Sales and marketing costs at 60% of revenues last year? My understanding of Palantir is that this isn't some SaaS model where a fixed cost product can be scaled at huge gross margins. This is a niche IT consultancy coming up on two decades of life. Today's stock market of hype dream valuations is their window to offload this to the public and clearly they know it.
From what I see in my own children, depression and developmental impairment are not fabricated risks. I’m not saying they outweigh greater public health concerns regarding the spread of the disease but the worries I have for my kids if the next school year is entirely remote go entirely beyond personal inconvenience. There are sadly no perfect solutions here.
16 years of losses for a company that does not appear to have compelling operating leverage does not seem like something which would get an enthusiastic Wall Street reception.
I'm not so sure of this. First of all, remote learning takes just as many teachers as in-person learning unless the education plan is just "watch Khan academy and check in with us in a year." In fact under the hybrid models being proposed in areas like NYC it will take more teachers as the teacher doing in-class learning cannot simultaneously handle remote instruction. There are some decent ed-tech products out there but they can't put education on autopilot.
Second, even if you had the technology to automate remote learning during the crisis, are you going to fire all your teachers only to rehire them in Spring/Summer? No I don't have a crystal ball on the future but I'd be surprised if by Spring we didn't have some form of viable if not 100% effective vaccine. We won't be locked inside forever.
Tax revenues which have been decimated by the crisis. Unlike the Federal government which can effectively borrow/print whatever it needs, states and municipals are limited by the real world and either have balanced budget requirements or de facto requirements imposed by the bond market/fiscal realities. The equation is simple. Tax revenues have plummeted while expenses have risen due to the costs of coping with the crisis (unemployment, medical services, etc..). Am I saying all of these tax dollars are spent with great efficiency? Of course not. But imposing unnecessary austerity in the middle of a crisis has proven time and time again to do nothing but prolong and deepen economic pain. It would be arbitrary and destructive if say US defense spending can remain immune because it has access to infinite credit while our school district and firefighters will be cut because they are state/local funded.
The bull case is that by mid-1Q we have a vaccine and the crisis is over. Government fiscal and monetary keeps the economy on life support until that happens. If you value a business bottom up and you think 2021/2022 sort of revert back to 2019 then by now in 2020 you are basing your valuations on those numbers and decreasing the equity value where necessary for businesses that took on debt to get through 2020. The Fed has said it will keep rates low for longer and overshoot 2% which is an average target not a ceiling. If your money has to go somewhere (and it does) then fixed income duration at paltry yields looks like a bad bet if we get a tick up in inflation. In an inflationary environment stocks aren't great but they will preserve purchasing power better than bonds. Sure you can play with commodities and bitcoins but are you as say a middle-aged saver with a family going to put your entire liquid net worth into gold bullion and bitcoin (of course this being Hacker News I expect a good number of "of course" responses!)
For my two cents I was embarrassingly late the the bull party and couldn't believe the rally back so fast. There will of course be a jobs recovery from the lows as the virus threat ebbs but I suspect a decent number of the jobs lost are structural and employment won't quickly rebound to sub 5%. Gun to my head I'd say high single digit unemployment could linger a while which is pretty painful. If the Federal government remains deadlocked then state and municipal austerity will multiply the economic pain.
I am an independent producer. The intent of your proposal is to send me all the money so I should like that. But let’s talk about the realities. To make a show or movie I need financing and that comes from a studio. To recover my own expenses and hopefully earn a profit I need to sell distribution rights across different geographies to different copyright holders. These entities exist for a reason. Look everyone would like to pay zero for infinite content but the reality is that without payments there is no content.
I started a family in NYC and we are still here. It’s very possible to do it without being a billionaire and it’s a fantastic experience rich way to grow up. I grew up in the burbs and that was great too. There is no one way to do things. But if you really love NYC don’t believe you can’t have a great family life here.
I’m on the pretty low to nonexistent level of fashion consciousness but fast forward 8 months to a world where maybe there is a vaccine. I can see a rebound cultural shift to going out/dressing up bringing back fashionable clothing for work and play stronger than pre-pandemic. There can easily be a cultural shift away from everyone sitting in their basement playing Animal Crossing in dirty sweatpants on Saturday night. I’m a homebody introvert but when the vaccine hits man I’m hitting the town hard!
Or there is a reasonably effective vaccine in 1q timeframe and much of the long term extrapolation from a temporary situation is overdone. I’m certainly not saying this is going to be the outcome but it is a very real possibility.
If people recall all of these predictions were made after 9/11 and the subsequent two decades were not exactly a period of decline for NYC. I live in and love NYC. If it’s not your thing that’s fine. There doesn’t have to be one way to live for everyone. I’ve been in the country three weeks now and it’s lovely. I’m happy to be here another three weeks. But my god am I itching to get back to the city.
I’d also point out that if we have a vaccine by year end or early 2021 which isn’t a certainty but is hardly a trivial possibility then all of these grand prognostications (which garner clicks) that life has changed forever will look awfully silly.
We got a Kano touchscreen Pi model last holiday season. It lasted maybe 3-4 months before totally falling apart and the power system dying. I wanted to like this company and their vision so I hope they have fixed the build quality.
The article confuses me. I was doing symbolic genetic algorithms to derive formulas back in the mid-90s so that's not new. But this seems to suggest a combined genetic algorithm/NN approach is being used. Curious to see the underlying paper.
Bloomberg terminal is no longer a physical thing (except for a custom keyboard with integrated fingerprint reader and function keys) and runs on generic Windows.
For equities an Interactive brokers setup with a few hundred dollars for additional feeds replicates 90 percent of Bloomberg functionality at 2% of the annual expense. For fixed income you are SOL without a Bloomberg. Among other things, good luck getting basic bond runs. And while you can build out tooling to do fixed income analytics on your own it is cumbersome and will require a lot of manual data gathering/input making it hard to rapidly compare securities.
They do. If they don’t close a deal they are stuck with all the transaction costs. This leads to adverse selection of deals as a SPAC will always choose to do any deal over dissolving without a deal.
SPACs are a bull frenzy market phenonemom. The winners are the investment banks who collect insane fees between insurance and deal advisory. The other winners are sponsors who get the fattest fee payout in the financial ecosystem dwarfing hedge funds or private equity. Believe me investors are not the winners.
Far too sweeping of a statement. "At their best" charter schools provide a laboratory for experimentation and alternative models of education which are impossible to implement within a rigid bureaucracy. In NYC we have many excellent progressive charter schools with massive waiting lists to get in. In many cases test scores are lower because these schools have chosen to emphasize real education over test preparation which unfortunately dominates bandwidth in many classrooms.
That may be right. I love martial arts and m body craves doing them. But running to me is root canal. When my wife says she actually enjoys running and not just the end results of increased endurance I think she is nuts!
Are you kidding? Every teacher I know has had to radically reinvent their classrooms for fully remote learning on the fly with minimal support and are working around the clock to do so.