Hola Wednesday! [DOT 20/4/22]

20/4/22 MegMegMcGee 27

If we did our dates correctly (ahem) around here you would know that it is 420. If you celebrate, do enjoy! Seems like a mighty fine idea, given the rest of what is going on…

Ukraine updates:

Russia-Ukraine war latest: Mariupol ‘offered ceasefire’ for surrender; eastern city captured by Russia
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/apr/19/russia-ukraine-war-zelenskiy-says-battle-for-donbas-has-begun-dialogue-between-macron-and-putin-stalls-live

This is unhinged in any timeline.

Sprots! Yay for her!

Adrianne Haslet’s Boston Marathon was ‘the best day of my life’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/19/adrianne-haslet-boston-marathon-return/

Stonks!

Netflix shares crater 25% after company reports it lost subscribers for the first time in more than 10 years
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/19/netflix-nflx-earnings-q1-2022.html

Thanks I love it.

Have an awesome day!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar

27 Comments

  1. I wonder how excited the flight attendants really are about The Great Unmasking? I guess on the one hand they don’t have to be gazpacho police about masks, in the words of perhaps the dimmest member of Congress (a low bar) Marjorie Taylor Greene. But on the other hand despite all the airlines talking about air filtration and flow and “airplanes being the cleanest air environment” I’d be a little skeptical. Hasn’t it been known since the dawn of flight that you’re much more susceptible to colds and flu while flying? The airlines really retrofitted and upgraded entire fleets in record time? Where did they get the plans and the parts? Who did all this work?

  3. The Netflix thing is all you need to know about why The Markets are nothing but greed factories. Any one of the supposed geniuses who work in The Markets would have known this was coming, but nope. They really just expected the money to keep on going forever, like they always do.

    • I forget who it was who first said, “If you want to invest in a company look at their parking lots.” It was a metaphor: Do you drive by a store and day in and day out and the parking lot is getting fuller and fuller and there’s a steady stream of customers coming and going? That’s the sign of a successful and growing company, temporarily at least.

      Megyn Kelly, of all people, recently gave an interesting interview. She claimed that when she was let go at Fox CNN came to her with a huge offer but she turned them down, figuring that her Fox viewers wouldn’t follow her there. She tried her luck at NBC, which was expanding the TODAY show to a ridiculous length.

      She also had this to say about her “friend” and colleague Chris Wallace, something along the lines of “So CNN is tanking and they figure, ‘no one is watching us now so let’s give them more of us with CNN+!’ And Chris was making tons of money at Fox even though his show was the lowest rated for his time slot but no one seemed to mind, and I don’t know what he was thinking with CNN+…”

    • …I might have this wrong…but I thought I’d read that cutting off their russian subscribers had lost them more than the 200,000 figure quoted as the drop…which implied that they were in fact still adding users

      …so it seemed to me to be another example of the share price reflecting something other than the thing the drop in that was supposedly caused by?

      …netflix was ahead of the game but there’s a whole bunch of streaming services now & they all have their exclusive content so instead of being the one with the deepest pockets & “best” (or most extensive catalogue of) content they’re up against disney, for example

      …someone who knows more about this stuff than me might be able to give a plausible explanation but it sort of seems to me like overstating certainty about a singular cause when what’s being discussed is a reflection of a multiplicity of effects…on account of markets ultimately being reactive & prone to feedback loops rather than indicative of linear cause & effect relationships…not unlike that thing the agriculture professor tried to explain in that thread about wheat production price fluctuation that had seemingly misconstrued the problem as scarcity rather than a shipping/transport problem?

    • It’s a sign of how much money hangs on timing and algorithms rather than real financials.

      A huge number of traders know that algorithms of some big index funds are triggered to sell anytime a bad number hits the official financial reports, and it’s profitable to buy from the early sellers and hold until the last possible moment. So instead of a more gradual curve that reflects a growing sense that numbers are going soft, you get these kinds of artificial pumping up of prices followed by sharp crashes.

    • The funny thing is that not only was it obvious, the entire reason the company is struggling is because they tried to make themselves more appealing to said markets! I’m old enough to remember when Netflix was the only game in town and had an appealing back catalog of movies and shows. Now that every production house has their own service — and Netflix spent years pinching pennies to boost the stock price — suddenly they’re left with no old movies, few old shows. Instead they offer sub-mid-tier Ryan Reynolds movies and D-minus sci-fi and occasionally a slightly better than Hallmark rom-com. Gee, what a shock to see they’re not doing so well!

  4. Meanwhile Hazza has confided to Hoda Kotb in the preview for today’s “TODAY” show interview:

    Harry said of the Queen: “She’s always got a great sense of humour with me and I’m just making sure that she’s protected and got the right people around her.”

