LyrArc Article Gist
Surges in capital value can be wildly misleading. Nvidia a rapid computing company propelled in stock value. From the growth of crypto currency that led to losses and was perceived as a danger to the financial system by central banks and governments. This is happening when capital investment is a dire need in education and schools, good teachers and good classrooms, when only a third of American students pass NAEP tests on reading comprehension. Today's capital allocation system was never designed to accomplish this even as it sends hundreds of billions of dollars in one single day to a single company. Nvidia is now seeing a surge from chatbots computing coming out of ChatGPT,  leading to $184 billion change in its market value on May 25, 2023.  Nvidia was mostly a graphics processing company setup to make graphics on PC's look better. In 2006 Jensen Huang made the decision to open it up to developers to tinker with it and develop more computing capabilities. This has led to Nvidia designing much more powerful computing chips that perform thousands of calculations at the same time.   Nvidia designs the chips and sends production out to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Suddenly Nvidia sees its share price surge and it joins companies such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla that have seen one day surge in the value of the companies by over $100 billion shown in this WSJ graph by date. Huang says he thinks that this is the beginning of a ten year period in which companies will redo their data centers to build them up with AI computing capabilities. WSJ also says China's top nuclear weapons research institute has bought these advanced chips even though it is on a US export blacklist since 1997. In 2022 the Biden administration imposed new licensing requirements on export of the most advanced chips. Since then Nvidia is following specifications for chips that allow it to export to China, says the WSJ.     ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Washington Post's new idea of developing content for social media platforms  (Third Newsroom) to cut losses of $77 million in 2023 by earning profit on social brand exercises, comes at a time when the risks of social media platforms to education of children and to their mental health are great. Social media platforms entry into the news business has led to old news companies first interacting with them over a decade and realizing that this was leading to gains for social media platforms and losses for the old news companies. For older news companies such as the NYT, WSJ, Washington Post and others in the US this was a period in which these companies lost control over their news content along with loss of revenues. Over the last five years the companies have become profitable managing their own content and increasing subscriptions. The Washington Post has run into problems and has a $77 million loss. It was sold to Amazon's Bezos for $250 million by the founding family in 2013.  It is now trying to revive its business by doing what failed for the NYT, WSJ and others- by embracing rather than rejecting social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and others using the News Movement idea of UK journalist Lewis and Winnett. That News Movement makes content for Instagram and TikTok but has not generated profits. Under Lewis as head of Washington Post news division, Matt Murray formerly editor of WSJ would as head of Third Newsroom develop this kind of content for social media platforms. This runs the risks of aiding the work of social media platforms at a time when TikTok has raised national security concerns in the US, and along with Instagram is being cited as part of social media platforms that are affecting the mental health of children. Its disastrous impact on the health of the Nation and its future comes from reducing focus on education and studies by diverting an average of 4.8 hours each day away from educational activity for the children that make up the future generation of this Nation. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
How changes in retail with Wal-Mart and technology with Amazon online sales killed a toy brand. Employees fared poorly as the business took on debt under private equity and was finally liquidated.

LyrArc Article Gist
A small group of founders of the Pay Pal company Sacks, Thiel and Musk  are only a small fraction of the larger tech universe that includes Apple, Google and Amazon and other technology companies in many industries including auto, aerospace, chips, other manufacturing,  possibly no more than 10--20%. They are now enabled by US Supreme Court decisions to allow business supported PAC's to operate freely to influence political events in 2024 for promoting their own business interests.  The influence operates through social media channels in ways that limit verifying of information because of the speed with which information can be posted on the internet. This has created new challenges for 2024 and the American system of representative government enshrined in the words in the preamble of the Constitution about  "We the People" - "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." ...

