johnny

Which shop is this data from?

Well, it's like I've been telling you idiots for this entire thread: All we needed was an exposé on the CEO's involvement in a global pedophile ring, a failed attempt to spinoff half of the business for free, and for almost all A-malls in America to be shut down for a year to unlock the value here. Another victory for the shrewd, conservative value investor. I've cashed in my chips and will now be deciding which crypto-marijuana enterprise to roll my gains into. Thanks for playing everybody! Even though I am out of the stock I will continue to regularly view all of the underwear shows (including Rihanna's circus freak one) because it's important to keep one's finger in the pulse of the market.

Everything that could go wrong for this company has. Every big corporate move has been a catastrophe (TMobile, DirecTV, TWX), even internally Warner is having all sorts of issues. HBO's streaming efforts were bungled for years; the DC Cinematic Universe is like a tenth as valuable as Marvel, etc. So I mean, the investment case here is just, like, mean reversion? Mediocre management shouldn't be capable of doing the Absolute Incorrect Thing Every Time. That would actually take incredible skill. If you assume the mobile business is sound and like its prospects, and you think Netflix and Disney+ both deserve the twelve-figure valuations they currently enjoy, you've got every value poaster's dream: a Sum Of The Parts bargain. The real issue is that HBOMax strikes me as, at best, a third place streamer. What does this mean, exactly? They started off by targeting 50 million subscribers by the end of 2025. That was a year ago, so maybe they've beefed it up, but that's quite a pathetic figure if it reflects their true opinion of themselves. That means they're hoping to be 1/5th the size of Netflix today, five years from now. Good luck on the content bidding wars, I guess. The only good sign I see is this rather bold day-and-date film release 2021 plan for HBOMax. But I have to say I'm sort of shocked at how little that seems to have reverberated for the consumer. People in Hollywood flipped the fuck out, but I don't remember hearing any normal person expressing special excitement about the fact that they could see Wonder Woman 1984 for "free". Either way, it's not quite a bet-the-company move, but at least it shows some amount of creativity/adaptiveness.

Eh, going to war with a company that: 1) Has hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on war and 2) Controls your distribution and ability to shape/design/monetize your product ~50% of your value-weighted userbase ...is not an ideal situation. This competition is probably inevitable, so as long as it’s happening it’s wise to try to extract as much antitrust value as possible from it. But it’s hardly a fantastic development. Especially since I think a lot of shareholders of $FB are also overindexed on $AAPL. If you own both of these companies, obviously you’d vastly prefer some kissy kissy makeup over Facebook dumping billions into a Watch, Apple dumping billions into an Oculus, and both dumping hundreds of millions into lobbyists trying to inspire congresspeople to strangle the other to death.

Is junior still involved in the company? Even if not; wouldn’t touch this with a ten inch pole.

Don’t think they’re credible. The government is able to say whatever weird terms that are/n’t a “taking” were part of the government bailing them out. The closest analogue here, I guess, would be playing hardball with the PrisonCos so that they can’t roll their debt, have a liquidity crisis, and then stepping in? Not sure I see that level of dedication/originality/sophistication coming from the team that is in charge of this. I think the bearest of the bear case is this: the government plays total hardball, doesn’t extend any contracts (or early-terminates many) and also refuses to consider buying the properties back for anything but a massive massive discount to book. The government -is- sort of a monopsony buyer of these properties so, as long as there is credible continuity of government (IE republicans aren’t coming back any time soon) there’s no reason they can’t drive a VERY hard bargain that might approach some bagholder’s intuition about what an unconstitutional “taking” is. But ultimately, what’s the issue? It’s not like these prisons were built/purchased/operated with any expectation other than leasing the assets to the state. You can’t complain that the state treated you unfairly by being the only plausible buyer for the asset you decided to turn a bunch of concrete into. These firms put themselves in the position to have the screws turned on them.

