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Advancing our amazing bet

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#211

Post by bzbarsky »

jameshart wrote: post #175
asafira wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking about your last statement: If the price were an average of beliefs, we would have people that believe it's worth more and people that think it's worth less. Those that think it is worth more would, logically, buy Google stock, and then the price would increase until we reached the price where people are somewhat on agreement that it isn't worth more. So, either there is a lack of funds to make the purchases,…

Every stock trade reflects a disagreement between two parties about the value of the company, not an agreement on what it is worth. The buyer would rather own that stock than that amount of money. The seller would rather have the money. They can't both be right about which is more valuable.

> They can't both be right about which is more valuable

Actually, they can. As a simple example, they can agree on both price and volatility projections, but simply have different utility functions in terms of how much volatility they are willing to accept. Most simply, one of them might be 64 and about to retire while the other is 22 and just starting to invest in their retirement fund.

I expect that a majority of stock purchases/sales are in fact driven by such considerations and not fundamentals analysis...

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#212

Post by jacquesm »

dredmorbius wrote: post #210
jacquesm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the trend on G+ usage? Any chance that in the near future we'll be able to search for anything with a '+' sign in it and get a relevant answer rather than some G+ page?

I haven't run a re-assessment, and I'm not aware that Stone Temple Consulting (who'd greatly expanded sampling based on my methods) have, though Eric Enge's mentioned doing so. There are a few sources which track online social network usage, and my experience has been that G+ trends are down, sufficiently enough that they've fallen off the survey's entirely. If you wan to trac total posting activity and trends per ye…

Thank you.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#213

Post by prodigal_erik »

jacquesm wrote: post #170
thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

That title sure doesn't match the payload.

Not for the first time. The title of the announcement killing Reader was "an update on Reader".

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#215

Post by nixos »

smitherfield wrote: post #192
nixos wrote: post #74

Again Google is shooting themselves in the foot. Google Fiber, like Android, is a moonshot to keep their line of business alive. Failure doesn't mean that Google doesn't profit off a new line of business. Failure means that Google can be shut down. Google lives off open internet. Their profit is primarily off: 1. Android 2. Search 3. AdSense, AdWords. A closed internet means that 2 out of 3 is dead. All they have in…

>If AT&T and Cable monopolize the internet (which they are close to doing) without strong net-neutrality laws, they can (and will) slowly migrate to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by them). >In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless. That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way…

>That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way to bill the owners for serving them

Or you create a white-list (which is slowly being made). Your average Wordpress site counts against data. Want it to be "free"? Pay AT&T some money? Can't because it's too complicated for anyone but CNN? Too bad.

Oh, you only get 200 MB per month? Not a big deal, because CNN/BBC/YouTube pay money not to be counted against data limits.

We didn't have this for decades. Really, it started about a decade ago when dial-up died.

Under dialup, one could switch providers on a dime, so you could switch from anyone pulling such shenanigans.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#216

Post by jameshart »

bzbarsky wrote: post #211
jameshart wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every stock trade reflects a disagreement between two parties about the value of the company, not an agreement on what it is worth. The buyer would rather own that stock than that amount of money. The seller would rather have the money. They can't both be right about which is more valuable.

> They can't both be right about which is more valuable Actually, they can. As a simple example, they can agree on both price and volatility projections, but simply have different utility functions in terms of how much volatility they are willing to accept. Most simply, one of them might be 64 and about to retire while the other is 22 and just starting to invest in their retirement fund. I expect that a majority of s…

You're right, of course, they don't just disagree about the value of the stock, they disagree about the value of money, and the meaning of 'value'.

But my point is that when you see that a stock is trading at a particular price, all that tells you is that one person has a utility function that values that amount of money higher than a unit of the stock, and one person has a utility function that is opposite it. There's no guarantee either of them have a utility function anywhere near your own. Which leads me to conclude that the net information content of a stock trade is, fundamentally, zero. And yet prediction markets work - go figure.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#217

Post by alxndr »

jacquesm wrote: post #214
prodigal_erik wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for the first time. The title of the announcement killing Reader was "an update on Reader".

There ought to be a gallery of such examples.

This tumblr account serves as a log of the language used in acquisitions: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#218

Post by dredmorbius »

jacquesm wrote: post #212
dredmorbius wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't run a re-assessment, and I'm not aware that Stone Temple Consulting (who'd greatly expanded sampling based on my methods) have, though Eric Enge's mentioned doing so. There are a few sources which track online social network usage, and my experience has been that G+ trends are down, sufficiently enough that they've fallen off the survey's entirely. If you wan to trac total posting activity and trends per ye…

Thank you.

A quick check on "this" and "upon thus" searches suggests that Google's search results depth may not be sufficient to measure the size. I was seeing ~400-500 results for each going back to 2012, on an Oct 26 - Oct 25 year (just to get most current data).

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#219

Post by bzbarsky »

jameshart wrote: post #216
bzbarsky wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can't both be right about which is more valuable Actually, they can. As a simple example, they can agree on both price and volatility projections, but simply have different utility functions in terms of how much volatility they are willing to accept. Most simply, one of them might be 64 and about to retire while the other is 22 and just starting to invest in their retirement fund. I expect that a majority of s…

You're right, of course, they don't just disagree about the value of the stock, they disagree about the value of money, and the meaning of 'value'. But my point is that when you see that a stock is trading at a particular price, all that tells you is that one person has a utility function that values that amount of money higher than a unit of the stock, and one person has a utility function that is opposite it. There…

> There's no guarantee either of them have a utility function anywhere near your own.

Yep.

> Which leads me to conclude that the net information content of a stock trade is, fundamentally, zero.

It might not be if you have a bunch of trades, averaging over lots of people with different utility functions. Maybe. Depending on how average your utility function is.

In practice people end up with heuristics like "100 - age" and diversification out of stocks or hedging of their stocks to deal with the imperfect matchup between their utility function and the averaged one.

It's hard not to think of the whole thing as a house of cards sometimes.

> And yet prediction markets work

Sometimes they do. As long as everyone involved has broadly the same utility function: that of maximizing their money above all else. If enough people, or more properly enough monetary units, come in with a weird utility function (e.g. valuing a particular prediction more than their money), you get prediction market failures.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#220

Post by petra »

gm-conspiracy wrote: post #196
petra wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that a lot big players are betting fixed wireless for the urban market(instead of the smaller rural market) . It's probably the main purpose of 5G. And there's some nice technical innovation(cohere promises to solve fading, tarana talks about working in urban non-line-of-sight) . And even LTE-A offers nice capacities in that context. So why are you betting against it ?

By its very nature, it is inherently more unreliable than a "wired" connection. Additionally, as usage of a particular endpoint increases, capacity for each individual user decreases proportionally. There was an article some days ago about how we used to get these amazing LTE speeds, but now they are horribly congested and feel like low-grade DSL.

I believe there are already places with fixed wireless services(austria or south-korea if i recall correctly) that looks competitive.
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