LyrArc Article Gist
ProPublica Report that shows taxes paid by Warren Buffett of Berkshire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Michael Bloomberg of Bloomberg, Soros of financial business, and Elon Musk of Tesla. This report put out by Americans for Tax Fairness shows tax rates of a group of 25 such business persons at 3.4% on wealth growth between 2014-2018 of $401 billion. This is not to say that Democrats or Republicans can be elected to solve this, which is basically a problem not of fairness but of how it enables underfunding of America's basic infrastructure of health, education, transportation, and public services such as parks, clean air, and renewable energy, energy grids, water supplies, heating infrastructure, on and on on the list. Why because the difference between a modern industrial base country and a backward, lack of industrial base country is just this list. When the companies also unfund maufacturing in the US as Apple does by making almost  all products overseas it means lossof manufacturing knowhow and loss of leadership of the free world which simply means chaos without America's leadership based on its founder's values.   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
US president Biden signs a broad executive order on July 9, that is directed at promoting competitive behaviour in the American economy, and taking action against companies that have anti competitive behaviours. It also aims to limit corporate dominance that then can lead to anti competitive behaviours. These types of behaviours puts consumers, workers and small compoanies at a disadvantage. The Biden plan stretches from the smaller items such as hearing aids and baggage fees, to the task of putting in place the first antitrust regulation on tech companies Apple, Google, Amazon and others. Industries Biden sees as needing help are agriculture, healthcare, shipping, transportation, technology, and labor practices that limit wages and mobility. In making the executive order the White House says it "will lower prices for families, increase wages for workers and promote innovation and even faster economic growth." As each step is taken by the Biden administration to help workers, families, women and children, the situation is a reminder of the actions taken by Franklin Delano Roosevelt at another period of crisis in the nation's history. The July 9 executive order will create a Competition Council as proposed by Tim Wu, special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy in the White House National Economic Council. The Compeititon Council task will be to get federal agencies to take action to promote competitive behaviours for the first time since the 1980's when Republican presidents Reagan, Bush, and Democratic presidents Clinton, Obama, allowed such behaviours in some industries to get entrenched. In Biden's own words "the rise of monopolies weaken labor." In each industry agencies will now have the task of pushing back against anti-competitive behaviours already put in place by companies. In agriculture it will help small farmers, in pharmaceutical sector it will help the American people deal with a problem that has no end in sight of high drug prices and practices that support this. In all areas of the economy the Biden plan is for a new coordinated effort across all the agencies of the government and under the leadership of the president, to restore the vibrant economy to what it was before the long deterioration through anti-competitive behaviours. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
With the decline of its hardware business making iPhones Apple is looking at other fields. It is launching cheap online TV subscriptions in streaming wars in competition with Netflix and others. Apple is launching a new TV streaming service Apple TV+ in 100 countries for 4.99 British pounds a month undercutting Netflix's price of 5.99 pounds. The new service will be started November 1, 2019. Disney plans a streaming service for 7 pounds a month starting November 12. This service is alongside iPhone 11 launch and anew iPad, a new iWatch. Buy any new Apple device and you get a 1 year streaming service free.  Sales of iPhones fell 14% in the April to June 2019 quarter to 39 million units. Samsung's business is growing by 4% to 75 million units and Huawei by 16% to 58 million units. Apple sees the need to increases its services business with a target of $50 billion in 2020. Apple sees itself more as a media and cloud services company as it makes this change. In markets such as India Apple's growth is limited by its failure to lower prices on new iPhones. In China it faces strong competition from Huawei. The trade tensions are increasing the strength of Chinese brands in the Chinese market. The market in U.S. and Europe is saturated after years of expansion. New iPhone models are costly and bring peripheral advantages such as more and better cameras and features such as screens that are not breakable- for the iPhone 11- not dimensions that are critical for making a costly purchase. After years of growth tech companies such as Apple, Google, Alibaba, Amazon are reaching a point where incremental growth is not what it used to be and most of the rapid growth behind them. Trade tensions are also limiting the outlook in the Chinese market, and pricing remains a major factor in the Indian market. Western markets are saturated. There are fewer and fewer substantial new ideas from these tech companies. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
A potato farmer in the Himalyan foothills is able to buy his first refrigerator using his Jio smartphone, even though he lives in a remote part of  India with no paved roads or indoor plumbing. Jio is the company founded by Reliance Industries head Mukesh Ambani, that is changing the way India shops and how it accesses the internet. Jio brings 4G technology to India and dramatically brings down data prices. To do this Reliance used its past success in executing big projects. It was designed to be a network that reached 18,000 cities and towns, and 200,000 villages, some lacking electricity, requiring 200,000 cell towers and 150,000 miles of high tech fiber optic cable. The project is now essentially completed, according to the company. This may be the biggest one it has tackled. Starting in polyester yarn and textile business, and in oil refineries, the company sought to diversify into digital platforms to compete with the likes of Google and Netflix. Ambani sees Jio not as a telecom business but as a digital platform and plans to use it to sell advertising, sell content, and financial services, also selling high speed broadband services. Ambani's project was designed to give India the opportunity to leapfrog into 4G and high speed internet and do this along with expanding the access through lower prices in the market to reach millions of people in remote regions of India including rural areas. Low cost access to data helps level the playing field between the rich and the poor. There are about 390 million internet users in India, penetration of 28%. This is now changing rapidly as prices drop - the potato farmer who bought his first fridge did this on his phone, connecting online with Jio which built a tower nearby that beamed nearly unlimited 4G data for about $2.10 a month. Jio has now signed up 215 million subscribers with its low cost service. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone are larger competitors but it is Jio that has revolutionized the market in India, and which now enables companies like Amazon to use the new 4G services to build its retail online business.   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Zweig says the dominance of Apple and tech stocks such as Google and Amazon in the DJIA is temporary and will not last more than a few years as all things are cyclical. He points to Exxon, IBM and other stocks that were dominant at one time and then declined over time.

