IBM

You can only use his strategy if you do the work on the short side and come up with good ideas. That's what his actual edge is. He doesn't have to disclose short positions like he does long positions in 13-F filings, so you only know what he's short if he's willing to talk about it publicly.

Being a short seller is like playing a game on hard mode. The bias of most market participants, sell-side analysts, self-promoting CEOs, and frauds are to the long side. Being net long is the only way to stay in the game over decades like Chanos has.

Chanos has been short TSLA for 4 years, and that's only been possible because the fund is net long [1]. The only reason he probably hasn't shut the short-only fund is because clients who allocate to it are probably hedging other long exposure they have allocated to other managers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv3YhMzS0z4

You don't have to believe Apple. All you need to do is look at the secondary market and see how prices for used devices hold up and see that it's true.

A new update in the Dragonfly story: https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...

In a few years doctors will be prescribing Apple Watches to patients and it will be reimbursed by health insurers. #TimeStamp

Counterpoint: “We’re thrilled Apple Watch has become an essential part of people's lives,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer. “The completely redesigned Apple Watch Series 4 continues to be an indispensable communication and fitness companion, and now with the addition of groundbreaking features, like fall detection and the first-ever ECG app offered directly to consumers, it also becomes an intelligent guardian for your health.”

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/redesigned-apple-watc...

>The real problem is so much more difficult that it's easy to try to find something you can do, block the technology, so you feel like you are doing something even if it's completely ignoring the root of the issue.

Blocking WhatsApp would be a perfectly justifiable solution! Regulating it would be as well. Facebook and Google want to airdrop their products into all of these emerging markets for growth, ignoring all the negative externalities until someone holds them accountable. None of these countries need to be fatalist about technology or these companies.

I think it's the most pressing political issue right now.

The focus of antitrust on prices is the direct result of Bork's influence on the Supreme Court, as this excellent article makes clear [1]:

>And so Bork argued that federal judges must resolve the “paradox” by declaring that the only legitimate purpose of antitrust law was to promote “consumer welfare,” basically meaning lower prices. And the only way to promote consumer welfare was to promote efficiency, because efficiency meant more production, which meant cheaper products. Any other purpose would interfere with efficiency and must therefore be ignored.

>To see how radical this was, just consider one example of something not captured by consumer welfare: employee welfare. In a town dominated by a single employer, workers may be forced to submit to poverty wages and abusive work conditions. Coal miners know this all too well—so do Walmart employees. (See Alec MacGillis, “What J. D. Vance Doesn’t Get About Appalachia.”) But to Bork, that could never justify antitrust enforcement so long as the product stayed cheap.

>The Antitrust Paradox makes for remarkable reading today. Like a caricature of a Chicago School economist, Bork explicitly warned against learning from experience. Rather, all business practices should be judged based on what “simple” (his word) economic models predict. “Only theory can separate the competitive from the anticompetitive,” he wrote. And theory says consolidation is good, because it means strong firms are crushing weak ones.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...

This is a profile of a person who has sparked a revival of antitrust in America. If you want to read the actual paper she wrote, which is linked to in the article, you should do that.

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

Lina Khan is a rising superstar in antitrust/policy circles and the next Democrat in the White House should appoint her to the Supreme Court so she can start to undo Bork's Chicago School influence on antitrust doctrine.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...

There's even less of a moat for Tesla in selling batteries to utilities than there is for their cars.

And SolarCity was heading to zero. It was acquired by Tesla because Elon had to bail himself out or the myth of Elon Musk as Tony Stark would have been undone. But also because he along with his cousins would have lost a lot of money. That's compounded by the fact that Elon is significantly personally leveraged and any loss of confidence in Elon Musk Inc. or a decline in his holdings would imperil his other companies [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-supports-his-business...

I follow Antonio García Martínez on Twitter and he's usually always making this same argument: that any privacy regulation is just going to entrench Facebook and Google. Which is very convenient because the implied solution to that is no regulation at all [1]!

But no one who cared about privacy thought this California bill was anyway a giant triumph. Everyone knows it's not equivalent to GDPR, for one because it's just in one state. This was just the result of a handful of people taking advantage of a quirk of California's legislative process to a put a gun to lawmakers's heads. If not for the ballot proposition process, California would be the last place I'd expect to pass strong EU-style privacy laws, because it's home to the surveillance capitalism industry.

What that California bill did do was show some tangible movement can be made in the US, to the point where the internet companies are now mobilizing to make a federal law (in the hope that this current Congress and Administration will not pass anything close to what's on the books in EU) [2]. What they didn't expect is that it's not just the left that is gunning for Facebook, Google, and Twitter anymore, it's the right as well. You might believe both aisles of the political spectrum are motivated by partisan reasons, but it doesn't matter. The bipartisan environment required for strong regulation to happen is here.

