I’m a former investor in the company. Many comments here focus on the DNA business, but the company treats it as more as lead gen, a “cheap” way to get new customers in and later to subscribe to their family tree product that prints cash. The DNA business is breakeven but that’s a lot cheaper than funding TV shows like Who Do You Think You Are - which was their old marketing tool.
Funny anecdotes:
- they own findagrave.com which is exactly what it sounds like
- they paid $50mm at one point to the Mormon church to effectively shut down their only competitor (family search.org). They also offered ancestry.com membership for free to every Mormon as well. The agreement handed over Mormon church’s records making Ancestry’s database broader.
- they sometimes call themselves a “Social Network for dead people” because you can opt to make your family tree public, allowing you to see connections/overlaps between your ancestors and others.
There needs to be a buyer and a seller for any trade. You don't know the stories of the other participants in those transactions - maybe if they didn't get rid of their oil on that day for pennies (or negative dollars), they would have been forced into far worse consequences, defaulted on their legal obligations, or forced into breaking a trade. If you read the terms of the futures market, it is very specific in how you must take delivery and where, and failing to fulfill those requirements exactly would result in way worse consequences (imagine an oil trader who is banned from trading... yeah way worse than losing a bit of money). There is a set of counterparties out there that collectively decided that paying those guys $500M was better than their next best alternative.
Inflation is expected to be 0.6% this year and 1.6% next year by CBO. The 5 year Inflation-indexed Treasury (TIPS) market is implying inflation of 1.6%. Prices on commodities and rent prices in major cities are mostly flat to down. Prices of imports are low and stable on average. So if you are observing signs of inflation, you are not living in the US or using the US Dollar.
Accounting standards do change all the time. Enron forced a change in how variable interest entities are treated. Rise of multi national conglomerates added comprehensive income accounting to account for FX. Most recently, rise of SaaS changed the way revenue and costs are accrued for multi year contracts.
The debate is what is the point of accounting standard - is it to calculate standardized figures like revenue and earnings in the most consistent way possible across all industries? Or is it to splinter the accounting world by adding a myriad of industry specific terms like “subscribers” and “churn” and even “EBITDA” that only apply to some companies but not all? I prefer the former but it’s a debated topic.
Interesting and I was wrong. While that might make for a good case why Apple should be compelled to allow the side loading of apps (especially since an App can be sandboxed and couldn’t possibly damage the device, a key criteria in the link). It still makes it hard to win an antitrust case against Apple. If you defined the market for Ford radios as to only include Ford-manufactured vehicles, then every single car company is a monopolist. Defense would push back that Ford competes against GM and Tesla, not against Bose and Sonos (in my prior analogy), so as long as consumers have choice of cars, then Ford shouldn’t be subject to antitrust actions and remedies in regards to radios.
Defining Apple as a monopolist on iOS is like calling Ford a monopolist in selling radios in Ford vehicles. No one thinks it’s a violation for Ford to include their own radio (built by a 3rd party like Bose - same as an app) in a Ford truck, and offer you an expensive upgrade to that radio (say also by Olufsen - also like a better App) if you want it. No one demands that Ford allow a different vendor to sell you a compatible radio through a Ford dealer and for Ford to not take a cut of the purchase price. And if Ford says that installing a third party radio without their authorization voids your warranty or otherwise makes it impossible to do so, it’s generally accepted to be OK. This analogy is at the core of Apple’s defense and it was brought up in previous anti trust cases like AA v. Sabre.
If it’s stock options at the last round valuation then they will be worthless. In theory the 409A valuation should be adjusted but in practice it’s most likely still at the 2018 round value.
Ligado’s biggest investors are JPMorgan, Centerbridge, and Fortress. David Redl, the former head of the NTIA, supported Ligado’s mission while the GPS (part of DoD but also co-run by the DOT) was against it for as long as this issue existed. The FCC pushed this through because Ajit Pai is retiring at the end of the year (regardless if Trump wins) and wants a legacy of approving more commercial uses of spectrum.
I believe it’s full access to the recent news articles that are included in WSJ online subscription (No archive, no WSJ pro, no databases), but I don’t know for sure. It’s sort of like Spotify, how do you know you have access to every single album by artist X? All of the major front page articles people talk about are in News+ but without looking up each one in both sources I don’t really know for sure.
