Just to be clear, the number of profit dollars more than doubled, not the profit margin. Revenue went up significantly as well, as you can imagine.
Net profit went from ~2% last year to ~3% this year. Unexpected oopsies can soak that up real quick.
Another fun way to think about it is that $1.6B net profit was about two tenths of one percent of Amazon's $738B market cap. Increase that by another 10-20x and they can actually start thinking about paying a dividend.
In the UK it's worse than that though, because most items eligible for Prime cost more anyway. It usually costs the same to buy the non-Prime version and just pay for next day shipping on top.
The math may be mildly better than that in the US, but not by much. I call it the "Prime tax."
So you're just trolling. Okay. Thanks for clarifying.
Well, actually, friend, if you review the thread it turns out you're the one that spontaneously jumped into an exchange between me and Karen and started piling on.
It's really interesting how hard you're flexing the bounds of logic to try to come up with ways to be dismissive. Why not spend your cycles actually arguing Tesla's merits (if you feel there are any)?
It's foolish to trust the predictions of a pundit (or a fund manager) who won't commit their own money.
Pundit? Fund manager? From whence come these straw men?
I have to say I find it fascinating that when I express an opinion on a discussion board I get the functional equivalent of "$10,000, Rick". This is clearly a touchy subject for some of you.
Since you clearly don't believe your own predictions, why should anyone else believe you?
I actually don't care if you believe me or not. You likely have more than enough Google bux to splash around on the casino table that you'll be fine. I fear, though, that poor Karen has overextended herself. Maybe you can spot her a few when things go thud.
As Buffett once put it, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The sure thing is that eventually investors will get tired of Elon's sweet crooning and flashy distractions and will stop giving him more money to throw after the billions he's frittered away. The unsure thing is exactly how long that will take. But I'm heartened at the (dare I say) S-curve of reality that finally seems to be setting in.
You're disagreeing with math. For the claimed numbers to be true, what cost $100 in would have to $250 today. Adjust as needed for your actual 2000 cable bill. Nowhere did I claim that the average cable bill in 2000 was $100. Try again.
Sorry if that was too subtle for you. Simply stating that the average bill went up between 2000 and now without evaluating what services people were actually paying for then and now is, to put it generously, disingenuous.
I have no position either way -- I'm just sitting back waiting to pop the popcorn when the world finally gets over one of the true charlatans of the century. [Oh, LOOK! FLAMETHROWERZ!!!1!! What was I saying? Nevermind.]
You, on the other hand, are obviously long -- probably way long. Maybe it's time to take your profits and reclaim all the time you spend on your desperate astroturfing. It has to get tiring after a while.
Yes yes yes, Karen... why's everybody picking on your poor lil' Elon?
Maybe, just maybe, Tesla is the most shorted stock in the market because it's considered the most overvalued and most likely to crater. Nah, can't be. MAAAAAARS!!!!!!!
I suspect Tesla's method of using less hardware will be the main path in 15 years for autonomy, once we have car to car communications and car to traffic control communications as standard equipment in every vehicle and bugs worked out.
All the kinks worked out and equipment in every vehicle on the road in the next 15 years. Elon, is that you?
Some cars with humans or lasers can communicate safe passages and routes through construction, and other road conditions (wet/ice/snow...) And lesser equipped cars can then navigate recently validated routes more safely.
I'm sure you're not saying that a ~4,000 pound hunk of metal being propelled at ~60mph can make safe operational decisions based not on current environmental conditions but on environmental conditions that existed at some point before it reached a given area.
They tell me "Your insurance told us they'd pay such-and-such amount. When we sent them the claim they said they're only paying so-and-so amount. Happens all the time. Nothing we can do about it".
There are really only two choices: Either your dental insurance plan describes in writing what procedures are covered and what the copays/deductibles are, or it doesn't. If the former, you should have a claim against the insurance company for not providing the coverage they committed to provide. If the latter (and this of course would not be the case for a Delta Dental plan), there's no bait and switch since they didn't commit in writing to reimburse one penny. And if you're relying on your dentist's billing department as a reliable go-between, well, caveat emptor.
I had some cavities filled. I had to go get a loan from my bank to pay my end of it.
Bank loan? Cavities? Come on. Have you considered that maybe the real issue is that your dentist charges significantly above conventional rates and that the insurance company (as is certainly described in your plan documents somewhere) will only reimburse up to those conventional rates?
Nobody can tell you what something is actually going to cost you out-of-pocket, because the insurance company will say "we'll pay this much", but when the doctor/dentist goes to submit the claim, they say "oh well we're only really going to pay this much, LOL" and the patient gets stuck with the bill.
