Agreed. Funny how only the establishment Left complains about "fake" news. They've lost control of the narrative and know it; Obama's impotent farewell lecture tour is a last-ditch effort to discredit the "alt" sites and networks that helped defeat Hillary Clinton.
Whatever you think of him as a person or his policy recommendations, Donald Trump is a genius political operator who enjoys outfoxing the establishment media. It's like watching a master-level troll repeatedly outplay every smug asshole in NYC-NOVA-DC. That's why he calls the New York Times "failing" in his tweets to millions of people and decides to let TMZ of all networks air a documentary about him. (And lest anyone pity the Times, remember how they were in bed with the establishment during the run-up to the Iraq War, promulgating all sorts of lies to drum up support for that fiasco.)
When the First Amendment was ratified, every newspaper in the republic was blatantly partisan -- if your operatives weren't discrediting your enemies through anonymous columns, you were doing it wrong. I much prefer an environment where everyone knows where everyone stands, instead of putting on airs about being some unbiased source of truth even though you're actually in bed with the state.
Besides, blatant newspaper partisanship back then in no way precluded genius works like the Federalist and Antifederalist letters from being published and shared. Ignore the smug elitists on the Left who think only they can decide what's "fake" and what is not.
Agreed, though I don't trust any national politician. Based on Trump's background (real estate, living in a cosmopolitan city like New York, Hollywood shows), I'd characterize him as a Big City party machine Democrat-type -- who somehow owned the entire GOP field and got elected president. Do you think he's really much different than the Chicago/NYC/SF machine politicians?
As for social issues, my suspicion is that Trump doesn't care either way. Unlike Pence, he's not a self-anointed crusader for Evangelical Christianity, but he's also not a left wing SJW who will make bathroom gender or whatever a *defining national issue*.
But like you said, Trump is a wildcard, so who the hell knows. Hence my strategy of tossing out any ideological frameworks and tallying the score; so far it's in Trump's favor, but four years is a long time.
The more I reflect on this election, the more fascinating it becomes.
While I didn't vote for Trump nor support his campaign, he's in the black right now as far as I'm concerned:
-TPP is dead -He finished off the remnants of the Bush crime family by humiliating and crushing Jeb! in the primaries. ("Iraq was a disaster," "9/11 happened on his brother's watch" -- pretty amazing he said this in a GOP primary right in their backyard.) Watch the various YouTube videos and Trump sounds like every leftist I knew circa 2006 waiting for the Democratic Party to say as much. Had that corpse of a candidate John Kerry been as animated in 2004, history might have turned out very differently. -In an act of bipartisanship, Trump also finished off the remnants of the Clinton crime family by humiliating Hillary and her sycophants with the greatest upset of the modern political era.
That being said, his administration can easily go into the red in a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." But until then, this stuff is more exciting and amusing than Game of Thrones. The more assholes he throws under the bus in his pursuit of petty vengeance and self-aggrandizement, the better.
It has nothing to do with hard work or studying. I'm reading Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" right now, so stop assuming I'm an idiot bumpkin, or even voted for Trump. And the only ones being talked down to right now are the Krugmans of the world who were too busy smelling each other's farts to see what was happening outside the glass towers of NYC.
FYI, this class of people brought us the Iraq War (great job guys!), the financial crisis (brilliant!), the bailouts (rewarding morons - perfect!), Obamacare, and a million other inflationary, broken policies & programs that engender moral hazards and limit freedom. In case you haven't guessed, I want these people to go away and let the states do their own thing. They all need real jobs that don't involve sucking on the federal tit.
In fact, the arrogant cluelessness displayed in your post is everything the Trumpers rallied against. You either get it or you don't.
As much as I despise Donald Trump, seeing these haughty Progressives eat a buffet of crows warms the cockles of my heart.
For the last 90 years, the Ivy League-armed technocrats of the Progressive apparatus have waged a relentless war against state sovereignty in their march to greater political and economic consolidation in D.C. and NYC. Only the "leadership" from the PhDs in D.C. matter, plebs. We'll control your healthcare, collude with the media to control the agenda, concentrate more power in the unelected bureaucracy that grows like a weed in Northern Virginia, and then call anyone who supports states' rights (aka federalism aka competitive sovereignty) a racist or neo-Confederate.
Fuck you. You made this bed. Now lie in it. Enjoy Trump turning the gun of the federal leviathan you created right in your face. Applauding for Obama's "I'm going it alone" screed when the Democrats lost Congress doesn't seem like a wise precedent now does it? But let's be honest: you only like democracy when it goes your way, otherwise you pout.
By the way, these same Silicon Valley assholes and California Democrats have made fun of Northern California's "State of Jefferson" secession movement for decades.
Seeing the Obama elitists go down in flames in Congress and the executive puts a big ol' smile on my face. The next blow against these Silicon Valley fucks will be the bursting of the zero percent interest rate bubble blown by the Fed (another wonderful gift from the Progressives), which will wipe out the GAAP non-profitable bullshit "app" companies in the Valley. (This is probably why they hate Trump, though: he's mentioned that we're in a bubble and it's the Fed's fault.)
Truthfully, though, the Democratic party and the country would be better off if they did leave. As long as the Dems in the Bay Area foist Pelosi, Boxer, and Harris on the rest of the republic, the party will be repugnant to most of the Rust Belt and places like New Hampshire, where citizens still value freedom and being left the fuck alone.
My point, perhaps stated obtusely, is that these ideas "won" -- in the sense that they're timeless and sensible -- because had we adhered to them, there wouldn't be Trump, and even if there were, he would be less dangerous to the republic.
To add something to the other comments about the benefits of the Electoral College...
The United States is a constitutional republic; the Framers were very clear about the dangers of majoritarian mob rule. The most important sentence in American history is from the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
I point this out because it was universally accepted by the Framers that rights precede governments -- they are not created by them. Governments exist to protect the universe of rights you possess as a human being. No majority can legitimately (or justly) take away free speech, or religious freedom.
As such, the Framers devised several mechanisms to limit mob rule and protect the states from a consolidated (and therefore tyrannical) federal government.
Senators were intended to represent state legislatures, not the people at large. This was so the federal government could not bully the states. Obamacare and other unfunded federal mandates would not exist if senators answered to state legislatures responsible for paying for such programs. The Progressives killed this with the Seventeenth Amendment, and it was not replaced with anything comparable, e.g. states representing a majority of the population can void any federal law.
Preserving the strength of the states through senators and the Electoral College is important because the Founders recognized the benefits of competitive sovereignty: if one state fell to tyranny or some other idiocy (aka went California), you could move to another state. Competitive sovereignty leads to legal innovations (Delaware corporate law as the de facto standard), tax competition, etc. The Fourteenth Amendment, properly enforced, corrects the chief problem with states' rights, namely localized majoritarian tyranny (Jim Crow) that deprives some group of its rights.