The point of mentioning the guns was that whomever controlled the island could limit the ability of ships and submarines to transit to and from the inner Baltic Sea. If you have guns on the coast of Poland and on the island, then it leaves a very narrow set of channel where you can't bombard passing ships.
There were extreme wind conditions on that day and the wind was expected to get worse through the day. The pilots wanted to arrive as early as possible to beat the storm.
Source: I was on a Norwegian flight at exactly the same time and the pilot explained this logic to us and also mentioned that we were on pace to break this record. Unfortunately, the pilot couldn't land in the wind conditions and we had to divert. Good thing we had that extra fuel too as the diversion was to Copenhagen which is quite far.
Cars with no person inside them at all (vehicle drones?) would unlock the biggest productivity gain in a century. Revolutionize anything that can be delivered to your house (food, goods, groceries) and make sharing items feasible (need a power tool? Just have a drone drop it off for an hour then pick it up after you are done). I think the biggest advance of self driving is having cars with no people in them at all
1. For mature tech companies selling high margin products, R&D is typically 8-16% of revenue while operating profit margins are 20-40% of revenue. Even after taxes and interest, it’s natural for buybacks to exceed R&D
2. Not all R&D spent is booked as accounting GAAP R&D. Any internal tool for example can not be booked as R&D because it’s not sold to end customers.
3. Companies outside of tech do not report their amount of R&D spend but include it with SG&A. If deemed immaterial then you don’t see it
Oakland has built less housing per capita than SF over the last 5 years, as mentioned in the article. Appears like a few big projects finished construction and 2019 was an outlier year. The article implies this bounty will continue by citing “15,000 units in development” but doesn’t mention that SF has 4x as many “in development” and many projects linger in that category for a decade and many never get built.
I think Beijing cares about how the people of Taiwan perceive Hong Kong’s autonomy within China. If Taiwan views Beijing as a repressive regime then the independence movement would gain popularity.
In the fading days of the Soviet Union they put away dissidents in insane asylums where they were pressured into giving up their USSR citizenship and leaving for the West. While inhumane, no one ever got beaten or treated as poorly as the modern Russian police treats its opponents. That was partially why 1991 was a bloodless revolution, the USSR mostly abided by its own laws, minus the democracy part. I have a feeling history will judge the current regime worse than the Communists.
US government has the power to tax the entire US economy, providing financial backing to the US dollar. This is why fiat currencies weaken with their national economies, and vice versa
Quite a few people work relative to market trading hours and customary times to hold earnings calls and roadshows. Sales people work around their store business hours. Schools have fixed schedules. Hours sadly dictate schedules for most people
This is exactly why they are direct listing. TPG is screaming bloody murder but then again they claim to be the masters of structuring complex deals so they can’t claim that a startup snuck in a loophole under them.
We had one investor who asked and got this kind of model. It creates a ton of complexity (say if the investor takes some money out, you don't count the gains that this money would have earned since that point. Then imagine they put more in later - now you have to track the hypothetical returns on that new money, but not from the original investment but from the add-on time. Trust me the math gets heavy). It just proves unworkable for a fund with hundreds of investors to track everyone's benchmarks separately. Then imagine trying to show net of fees returns for the fund for marketing purposes. Do you show the returns of the guy who invested when the benchmark was low and may not have paid any fees due to relative underperformance? Or the guy who invested at the optimal time and got the biggest outperformance and paid a lot more in fees relative to the first guy? Good luck justifying your choice to an SEC examiner. This is why even the savviest investors don't ask for what you are suggesting.
California prohibits pricing based on driving habits like speed. Other states do permit it and Progressive offers snapshot device which does what you describe - offer discounts for safe driving behavior.
1) construction costs don't scale down linearly with square footage. Every home needs a kitchen, a heater, a bathroom, a foundation. This makes micro homes much more expensive on per foot basis
2) using construction costs from rural areas with low cost labor. Majority of home construction is labor with materials and overhead the rest. Contractors in SF are highly sought after due to hyper demand and charge double the figures here
3) seismic reinforcement in SF significantly increase construction costs
4) the cheapest anyone ever built anything in dense urban areas is $250/sq ft. My architect here says $350/ft is a challenge in SF for 2000 sq ft build. Good luck!
Situation is even worse for tankers. So many were ordered during the boom, that owners are actually paying customers to rent tanker ships. They do it because the customer would then cover the fuel cost of moving the ship to a more profitable region with greater demand.