Back in the real world, the doctor/dentist has agreed to accept only the reimbursement allowed by the insurance company for a given medically necessary procedure in order to be part of that insurance network. If you signed a piece of paper saying you would be personally responsible for anything the insurance company didn't pay even if the doctor/dentist performed medically unnecessary services, well, maybe you should read before signing next time.
The highlights reel playing on a demo unit of Sharp's 8K set required 300 megabits per second of bandwidth to stream, said Adrian Wysocki, group product manager at UMC, the Sharp-owned firm that builds TVs in Poland for the company. He suggested in a conversation Friday that more efficient formats could cut that to 100 Mbps.
I'd love to hear how they're going to cut stream bandwidth by 2/3 without nullifying whatever incremental visual experience 8k is supposed to give you.
Is it a jerk move on Microsoft's part, to prosecute this guy for helping people keep software working which they've already paid for? Sure, and they deserve to be publicly shamed for it.
This could not be more wrong.
1. Microsoft didn't prosecute him -- the federal government did. 2. According to the original WaPo article, Microsoft actually intervened to help Lundgren by explaining to the court that the value of the restore discs was only $25, not the $299 the prosecutors had originally alleged:
Initially, federal prosecutors valued the disks at $299 each, the cost of a brand-new Windows operating system, and Lundgren’s indictment claimed he had cost Microsoft $8.3 million in lost sales. By the time of sentencing, a Microsoft letter to Hurley and a Microsoft expert witness had reduced the value of the disks to $25 apiece, stating that was what Microsoft charged refurbishers for such disks.
Well, technically, summer vacation is a little less than three months. All the grades have to be in by the third week of June and the next academic year starts the second week of September. And since I have to prepare for the next quarter, Winter Break is really only about three weeks' long. And I usually have to do yard work during Spring Break, so that doesn't really count as vacation.
Oh dear god, Jim -- are you pretending to be in academia again? That's just too cute.
Farming too hard in the colonies? Trap a bunch of Africans and bring them over as slaves. . . . Now H1Bs. It's all the same thing.
Yes, when I think about H1Bs coming to the U.S. and getting paid far better than they ever would in their home countries, the immediate parallel that springs to mind is plantations, whips and chains. Ah Maslow, we hardly knew ye.
But in any event, the real irrationality is having defined benefit plans in the first place. Those by their very nature require long-range assumptions about lifespan and market performance, and the people who made overly optimistic assumptions decades ago are long gone when they're proven badly wrong. If an entity providing a pension ceases to exist, the pensioners get screwed because there aren't enough dollars to pay what they were promised and there's nobody to keep refilling the leaky bucket. And if people live a lot longer than projected (as continues to be the case), the entity can get put under significant pressure due to the extra unanticipated funding. Take a look at NCR for a good recent example of how this can go badly wrong.
Public pensions are generally just kicking this can down the road, to the tune of a ~5% per year increase in the gap between their promises and their assets. But the music will inevitably stop someday, and there will be some people left without chairs.
If the USPS insists on continuing with a defined benefit plan despite all that, it's perfectly reasonable in my view to ask them to put themselves (and their retirees) in an equivalent risk position by assuring sufficient funds to pay everything they promised to pay. That's all that's going on here.
They killed all the small private aircraft companies that made small planes with the active help of NTSB.
Baloney. Here's a list that includes nearly five dozen small private aircraft companies that make small planes.
Boeing liked small pesky competitors being killed off.
Not only are the above companies not "killed off," they're not even competitors given that Boeing doesn't make small planes. (Unless you somehow consider private versions of Boeing's 7x7 models "small.")
That might have been a valid rejoinder had complexity been one of my critiques. I'd suggest you try to educate yourself a bit about the issues I actually did raise, but I can appreciate how retasking those neurons might unduly detract from your ability to produce the stream of drive-by one-liners littering your comment history.
Hard to believe an article like this wouldn't have a link to a single picture. Here's an article from last year with some pictures and more details of the process.
There are so many weasel words baked into this that no ISP on the planet could be confident they wouldn't fall afoul of it, and so many exceptions that state agencies can pretty much do whatever they want anyway.
(3) A public body may not contract with a broadband Internet access service provider that, at any time on or after the operative date specified in section 3 of this 2018 Act: (a) Engages in paid prioritization; (b) Blocks lawful content, applications or services or nonharmful devices; (c) Impairs or degrades lawful Internet traffic for the purpose of discriminating against or favoring certain Internet content, applications or services or the use of nonharmful devices; (d) Unreasonably interferes with or unreasonably disadvantages an end user’s ability to select, access and use the broadband Internet access service or lawful Internet content, applications or services or devices of the end user’s choice; or (e) Unreasonably interferes with or unreasonably disadvantages an edge provider’s ability to make devices or lawful content, applications or services available to end users.
