metaphor

From a related article marked dupe[1]:

> Because of its failure to implement security measures, more than 55,000 U.S. customers faced attacks from hackers that compromised Ring devices between January 2019 and March 2020, the FTC said.

During this time frame, Amazon reported[2][3] raking in $14B net profit on $356B revenue, so the impact of a $30M penalty relative to operations of the period amounts to ~0.2% and ~0.008%, respectively.

Nice rounding error, FTC...unimpressed.

On a related note, I recently replaced my heat pump and part of the contractor's offer was a free Ring-compatible smart thermostat with the purchase of a qualified high-efficiency system...I firmly insisted to keep that garbage out of my home and install a sufficiently dumb one instead (Honeywell T6 Pro variant without wifi).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36147196

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872420...

[3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872420...

> The end result of this announcement is another expensive system only available to the same incumbent of tech giants with tens of billions at their disposal.

Certainly wasn't the case when a public research university partnership seeded by a generous donation from Nvidia co-founder/UF alumnus Chris Malachowsky was formally announced[1] shortly after DGX A100 launch[2] several years ago, never mind the handful of other academic early adopters mentioned in the press release.

Of course, we tend to conveniently forget such exogenous details.

[1] https://news.ufl.edu/2020/07/nvidia-partnership/

[2] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidias-new-ampere-data-c...

> That people think these models “tell the truth” or “hallucinate” is only half the story.

A meta-problem here is in choosing to use descriptive phrases like tell the truth and hallucinate, which are human conditions that further anthropomorphize technology with no agency, making it more difficult for layman society to defend against its inherent fallibility.

  UX = P_Success*Benefit - P_Failure*Cost

It's been well over a decade since I learned of this deviously simple relationship from UX expert Johnny Lee, and yet with every new generation of tech that has hit the market since, it's never surprising how the hype cycle results in a brazen dismissal of the latter half.

> ...but a relatively faraway Typhoon No. 2 (internationally known as Mawar) is featured instead.

Relatively far away, but quite important given Guam is a very popular summer destination for Japanese tourists, and Mawar was a Category 4 super typhoon when it hit[1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/super-typhoon-m...

> Annoyed at all these N=1 articles from prominent thinkers about this stuff.

It's a transcript of a casual interview, not an article, and certainly not a publication whose purpose is to convey statistical rigor.

As an aside, it doesn't strike me as entitled that society might permit thinkers of academic renown to express their personal opinions in less than rigorous settings on subjects to which their peer-reviewed contributions may be categorized as "prominent".

> ...but I’m pretty sure Citadel is not even a major player [in the options market].

A quick sanity check suggests Vanguard[1], Fidelity[2], Schwab[3], and TD Ameritrade[4] disagree with your assertion.

[1] https://nms606.karngroup.com/vgrd/606a/2023Q1/588e3c62ff

[2] https://clearingcustody.fidelity.com/trade-execution-quality...

[3] https://www.schwab.com/legal/order-routing-1

[4] https://www.tdameritrade.com/disclosure.html

You know those bills that summarily end with "and for other purposes"? Well...

Worth noting that the GOP-led House is trying to silently kill this with haste (along with funding for IRS enforcement) by burying defunding language in H.R. 2811 (a.k.a. the House's proposal to raise the debt ceiling) § 251 under a backhanded title named "Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection"[1]:

> The unobligated balances of amounts appropriated or otherwise made available for activities of the Internal Revenue Service by paragraphs (1)(A)(ii), (1)(A)(iii), (1)(B), (2), (3), (4), and (5) of section 10301 of Public Law 117–169 (commonly known as the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”) as of the date of the enactment of this Act are rescinded.

The $15 million budget mentioned in the article was appropriated[2] by § 10301 p. (1)(B) of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 and will expire at the end of this fiscal year:

> TASK FORCE TO DESIGN AN IRS-RUN FREE "DIRECT EFILE" TAX RETURN SYSTEM.—For necessary expenses of the Internal Revenue Service to deliver to Congress, within nine months following the date of the enactment of this Act, a report on (I) the cost (including options for differential coverage based on taxpayer adjusted gross income and return complexity) of developing and running a free direct efile tax return system, including costs to build and administer each release, with a focus on multi-lingual and mobile-friendly features and safeguards for taxpayer data; (II) taxpayer opinions, expectations, and level of trust, based on surveys, for such a free direct efile system; and (III) the opinions of an independent third-party on the overall feasibility, approach, schedule, cost, organizational design, and Internal Revenue Service capacity to deliver such a direct efile tax return system, $15,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2023: Provided, That these amounts shall be in addition to amounts otherwise available for such purposes.

What the GOP really wants to quietly snuff is the IRS's enforcement budget...something about IRS examinations and collections having very real capacity to deliver positive revenue increases for the Treasury[3], and higher-income taxpayers facing the largest increase in audit rates[4].

Alas, games will be played[5].

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2811...

[2] https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ169/PLAW-117publ169.p...

[3] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56467

[4] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57444

[5] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28542

> ...but all the banks that failed recently were doing normal banking (taking deposits and making loans).