In short, the Electoral College requires broader coalitions beyond urban population centers. Consider NY and California, which by virtue of containing San Francisco and NYC, have disproportionately benefited from elitist, inflationary policies that have largely fucked over the "Brexit states." After all, the banks receiving the money conjured out of thin air by the Fed are in NYC, not Flint, and the money is used to prop up bullshit companies in SF, not Youngstown. Likewise, monetizing the federal debt via the Fed enables the bureaucrats to receive paychecks from Uncle Sam, and they're concentrated in Northern Virginia and D.C., not Michigan. If it wasn't for the bureaucrat class and its sycophants, Virginia would've gone to Trump, too.
The seeds of the republic's destruction were sown in the 1910s by the Progressives: the States were expelled from Congress (Seventeenth Amendment), federal income tax instated, and Federal Reserve created, leading to inflationary monetary policies that impoverish savers and create asset bubbles. Someone like Trump is an unsurprising response to decades of unchecked statism and the rise of the managerial/bureaucratic class; by definition, such a class cannot constitute anything close to a numerical majority.
The people are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.
Now Trump will become head of the federal leviathan the Progressives created and Republicans failed to control. He will have unprecedented executive powers thanks to the COWARDLY failure of Congress to reign in G.W. Bush and Obama.
But I do feel some schadenfreude now that Progressives are talking about secession.
For years, I was called everything from a neo-Confederate to racist for advocating states' rights and secession (if needed) in response to the federal leviathan that spies on us, wages unconstitutional wars, and debases our currency. I was called backwards when I sounded the alarm against political and economic consolidation in D.C., about how it was always a conceit that such programs could work without destroying liberty in the process. A nation of 310+ million stretching from sea to shining sea should not be centrally managed from D.C. -- or anywhere. And now we have Donald Trump in the presidency. Great.
The REAL winners in this election? The ideas on which this republic was founded. Competitive sovereignty between the states. Limited federal government based on strict interpretation of enumerated powers. Congressional primacy (Article I > Article II). A president with less executive power. The rule of law. Separation of powers. Decentralization. Liberty.
Restore the republic, and you have less to fear from tyrants like Trump, Clinton, and the would-be Caesars who show up in 2020. This country was blessed to have one Cincinnatus in Washington, but we must always err on the side of prudence and never give into further political consolidation.
This trend has occurred for literally centuries. Each new wave of technological innovation eliminates jobs that escaped the previous wave. And I think this is a Good Thing for humanity in aggregate, even if it causes local disruption and job loss.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Trump has strong support in regions that engage in resource cultivation and extraction. Even if the citizens of these states are economically marginalized, politically they exercise disproportionate power due to how the republic is configured, e.g., electoral college votes.
The reality is that IF Trump is elected and IF he somehow gets Congress to agree to tariffs (or whatever meddling he concocts to appeal to the rubes), artificially increasing costs by government intervention -- while we're also in an artificial zero interest rate environment -- will only accelerate automation. Financing is really damn cheap, and the prospect of paying people more money is a strong inducement to eliminate their jobs, especially on the low-end where government regulation already makes hiring people needlessly difficult, expensive, and convoluted.
Many years ago I lived in area that once had an abundance of logging jobs. Most of them went away -- even though plenty of timber was still harvested -- due to improved efficiency and automation. But displaced workers blamed those damn tree huggers for their woes. The main driver -- even if regulation has some impact -- was and is automation. However, if you're smart enough to see how all this fits together, you're probably not the kind of person to sit around collecting unemployment checks and voting for people who want to redistribute wealth and/or meddle with the economy for your benefit. You see how the landscape changes and you change with it.
That being said, I absolutely understand the populist anger when banks and other dipshits are bailed out, and people are not. The only sensible answer is to stop playing favorites across the board and let the economy naturally adjust.
You're correct, roman_mir, but this isn't a US-specific problem. There's Japan, EU, etc. It's a rolling disaster for the so-called liberal capitalist democracies.
What's disheartening is that public anger over the dismal outcomes of this inflationary fiscal policy manifests itself in bizarre and ineffective forms, like Trump. The Fed, meanwhile, continues as usual, while Congress ignores its constitutional responsibility to coin money and regulate its value.
The current bubble will definitively end when the Central Banks stop propping up asset prices through cheap money and absurdly low interest rates (to say nothing of buying stocks directly, which is a disaster for capitalism).
If you look at Twitter and other bullshitty social media companies that never turn real profits, you'll see they dilute shareholders by issuing stock to employees, who unload the shares for cash instead of holding them like long-term owners [1]. During asset bubbles, this makes sense since the stock functions as a sort of currency the company controls, and you can keep printing as long as there are buyers and fools.
People with easy money are a) desperately searching for yield, since interest rates are artificially low b) shortsighted morons who buy into whatever buzzwords you throw at them and have no memory of 1999-2000. So they snatch up the flood of Twitter shares -- which are overpriced based on conservative valuation methods that examine the fundamentals of the underlying business -- and hope to find a greater fool to sell to. Twitter's timing is off, since I think we're reaching the top of the current asset bubble, so there won't be a greater fool at the current price.
The good news is that Bay Area residents will probably see housing and rent prices start to level off and perhaps decline, and BART won't be as crowded due to the inevitable layoffs at the various bullshit companies there. In Twitter's case, I suspect a private equity firm swoops in after the stock price declines some more and fires half the employees. Based on bottom-up economic indicators I follow, the economy is not strong enough to support current asset prices, but we're in that awkward period where Wile E. Coyote hasn't looked down just yet.
The lesson here is that public companies that never turn a real profit, or become worse off as they get bigger, are usually broken at a fundamental level that's really hard to fix.
This benefits all shareholders, of which the Waltons are the largest.
Do you own index or mutual funds in a 401(k) account to fund your retirement? If yes, the "blood" is on your hands, too. You proportionally benefit as much as the Waltons when jobs are cut and money is freed up for other purposes, including returning it to the people who own the enterprise.
Anyone here a California public employee counting on a pension? How do you think CalPERS is going to achieve those rosy 7% returns to fund the payments to future retirees? Dividends, share repurchases, and growth from allocating retained earnings -- the shareholders own this money, after all -- in value-additive projects. Cutting the fat is one way of freeing up additional free cash for these purposes.
I think it's interesting how millions of Americans are shareholders who benefit from these moves as much as the fat cats.