Privacy activists should seize on the opportunity to pass a federal law that's equivalent to the EU's. And if there's no movement on that, force the issue by creating a patchwork of laws in state legislatures. They should also seek out the backing of Apple, Salesforce, IBM, Oracle, or anyone else in the tech industry that has the straightforward business model of selling a product or service for money to a customer. It's critical to make clear to legislators that there's no united front from the "tech industry" on this.

[1] The real answer is antitrust enforcement, which is also gaining political support.

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/technology/tech-industry-...

It's been obvious for a while now, but I think this pretty much seals it: the smartwatch category is basically the iPod redux; there's no viable competition to the Apple Watch.

I'd gladly support BuzzFeed News. Just today they broke this huge story [1].

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christinekenneally/orph...

The SEC will have a great opportunity with Elon Musk.

The Tesla episode on Dirty Money is going to be lit.

They won't pull the Netflix app, they just won't let it update until they've made changes. Spotify tried directing users to the web and that's what happened with them.

The next step is to ban third party frameworks in apps for "analytics" or serving ads. That should be something intermediated and provided by Apple itself.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skadnetwo...

Here's the ProPublica stories that led to this

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...

https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...

The Dirty Money episode on Tesla is going to be lit.

This story is incredibly well reported. The lobbying force Google, Facebook and the rest of the surveillance capitalism industry can bring to bear against privacy legislation is incredible. If Apple wants to make a real dent in the universe for privacy, they need to be the opposing force in the same arena. Privacy at a product level is great, but creating a legislative equivalent to GDPR (and their other privacy laws) in the US would be infinitely better.

Loved this line:

>Soltani wryly pointed out that Mactaggart had offered Silicon Valley a take-it-or-leave-it privacy policy — the same kind that Silicon Valley usually offered everyone else.

>I'm not defending the quality of the article, it's bad. And I think if the reasons you just listed were in your original comment, I would have upvoted it instead of viewing it as overly dismissive.

That's fair. I should have written a fuller comment off the bat, but everyone can read my reasoning now.

>For sure, the bar is low because the stakes are low. But a shitty writer and a need to inflate word count for the editor yields articles like this as well, no need for a PR conspiracy. I guess it depends a lot on how you feel about Hanlon's razor.

I actually don't think this is anything particularly nefarious or underhanded. It's all in the game, as Omar would say. In fact I'm amused by how transparently bad it is. She brings up some good points (the permissions should be more granular) but the framing of the story is clearly working in service of Facebook's agenda. The actual solution that needs to happen isn't technical at all. It requires new legislation establishing equivalents to Data Protection Commissioners in the EU and creating a comprehensive, omnibus policy for them to enforce.

This story basically has no meat other than "the permissions API for contacts isn't granular enough" padded with casting aspersions on Apple, by the Facebook beat reporter. There are no quotes from anyone in the infosec field who is familiar with the technical underpinnings of iOS or is otherwise familiar with Apple's history with privacy (policy, technical, business model, etc). The entire premise of this story which amounts to "Is Apple really so virtuous?" is completely unsubstantiated.

So sure, I don't have any definite proof that this was a story planted by Facebook's PR team. That would require me to have seen the communications between this reporter and them, but I don't think the hurdle is "beyond a reasonable doubt" to say this was A Facebook Production given the context (the running spat between Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook employees on Twitter whining about this very thing, etc).

This is a Facebook submarine [1].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I've wondered why Apple has been perpetually undervalued for many years and my theory is basically that the market has always viewed Apple against comps like Dell, HP, Nokia, Blackberry, etc. That is, a hardware company that is always at risk of being passed over by something that was cheaper (because hardware is allegedly a commodity).

Of course the reality is that Apple has a durable moat in being a platform company with differentiated products. I think what's changing now is that the growth of Services is basically forcing the market to realize this and the multiple is getting re-rated upward.

The book The Outsiders profiled a number of CEOs and companies where good capital allocation enhanced total returns over time [1]. I'm pretty sure if it were revised there'd be a chapter about Tim Cook and Apple. Being able to buy back stock in size for 5 years now, without the market figuring Apple out, is kind of absurd. It might be the biggest transfer of wealth from sellers to shareholders of all time.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Outsiders-Unconventional-Radically-Ra...

Apple never had a high multiple at any point after 2009, when the most profitable product of all time was established and growing.

This is the last 15 years of AAPL against it's P/E NTM

https://i.imgur.com/zW6ORJK.png

They released updates to the Macbook, Macbook Air, Macbook Pro and iMac last year [1]. The year over year comps aren't as relevant.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/05/apple-macbook-lineup-cp...

What time should you take melatonin if you don't have any major sleep problems but want to improve sleep quality?

Excited for the Tesla episode of Dirty Money on Netflix when this story comes to an end.

This story is part of the ongoing Qualcomm PR effort to get people to care about what modem is in their phones [1]. Of course no one actually makes a purchasing decision based on what modem is in their smartphone.

[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/news/onq/2018/07/23/over-million-us...