I feel like the term "normal" here is a bit loaded.

To quote Buffett on First Republic Bank[1]:

>> If you take First Republic, for example, you could look at their 10-K and you could see that they were offering non-government-guaranteed mortgages in jumbo amounts at fixed rates, sometimes for 10 years, before they changed to floating. That's a crazy proposition.

Rubbing salt into the solvency wound, an overwhelming majority of First Republic's long-term assets were tax-exempt municipal bonds, and thus not eligible BTFP[2] collateral.

In the case of SVB, it was an extreme outlier with respect to sector concentration of uninsured depositors where all it took was a single individual with influence in a tight-knit community to trigger historically unprecidented outflows, which in turn forced massive losses in long-dated securities to be realized in an attempt to quench the liquidity demand impulse, which in turn broke the bank's solvency...nevermind that their outsized duration risk wasn't hedged, or that their Chief Risk Officer stepped down almost a year before the bank's demise without proper regulatory disclosure.

Then there's the matter of certain relaxations to the Dodd-Frank Act pushed during the Trump administration[3; see Title IV]...nevermind that Frank himself sat on the board of Signature Bank, or that SVB's CEO Becker sat on the board of the San Francisco Fed. I suspect it's not merely a coincidence that the assets of these failed banks skyrocketed shortly after deregulation yet remained under a certain $250 billion asset threshold "for strategic reasons".

[1] https://youtu.be/5QBkn42PSxk?t=488

[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/financial-stability/bank-term...

[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/215...

To be sure, Munger was specifically throwing shade at investment banking practices; here's where that discussion happened for context[1].

[1] https://youtu.be/5QBkn42PSxk?t=620

After sleuthing Q1 earnings earlier this past week, it's becoming quite evident that the US is entering into stagflation territory.

For example, cherry-picking Quaker Foods North America, PepsiCo 23Q1 earnings reported[1] +10% revenue on -5% volume; this pattern is rearing its head across the consumer staples sector.

Putting this into pragmatic perspective, local prices where I'm at are $5.68/42oz ~= €4.30/kg for Quaker Oats name brand as a proxy baseline, while Walmart's Great Value house brand are $3.98/42oz ~= €3.00/kg on the cheaper end of the spectrum.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/77476/00000774762300...

The big picture I'm seeing is there's a game being played[1], but to your point, AMD did respond to RTX 4070 launch by dropping prices on RX 6800 series GPUs[2].

[1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35663511

Agreed. At this point, it's clearly artificial GPU scarcity. We felt it early in consumer staples[1], and the grifting by auto dealers wasn't imagined either[2]...I won't even bother with the housing market to preserve my sanity. GPUs are really no different.

Consumers need to wake up and smell the underlying meta[3].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-12/measuring-shrinkflati...

[2] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/article/automotive-dealers...

[3] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/

Reference slide 5 from the cow's mouth[1] for this article's unlinked source.

On first blush, the headline just looks like a consequence of quarterly revenue miss when there's an implied floor to both cost of sales and operating expense in the face of elevated FX headwinds and substantial macro uncertainty.

TSMC posted poor results last week, not dissimilar to Texas Instruments on Tuesday. Now we see Samsung join the club, and the trend is likely to be no different for Intel after market close today.

All the while Nvidia has been trading in the $270-280 range on pure AI hype euphoria, completely oblivious to $2+ billion of deprecated Ampere architecture inventory glut, the export restrictions hammer that dropped last year when China sales alone accounted for over 21% of FY22 revenue, and more recently, AIB manufacturers informed that RTX 4070 production is being paused a mere 1 week after launch in an attempt to prevent inventory buildup, just to call out a few.

[1] https://images.samsung.com/is/content/samsung/assets/global/...

> Is that legitimate, or is that just timely excuse making?

Arguably[1] a bit of both.

[1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/econ_workingpaper/343/

> Apple as a whole only makes 21B a year from all services, and they run everything from cloud storage, to synchronization, to an App Store with a wild profit margin from fees.

Correct on "wild profit margin", but your numbers are wrong according to FY22 10-K filing[1]:

  Services Revenue       = $78.129B
  Services Cost of Sales = $22.075B
  Services Gross Margin  = 71.7% ($56.054B)

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0000320193220...

> If their own system has better native functionality, people will see this as a selling point. If not, they're free to ignore it.

This implicitly assumes that the manufacturer's direct cost of integrating/supporting such features, and indirect opportunity costs of not deploying an alternative replacement, are both effectively $0.

> A car is a high-margin item, so the impact of even a handful of consumers choosing not to buy must be huge, right?