Yes, the benevolent, all-knowing central planners have signaled the following over the past three decades: the central banks will collude to keep interest rates extremely low, and minimum wages will continue to increase in many jurisdictions. After all, these planners are more qualified than market participants to determine who should get paid what.
Regardless of one's political inclinations, I find it interesting how these factors (along with the ones you mentioned) interact to move the goalposts, i.e., when automation makes financial sense. Money is cheap and labor, especially at the low end, is comparatively expensive, assuming it's on the books. (To your list I would also add licensing requirements for all sorts of professions and trades.) But at the end of the day, if you use the power of the state to make it difficult to hire, employ, and fire people, enterprises will just figure out how to avoid employing them in the fist place, starting with the bottom of the ladder first. Then everyone can be on the dole and vote for the politicians that keep the handouts flowing!
You're absolutely correct. Bemoaning the loss of these "jobs" is like fretting that indoor plumbing will put the "night soil" collection crew out of business. Inane busywork is not a particularly lofty goal for any wise civilization.
Besides, think about how preposterous and decadent pizza delivery is: you pay someone $X/hour to deliver a 1 lb package in a vehicle that weighs ~3000 pounds and is powered by oil, a finite resource that took literally millions of years for nature to create. In Critical Path, Bucky Fuller argued that one gallon of gasoline should really cost $1 million, given the time and energy (solar, geothermal) required to create petroleum [1].
Entrepreneurship is about discovering and eliminating inefficiencies in the economy's production structure as much as creating or inventing Shiny New Things. In fact, efficiency improvements are paramount if we want to support 7+ billion human beings on this planet.
Thanks for sharing. Just from reading about that era, I picked up vibes that shortening the work week was taken seriously by a lot of eminent people, but had no idea about that bill.
One of the reasons I enjoy studying history is that you see lots of sensible ideas and movements that were somehow lost or abandoned along the way. For example, Colonial America was probably the most literate society in history up to that point, and without a massive education bureaucracy. That's interesting to me -- how can we learn from that experience and outcome? How can we educate people without an Education System per se? You don't want to idolize the past or fall into Lost Cause-type romanticism, but you also don't want to discard it, either.
There's an interesting book called Kellogg's Six Hour Day by Hunnicutt. Here's the synopsis:
"Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom."
The employees grandfathered into the 30-hour week stayed on it until they retired in the 1980s. A 30-hour week gave employees more time for clubs, gardening, sports, family, etc. When you think about how wealthy we are in, say, energetic terms (useful work extracted from an ox vs cubic meter of natural gas), it's amazing how much time and capital we spend on destructive bullshit like sitting in traffic or paying people to do our taxes because the system is too complicated (we're paying a tax on paying taxes ffs). Just unbelievable how needlessly dumb the world is in light of automation, nuclear power, blah, blah, blah.
The ancient Greeks viewed labor as a necessary evil that got in the way of more enlightened pursuits [1]. This is not to say they condoned laziness, but TPS reports, patent lawsuits, and $ModernBullshit are not the highest forms of civilization. Why we focus on metrics like GDP -- which in no way accounts for quality, or whether the "work" should even be done -- is absolutely beyond me. In the end, complex, industrial civilization is still relatively new compared to the species' time on the planet, so we're still trying to figure this out.
This is the chief argument against complex regulations, however well-intentioned. The perfect example is Dodd-Frank here in the United States.
Citibank's CEO noted that Dodd-Frank would "widen the moat" -- that is, give them a competitive advantage because Citibank's large enough to pay lawyers and compliance staff without much impact to the bottom line.
Regional banks -- and we need them to thrive because economic centralization is as bad or worse than political centralization -- have to comply with this regulation too, only it's proportionally more costly to them. Here's what the CEO of M&T Bank in Buffalo, NY said about it:
"Rapidly changing technology in combination with the need for continued expenditure on compliance infrastructure is creating a dual challenge for regional banks.... Traditional banks are increasingly caught in a vise—they cannot afford to shortchange investment in the mobile and online banking technologies that their clients want, as well as in the cybersecurity that will keep their customers’ information and assets safe from global criminals. Yet banks also have to simultaneously bear the higher regulatory and compliance expenses and decreased revenues brought about by legislation and regulation meant to address the ills of the last crisis. The largest banks, on the other hand, are able to take advantage of their massive size to shrug off the impact of compliance costs, fines and penalties, and still have the wherewithal to invest in the latest technologies. As a result, they are increasingly gaining a competitive advantage over these smaller banks."
There's a provocative and interesting book called The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History by Kolko, a socialist. His thesis is that the famous "progressive" regulations of the early 1900s benefited large, established corporations -- essentially they used Congress to create favorable regulatory regimes to stifle competition and upstarts.
This is why you should be extremely skeptical of dense "regulations" drafted by lobbyists working for entrenched companies. If you benefit, it's usually by accident.
Why not? The central bank cartel is conjuring money out of thin air and suppressing interest rates, so "investors" have to seek returns *somewhere*. We tried make-believe internet companies, housing, bonds, commodities, so why not this is, too? Let's also turn them into securities, sell them to public pension funds (which face a massive funding gap and thus desperately need returns), and then have the government bail us out when the whole thing explodes, because moral hazard is missing from your original idea. MURICA!
All snark aside, I'm counting on the computer scientists and engineers to save us from the legal carter, which, like banks, exists to serve its members at the expense of productive society. Hence the bloated tax codes, legal codes, etc. Algorithms seem like the best way to beat the useless rent-seeking bastards at their own game.
In the year 2016, a disturbing amount of human activity is run through Excel instead of proper databases.
A similar study from 2009 tested for errors in various operational spreadsheets and concluded, "Our results confirm the general belief among those who have studied spreadsheets that errors are commonplace." The Financial Timescommented on the prevalence of spreadsheet errors in business, saying it's probably a function of training and organizational culture.
I've heard from a few salespeople in the software industry that their biggest competitor in the SMB space isn't $BigCRMCorp, but Excel spreadsheets that have acreted over the years.
The central banks of the world are conjuring money out of thin air and using it to buy stocks, which are ownership claims on real businesses with real assets, made of real materials in a universe dominated by the laws of thermodynamics [1]. Think about this absurdity and the implications for holders of fiat currency.
Therefore, the marginal buyer is increasingly a central bank that can create as much money as it wants, consequences be damned. When this ends, I suspect equities, like most other asset classes, will have a long fall back to reality.
Concurrently, interest rates are artificially low, leading to all sorts of chicanery and malinvestments. Shares of dividend-paying blue chips, such as Microsoft, are bid higher and higher as income-seeking investors search for yield wherever they can. However, the price you pay for future cash flows absolutely matters and determines your return; at current valuations, I suspect there will be a lot of tears for equity holders.
