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hackunomatter

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I think, basically, Uber will pay some $$$ to make the lawsuit go away and "license" Waymo's tech (which they already had, courtesy Mr. Lewandowski, but now will legally have it).

The theory behind Kopi Luwak was that the civets knew which (coffee) berries were perfectly ripe, so ate them; in the process, pooping out the seeds (coffee beans).

Once humans found this out, now civets are kept in cavity and fed just coffee berries (i.e., they have no choice, just eat whatever is put in from of them). Natually, the beans that come out will be no different than average coffee beans. Yes, there's this whole "civet digestive enzymes" part, but that plays a negligible role IMHO.

Sounds like pump-and-dump to me. From what I could gather (albeit I'm not very familiar with financial engineering): the Chinese stock market is hot, and P/E of 100 is not uncommon. In other words: P = 100 x E.

Suppose you are a company that sells some conventional goods whose market is tapped out, so no more growth in the "E". You find a game company (who doesn't understand the games market, especially China, where smartphones are like second appendages?) with earnings of, say, X. If you can buy this outfit for something significantly lower than 100 * X, then (using the equation above), you'll be able to boost your own company's "P" by 100 * X by acquiring the company, at a cost much lower than 100 * X.

Yahoo, for long, had a market cap much below the value of all of its assets (including $BABA). One reason why it was undervalued was because the market didn't believe that they could dispose of their $BABA assets without incurring a huge tax penalty.

FTA:

Collectively, the five are among the biggest investors in research and development on the planet. According to their earnings reports, they are on track to spend more than $60 billion this year on research and development. By comparison, in 2015, the United States federal government spent about $67 billion on all nondefense-related scientific research.

That's depressing. On the other hand, DARPA has been the force behind a lot of advancements: the Internet, self-driving cars, etc.

You can keep finding tenuous connections, but in the end, there's no proof. It's all speculation, with assumptions, biased interpretations, etc.

When you don't want to accept the obvious, it's easy to just keep scratching away until you think you find something (look up pareidolia).

At $5B for 12,000 employees, that works out to about $400,000 a pop. Each employee could have been given an apartment in many parts of the country... :-)

I'm not criticizing, just admiring the cost.

The investigation is ongoing, and the results will be announced by the end of the month. You are already passing judgment that they should not be held accountable, when you don't have any facts either! All I'm saying is that if the investigation concludes that Thuan was informed directly by Fowler and did nothing, then he deserves to be fired. Same with Graves.

Since it doesn't seem that Graves or Thuan did anything wrong

Wait, what? Did you read the article? If Fowler reported her problems to Thuan himself, then he most certainly bears responsibility, and needs to answer for that. Same with Graves: he was head of HR for periods over that time, and needs to answer too.

Only when you start holding the top-level people accountable will the culture change. Throwing some flunky under the bus will never bring about serious change.

I like to say (not sure if it's original or not), "anyone who says 'money doesn't buy happiness' has never traveled First Class". I got bumped into FC once, and it. was. amazing. Especially on a long haul flight, you actively enjoy the time spent there.

Typically you get 2 weeks of vacation a year. That's 4% of the cost. Not a significant amount.

As for work outside store hours: sure, there is some. But it's not a restaurant where you have to sterilize everything in the kitchen. It's a bookstore. At most you have to sweep the floors, maybe re-shelf some misplaced books, and shelf the newcomers. It's not a tremendous amount of work that has to be done before opening or after close.

I never bought this "minimum wage increase destroyed us" story when it came out. The minimum wage increased from $11.05/hr to $12.25/hr. That's an increase of $1.20/hr.

They claim this will cost them an additional $30,000/year. Let's consider that. Assume that their employees are all current minimum wage employees (otherwise they would not be affected). Given that they're open for 8 hours/day (which works out to 56 hours/week), it would mean that their additional cost would be an additional $3500/employee; so an additional cost of $30000 means they have 9 employees working all the time. Anyone who has been to Borderlands (and I have been a few times) can see that they do not have 9 employees all the time. Max I've seen are about 4. It's a bookstore, not an oil change place!

In any case: whatever floats their boat. If sponsorships help them stay afloat, so be it. But they shouldn't blame the minuscule wage increase for their woes.