I do think that substantial prisoner population reduction is the only decent bear case here. So my question is: is it feasible? What does the super narrow scope of Biden’s EO say about his administrations interest in actually pushing decarceration in a big way? The EO signed seems like the bare minimum gesture towards his campaign promise/theme, not a commitment to a bold new vision. Given the strong hand progressives have right now, it’s just hard for me to believe that they’re oblivious to the sort of asymmetry involved in mass prisoner releases. The upside is that you please maybe your most “locked-in” voters, so maybe you juice their turnout in future elections from the already quite high turnout they achieved recently. The downside is you take 10 or 20 or 30 thousand rolls of a mysterious n-sided die that might land “your early released prisoner murders an entire family”. Why not take the easy path, buy the prisons, staff them with some new (ideally unionized!) federal employees, and congratulate yourself for eliminating the evil profit motive from your now wonderful, just Government-Run Penal System? I’m trying really hard to figure out the political incentives here, but it’s a wall I can’t get over. Even with the political incentives mapped out, I think any long-term bull needs to have some opinion on what the debt situation is like for these companies going forward. How much more costly does being blacklisted by the banks make them? If the situation is precarious enough, they may not in fact be able to credibly hold out for fair value on the sale of the properties to the USFG.

Now that we have had the election outcome(s), figured I’d bump this with the “news, not news” stuff. Biden signed the EO directing BOP (or was it DOJ) to not renew contracts for privately run facilities. Seems to leave the elephant firmly in the privately-run room (ICE detainees), and also doesn’t seem to mandate any contracts be early-terminated (despite the very important observations above that such a thing seems within gov’t rights) Here’s my macro take: Violent crime is up this year, and AFAIK there’s still a overcapacity issue at many facilities (I’m a few years out of date so maybe this is no longer a problem). I still don’t see an easy path to a quick and painless divorce for the government and the industry here. How long is the full appropriations-to-shovel-to-ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new government prison? How sensitive is the pursuit of this to congressional opposition? Does the Biden administration have enough confidence in the anti-prison constituency to DEMAND republicans let THEM build more prisons? Assuming the Biden administration really wants to get this done, the only way to actually GET it done in his administration would be purchasing facilities, and if that’s the outcome, it seems like the consolidation makes demanding at least replacement value for the facilities quite plausible. But still not long!

Sure there was, it was just celebratory and positive since it was The Good Kind of Interference And Other Issues: Facebook's Effort to Suppress the Hunter Biden NY Post Story Gave it Half the Reach of Major Anti-Trump Scoops https://www.newsweek.com/facebooks-effort-suppress-hunter-biden-ny-post-story-gave-it-half-reach-major-anti-trump-scoops-1539954 I'm not saying they didn't do the correct strategic thing here--I just think the underlying phenomenon here are so insanely complex that trying to game this stuff out 8 years is butterfly-effect territory. And like I said, I don't think they're getting that much credit from liberals for this very hard work. Look at what's going on right now: Facebook and Twitter are banning the sitting President, who just two months ago got 74 million Americans to vote for him. And the polite society consensus is that they should have done this 10 years ago and any delay is inexcusable and impermissible. This is not a stable situation, and I don't think we should be too complacent about the precarious political position Facebook will remain in for the remainder of its existence.

Agreed on all points. I just doubt it's going to buy them much quarter in the short term (while making the wormcan bigger in the long term). The tech-adjacent liberals I know haven't stopped blaming them for 2016, and their considerable efforts to Make It Right in 2020 don't seem to have been appreciated by their critics. Still holding, just a very weird and unstable situation.

I really couldn't disagree more. With no satisfying underlying principle guiding this decision, this is absolutely not ensuring the longevity of -anything- in its current form. We're still in a state of complete disequilibrium, and Facebook remains a big juicy target for Ambitious Regulators, Aspiring (or Degrading) Politicians, and Culture Warriors. All we've done is reaffirm that the social media empires are taking more seriously their holy role in deciding what thoughts are permissible, no longer worried about exercising any humility due to the social status of the Thinker. That said, I don't think the decision makes any of this worse. It is probably a tactically clever thing--ban POTUS when there isn't enough time on the clock for the full legal issues to flesh themselves out, while everybody is too busy with A Crisis of Something Else to focus on litigating it in public, but giving yourself something to point to to show you weren't Complicit during the Age of Orange Hitler. So, as far as what it means for the value of the business? Probably not huge, maybe a very slight positive? But considering how monumental this shit is at the layer of "society", I'd say the civilizational uncertainty makes me wanna dial the correct multiple for everything back a bit.