(4) Notwithstanding subsection (3) of this section, a public body may contract with a broadband Internet access service provider that: (a) Is the sole provider of fixed broadband Internet access service to the geographic location subject to the contract; (b) Engages in any of the activities described in subsection (3) of this section in the process of addressing copyright infringement or other unlawful activity or the needs of emergency communications, law enforcement, public safety or national security authorities; (c) Engages in paid prioritization if the Public Utility Commission determines that the broadband Internet access service provider’s paid prioritization provides significant public interest benefits and does not harm the open nature of the provided broadband Internet access service; (d) Engages in any activities described in subsection (3)(b) to (d) of this section if the Public Utility Commission determines that the broadband Internet access service provider’s engagement in the activity is reasonable network management. An activity is reasonable network management if the activity: (A) Has a technical network management justification; (B) Does not include other business practices; and (C) Is narrowly tailored to achieve a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology
of the broadband Internet access service; or (e) Engaged in any of the activities described in subsection (3) of this section at any time on or after the operative date specified in section 3 of this 2018 Act if: (A) The broadband Internet access service provider certifies that it has ceased engaging in all of the activities described in subsection (3) of this section; and (B) The Public Utility Commission determines that allowing a public body to contract with the broadband Internet access service provider provides significant public interest benefits.
(5)(a) A broadband Internet access service provider engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service to a public body shall publicly disclose information regarding the provider’s network management practices and performance characteristics and the commercial terms of the provider’s broadband Internet access service sufficient for end users to verify that the service is provided in compliance with subsections (3) and (4) of this section.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to be clear, the number of profit dollars more than doubled, not the profit margin . Revenue went up significantly as well, as you can imagine.
Net profit went from ~2% last year to ~3% this year. Unexpected oopsies can soak that up real quick.
Another fun way to think about it is that $1.6B net profit was about two tenths of one percent of Amazon's $738B market cap. Increase that by another 10-20x and they can actually start thinking about paying a dividend.
In the UK it's worse than that though, because most items eligible for Prime cost more anyway. It usually costs the same to buy the non-Prime version and just pay for next day shipping on top.
The math may be mildly better than that in the US, but not by much. I call it the "Prime tax."
I actually don't care if you believe me or not.
So you're just trolling. Okay. Thanks for clarifying.
Well, actually, friend, if you review the thread it turns out you're the one that spontaneously jumped into an exchange between me and Karen and started piling on.
It's really interesting how hard you're flexing the bounds of logic to try to come up with ways to be dismissive. Why not spend your cycles actually arguing Tesla's merits (if you feel there are any)?
It's foolish to trust the predictions of a pundit (or a fund manager) who won't commit their own money.
Pundit? Fund manager? From whence come these straw men?
I have to say I find it fascinating that when I express an opinion on a discussion board I get the functional equivalent of "$10,000, Rick". This is clearly a touchy subject for some of you.
Since you clearly don't believe your own predictions, why should anyone else believe you?
I actually don't care if you believe me or not. You likely have more than enough Google bux to splash around on the casino table that you'll be fine. I fear, though, that poor Karen has overextended herself. Maybe you can spot her a few when things go thud.
Karen, even if it's not your intent, you're coming across like an insecure bully. WANNA BET???? HMMMM????? YOU MUST BE WRONG IF YOU WON'T BET!!!
Sit back and enjoy the show. And try to grow up a bit.
Um, how much are you ending up paying for your "affordable electric car"? Government subsidies don't count.
As Buffett once put it, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The sure thing is that eventually investors will get tired of Elon's sweet crooning and flashy distractions and will stop giving him more money to throw after the billions he's frittered away. The unsure thing is exactly how long that will take. But I'm heartened at the (dare I say) S-curve of reality that finally seems to be setting in.
You're disagreeing with math. For the claimed numbers to be true, what cost $100 in would have to $250 today. Adjust as needed for your actual 2000 cable bill. Nowhere did I claim that the average cable bill in 2000 was $100. Try again.
Sorry if that was too subtle for you. Simply stating that the average bill went up between 2000 and now without evaluating what services people were actually paying for then and now is, to put it generously, disingenuous.
I have no position either way -- I'm just sitting back waiting to pop the popcorn when the world finally gets over one of the true charlatans of the century. [Oh, LOOK! FLAMETHROWERZ!!!1!! What was I saying? Nevermind.]
