In realgraph you can see some of the things they keep track of, which include what you have in your address book, total time spent "dwelling" and a few other interesting nuggets.
While I would never install a platform app because I know what kinds of privacy controls some platforms have - seizing a graph of your phone, sms and email contacts (realgraph) to weight engagement is pretty egregious.
The minority of people who understood what this was already worked for platform companies and wanted to again, and the few who didn't but also knew how invasive this was could always be discredited as conspiracy theorists.
Ever wonder who else gets those graphs from platform companies? Today this is all interesting, but a couple of weeks from now when this all sinks in, I wouldn't be surprised if I were mad as hell.
> ... The Fed hasn't bought a single share of stock.
1. This is actually currently being debated within the Fed.
2. I didn't say the Fed is buying stocks. They are buying the stable assets that the mega-wealthy have in their portfolio. Mega-wealthy don't have all their eggs in one basket. The Fed in solidifying a portion of their basket which allows mega-wealthy to retain the added risk in the markets.
When you throw extra demand in a market, prices go up all across the board, not equally though.
As for this particular situation, Fed buys corporate bonds, making companies less risky for stockowners. They also push those yields down, so capital goes to stocks to seek better returns.
Tell me how Federal reserve's actions don't prop up the stock market?
The Fed is artificially keeping interest rates low allowing idiotic stock buybacks to continue for almost no cost, keeps the cost of investor speculation cheap and they are bailing out companies that have bad non-performing loans (banks included)...
The Fed's "Rube Goldberg activity" holds up the stock market...uuuuntil it doesn't.
Did they have a shortage of products to sell? I think the impact of not selling in China may have been more important than the impact of not producing in China last quarter. And in any case the second quarter will probably be worse.
Very much so. I ordered a new watch and it took three weeks to arrive, when usually they are just a few days.
My friend who works at Apple said in March people weren't getting laptops when they joined the company because they didn't have any to give, as all the new ones were being sent to customers.
I’d be interested to know from someone knowledgeable whether Apple can recognize the revenue from a sale before the product has been delivered to the customer. It’s not clear to me that they can/do.
I’ve just moved within Apple, and requisitioned a top-of-the-line MBP (my current one is from 2014, I used to use a Mac Pro in my old position). Even with a custom build to top spec, and with it being internal (ie: not customer), it was still shipped in 2 days and arrives tomorrow.
Definitely, products that Apple were always available with deliver within 2 business days. As the crisis grew worse, a lot of products started slipping to 2-3 weeks for delivery. Apple usually doesn't stockpile and sells things as they make it, with a tiny ~margin~ inventory.
Keep in mind they have a significant presence in Asia, they felt this for nearly the entire quarter.
Plus like Facebook, it's not all straight down. Tim Cook:
> “We’ve seen a further change in the last part of March and first part of April were very depressed and then we’ve seen a pick up relative to that period of time in the second half of April"
They also announced $50b more in buybacks. Apple is confident in a way that most businesses are not.
Good point re: Asia presence and agree they seem confident + have the balance sheet to back it up.
Overall would just be nice to see weekly splits of revenue from all these companies instead of the vague descriptors we're getting. Would be much easier to project worst case/Q2 that way.
It's not a secret to any investor that Lyft's business has gone way down. These sorts of layoffs tend to only spark panic selling when they are not expected.
They're a global company that operates in 900 cities. I don't understand why so many people on this site seem to think it should be a few programmers and some suits to sign the checks.
because for the past 11 years, and people tend to forget how long this company has existed, they have been burning through money faster than star athletes after retirement while inventing increasingly convoluted metrics to claim to be actually profitable.
Many people are just tired of seeing glorified sales and taxi companies disguising themselves as tech companies.
The defining feature of a technology firm is reduction of marginal costs at scale. If you're adding human labour with every city you expand into you might have a problem on your hands if your banking on making facebook margins.There is an underlying exhaustion among some people, myself included, who want to see investments into basic research and real technological advances rather than yet another app delivering pizza being valuated at 50 billion dollars.
Yes, and I think that's the problem. The infrastructure is actually a cost for Uber. It's better to have less infrastructure. I have sometimes the feeling the infrastructure team at Uber is trying to build the tower of Babel to touch the heavens or something rather than considering that the end goal is giving people rides and not building more infrastructure.
I think people should recognise that the taxi market has an advantage. It's a distributed system and a market. Taxis organise themselves.
If you're going to replace an entire market with a centrally planned system and a giant electricity and compute eating machine then you better have something to show for it in terms of efficiency.
Exactly. It's like measuring the success of building an airplane by how much it weights.
What's especially interesting to me here is how the landscape has changed since Uber launched 10 years ago. In 2010, you legitimate had to build a lot of your own stuff; at that point Amazon hadn't even launched SNS or Redshift. [1] Docker didn't exist. Etc, etc.