Yes, 70 year olds might wish they could find something like Facebook that allowed them to share Hunter Biden's dick pics and speculate the Kamala is Osama with gender confirmation surgery. But they're not going to get that. At best, they'll get a shoddy implementation that suffers from lack of engineering talent (because 80% of engineers are trans). Even with good engineering, it won't be able to afford top-tier hardware/cloud services, since you need F500 companies paying your bandwidth bills to allow unlimited photo/video uploads (and 99% of F500 CEOs are trans). Even if those two problems were somehow solved, it would fail the most critical feature of a social network: connecting you with (almost) everybody you know. Conservatives aren't going to leave Facebook en masse over politics for the same reason that so many AR-15 lovers stay in California, even though moving one state over would let them own machine guns and pay 0% in income tax. California, like Facebook, is an aggregate product, and as much as you may bitch and moan about some aspects about it, you can't get the other stuff in Henderson, Nevada. It's not just about getting "I saw Michelle Obama in the primate exhibit at the zoo" posts. Its about sharing those posts with people you love--your grandkids, who are probably not going to accompany you to 1488Book. If this was going to work anywhere, it'd have succeeded with Gab, since Twitter is actually an order of magnitude more simple, as a product, and doesn't actually rely on 1:1 relationships in the conventional social media sense. It didn't, as far as I can tell. And the only explanation is that the people who say they wanted Gab, really just wanted Twitter to become Gab. They don't want to leave Twitter, they just wish it were different.

From the real deal piece: How much detail is available on this? I'm quite curious about the Bank of China facility especially, but in general I'm just trying to get into the head of the people providing capital at 1.4% (back when rates were "normal").

The important thing about the M1 chips is they don't really have to be better. They just have to be indistinguishable, and cheaper. I think everybody expects Apple's looking at like 10-15% of gross margin improvement on the entire product with this thing, and having messed around with it a bit, whatever the deficiencies or tradeoff of the M series are, they're not going to be felt by >95% of Mac buyers. Remains to be seen how the solution works for the Mac Pro types, for the people perpetually on the verge of thinking they're going to do PC-level gaming on Macs, etc. But there's a reason the majority of <25 year olds do most of their "computing" on their phone--that's really the only thing they need. So barring some big technical blunder/error, this is a winner for sure.

I mean, it's not about "figuring it out" it's really about creating an enforceable contract to prevent it. I'm sure the FDIC can "figure out" that HNW people are having their bankers split up their multi-million dollar checking accounts into a bunch of $249,999.99 discrete deposits at dozens of different institutions, but the question is what they're going to do about it. Given how this account splitting is basically industry-wide now, I think everybody's landed on an answer: "absolutely nothing". So, can Apple say "discrete legal entities owning different applications will be considered related entities for the purpose of our small business program, should they share n% beneficial ownership, and by the way we will have sending auditors to check your articles to figure out if you're gaming the system"? I doubt it. My point is, a brilliant poster in this thread once said: They're doing the "right thing" here but they're still trying to bracket it and somehow maintain the notion that 30% is a reasonable norm and that any deviation from it is an act of generosity from Apple. My -guess- here is that people restructuring their app empires in order to maximize the 15% rate will be the norm, and tolerated by Apple. If anything, my suspicion is that this "small business" framing is about trying to make this seem like a more pro-social act than it is, and perhaps as a bonus softening the blow to the analyst/investor community, who might freak out about the implications of this change if it was presented more clearly as "Apple will be reducing its App Store revenues by about 50% starting immediately".