You, on the other hand, are obviously long -- probably way long. Maybe it's time to take your profits and reclaim all the time you spend on your desperate astroturfing. It has to get tiring after a while.
A 74% inflation-adjusted increase since 2000 would be around a 150% raw increase.
That means the same service that cost you $100 in 2000 would cost you around $250 now.
If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida that would be perfect for you.
Yes yes yes, Karen... why's everybody picking on your poor lil' Elon?
Maybe, just maybe, Tesla is the most shorted stock in the market because it's considered the most overvalued and most likely to crater. Nah, can't be. MAAAAAARS!!!!!!!
I suspect Tesla's method of using less hardware will be the main path in 15 years for autonomy, once we have car to car communications and car to traffic control communications as standard equipment in every vehicle and bugs worked out.
All the kinks worked out and equipment in every vehicle on the road in the next 15 years. Elon, is that you?
Some cars with humans or lasers can communicate safe passages and routes through construction, and other road conditions (wet/ice/snow...) And lesser equipped cars can then navigate recently validated routes more safely.
I'm sure you're not saying that a ~4,000 pound hunk of metal being propelled at ~60mph can make safe operational decisions based not on current environmental conditions but on environmental conditions that existed at some point before it reached a given area.
They tell me "Your insurance told us they'd pay such-and-such amount. When we sent them the claim they said they're only paying so-and-so amount. Happens all the time. Nothing we can do about it".
There are really only two choices: Either your dental insurance plan describes in writing what procedures are covered and what the copays/deductibles are, or it doesn't. If the former, you should have a claim against the insurance company for not providing the coverage they committed to provide. If the latter (and this of course would not be the case for a Delta Dental plan), there's no bait and switch since they didn't commit in writing to reimburse one penny. And if you're relying on your dentist's billing department as a reliable go-between, well, caveat emptor.
I had some cavities filled. I had to go get a loan from my bank to pay my end of it.
Bank loan? Cavities? Come on. Have you considered that maybe the real issue is that your dentist charges significantly above conventional rates and that the insurance company (as is certainly described in your plan documents somewhere) will only reimburse up to those conventional rates?
Nobody can tell you what something is actually going to cost you out-of-pocket, because the insurance company will say "we'll pay this much", but when the doctor/dentist goes to submit the claim, they say "oh well we're only really going to pay this much, LOL" and the patient gets stuck with the bill.
Back in the real world, the doctor/dentist has agreed to accept only the reimbursement allowed by the insurance company for a given medically necessary procedure in order to be part of that insurance network. If you signed a piece of paper saying you would be personally responsible for anything the insurance company didn't pay even if the doctor/dentist performed medically unnecessary services, well, maybe you should read before signing next time.
The highlights reel playing on a demo unit of Sharp's 8K set required 300 megabits per second of bandwidth to stream, said Adrian Wysocki, group product manager at UMC, the Sharp-owned firm that builds TVs in Poland for the company. He suggested in a conversation Friday that more efficient formats could cut that to 100 Mbps.
I'd love to hear how they're going to cut stream bandwidth by 2/3 without nullifying whatever incremental visual experience 8k is supposed to give you.
Is it a jerk move on Microsoft's part, to prosecute this guy for helping people keep software working which they've already paid for? Sure, and they deserve to be publicly shamed for it.
This could not be more wrong.
1. Microsoft didn't prosecute him -- the federal government did.
2. According to the original WaPo article, Microsoft actually intervened to help Lundgren by explaining to the court that the value of the restore discs was only $25, not the $299 the prosecutors had originally alleged:
Initially, federal prosecutors valued the disks at $299 each, the cost of a brand-new Windows operating system, and Lundgren’s indictment claimed he had cost Microsoft $8.3 million in lost sales. By the time of sentencing, a Microsoft letter to Hurley and a Microsoft expert witness had reduced the value of the disks to $25 apiece, stating that was what Microsoft charged refurbishers for such disks.
Given that world oil production is around 35 billion barrels a year, 279,000 barrels isn't even a blip on anyone's radar.
Well, technically, summer vacation is a little less than three months. All the grades have to be in by the third week of June and the next academic year starts the second week of September. And since I have to prepare for the next quarter, Winter Break is really only about three weeks' long. And I usually have to do yard work during Spring Break, so that doesn't really count as vacation.
Oh dear god, Jim -- are you pretending to be in academia again? That's just too cute.
Farming too hard in the colonies? Trap a bunch of Africans and bring them over as slaves. . . . Now H1Bs. It's all the same thing.
