Jurgis

I've read about the Disney+/Hulu segmentation and for me that is pure milking of customers. (No, I'm not a Disney fan coming into this.). And while I wanted to cancel Netflix, I see Netflix as being the most customer friendly of all media companies. They don't try to segment me and milk me for extra dollars to see all the content they have. Disney wants to force me to sub Disney+ for Marvel/StarWars/kiddie stuff and Hulu for every other movie. This sucks on two levels: I don't give a crap about kiddie stuff, so on one side they are segmenting too little and on the other side they are segmenting too much. So personally I'm likely not gonna subscribe to either. But then a lot of other people will likely sub to Disney+... Hulu is less likely. Edit: I'm might ask Sanjeev to change my name tag to "Grumpy Investor". 8)

I would push back on this from two sides: 1. You could argue about "better service" as defined by ease of calling Lyft/Uber vs. calling taxi. This is mostly US phenomenon though. In a lot of countries there are taxi apps/etc. that offer the same convenience. Also, I'm not really pro-taxi person, but security/quality of cars/drivers is arguably better in taxis. Of course, I've got recency bias of using Uber/Lyft mostly, but I've had pretty scary and pretty lousy drivers. And I gave them all 5 stars since OTOH you don't want to kill poor person trying to make a living with bad reviews. If taxi service had Japanese/Finnish car quality/driver professionalism and charged the same as Uber/Lyft, I'd take taxi all the time period. 2. Regarding raising prices 30-35% and not losing riders: currently Uber/Lyft is somewhat competitive with driving to destination, parking in paid parking and driving back, so I may take Uber/Lyft instead of driving and parking. With 30-35% raise, this use case economics are killed completely.

Not bad. But I think there's a lot of anchoring to Watsa's 15% return goal.

Anecdotally, Lyft has been offering discounts for quite a while. Possibly in preparation for IPO, possibly to grab market share, possibly to show growth, possibly all of these. I don't have preference, so I've been using Lyft predominantly, except when I see surge pricing on Lyft, but Uber has no surge pricing at the time. Although I somewhat agree with Broeb22 about duopoly pricing, there seems to be an issue that to pay drivers "normal" wage and to be profitable, Uber/Lyft will have to drive up 8) prices a lot. Which will likely drop the number of rides which may drop the number of drivers, which ... - not a positive cycle. Unless the riders are so hooked up that they'll tolerate way higher prices. Or companies will find a way to profit without driving the prices up. But it's not easy to see how they would do it apart the magic "self-driving cars" spiel. "Self-driving cars" is not really an answer. First, the development is taking longer than expected. Second, it's not clear that Uber/Lyft will dominate self-driving car ecosystem. As a customer, I'm afraid of the bearish predictions that either Uber/Lyft will drive up prices to close to old taxi pricing or they'll go out of business and we'll go back to old taxi pricing anyway. I'd like to hope that this won't come true. But Spekulatius was right in his initial post - investors are subsidizing the riders so far.

I started to reply on that thread but the website said something like, this thread hasn’t been active for a long time, consider starting a new thread. So I did. That website comment should be ignored. Hopefully Sanjeev will merge the threads.

I don't know how our situation compares to others. We don't have cable. We have NFLX streaming, Amazon Prime and NFLX DVD service for new/not-available-on-streaming movies. I was for cancelling NFLX streaming, but was overruled. 8) However, if Amazon Prime starts showing more ads, I might change my mind and become pro-NFLX again. 8) Things may change a lot if/when NFLX DVD service shuts down. I'll have to think then how to get new/not-available-on-streaming movies. I think DVD service will be closed within 5 years. Edit: DIS movies were all on NFLX based on their agreement with NFLX. Once they are not on NFLX, I might get them through NFLX DVD service. I get some HBO content through DVD service. So DVD service is somewhat key factor in my decisions to subscribe or not subscribe to anything else.

Tell that to my wife. 8) Netflix is not gonna be cancelled even if it goes to $20 per month. We likely won't sub DisPlus even at $7 per month. Opinions may change at any time and all that.

Broeb22: Just MHO, but you are probably better off looking at NFLX or STNE (or maybe PINS) than Uber. In fact, there are tons of other software companies that are expensive, growing and still probably better than Uber. I can post ticker soup if anyone is interested. (Some of the names have been discussed on CoBF, some maybe not).

Finally, someone else who saw the same thing I did! Sauron was not destroyed he just relocated to a galaxy far, far away...