    I’m sure his father and brother were delighted to hear it. I suppose when you actually live around the Monarch and spend your days representing her and interacting with the people around her who might not be right, it doesn’t offer quite the perspective you’d gain from holing up in Montecito. I think he’s going to suffer the fate of Prince Andrew: Once she’s gone it’s all over, especially for the two of them, maybe for all of them. Those with a literary bent are no doubt hotly anticipating the Fall debut of Hazza’s memoir, “You Think the Duke of Windsor Rocked the Monarchy? Hold My Beer”.

    • …could be…but I guess to the extent I paid attention I broadly assumed he wasn’t talking about the family?

      …the royals have a whole edifice of staff with its own hierarchies & fiefdoms & I can certainly see how he’d be hoping the ones in his gran’s orbit weren’t steering her wrong

      …but I confess my royalty scrying abilities are somewhat underdeveloped?

      • I don’t think he meant his own father and brother, I do think he was alluding to the staff. But what would he know about any of them at this point, especially since he got out of Britain (and with just moments to spare, Canada) before lockdown, when the bubbles formed. “Gran, I know Twitcher’s been with you for 34 years and was with you up at Windsor for those two years with Granda’ but Meghan and I just feel something’s not right…”

    • Did you see how happy and healthy Harry and Meghan looked at the Invictus Games? I’m so glad they escaped and yes FWIW he does seem to have a special relationship with his grandmother.

      • I did see all of that, and I’m a fan of Hazza, as much as an American can be. But he’s sliding into Meghan McCain territory with very little to show for his “escape,” aside from weirdly hyped insights into the family he fled and weirdly hyped and teased rapprochements. Plus, there’s that Netflix deal, the same outlet that’s airing “The Crown.” I bet his father was thrilled with Season 4 and eagerly awaits the premiere of Season 5.

        He does seem to have a special relationship with his grandmother, which leads me to believe (because I am so incredibly bored and with little else to think about) that she’s doing to him and Wills what she did with Randy Andy and Chuck: Well of course the one who’s going to get the throne will be there and be dutiful & etc. but it’s the second-place finishers that she has more sympathy and tolerance for and more interest in. Maybe from her own experience growing up with her younger sister, who for years was like this uncontrollable force of nature once her own marriage plans were thwarted by her own older sister. Apparently the Queen does not have these sentiments when her horses race at Ascot.

  5. Well NOW we know this legislation will never happen nationwide!

    https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/3271896-legalizing-marijuana-lowers-demand-for-prescription-drugs-study-finds/

    Who would have thunk that Fl. Trump is just running a grift w/ his CRT math thing?

    https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2022/04/19/desantis-textbooks-florida-woke-one-publisher-allowed-k-5-math-classes/7357965001/

    and the opposite of the airplane anti-mask celebration…

    https://crooksandliars.com/2022/04/americas-expendables

    • Me. I’d have thunk it. A cute feature of this law is that DeSantis doesn’t have to provide any examples of what is “wrong” with the textbooks, claiming that he’s protecting these companies’ copyrights.

       

      I’m sure the single company donates heavily to Republicans in general and DeSantis specifically.

    • None of the articles I’ve read so far have said what was actually wrong with the rejected math books? My guess is there was a diverse group of children smiling on the cover?

  7. The NY Times has finally picked a replacement for Dean Baquet as chief editor, choosing…. his #1 deputy, Joe Kahn.

    He is seen overwhelmingly as an establishment choice. Some critics have noted that the establishment press model is deeply stuck in a both sides mentality that fails to see how badly one side has turned toward authoritarianism. Any retrenchment of that position is obviously a big problem.

    What is missing in most accounts is that Times heir and publisher AG Sulzberger is a toxic force behind the scenes. He is stupid, weak, insular, and obviously open to the pleadings and flatteries of right wing operatives.

    Baquet’s response was largely to appease Sulzberger, even as the Times’s natural biases were leading them further and further from honest reporting and into the twilight world of splitting unsplittable  differences. About the only hope for the place is that Kahn has enough capacity to see that this path will wreck the paper in a very short time, and convince his Sulzberger to see it.

    I might hope out a slim hope that Kahn can see the failures of the path he’s on, but getting a stupid and vain dolt onboard is a monumentally harder task.

  9. I’m late to the party, here, but…

    How did Netflix not see this coming? There are a finite number of households that are either willing or able to pay for an account. I’d bet that less than 1/3 of the people who are sharing someone else’s account will get their own paid account if/when Netflix makes that move.

    Also, since there IS a finite number, how could they expect profits to keep increasing? Wouldn’t keeping profit from dropping (as opposed to going up, up, up) be just as beneficial for the company in the long run?

    I’m pretty sure the answers to all of that is “capitalism”, or possibly, “greed”, but if anyone has a different take on it…? Am I just oversimplifying it?

Leave a Reply