I have certain things I look for to determine if a company is worth researching more, and one of them is if they're highly profitable (they're not), if they have a lot of free cash flow (they don't). I cannot evaluate what their assets amounting to $15B are and whether or not these are under/overvalued, so instead I look at cash - debt as that's something I understand much better.
There's no magical formula, tons of people like to put money on unprofitable companies that have a lot of hype and tell you a good story about their mission. For me, I look for companies that are making money today, that have a good earnings rate of growth relative to their p/e ratio, and a business that I understand.
Robinhood is not that. It could be that in the future when I revisit it in a couple quarters or more, but it's not for me.
>But one guy taking a negative expected value bet and winning big doesn't really help all the other little guys on WSB who got roped in to buying GME at 100+ today
I don't disagree with your post overall, but do want to give some credit to the particular user being discussed. He had a solid bull value thesis that was well thought out and not at all based on memes, with the short squeeze potential being a mere afterthought. He has a great youtube channel where he explains his thesis in-depth. While he posts occasionally on WSB he does not seem to fit the wild gambler image that WSB has.
I don't have enough experience or knowledge to speak intelligently on whether his play was actually negative or positive expected value but it was not a random gamble.
Just felt the need to throw this out there because with all the attention this is getting I've seen him unfairly (in my opinion) being grouped with the admittedly large amount of people who are essentially just gambling.
How would that not be a breach? Their system allowed a malicious entity acting in bad faith to gain large amounts of data under false pretenses. If they got the data by pretending to be an employee and social engineering their way into the data that way facebook would 100% call that a breach. Is this that different?
(a) Users were duped into giving up their data under a false pretense. This alone cannot be called a breach.
Also, one of the following occurred:
(b.1) Facebook was duped into letting a fraudster install an app on their platform. If this happened, it was a breach.
or
(b.2) Facebook knew all along that the academic research was only a cover for duping users into giving up their data. If this happened then it was not a breach, because Facebook themselves effectively sold the data.
So what Facebook appears to be saying is: There was no breach. We sold the data!
Because they know that apps make money through Facebook ads and they do charge for those. If Facebook knew about the true purpose of this sort of app, then they also knew that they were going to make a lot of money off of it.
> It is WORSE than a breach, because FB is complicit.
A breach in which the custodian is complicit is still a breach, not something worse. Obviously, the its worse from the perspective of the custodians degree of responsibility if they are actively malicious rather than negligent or innocent, but this is still within the usual definition of a breach of private data. A breach is about the subject’s privacy being violated, which can happen with or without the complicity of the custodian of the data.
I used to be a mid level manager at a small regional somewhat-niche retail chain. The last few years they have started to heavily focus on employee knowledge. Hiring full time staff whose only job are to be product experts to help customers, introducing huge amounts of product knowledge courses. They know they can't beat the big boys on price so they are trying to become THE local place you go to talk to someone about this specific niche. It has been working out very well for them.
The niche doesn't even really matter here. It could be car stereos, music, books, alcohol, grocery, whatever. I definitely think the path to survival for small retail shops going forward is going to be expert level knowledge and customer service. The days of people patronizing your store just because its physically nearby are numbered.
edit: Also, and this is totally anecdotal, but I personally shop at several places that aren't quite the cheapest (though none are TOO relatively high priced) but I continue to shop because the staff are far more knowledgeable than I and their assistance is well worth the extra ~10% in price.
Notable that yesterday one of the top stories was that Amazon's major book competitor, Barnes and Noble, just fired most of those exact "expert" staff. That they claim they cannot afford to loss lead books like Amazon does, so they must instead discard their highly paid, skilled workers in favor of minimum wage.
This is the general trend in most of America. Many now fall into one of three categories. Highly rewarded entrepreneur / chief officer, educated and well paid but fiercely worked salary, or minimum wage serf. The bands are also becoming more defined and logarithmically separated. ~$16000 (2^14) [serf], ~$90000 (2^16.5) [educated salary], $500000+(2^19) [wealthy / gentry]
Further, the middle section is mostly bleeding downward due to factors like the above mentioned layoffs (Sam's Club did similar), the increasing relative cost of education / health care / other barriers to entry, and the inflation adjusted erosion of buying power.
Its an argument to say the path is towards expert service, yet with the range of social review / recommendation pages / boards available now (much of which Amazon itself cultivates), even newcomers can quickly become informed if they are so inclined. No wonder many now prefer to use automated isles rather than human checkouts. The staff provide little and often just push annoying suggestive sells.
>> Third, it's a file storage. This is the most overlooked part, unfortunately.
When gmail first launched I remember it having such relatively high storage space that my friends and I used it extensively as a music sharing/storage system. An mp3 was just small enough to make it a comfortable email attachment and the storage space was great in an age without infinite cloud hosts.
Huge amounts of gmail's early utility to me was simply the file storage. Lots of people would give you a free email address. Google made a big deal out of the massive space they offered.
A while back, Gmail began blocking .js file attachments, but I didn't realize until today that this means my old JavaScript file attachments would be retroactively blocked. I tracked down an email from two years ago with a JavaScript file attached that I needed, but I couldn't download it!
I was eventually able to get it by doing "Show Original" in Gmail and copy/pasting the base64-encoded attachment data and decoding it. But it made me nervous about using Gmail as a way to hang on to files, since things I attach now might not be available later.
I had this same issue. Google also blocked .jar and .zip if I remember. I had lost some old school projects that I tried to recover, which we're turned in via email. I couldn't download the attachments for this, despite the fact I sent them in the first place! Much less, why couldn't I allow someone to send me a .js file I wanted it? It's a weird restriction to not even be given a choice.
Which really shows how the game has gotten so much harder. Ten years ago someone playing a fundamentally solid deterministic strategy could print money online. And in many low stakes casino games that is probably still true.
One difference that immediately jumped out at me is with bee you can send a paper check. My landlord for instance will only take a paper check or money order and with simple it isn't possible to easily pay my rent without a fairly significant inconvenience. I'm sure many poor people are in similar situations.