Yes, when I think about H1Bs coming to the U.S. and getting paid far better than they ever would in their home countries, the immediate parallel that springs to mind is plantations, whips and chains. Ah Maslow, we hardly knew ye.
No one, and I mean no one, pre-funds their pension fund 75 years out, it's not rational.
As others have pointed out, the USPS doesn't actually have to fund benefits 75 years out.
But in any event, the real irrationality is having defined benefit plans in the first place. Those by their very nature require long-range assumptions about lifespan and market performance, and the people who made overly optimistic assumptions decades ago are long gone when they're proven badly wrong. If an entity providing a pension ceases to exist, the pensioners get screwed because there aren't enough dollars to pay what they were promised and there's nobody to keep refilling the leaky bucket. And if people live a lot longer than projected (as continues to be the case), the entity can get put under significant pressure due to the extra unanticipated funding. Take a look at NCR for a good recent example of how this can go badly wrong.
Public pensions are generally just kicking this can down the road, to the tune of a ~5% per year increase in the gap between their promises and their assets. But the music will inevitably stop someday, and there will be some people left without chairs.
If the USPS insists on continuing with a defined benefit plan despite all that, it's perfectly reasonable in my view to ask them to put themselves (and their retirees) in an equivalent risk position by assuring sufficient funds to pay everything they promised to pay. That's all that's going on here.
They killed all the small private aircraft companies that made small planes with the active help of NTSB.
Baloney. Here's a list that includes nearly five dozen small private aircraft companies that make small planes.
Boeing liked small pesky competitors being killed off.
Not only are the above companies not "killed off," they're not even competitors given that Boeing doesn't make small planes. (Unless you somehow consider private versions of Boeing's 7x7 models "small.")
That might have been a valid rejoinder had complexity been one of my critiques. I'd suggest you try to educate yourself a bit about the issues I actually did raise, but I can appreciate how retasking those neurons might unduly detract from your ability to produce the stream of drive-by one-liners littering your comment history.
Hard to believe an article like this wouldn't have a link to a single picture. Here's an article from last year with some pictures and more details of the process.
There are so many weasel words baked into this that no ISP on the planet could be confident they wouldn't fall afoul of it, and so many exceptions that state agencies can pretty much do whatever they want anyway.
Here's the relevant language from the enrolled version of the bill:
(3) A public body may not contract with a broadband Internet access service provider that, at any time on or after the operative date specified in section 3 of this 2018 Act:
(a) Engages in paid prioritization;
(b) Blocks lawful content, applications or services or nonharmful devices;
(c) Impairs or degrades lawful Internet traffic for the purpose of discriminating against or favoring certain Internet content, applications or services or the use of nonharmful devices;
(d) Unreasonably interferes with or unreasonably disadvantages an end user’s ability to select, access and use the broadband Internet access service or lawful Internet content, applications or services or devices of the end user’s choice; or
(e) Unreasonably interferes with or unreasonably disadvantages an edge provider’s ability to make devices or lawful content, applications or services available to end users.
(4) Notwithstanding subsection (3) of this section, a public body may contract with a broadband Internet access service provider that:
(a) Is the sole provider of fixed broadband Internet access service to the geographic location subject to the contract;
(b) Engages in any of the activities described in subsection (3) of this section in the process of addressing copyright infringement or other unlawful activity or the needs of emergency communications, law enforcement, public safety or national security authorities;
(c) Engages in paid prioritization if the Public Utility Commission determines that the broadband Internet access service provider’s paid prioritization provides significant public interest benefits and does not harm the open nature of the provided broadband Internet access service;
(d) Engages in any activities described in subsection (3)(b) to (d) of this section if the Public Utility Commission determines that the broadband Internet access service provider’s engagement in the activity is reasonable network management. An activity is reasonable network management if the activity:
(A) Has a technical network management justification;
(B) Does not include other business practices; and
(C) Is narrowly tailored to achieve a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology
of the broadband Internet access service; or
(e) Engaged in any of the activities described in subsection (3) of this section at any time on or after the operative date specified in section 3 of this 2018 Act if:
(A) The broadband Internet access service provider certifies that it has ceased engaging in all of the activities described in subsection (3) of this section; and
(B) The Public Utility Commission determines that allowing a public body to contract with the broadband Internet access service provider provides significant public interest benefits.
(5)(a) A broadband Internet access service provider engaged in the provision of broadband Internet access service to a public body shall publicly disclose information regarding the provider’s network management practices and performance characteristics and the commercial terms of the provider’s broadband Internet access service sufficient for end users to verify that the service is provided in compliance with subsections (3) and (4) of this section.