From GM's latest 10-K filing[1], quickly distilling the past 3 years of consolidated income statements down to its Automotive ex. GM Financial stream:

  | (US$ Millions)    | 2022    | 2021    | 2020    |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | Revenue           | 143,975 | 113,590 | 108,673 |
  | Cost of Sales     | 126,892 | 100,544 |  97,539 |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | Adj Gross Profit  |  17,083 |  13,046 |  11,134 |
  | Adj Gross Margin  |   11.9% |   11.5% |   10.2% |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | SG&A              |  10,667 |   8,554 |   7,038 |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | Adj EBITDA        |   6,416 |   4,492 |   4,096 |
  | Adj EBITDA %      |    7.4% |    7.5% |    6.5% |

...and Ford for the sake of comparison[2], distilling down to Automotive ex. Ford Credit and Mobility steams:

  | (US$ Millions)    | 2022    | 2021    | 2020    |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | Revenue           | 148,980 | 126,150 | 115,894 |
  | Cost of Sales     | 134,397 | 114,651 | 112,752 |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | Adj Gross Profit  |  14,583 |  11,499 |   3,142 |
  | Adj Gross Margin  |    9.8% |    9.1% |    2.7% |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | SG&A              |  10,888 |  11,915 |  10,193 |
  |-------------------|---------|---------|---------|
  | Adj EBITDA        |   3,695 |   (416) | (7,051) |
  | Adj EBITDA %      |    2.5% |  (3.3%) |  (6.1%) |

There are at least two major underlying markets at play here: manufacturer-dealer and dealer-consumer.

Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics research paints a colorful picture of market dynamics from 2007-2019[3] where post-GFC increase in domestic competition and the rising cost of manufacturing forced dealers to "innovate" as a way of offsetting new car sales margin decline, which set the stage for 2019-2022[4] where manufacturers largely internalized an outsized supply chain squeeze while dealers gouged the shit out of consumers. So when you say "high-margin", I think you're looking in the wrong bucket.

Then there's GM Financial segment sitting on a $65.322B retail finance receivables portfolio[5] of which 27.2% are sub-680 FICO consumers, and carrying $96.854B of debt[6]...nevermind rising interest rates, increasing layoffs, and a looming credit crunch. Remarks like:

>> In 2021, GM Financial redeemed $1.5 billion in aggregate principal amount of 5.20% senior notes due in 2023. The redemption resulted in a $105 million loss on the early extinguishment of debt.

...buried in page 76 of the fine print suggests internal bleeding damage control.

> How does this business decision make sense?

It doesn't make sense because you're thinking about it from the perspective of consumer optionality based on today's trend, not as a publicly traded business balls deep in competition looking forward.

Considering GM's top 2 selling vehicles are trucks[7] (Silverado = 33.8% of 2022 Chevy units sold; Sierra = 46.7% of 2022 GMC units sold)---and speculating on the retention quality of consumers who would readily classify CarPlay integration as "not negotiable", choosing to overweight an accessory feature that X competitors may also offer over other characteristics/intangibles salient to GM products---I begin to question both the net value prop and opportunity costs being wholesale handed over to Apple.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467858/000146785823...

[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/37996/00000379962300...

[3] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2022/article/automotive-dealers...

[4] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/article/automotive-dealers...

[5] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467858/000146785823...

[6] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467858/000146785823...

[7] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g39628015/best-selling-car...

Clark Construction's lawsuit is Case No 22-2-20747-7 SEA filed with the King County Superior Court[1].

That being said, it never ceases to amaze me how much friction there is in attempting to access public records in our country's court systems; at least King County Superior Court uses Daily Journal tech, which isn't the grift-by-undesign dumpster fire that the Western District of Washington's PACER interface is, but you'll still need to register a username to dive deeper.

[1] https://dja-prd-ecexap1.kingcounty.gov/?q=node/420/3327963/F...

> MRR that would return after-expenses revenue

Come again?

In case anyone else was wondering, it's the opening verse to The Doors' People Are Strange[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHaGrZkkv4

Relevant S-3 ASR[1] filed last week Friday.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1653482/000162828023...

> Love the people, love the country, but Golden Curry's bright warning red "EXTRA HOT" is not bloody hot at all.

I chuckled at the basis of your comparison being a globally commercialized instant product.

Nope...the Amazon page that ASUS redirects to[1] is a different SBC[2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Tinker-1-5GHz-Graphics-Motherboa...

[2] https://tinker-board.asus.com/product/tinker-edge-t.html

Definitely the UK, more specifically, RAF Lakenheath, a well-known F-15 OCONUS base.

From the pic[1], "LN" tailflash is telltale, but if your confidence is still waivering, this is the precise location[2] that the pic was taken from: you can see spot "03" painted on the flightline and tower in the background.

[1] https://images.axios.com/7Kz2FLdbEv-I_Pr-GjkRXdriQSM=/0x254:...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/52%C2%B024'02.2%22N+0%C2%B...

Probably not a good image that Scott[1] and Mike[2] (via their respective trusts) have been quite busy liquidating 1,076,750 shares each into the public at a rate of 8,614 shares per trading day since the beginning of October last year...all the while laying off 5% of their workforce.

Something about leaders eating last comes to mind...

[1] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0001666121

[2] https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=0001666120

Pretty sure the parent is referring to the obsolete 1FF variant, e.g. [1]. The intent back then was to use your personal SIM on a shared cellphone.

[1] https://www.telecomkhabar.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/C30...

As of November 2022, 20.40% in the aggregate[1].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TERMCBCCINTNS