April 24: Wall Street rallied amid an outlook that a centrist will likely win the French presidential election.
April 25: Bull run amid strong earnings by Caterpillar, MacDonald’s. Nasdaq rose 41.65 point to close above 6,000 for the first time ever.
April 28: Stocks edged lower after first quarter growth turned out to be the weakest in 3 years. For the week, the big 3 indexes rose 1.5 – 2%
Graph: Yahoo Finance
The secretary of state warned the UN Security Council that failure to act now on North Korea may bring “catastrophic consequences.”
He called for “painful new sanctions” to pressure North Korea to give up it’s nuclear and missile programs.
North Korea tested another missile day of the meeting. Reportedly, the test likely failed.
A team of software designers, technicians, conservators, architects, artists, artisans, working together as Factum Arte, are recreating works of art to be used by the public. Some of their work is already used by museums. The group makes its money by also producing works in the private market.
The goal of their public efforts are to give more people the chance to understand works of art and to help preserve them.
Workers at Factum Arte are now planning to replace works of art destroyed by ISIS. Their facsimiles are made from originals removed by Europeans in earlier eras from Iraq.
Because the works are not originals, there is less concern about damaging them, so they can be placed in their original setting, giving visitors what may be a more authentic experience of them.
How close are the facsimiles to the originals? In terms of resolution, around 100 microns (1 point of information per 1/10th of a millimeter), and technology continues to improve.
According to a recent report by Pew Research, young people are more often in favor of big government that provides a lot of social services.
Pew’s research found that Americans from 18-50 are around 55% in favor of bigger government. Those over 50 and under 65 are the least in favor of bigger governments, and those over 65 also are more often in favor of smaller governments, but not as much as the 50-64s.
Who else prefers bigger governments? Relatively speaking, women, those with highschool education or less, and those with less than $30,000 in family income. Also, Republicans and Conservatives fairly strongly favor small government, while Liberals and left-leaning individuals strongly favor bigger government.
The new president has so far racked up a travel bill of $20m.
The rate, accumulated over Trump’s first 100 days, if continued would cost $294 million after 4 years, or over half a billion after 8.
One of the top destinations for the president is his private Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which he calls the “Winter White House.”
For comparison, Obama spent $97m in 8 years.
Amazon Prime now has 80m subs. The increase has been steady in the last 2 years.
People like Amazon’s fast delivery, cheap prices, easy checkout, and good customer service.
The app may be on every young person’s phone, but it’s losing money.
When it launched its IPO this year, it raised $3.4b.
But as of January, it’s lost $1.2b. Almost half of that loss was in 2016.
It was growing at 15m new daily users in the first 3 quarters of 2016, but the last quarter had just 5m new users.
Snapchat is trying to make money by employing industry experts, and they will be setting their sights on combating competitors who do basically the same thing as Snapchat — Instagram with Stories and WhatsApp with Status. They will also be trying to win away advertising investment from other platforms.
However, investment in video ads is growing steadily, adding about $5 per year since 2014. Growth expected to increase, and be worth $90m in 2020, up from today’s $75m.
The chat app aims to hide even metadata, the graph of its users’ connections and activity (as opposed to just hiding the content of messages).
Ricochet applies Tor-like tech to cloak the user’s device, not just web destinations. Messages also do not use a central server to send messages, so the data does not exist there.
“There’s no record in the cloud somewhere that you ever used it,” John Brooks, the 25-year-old developer said of his app. “It’s all mixed in with everything else happening in Tor. You’re invisible among the crowd.”
Profits in the music industry are coming increasingly from streaming and subscriptions, looking at percentage, and even downloads are decreasing a little.
CD and DVD sales are becoming less common relatively, but vinyl sales are up.
“If you study Chinese products, you can get inspiration,” according to a woman who works for technology investment firm Andreessen Horowitz.
She also works helping U.S. startups learn from Chinese tech.
Connie Chan says Chinese tech is ahead of U.S. tech in everything from livestreaming (worth $5b) to messaging. For example, while Americans almost all use messaging apps daily to communicate, in China they use similar apps (such as WeChat) to pay utilities and traffic tickets, order medications to their door, and get marriage licences.
“I spend so much time teaching people what they can’t see,” she told Wired recently. “It won’t stay invisible for long.”
The idea that Chinese tech is just a copycat of other countries’ is now obsolete, she said.
Now that Google is a sub-company inside Alphabet — which is run by founders Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin and Larry Page — Google is run by Sundar Pichai, and his earnings are up almost double from 2015.
In 2016, he made $199.7m. $650k is his base pay, and $198.7m was a stock award.
Google is reportedly more profitable under Pichai. It has boosted sales from its core advertising and YouTube business, and is working on cloud computing, machine learning, and hardware, including smartphones, VR headsets, routers, and smart speakers.
Alphabet is growing. GOOG’s stock rose above a $600b market cap this week for the first time.
A formal judgement has approved the administrative measure, indicating that a permanent restriction is now in place for all language editions of the online encyclopedia in Turkey.
Some are pointing towards Wikipedia’s depiction of Erdogan as a dictator as a cause:
“Erdoğan detractors have noted that under Erdoğan, more journalists have been incarcerated in Turkey than in any other country, including North Korea. Detractors have also pointed out the fact that the April referendum essentially nullified the traditional legal ‘check’ of parliamentary fiscal review, that parliament had previously held over his executive branch of government. Detractors have claimed that Erdoğan’s unceasing efforts at broadening his executive powers while also minimizing his executive accountability may amount to the ‘fall of Turkish democracy,’ and the ‘birth of a dictator.’
“The loss of availability is consistent with internet filters used to censor content in the country,” according to independent, non-partisan network monitoring observatory Turkey Blocks.
“SSL errors are issued for https requests, indicating failing to connect to the authentic servers, while the unencrypted addresses now return an nginx http 404 error indicative of filtering.”