LyrArc Article Gist
Environmental problems caused by Texaco in Ecuador and problems caused by Ecuador's ol pipeline network run by its oil company. Oil Spills in the Ecudorean Amazon and lots of real damage.

LyrArc Article Gist
Amazon sales rise 41% to $4.06 billion and international sales up 47% to $1.89 billion, removing the effect of a weak dollar international sales rose 34%. Gross margins are at 23.8%.

LyrArc Article Gist
Sim Shagaya and his online internet sales business DealDey in Lagos, Nigeria. He started with cupcake sales, a status symbol in Lagos. Because of online fraud most people in Lagos will not give out their credit card numbers. Dey gets around this by having motorcyclist riders deliver the goods and collect payment in cash. He has a 10,000 square foot warehouse near the Lagos airport, where motorcyclist delivery personnel take off for deliveries all over Lagos, with stalled traffic and delivery instructions like turning left where a lady sits with her plantains. He is planning a site that will be modeled on Amazon. Germay's Rocket Internet also plans to launch soon in Lagos, after opening in India, China and Brazil. Shagaya left Google S. Africa to start the business in 2005, initially starting a site based on the Groupon type business of selling vouchers. Items that sell well and are not returned are books, movies and videogames. Shagaya hopes to increase customers from the current 150,000 to 1 million for a Lagos population of 15 million, of which 5 millon are online on phones and computers....

LyrArc Article Gist
Alan Blinder, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, looks at explanations for low productivity growth since 2010, and points to the most likely reason- the lack of technological progress with the kind of impact that the personal computer and other innovations had in the period 1995-2005. Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple tech innovation has more impact on consumers than on the industrial economy and production. Lower investment since 2010 with the financial crisis could have added to this, but to a smaller degree, says Blinder. Blinder even points to some hours of work being taken up by workers using Facebook, Twitter and other similiar services. The notion strange to Silicon Valley is supported that tech progress, dynamism and entrepreneurship may have actually declined to some extent. Intel's Andy Grove, no stranger to early innovations supported this notion around 2008, saying he saw less innovation of the type he was familiar with, more refinements than breakthroughs by startups in Silicon Valley. Grove was critical of the decline in manufacturing in the U.S., which is likely to have hurt productivity growth....