Between the third central bank-induced financial bubble in less than 20 years and Trump/Clinton, I'm starting to think I'm on a bizarro Earth 2 or something.
Lots of people are incapable of thinking like the owner of a business, and are therefore surprised when things happen, despite it being obvious or inevitable from the perspective of a shrewd businessman. As a corollary, employees of public companies should get in the habit of reading financial disclosures and earnings call transcripts -- management often telegraphs what they're going to do, including outsourcing or layoffs. This puts you in the position of being one of the first passengers to learn that the Titanic has struck an iceberg, so make your way to the lifeboats before the rush.
A few months ago, there was an article about how the IT department at a car rental company was outsourced. Not that I'm glad or anything, but someone paying attention should *never* make a career out of working in the back office of a business like that. The car rental business is tough enough as it is, but Uber/Lyft have added additional pressure.
I work in a compliance function, so "infrastructure as code," Docker, and the rest of that shit make my life so much easier since we can automate large chunks of our security controls and audit work. That's progress. As an owner, having fewer admin grunts means more money to reinvest in higher-return activities (which as an employee you can help drive, if you're so inclined) and/or return to shareholders, who, after all, own the damn business and expect something from it.
But this hard-nosed perspective, for some reason, strikes people as cruel, or you're viewed as the villain or whatever. It's just how the world works and you have to adapt accordingly, even if it's annoying and extra work at times.
Yep, the whippersnappers probably don't realize how profitable local newspapers used to be. Indeed, they were one of Buffett's favorite investments in the early days. From a 1977 WSJ article: "Warren likens owning a monopoly or market-dominant newspaper to owning an unregulated toll bridge. You have relative freedom to increase rates when and as much as you want." [1] When the economics are like that, you can afford prestige journalism and professional reporters.
The WSJ article also notes how Buffett made a killing buying the Washington Post Co. at a significant discount to book value; the company's huge investment portfolio wasn't factored into the stock price at the time. Fast forward several decades, and now Bezos owns the actual newspaper and WaPo brand.
While there are legitimate *technology* companies in Silicon Valley, the ad-delivery/social media "it's 1999 all over again!" outfits for some reason get all the attention. Looking at some of the large employers in the area, you realize a huge number of people earn a paycheck from firms that sell ads, make CRM software, and run social media services (in the red quarter after quarter). It's sort of like the West Coast Wall Street: too many overpaid assholes doing stuff of no useful value to human civilization. (And both groups are enabled by the torrent of easy money from the central banks, which makes all sorts of bullshit possible.)
Retail is a brutal industry. Just look at retailers in the U.S. over the last century -- it's like the rise and fall of great empires. Again and again, dominant incumbents are unable or unwilling to innovate and stay ahead...or they blow money on expensive but useless projects like the Sears Tower.
While I don't follow Walmart closely, a few business sources I read summarized the company's recent strategy as cost-cutting and aggressive inventory management (keep fewer items in-store) to generate more free cash for share repurchases.
Share repurchases can absolutely be a productive use of free cash relative to other options, but Walmart needed to aggressively pursue ecommerce and other innovations *years* ago. Some ideas: improved self-checkout, better in-store navigation, easy way to order shit automatically and have it ready for pickup in-store, RFID tags, etc. Creating a hassle-free and brutally efficient way for customers to buy boring shit at good prices -- and defending that position against Amazon and the like -- seems like a better use of shareholder dollars than share repurchases, or Johnny-come-lately-oh-shit-let's-overpay-to-get-something-going acquisitions like Jet.com. At least they're trying something.
Walmart already has the hard parts in place: stores, logistics, leverage over suppliers. But they couldn't handle the pile of front-end code and in-store operations? (And by operations I mean designing stores for order pickup. Reflecting on my visits to Walmart, there's nothing that screams, "Hey, you can order shit online and go to this clearly-marked area in the front of the store for pickup!")
The strategy of aggressive share repurchases seems like slow capitulation in an industry like retail, especially when cost-cutting creates shitty in-store experiences for customers. I used to shop at Walmart, but in recent years the lines have ballooned and there's a non-trivial chance an item I want won't be on the shelf. WHAT'S THE POINT OF B&M STORES IF YOU DON'T KEEP SHIT ON-HAND? Simply put, any dollar savings I get from shopping there are wiped out by the cost in sanity and time.
Exactly. The current SaaS/social media/bullshit.ly bubble is apparent when you examine these companies. In one ear you hear about how "cloud" makes IT operations cheaper. But then a glorified ad delivery platform like Twitter still burns through cash at alarming rates. The business has no moat -- it's a fad at best -- and I think everyone from Google to Twitter will be stung once the impact of widespread adblocking is fully priced into ad rates.
(My gut tells me a correction in the spyware/ad tracking/clickbait ecosystem/cesspool is overdue. This could be recency bias, though: I helped two of my older relatives install uBlock Origin last week. Google has the brains and balance sheet to weather a correction -- Twitter doesn't. Outside of ads, Twitter's only other source of revenue is "analytics," i.e., selling your data to others. But even if the "adblocking effect" doesn't materialize, Twitter probably couldn't survive a drop in ad spend during a recession. My guess is scarce ad dollars are more productively deployed outside of Twitter; as Warren Buffett says, when the tide rolls out we see who's been swimming naked.)
An enterprise is value-destructive to owners if all the sales, R&D, G&A, etc. never amounts to free cash for profitable reinvestment in the business or disbursement to owners in the form of dividends and/or share buybacks. Add to that continued dilution of shareholders and IMHO you're looking at one poorly-run enterprise.
That being said, if an acquirer can bolt the Twitter service onto its existing sales and ops teams, it can probably generate real free cash. Working at Twitter as a peon seems like standing on thin ice -- an acquirer thinking about turning Twitter into a cash flow engine will probably fire 2/3 of the employees, consolidate data centers, etc.
Root cause analysis: central banks and their terrible monetary policies make money too cheap and easy, which leads to grotesque misallocation of resources, bubbles, and painful implosions. Instead letting the market constantly course correct, we effectively subsidize bullshit for a few years, feel good about it, but then have everything explode catastrophically.
Can someone explain to this ol' fogey why anyone wants to own Twitter at $18/share?
A cursory look at the company's recent financials shows it's still losing money. The number of shares outstanding is also increasing, so even if the company manages to generate (real) free cash at some point, you're entitled to a smaller share of it. The entire thing is bizarre -- it's not like Twitter's in a capital-intensive business like aluminum or shipbuilding.
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter is sold in the not-too-distant future. I suspect a grown-up management team could probably make Twitter profitably generate cash.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. Funny how only the establishment Left complains about "fake" news. They've lost control of the narrative and know it; Obama's impotent farewell lecture tour is a last-ditch effort to discredit the "alt" sites and networks that helped defeat Hillary Clinton.