So the question for me isn't, "Can Uber justify their apparently large infrastructure?" It's more, "If somebody started an Uber competitor today, how much of the work could they get from open source, PaaS, and SaaS providers?"
A really interesting question indeed. While Docker containers are a blessing from many perspectives, their orchestration is far from easy (yes k8s I am looking at you). Another consideration of a CTO, when choosing buy vs build, would be the cloud vendor lock-in and pricing consideration. Big cloud vendors may be a good offering for startups, when you need to move fast, growth is more important than margin and vendor lock-in is not an issue. However, as you grow, these things become increasingly important. Just to provoke some constructive thinking, I urge you to consider what businesses would become possible if running cost of IT & online payments equaled zero :)
"anywhere in the world" being the challenging part. If you're think about it from the perspective of a local taxi company, sure, it doesn't make sense. If you're a global service then it's probably different.
There's no such thing as a "global" taxi service. All cabs are local.
The only people who care about being able to use the same app in Bangalore that they do in Palo Alto are Uber investors and a tiny handful of globetrotting Davosians too lazy to install a new app or send an SMS.
Yes but there are plenty of people interested in having the same service in both Bangalore, Bombay and Ahmadabad, all three cities are quite far but people (including me) regularly travel between them. The local laws are completely different, but I don't have to worry about it. I know uber has figured out the cheapest fare, most convenient route from traffic conditions and the safest driver. If you think its a trivial thing or its somehow not needed then you are kidding yourself.
Also one thing I find is that taxis can be pretty dodgy depending on where you are. They're OK in my neck of the woods, but I've had some overseas that made me uncomfortable. I'd rather go with Uber.
Agreed. I do the same circuit (AMD/BOM/BLR) on a regular (read almost monthly) basis, and the ability to stick with ola or uber is a blessing that eliminates so much friction when I'm travelling!
Ola operates in 250 cities, that is pretty global I would say. Also it is the second choice for everyone I know and it is reflected in the fact that it operates in only 58 cities in India and still commands over 50% of the total market share.
The cabs themselves might be local cars driven by local people but in this instance the rides are being requested and serviced by the same infrastructure globally. That's a taxi company that has operations globally. The customers only travel locally but the company isn't limited to one geographic region.
Hatzichronoglou, Thomas: "Revision of the High-Technology Sector and Product Classification", OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers, No. 1997/02, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Page 7 specifically divides manufacturing industries (it doesn't address services) into four technology levels, high, medium-high, medium low, and low:
High technology: Aerospace, computers, office machinery, electronics-communications, pharmaceuticals.
Medium-high technology: Scientific instruments, motor vehicles, electrical machinery, chemicals, other transport equipment, non-electrical machinery.
Medium-low technoogy: Rubber and plastic products, shipbuilding, other manufacturing, non-ferrous metals, non-metallic mineral products, fabricated metal products, petroleum refining, ferrous metals.
Low-technology: Paper printing, textiles and clothing, food, beverages, and tabacco, wood and furniture.
Given J.S. Mill's wonderful definition of technology, 'the study of effects", there's little in human activity which is completely atechnological. There remains, however, much that is quite some remove from the cutting edge.
Yes, Netflix is a tech company. Eventually all companies that are enabled by technology and software become tech companies.
Even banking is becoming a tech industry.
That's 30 employees per city, for those who didn't do the mental math. Seems way more reasonable considering for each given market, you'll need a number of support staff + supervisors, marketing people, staff to support drivers and their enrollment, and staff to support an office if one exists. Divvy up corporate HQ heads (engineering, exec team, etc.) and I can see that number hitting 30 per city.
Perhaps, but it's not clear this would fall under any syndication rights. It's also not clear if he was honest about having part of the deal, from your link:
> During the New Yorker’s investigation into the veracity of the claims, reporter Connie Bruck was unable to find records of payments to Bannon. However, it’s possible his deal was capped and paid out between Seinfeld’s syndication in fall 1995 and Turner Broadcasting’s merger with Time Warner in late 1995. Following the deal, Turner’s Castle Rock came under the Warner Bros. umbrella and the company started sending out all of profit-participation statements. Prior records from the earlier months of syndication are not readily available.
And:
> On the other hand, when Bannon submitted an “income and expense declaration” during a contentious court battle with his ex-wife, any Seinfeld profit participations should’ve shown up. The New Yorker surmises either the profits weren’t substantial or Bannon failed to disclose them in a sworn statement.
I bet he made a few bucks in the 90s and and used the allure of the show to impress people since then. Seinfeld is still generating massive amounts of money so someone should know if they're sending any of it to Bannon.
https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml/blob/main/projec...
In realgraph you can see some of the things they keep track of, which include what you have in your address book, total time spent "dwelling" and a few other interesting nuggets.