) Image Crafting. The author wants to affect the way people think of her.
2) Narcissism. The author’s thoughts, opinions, and life philosophies matter. The author and the author’s life are interesting in and of themselves.

3) Attention Craving. The author wants attention.
4) Jealousy Inducing. The author wants to make people jealous of him or his life.
5) Loneliness. The author is feeling lonely and wants Facebook to make it better. This is the least heinous of the five—but seeing a lonely person acting lonely on Facebook makes me and everyone else sad. So the person is essentially spreading their sadness, and that’s a shitty thing to do, so it’s on the list.

Facebook is infested with these five motivations—other than a few really saintly people, most people I know, myself certainly included, are guilty of at least some of this nonsense here and there. It’s an epidemic.

To lay out the most common types of offenses:

7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook

1) The BragBragging is such a staple of unfortunate Facebook behavior, it needs to be broken into three subsections:

1a) The “I’m Living Quite the Life” Brag
 

Description: A post making your life sound great, either in a macro sense (got your dream job, got your degree, love your new apartment) or a micro sense (taking off on an amazing trip, huge weekend coming up, heading out on a fun night with friends, just had an amazing day)
Examples:

• Guess who just got her TFA acceptance letter!!!
• Hawaii!
• Tailgating, Giants game, night out with Dave, Matt, Paul, and Andy. I love you, Saturday.

Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting (I’m successful; I’m happy; I have a great social life), Jealousy Inducing

So at best, you’re just really excited about your life and you need to tell everyone, and at worst you’re specifically hoping to make people feel worse about their lives and jealous of yours. Somewhere in the middle would be you calculatingly crafting your words as part of an unendearing and transparent campaign to make people see you in a certain way.

Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re just excited and need to brag to someone. Even if that’s the case, the only people it’s okay to brag to in life are your close friends, significant other, and family members—and that’s what email, texting, phone calls, and live talking are for. Your moment of self-satisfaction is profoundly annoying to people you’re not that close with, and they make up the vast majority of people who will be subjected to the status.

1b) The Undercover Brag

Description: Like the blatant brags above except behind a frail disguise. This includes all humblebrags, indirect brags, brags disguised as a rant, etc.
Examples:

• Apparently they now give PhDs to frauds and drunks. What a time to be alive!
• I’ll be traveling for the summer if anyone knows someone looking to sublease a Soho apartment in July and August.
• On my walk home from work, I was whistled at twice, honked at twice, and one car almost caused an accident slowing down to stare at me. Sometimes I really hate men.

Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting, Jealousy Inducing
On one hand, these people are at least self-aware enough to cloak their brag in something. On the other hand, they have the same exact core motivations as the blatant braggers and looking at these examples actually makes the first group seem almost lovable in comparison.

1c) The “I’m in a Great Relationship” Brag
 

Description: A public expression of your extremely positive feelings for your significant other or an anecdote signifying the perfection of your relationship.
Examples:

• A surprise trip to Vermont for two nights in a cabin. All I can say is Wow, what a boyfriend.
• Thanks, Rachel, for the best year of my life.
• Excited for a rainy Sunday of pizza, games, and movies with the wife.

Core reasons for posting: Image Crafting (FYI, I have a boyfriend; I’m in a wonderful relationship), Jealousy Inducing

The image crafting and jealousy inducing motives here are transparent. The only less-appalling possibility could be that it’s an attempt to strengthen the relationship itself by showing how you feel in a more substantial way than just saying it in private. But really? You’re gonna drag 800 of us into this shit because you couldn’t find a more creative way to go over the top in expressing yourself?
The one very funny possibility when it’s a guy posting is that either he’s in trouble for something or that his girlfriend’s friend’s boyfriend pulled some shit like this at some point and his girlfriend has now been 10% mad at him ever since it happened, so he finally has to just bite the bullet.

The fact is, there’s no excuse for it, because if you feel the need to plaster your relationship all over Facebook, there are plenty of socially acceptable ways to do so—go nuts with couple profile photos, and enjoy three separate moments of like button and comment applause when you change your status to “in a relationship,” “engaged,” and “married.”

2) The Cryptic Cliffhanger....

...MUCH MORE

We previously visited Wait But Why in  an April 2016 post

A Deep Dive Into What Elon Musk Is Up To With His Neuralink Company

....MUCH, MUCH MORE
You won't believe how much more...