Whatever you think of him as a person or his policy recommendations, Donald Trump is a genius political operator who enjoys outfoxing the establishment media. It's like watching a master-level troll repeatedly outplay every smug asshole in NYC-NOVA-DC. That's why he calls the New York Times "failing" in his tweets to millions of people and decides to let TMZ of all networks air a documentary about him. (And lest anyone pity the Times, remember how they were in bed with the establishment during the run-up to the Iraq War, promulgating all sorts of lies to drum up support for that fiasco.)
When the First Amendment was ratified, every newspaper in the republic was blatantly partisan -- if your operatives weren't discrediting your enemies through anonymous columns, you were doing it wrong. I much prefer an environment where everyone knows where everyone stands, instead of putting on airs about being some unbiased source of truth even though you're actually in bed with the state.
Besides, blatant newspaper partisanship back then in no way precluded genius works like the Federalist and Antifederalist letters from being published and shared. Ignore the smug elitists on the Left who think only they can decide what's "fake" and what is not.
Agreed, though I don't trust any national politician. Based on Trump's background (real estate, living in a cosmopolitan city like New York, Hollywood shows), I'd characterize him as a Big City party machine Democrat-type -- who somehow owned the entire GOP field and got elected president. Do you think he's really much different than the Chicago/NYC/SF machine politicians?
As for social issues, my suspicion is that Trump doesn't care either way. Unlike Pence, he's not a self-anointed crusader for Evangelical Christianity, but he's also not a left wing SJW who will make bathroom gender or whatever a *defining national issue*.
But like you said, Trump is a wildcard, so who the hell knows. Hence my strategy of tossing out any ideological frameworks and tallying the score; so far it's in Trump's favor, but four years is a long time.
The more I reflect on this election, the more fascinating it becomes.
While I didn't vote for Trump nor support his campaign, he's in the black right now as far as I'm concerned:
-TPP is dead
-He finished off the remnants of the Bush crime family by humiliating and crushing Jeb! in the primaries. ("Iraq was a disaster," "9/11 happened on his brother's watch" -- pretty amazing he said this in a GOP primary right in their backyard.) Watch the various YouTube videos and Trump sounds like every leftist I knew circa 2006 waiting for the Democratic Party to say as much. Had that corpse of a candidate John Kerry been as animated in 2004, history might have turned out very differently.
-In an act of bipartisanship, Trump also finished off the remnants of the Clinton crime family by humiliating Hillary and her sycophants with the greatest upset of the modern political era.
That being said, his administration can easily go into the red in a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." But until then, this stuff is more exciting and amusing than Game of Thrones. The more assholes he throws under the bus in his pursuit of petty vengeance and self-aggrandizement, the better.
It has nothing to do with hard work or studying. I'm reading Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" right now, so stop assuming I'm an idiot bumpkin, or even voted for Trump. And the only ones being talked down to right now are the Krugmans of the world who were too busy smelling each other's farts to see what was happening outside the glass towers of NYC.
FYI, this class of people brought us the Iraq War (great job guys!), the financial crisis (brilliant!), the bailouts (rewarding morons - perfect!), Obamacare, and a million other inflationary, broken policies & programs that engender moral hazards and limit freedom. In case you haven't guessed, I want these people to go away and let the states do their own thing. They all need real jobs that don't involve sucking on the federal tit.
In fact, the arrogant cluelessness displayed in your post is everything the Trumpers rallied against. You either get it or you don't.
As much as I despise Donald Trump, seeing these haughty Progressives eat a buffet of crows warms the cockles of my heart.
For the last 90 years, the Ivy League-armed technocrats of the Progressive apparatus have waged a relentless war against state sovereignty in their march to greater political and economic consolidation in D.C. and NYC. Only the "leadership" from the PhDs in D.C. matter, plebs. We'll control your healthcare, collude with the media to control the agenda, concentrate more power in the unelected bureaucracy that grows like a weed in Northern Virginia, and then call anyone who supports states' rights (aka federalism aka competitive sovereignty) a racist or neo-Confederate.
Fuck you. You made this bed. Now lie in it. Enjoy Trump turning the gun of the federal leviathan you created right in your face. Applauding for Obama's "I'm going it alone" screed when the Democrats lost Congress doesn't seem like a wise precedent now does it? But let's be honest: you only like democracy when it goes your way, otherwise you pout.
By the way, these same Silicon Valley assholes and California Democrats have made fun of Northern California's "State of Jefferson" secession movement for decades.
Seeing the Obama elitists go down in flames in Congress and the executive puts a big ol' smile on my face. The next blow against these Silicon Valley fucks will be the bursting of the zero percent interest rate bubble blown by the Fed (another wonderful gift from the Progressives), which will wipe out the GAAP non-profitable bullshit "app" companies in the Valley. (This is probably why they hate Trump, though: he's mentioned that we're in a bubble and it's the Fed's fault.)
Truthfully, though, the Democratic party and the country would be better off if they did leave. As long as the Dems in the Bay Area foist Pelosi, Boxer, and Harris on the rest of the republic, the party will be repugnant to most of the Rust Belt and places like New Hampshire, where citizens still value freedom and being left the fuck alone.
We're not.
My point, perhaps stated obtusely, is that these ideas "won" -- in the sense that they're timeless and sensible -- because had we adhered to them, there wouldn't be Trump, and even if there were, he would be less dangerous to the republic.
To add something to the other comments about the benefits of the Electoral College...
The United States is a constitutional republic; the Framers were very clear about the dangers of majoritarian mob rule. The most important sentence in American history is from the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
I point this out because it was universally accepted by the Framers that rights precede governments -- they are not created by them. Governments exist to protect the universe of rights you possess as a human being. No majority can legitimately (or justly) take away free speech, or religious freedom.
As such, the Framers devised several mechanisms to limit mob rule and protect the states from a consolidated (and therefore tyrannical) federal government.
Senators were intended to represent state legislatures, not the people at large. This was so the federal government could not bully the states. Obamacare and other unfunded federal mandates would not exist if senators answered to state legislatures responsible for paying for such programs. The Progressives killed this with the Seventeenth Amendment, and it was not replaced with anything comparable, e.g. states representing a majority of the population can void any federal law.
Preserving the strength of the states through senators and the Electoral College is important because the Founders recognized the benefits of competitive sovereignty: if one state fell to tyranny or some other idiocy (aka went California), you could move to another state. Competitive sovereignty leads to legal innovations (Delaware corporate law as the de facto standard), tax competition, etc. The Fourteenth Amendment, properly enforced, corrects the chief problem with states' rights, namely localized majoritarian tyranny (Jim Crow) that deprives some group of its rights.
