nwzpaperman

:)

Bezos has liquidated so much AMZN stock he doesn't need AMZN's balance sheet for a piddly $250mm transaction. He might even figure out how to do something he hasn't done at AMZN and that's turn a profit. The last I checked, AMZN still had an infinite PE.

By keeping WaPo remote he can at least create the appearance that AMZN is corporately neutral for whatever news platform ideas AMZN pursues.

As far as I'm concerned, AMZN already has plenty of brand recognition to talk about any technological innovation they might integrate with the WaPo brand. I look forward to AMZN playing its cards in the space and seeing if they can compete against a truly focused and unencumbered competitor.

Production is easy, discovery and profitability are the problems.

Best wishes, Bezos!

Everyone needs to reconsider their worldview and a few important definitions they hold. One of those is privacy.

My definition of privacy: anything I relay to ANY one person is no longer private. What's the old saying about three people keeping a secret? Information wants to be free and privacy is not its natural state. It's always been this way, but the physical barriers to diffusion have been completely decimated in the past two decades.

This is not a mere blip in a long term trend, it is fundamental, IMO.

That being said, I believe there are new values we can all embrace to make the most of the state of the human experience today. Perhaps someone should can a thread on Internet values for the 21st century and beyond.

PS - Anyone ever wonder how MSFT got an anti-trust pass in the US, but not in the EU?

"In the interest of national security..."

Many people validate their positions--and themselves--by the quantity of people that agree with them which leads to holding popular positions.

At certain points in time altruism and necessity meet to overcome these social forces, but it's usually only when crisis forces everyone to the table.

"HLN, formerly known as CNN Headline News (often abbreviated as HN) and CNN2, is a cable television news channel...Since 2005, however, its format has increasingly shifted to long-form tabloid-, opinion-, crime-, and entertainment news-related programming."

Here is why it is COMPLETELY stupid to put wifi blimps in Africa. LOL

http://www.heritage.org/multimedia/infographic/2012/10/manpa...

As someone who has family in Africa, right now, and more going within a month, I am confident in my assertion that Africa is a failed continent.

Everyone on earth has tried to civilize, ahem, "bring online" Africa and failed beyond resource extraction. It is a money pit and there are no rules.

There is significant precedence for failure if you open any history book. It is arrogant to think you can influence anything meaningful there. Show some humility and invest in your own back yard where you have a slightly higher chance of making a meaningful impact.

I guess google plans to inherit Nigerian family fortunes and such and only needs the coms infrastructure to obtain it.

Definition of FIAT http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fiat

1: a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort

2: an authoritative determination : dictate <a fiat of conscience>

3: an authoritative or arbitrary order : decree <government by fiat>

What happens when you retire a light bulb? Contrast that with what happens when you retire a person. The light bulb goes in the trash bin, but the person begins an escalting battle for survival as he or she's financial reserves approach depletion.

A major federal reserve branch maybe has $30 billion in cash on hand at any given time. The marginalization of the US cash market is almost complete after the past decade.

Lastly, consider the possiblity that those back scatter xray machines aren't about weapons.

Post-2001 and the Patriot Act, bank tellers, stock brokers and insurance agents have all become lay intelligence officers under "Know your customer" compliance requirements. Informal value transfer systems, barter/black-market, are only a problem in terms of taxation.

Mt. Gox and money exchanges were functionally brought under these KYC compliance regulations and it is only a question of time until bitcoin users will have to speak about the source of the money. Sources are important because that's how taxes are levied.

If you can show you have paid taxes on your money, it's rare to have a problem.

We have systemic trillion dollar annual deficits, so tax collection efforts are being ramped up. It's why you get 10,000 IRS officers hired instead of 10,000 doctors for a national health care system reorganization.

I have personally discussed this with a friend that is a federal reserve spokesman, so anyone that wants to argue otherwise should consider that first.

You should have an asterix next to "making a ton of money."

*Past performance is not indicative of future results!

People and society need information and if someone or whatever outlet supplies good information, people will use it. If the person or whatever outlet start putting out bad information, the audience will leave for better information sources.

Those values are what are built into nwzPaper at least.

It means building a site like instagram, with zero revenue, can be very profitable if it competes with a revenue-generating site like Facebook. It is also repeatable.

Re: Lottery Ticket

Survivorship bias is not the same thing as playing the lottery even if the statistical probability of success launching a start-up or winning the lottery was identical. Instagram successfully built the technology, acquired the user base and sold to someone who found them valuable.

I don't think luck has anything to do with building a company. Bad luck is how losers explain their losses rather than learning from the loss.

Re: Non-linear consequence

You borrow $1,000 and service is $10/mo. The basic loan covenants would define a default if you can't pay all $10 in any single month according to schedule. That means $9.99 service of the debt gives the creditor legal capability to seize the entire collateral--business.

Fixed operating expenses can be viewed like debt service in that the economic entity breaksdown when all expenses can't be covered.

If the profit margin goes to zero, a company is still running, but extremely vulnerable to random economic volatility.

It is absolutely possible to undermine the business model of a company like Facebook by winning a marginal piece of their business away from them.

Economists are so fervently engaged in trying to eliminate cash-flow/economic/business cycles because deficits have non-linear consequences when they manifest.

With that, instagram had only one possible exit strategy to execute and they did.

"Yet that societies are not artificially put together, is a truth so manifest, that it seems wonderful men should ever have overlooked it. Perhaps nothing more clearly shows the small value of historical studies, as they have been commonly pursued. You need but to look at the changes going on around, or observe social organization in its leading traits, to see that these are neither supernatural, nor are determined by the wills of individual men, as by implication the older historians teach; but are consequent on general natural causes."

Democracy is an effect, not a cause. Don't conflate the two or project values on to me to which I have not espoused.

Music and video are different in that the monetary values are greater than individual monetary values of news articles. It's easy to win damages on a/v DMCA violations, but not so on articles from a bundled periodical.

The failure of legacy print publishing isn't about advertising. The failure of legacy digital publishing isn't about advertising. Information needs to be treated as you would any physical asset. The primary difference is that information is the most liquid asset in the world. Information has very few barriers to transmission, supply is almost entirely an artificial constraint and only a question of time and demand before a market for information is satisfied.

What that means is that print papers are slow transmission conduits with a relatively high artificial barrier on supply. Information follows diffusion principles in that it naturally wants to move from high to low states. Got secrets? ;)

Snazzy UIs, native readers and whatever kind of third-party aggregator everyone wants to build will be a failure. I know for fact that if I paid journalists anything, they would write on nwzPaper; no questions asked.

At a 13% proficient literacy rate in the US, and worse in most of the world, it's a challenge to cultivate a new journalism environment online, but it is absolutely a solvable problem.

Patch.com, Examiner.com and Yahoo's associated content have all but thrown in the towel. AOL has bet big on Armstrong and Patch and per their February job req, it looks like they want to double down!

The new journalism content and revenue model can only develop on top of the right platform. The stakes are quite high as the first winner will also win many adjacent markets as well!

I am biased, but I've got years of thinking and development into developing an actual platform solution that can efficiently scale global. Six months of beta knowledge and data and the next iteration coming soon.