That's correct. I was also surprised (I didn't know much about it going on), but it actually increased my enjoyment because I think it's important that we get reminders once in a while of just how vile these regimes were. Historical distance and the death of first-hand victims is making it all more fuzzy over time... "The Death of Stalin" was banned in Russia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin ). People in power there don't want any reminders.

Not to defend Transdigm, but: - Like you say, military has power and mechanism. So if they want, they should kick Transdigm's butt. If they don't, then they themselves are part of problem (of transferring taxpayers' money to TDG). - Unlike patients in Valeant's case, I have little sympathy for airlines or aircraft manufacturers or whatever other companies that source replacement parts. They are also big boys and can kick TDG's butt if they want. If they don't, then they themselves are part of problem (of transferring their shareholders' money to TDG). BTW, I'm not arguing against what khturbo said. It's possible that there are legit reasons to pay TDG through the nose. But if TDG is extorting, then its customers are not as powerless as patients who have to pay pharmas through the nose.

Number-wise India programming labor pool is way larger than Eastern Europe's. Quality-wise Eastern Europe's labor pool may be better, but best people have either emigrated to US/western EU or work for US/EU companies already. IMO finding a cheap quality team in EE is as hard as finding it in India. And if you find it, you'll have similar issues as with Indian teams. Not saying it's impossible, but it's not easy either. Just my impression though. YMMV and all that.

I don't know. My single experience with default/BK was pretty bad. I think single pennies on the dollar. That's anecdotal. There are way higher recoveries.

You could get less than 20 cents on the dollar. :) Seriously. There was a good post couple months ago which had a "test" if you should invest in distressed bonds. It listed a bunch of acronyms and terms that if you don't know, then you should not. I tried to search for it, but by CoBF-search-fu is not good enough. Seriously, you will get screwed by all the debt holders that are senior (ahead) of you. And you may be screwed by debt and equity holders that are junior to you just because they are institutions and they are allowed inside BK process and you are not. It's possible that you will be in the right debt class and will get good return. It's even possible they won't default. You probably would have to do a deep DD about the probabilities of these ... as well as who's in front of you. I'd guess that most of BRS fleet are either leased or are pledged as collateral for secured notes, so there might not be a lot left. But I don't really know... there's all these talk upthread about unencumbered aircraft, but you'd have to dig for the latest numbers, which is complicated by the missing 10Q and 6 months since last info... and the possibility that the previous 10Q is fubared by whatever issues they found with current 10Q filing. ::)

From brief search it looks like they could not file 10Q, which would have caused default. They got waiver from lenders to file by April 15th, but still have not filed. They may get another extension or just default. There are also resignations, exec/director changes and all that jazz. IMO at this time this is for deeply knowledgeable distressed debt investors only.

;D

Spek is right:

Might be opportunity if anyone can accumulate shares without driving the price 2-3x.

My wife told me that Prime Video now also has ads. So far, I haven’t seen any ads yet personally. They play an ad for their productions right before the show/movie starts. It's like 75% of the time now. I saw some of the ads in Prime Video my wife noticed . They are for Amazon products and deals on their website. They have had ads for movie/ series trailers for a while, but the product ads are new. I smell we end up exactly where we started. That sucks. Maybe Netflix is going to win by just not being assholes to their customers.

Let's bring politics to even more threads!

Oh poor multimillionaire CEOs. They are special snowflakes who just cannot stand the pressure. They need your love and coddling. Maybe pay out another 20M or 100M or something so they can sleep better while their organization screws their customers. Maybe you should start a Kickstarter campaign to get Sloan an emotional support animal. Though I'm sure he'd just prefer multimillions in cash. Send him a check to cry on.

::)

Last time the BOMN meeting was in Boston, we had several people who were not BOMN investors who joined us for the meet-up. Just to clarify: - There was a meetup (dinner) separate from the BOMN annual meeting organized by someone from CoBF. - I believe signup for the annual meeting was through some event website (Eventbrite??). I totally don't remember if this asked for any credentials. Also no clue if they will do the same this year or something different. EDIT: I seem to remember someone at the annual meeting who said they were not shareholder - but I don't know if they will allow the same this year. - If you want to buy a share, record date is April 15th: http://www.bostonomaha.com/documents/165/21c2c6114f08e2fed05e3cbc9bc26e4b.pdf

I just love how this page is called "tutti documenti". :D

Mailchimp does not open for me again (this happens most of the time, I don't know if it's an issue on their side or ???). Any other location for the letter? Or can someone post it here as attachment. Thanks