In short, the Electoral College requires broader coalitions beyond urban population centers. Consider NY and California, which by virtue of containing San Francisco and NYC, have disproportionately benefited from elitist, inflationary policies that have largely fucked over the "Brexit states." After all, the banks receiving the money conjured out of thin air by the Fed are in NYC, not Flint, and the money is used to prop up bullshit companies in SF, not Youngstown. Likewise, monetizing the federal debt via the Fed enables the bureaucrats to receive paychecks from Uncle Sam, and they're concentrated in Northern Virginia and D.C., not Michigan. If it wasn't for the bureaucrat class and its sycophants, Virginia would've gone to Trump, too.
The seeds of the republic's destruction were sown in the 1910s by the Progressives: the States were expelled from Congress (Seventeenth Amendment), federal income tax instated, and Federal Reserve created, leading to inflationary monetary policies that impoverish savers and create asset bubbles. Someone like Trump is an unsurprising response to decades of unchecked statism and the rise of the managerial/bureaucratic class; by definition, such a class cannot constitute anything close to a numerical majority.
The people are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.
Now Trump will become head of the federal leviathan the Progressives created and Republicans failed to control. He will have unprecedented executive powers thanks to the COWARDLY failure of Congress to reign in G.W. Bush and Obama.
But I do feel some schadenfreude now that Progressives are talking about secession.
For years, I was called everything from a neo-Confederate to racist for advocating states' rights and secession (if needed) in response to the federal leviathan that spies on us, wages unconstitutional wars, and debases our currency. I was called backwards when I sounded the alarm against political and economic consolidation in D.C., about how it was always a conceit that such programs could work without destroying liberty in the process. A nation of 310+ million stretching from sea to shining sea should not be centrally managed from D.C. -- or anywhere. And now we have Donald Trump in the presidency. Great.
The REAL winners in this election? The ideas on which this republic was founded. Competitive sovereignty between the states. Limited federal government based on strict interpretation of enumerated powers. Congressional primacy (Article I > Article II). A president with less executive power. The rule of law. Separation of powers. Decentralization. Liberty.
Restore the republic, and you have less to fear from tyrants like Trump, Clinton, and the would-be Caesars who show up in 2020. This country was blessed to have one Cincinnatus in Washington, but we must always err on the side of prudence and never give into further political consolidation.
Agriculture, mining, forestry, fishing, etc.
This trend has occurred for literally centuries. Each new wave of technological innovation eliminates jobs that escaped the previous wave. And I think this is a Good Thing for humanity in aggregate, even if it causes local disruption and job loss.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Trump has strong support in regions that engage in resource cultivation and extraction. Even if the citizens of these states are economically marginalized, politically they exercise disproportionate power due to how the republic is configured, e.g., electoral college votes.
The reality is that IF Trump is elected and IF he somehow gets Congress to agree to tariffs (or whatever meddling he concocts to appeal to the rubes), artificially increasing costs by government intervention -- while we're also in an artificial zero interest rate environment -- will only accelerate automation. Financing is really damn cheap, and the prospect of paying people more money is a strong inducement to eliminate their jobs, especially on the low-end where government regulation already makes hiring people needlessly difficult, expensive, and convoluted.
Many years ago I lived in area that once had an abundance of logging jobs. Most of them went away -- even though plenty of timber was still harvested -- due to improved efficiency and automation. But displaced workers blamed those damn tree huggers for their woes. The main driver -- even if regulation has some impact -- was and is automation. However, if you're smart enough to see how all this fits together, you're probably not the kind of person to sit around collecting unemployment checks and voting for people who want to redistribute wealth and/or meddle with the economy for your benefit. You see how the landscape changes and you change with it.
That being said, I absolutely understand the populist anger when banks and other dipshits are bailed out, and people are not. The only sensible answer is to stop playing favorites across the board and let the economy naturally adjust.
You're correct, roman_mir, but this isn't a US-specific problem. There's Japan, EU, etc. It's a rolling disaster for the so-called liberal capitalist democracies.
What's disheartening is that public anger over the dismal outcomes of this inflationary fiscal policy manifests itself in bizarre and ineffective forms, like Trump. The Fed, meanwhile, continues as usual, while Congress ignores its constitutional responsibility to coin money and regulate its value.
The current bubble will definitively end when the Central Banks stop propping up asset prices through cheap money and absurdly low interest rates (to say nothing of buying stocks directly, which is a disaster for capitalism).
If you look at Twitter and other bullshitty social media companies that never turn real profits, you'll see they dilute shareholders by issuing stock to employees, who unload the shares for cash instead of holding them like long-term owners [1]. During asset bubbles, this makes sense since the stock functions as a sort of currency the company controls, and you can keep printing as long as there are buyers and fools.
People with easy money are a) desperately searching for yield, since interest rates are artificially low b) shortsighted morons who buy into whatever buzzwords you throw at them and have no memory of 1999-2000. So they snatch up the flood of Twitter shares -- which are overpriced based on conservative valuation methods that examine the fundamentals of the underlying business -- and hope to find a greater fool to sell to. Twitter's timing is off, since I think we're reaching the top of the current asset bubble, so there won't be a greater fool at the current price.
The good news is that Bay Area residents will probably see housing and rent prices start to level off and perhaps decline, and BART won't be as crowded due to the inevitable layoffs at the various bullshit companies there. In Twitter's case, I suspect a private equity firm swoops in after the stock price declines some more and fires half the employees. Based on bottom-up economic indicators I follow, the economy is not strong enough to support current asset prices, but we're in that awkward period where Wile E. Coyote hasn't looked down just yet.
The lesson here is that public companies that never turn a real profit, or become worse off as they get bigger, are usually broken at a fundamental level that's really hard to fix.
[1] = https://ycharts.com/companies/...
This benefits all shareholders, of which the Waltons are the largest.
Do you own index or mutual funds in a 401(k) account to fund your retirement? If yes, the "blood" is on your hands, too. You proportionally benefit as much as the Waltons when jobs are cut and money is freed up for other purposes, including returning it to the people who own the enterprise.
Anyone here a California public employee counting on a pension? How do you think CalPERS is going to achieve those rosy 7% returns to fund the payments to future retirees? Dividends, share repurchases, and growth from allocating retained earnings -- the shareholders own this money, after all -- in value-additive projects. Cutting the fat is one way of freeing up additional free cash for these purposes.
I think it's interesting how millions of Americans are shareholders who benefit from these moves as much as the fat cats.
Yes, the benevolent, all-knowing central planners have signaled the following over the past three decades: the central banks will collude to keep interest rates extremely low, and minimum wages will continue to increase in many jurisdictions. After all, these planners are more qualified than market participants to determine who should get paid what.
Regardless of one's political inclinations, I find it interesting how these factors (along with the ones you mentioned) interact to move the goalposts, i.e., when automation makes financial sense. Money is cheap and labor, especially at the low end, is comparatively expensive, assuming it's on the books. (To your list I would also add licensing requirements for all sorts of professions and trades.) But at the end of the day, if you use the power of the state to make it difficult to hire, employ, and fire people, enterprises will just figure out how to avoid employing them in the fist place, starting with the bottom of the ladder first. Then everyone can be on the dole and vote for the politicians that keep the handouts flowing!
You're absolutely correct. Bemoaning the loss of these "jobs" is like fretting that indoor plumbing will put the "night soil" collection crew out of business. Inane busywork is not a particularly lofty goal for any wise civilization.
Besides, think about how preposterous and decadent pizza delivery is: you pay someone $X/hour to deliver a 1 lb package in a vehicle that weighs ~3000 pounds and is powered by oil, a finite resource that took literally millions of years for nature to create. In Critical Path, Bucky Fuller argued that one gallon of gasoline should really cost $1 million, given the time and energy (solar, geothermal) required to create petroleum [1].
Entrepreneurship is about discovering and eliminating inefficiencies in the economy's production structure as much as creating or inventing Shiny New Things. In fact, efficiency improvements are paramount if we want to support 7+ billion human beings on this planet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thanks for sharing. Just from reading about that era, I picked up vibes that shortening the work week was taken seriously by a lot of eminent people, but had no idea about that bill.
One of the reasons I enjoy studying history is that you see lots of sensible ideas and movements that were somehow lost or abandoned along the way. For example, Colonial America was probably the most literate society in history up to that point, and without a massive education bureaucracy. That's interesting to me -- how can we learn from that experience and outcome? How can we educate people without an Education System per se? You don't want to idolize the past or fall into Lost Cause-type romanticism, but you also don't want to discard it, either.
There's an interesting book called Kellogg's Six Hour Day by Hunnicutt. Here's the synopsis:
"Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom."
The employees grandfathered into the 30-hour week stayed on it until they retired in the 1980s. A 30-hour week gave employees more time for clubs, gardening, sports, family, etc. When you think about how wealthy we are in, say, energetic terms (useful work extracted from an ox vs cubic meter of natural gas), it's amazing how much time and capital we spend on destructive bullshit like sitting in traffic or paying people to do our taxes because the system is too complicated (we're paying a tax on paying taxes ffs). Just unbelievable how needlessly dumb the world is in light of automation, nuclear power, blah, blah, blah.
The ancient Greeks viewed labor as a necessary evil that got in the way of more enlightened pursuits [1]. This is not to say they condoned laziness, but TPS reports, patent lawsuits, and $ModernBullshit are not the highest forms of civilization. Why we focus on metrics like GDP -- which in no way accounts for quality, or whether the "work" should even be done -- is absolutely beyond me. In the end, complex, industrial civilization is still relatively new compared to the species' time on the planet, so we're still trying to figure this out.
[1] = https://www.jstor.org/stable/6...
This is the chief argument against complex regulations, however well-intentioned. The perfect example is Dodd-Frank here in the United States.
Citibank's CEO noted that Dodd-Frank would "widen the moat" -- that is, give them a competitive advantage because Citibank's large enough to pay lawyers and compliance staff without much impact to the bottom line.
Regional banks -- and we need them to thrive because economic centralization is as bad or worse than political centralization -- have to comply with this regulation too, only it's proportionally more costly to them. Here's what the CEO of M&T Bank in Buffalo, NY said about it:
"Rapidly changing technology in combination with the need for continued expenditure on compliance infrastructure is creating a dual challenge for regional banks. ... Traditional banks are increasingly caught in a vise—they cannot afford to shortchange investment in the mobile and online banking technologies that their clients want, as well as in the cybersecurity that will keep their customers’ information and assets safe from global criminals. Yet banks also have to simultaneously bear the higher regulatory and compliance expenses and decreased revenues brought about by legislation and regulation meant to address the ills of the last crisis. The largest banks, on the other hand, are able to take advantage of their massive size to shrug off the impact of compliance costs, fines and penalties, and still have the wherewithal to invest in the latest technologies. As a result, they are increasingly gaining a competitive advantage over these smaller banks."
There's a provocative and interesting book called The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History by Kolko, a socialist. His thesis is that the famous "progressive" regulations of the early 1900s benefited large, established corporations -- essentially they used Congress to create favorable regulatory regimes to stifle competition and upstarts.
This is why you should be extremely skeptical of dense "regulations" drafted by lobbyists working for entrenched companies. If you benefit, it's usually by accident.
Why not? The central bank cartel is conjuring money out of thin air and suppressing interest rates, so "investors" have to seek returns *somewhere*. We tried make-believe internet companies, housing, bonds, commodities, so why not this is, too? Let's also turn them into securities, sell them to public pension funds (which face a massive funding gap and thus desperately need returns), and then have the government bail us out when the whole thing explodes, because moral hazard is missing from your original idea. MURICA!
All snark aside, I'm counting on the computer scientists and engineers to save us from the legal carter, which, like banks, exists to serve its members at the expense of productive society. Hence the bloated tax codes, legal codes, etc. Algorithms seem like the best way to beat the useless rent-seeking bastards at their own game.
In the year 2016, a disturbing amount of human activity is run through Excel instead of proper databases.
A similar study from 2009 tested for errors in various operational spreadsheets and concluded, "Our results confirm the general belief among those who have studied spreadsheets that errors are commonplace." The Financial Times commented on the prevalence of spreadsheet errors in business, saying it's probably a function of training and organizational culture.
I've heard from a few salespeople in the software industry that their biggest competitor in the SMB space isn't $BigCRMCorp, but Excel spreadsheets that have acreted over the years.
The central banks of the world are conjuring money out of thin air and using it to buy stocks, which are ownership claims on real businesses with real assets, made of real materials in a universe dominated by the laws of thermodynamics [1]. Think about this absurdity and the implications for holders of fiat currency.
Therefore, the marginal buyer is increasingly a central bank that can create as much money as it wants, consequences be damned. When this ends, I suspect equities, like most other asset classes, will have a long fall back to reality.
Concurrently, interest rates are artificially low, leading to all sorts of chicanery and malinvestments. Shares of dividend-paying blue chips, such as Microsoft, are bid higher and higher as income-seeking investors search for yield wherever they can. However, the price you pay for future cash flows absolutely matters and determines your return; at current valuations, I suspect there will be a lot of tears for equity holders.
Between the third central bank-induced financial bubble in less than 20 years and Trump/Clinton, I'm starting to think I'm on a bizarro Earth 2 or something.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article...
Lots of people are incapable of thinking like the owner of a business, and are therefore surprised when things happen, despite it being obvious or inevitable from the perspective of a shrewd businessman. As a corollary, employees of public companies should get in the habit of reading financial disclosures and earnings call transcripts -- management often telegraphs what they're going to do, including outsourcing or layoffs. This puts you in the position of being one of the first passengers to learn that the Titanic has struck an iceberg, so make your way to the lifeboats before the rush.
A few months ago, there was an article about how the IT department at a car rental company was outsourced. Not that I'm glad or anything, but someone paying attention should *never* make a career out of working in the back office of a business like that. The car rental business is tough enough as it is, but Uber/Lyft have added additional pressure.
I work in a compliance function, so "infrastructure as code," Docker, and the rest of that shit make my life so much easier since we can automate large chunks of our security controls and audit work. That's progress. As an owner, having fewer admin grunts means more money to reinvest in higher-return activities (which as an employee you can help drive, if you're so inclined) and/or return to shareholders, who, after all, own the damn business and expect something from it.
But this hard-nosed perspective, for some reason, strikes people as cruel, or you're viewed as the villain or whatever. It's just how the world works and you have to adapt accordingly, even if it's annoying and extra work at times.
Yep, the whippersnappers probably don't realize how profitable local newspapers used to be. Indeed, they were one of Buffett's favorite investments in the early days. From a 1977 WSJ article: "Warren likens owning a monopoly or market-dominant newspaper to owning an unregulated toll bridge. You have relative freedom to increase rates when and as much as you want." [1] When the economics are like that, you can afford prestige journalism and professional reporters.
The WSJ article also notes how Buffett made a killing buying the Washington Post Co. at a significant discount to book value; the company's huge investment portfolio wasn't factored into the stock price at the time. Fast forward several decades, and now Bezos owns the actual newspaper and WaPo brand.
While there are legitimate *technology* companies in Silicon Valley, the ad-delivery/social media "it's 1999 all over again!" outfits for some reason get all the attention. Looking at some of the large employers in the area, you realize a huge number of people earn a paycheck from firms that sell ads, make CRM software, and run social media services (in the red quarter after quarter). It's sort of like the West Coast Wall Street: too many overpaid assholes doing stuff of no useful value to human civilization. (And both groups are enabled by the torrent of easy money from the central banks, which makes all sorts of bullshit possible.)
[1] http://www.rationalwalk.com/wp...
Retail is a brutal industry. Just look at retailers in the U.S. over the last century -- it's like the rise and fall of great empires. Again and again, dominant incumbents are unable or unwilling to innovate and stay ahead...or they blow money on expensive but useless projects like the Sears Tower.
While I don't follow Walmart closely, a few business sources I read summarized the company's recent strategy as cost-cutting and aggressive inventory management (keep fewer items in-store) to generate more free cash for share repurchases.
Share repurchases can absolutely be a productive use of free cash relative to other options, but Walmart needed to aggressively pursue ecommerce and other innovations *years* ago. Some ideas: improved self-checkout, better in-store navigation, easy way to order shit automatically and have it ready for pickup in-store, RFID tags, etc. Creating a hassle-free and brutally efficient way for customers to buy boring shit at good prices -- and defending that position against Amazon and the like -- seems like a better use of shareholder dollars than share repurchases, or Johnny-come-lately-oh-shit-let's-overpay-to-get-something-going acquisitions like Jet.com. At least they're trying something.
Walmart already has the hard parts in place: stores, logistics, leverage over suppliers. But they couldn't handle the pile of front-end code and in-store operations? (And by operations I mean designing stores for order pickup. Reflecting on my visits to Walmart, there's nothing that screams, "Hey, you can order shit online and go to this clearly-marked area in the front of the store for pickup!")
The strategy of aggressive share repurchases seems like slow capitulation in an industry like retail, especially when cost-cutting creates shitty in-store experiences for customers. I used to shop at Walmart, but in recent years the lines have ballooned and there's a non-trivial chance an item I want won't be on the shelf. WHAT'S THE POINT OF B&M STORES IF YOU DON'T KEEP SHIT ON-HAND? Simply put, any dollar savings I get from shopping there are wiped out by the cost in sanity and time.
Exactly. The current SaaS/social media/bullshit.ly bubble is apparent when you examine these companies. In one ear you hear about how "cloud" makes IT operations cheaper. But then a glorified ad delivery platform like Twitter still burns through cash at alarming rates. The business has no moat -- it's a fad at best -- and I think everyone from Google to Twitter will be stung once the impact of widespread adblocking is fully priced into ad rates.
(My gut tells me a correction in the spyware/ad tracking/clickbait ecosystem/cesspool is overdue. This could be recency bias, though: I helped two of my older relatives install uBlock Origin last week. Google has the brains and balance sheet to weather a correction -- Twitter doesn't. Outside of ads, Twitter's only other source of revenue is "analytics," i.e., selling your data to others. But even if the "adblocking effect" doesn't materialize, Twitter probably couldn't survive a drop in ad spend during a recession. My guess is scarce ad dollars are more productively deployed outside of Twitter; as Warren Buffett says, when the tide rolls out we see who's been swimming naked.)
An enterprise is value-destructive to owners if all the sales, R&D, G&A, etc. never amounts to free cash for profitable reinvestment in the business or disbursement to owners in the form of dividends and/or share buybacks. Add to that continued dilution of shareholders and IMHO you're looking at one poorly-run enterprise.
That being said, if an acquirer can bolt the Twitter service onto its existing sales and ops teams, it can probably generate real free cash. Working at Twitter as a peon seems like standing on thin ice -- an acquirer thinking about turning Twitter into a cash flow engine will probably fire 2/3 of the employees, consolidate data centers, etc.
Root cause analysis: central banks and their terrible monetary policies make money too cheap and easy, which leads to grotesque misallocation of resources, bubbles, and painful implosions. Instead letting the market constantly course correct, we effectively subsidize bullshit for a few years, feel good about it, but then have everything explode catastrophically.
Can someone explain to this ol' fogey why anyone wants to own Twitter at $18/share?
A cursory look at the company's recent financials shows it's still losing money. The number of shares outstanding is also increasing, so even if the company manages to generate (real) free cash at some point, you're entitled to a smaller share of it. The entire thing is bizarre -- it's not like Twitter's in a capital-intensive business like aluminum or shipbuilding.
I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter is sold in the not-too-distant future. I suspect a grown-up management team could probably make Twitter profitably generate cash.