Blog – Page 6 – Christopher W. Richardson

Is the brand or the department store the destination? Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and Facebook

With the COVID-19 global lockdowns, 2020 looks to be a banner year for e-commerce. Pretty much since the dot-com bust, there’s been a slow but steady growth in e-commerce. In fact, it’s become such a staple that you regularly hear people discussing Amazon.com as if it’s a monopoly. But in reality, it not only isn’t … Continue reading “Is the brand or the department store the destination? Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and Facebook”

Hedge Funds and New Hong Kong

As I discussed last week, China’s proposed security law for Hong Kong would be a major blow. Follow-on discussions of potential results of the implementation of such a law really span quite a bit of ground. On the “very likely” side of things, Hong Kong is currently home to over 400 hedge funds, managing north … Continue reading “Hedge Funds and New Hong Kong”

Apple moving to ARM on Macs, what does it mean?

There’s a rumor that Apple will be moving to ARM chips on the Macintosh product line. It’s still just a rumor, and we’ve been hearing such things for a few years now, but now it’s out on Bloomberg, which is saying Apple intends to make this announcement the week of the 22nd, at their World … Continue reading “Apple moving to ARM on Macs, what does it mean?”

Hong Kong no longer autonomous from China

With everything going on regarding COVID-19, and now the protests and riots in the US, it’s easy to forget that just a few months ago, there were on-going protests in Hong Kong around Beijing’s attempt to pass a law allowing people to be extradited to the mainland. Equally seemingly lost in the noise is Beijing’s … Continue reading “Hong Kong no longer autonomous from China”

Amazon and self-driving cars?

For a few years now, pretty much every big tech company has been doing something in the self-driving car space, and Amazon isn’t new to this (at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, they announced a partnership with Toyota), but their participation might be the least clear. Tesla, of course, makes sense. Alphabet (Google’s parent) has … Continue reading “Amazon and self-driving cars?”

Keep your eye on the anti-aging space

Humans have been dreaming about immortality approximately forever. But over the last 40 years, we’ve slowly but surely started to make progress on developing a fountain of youth. One needs to be careful in this space, because for every actual advancement, there are dozens if not hundreds of fake, wrong, or fraudulent claims. That said, … Continue reading “Keep your eye on the anti-aging space”

Preliminary results from Finland’s basic income experiment … social “science” is hard

Finland is conducting an experiment where they took a random sample of young-and-unemployed and long-term-unemployed people (2,000 in total) and provided them a small, basic income, not tied to their social benefits (i.e., if they got a low wage job, the wages would not count against their basic support, as most such current systems do). … Continue reading “Preliminary results from Finland’s basic income experiment … social “science” is hard”

Did AMC just shoot itself in the foot?

The VOD wars had kicked off long before the COVID-19 global lockdowns started, but the lockdowns are accelerating change in a lot of businesses. In the wake of the lockdown, there are no movie theaters anymore, so NBC Universal decided to stream Trolls World Tour. It generated US$100 million in revenue, and prompted AMC Theaters (the … Continue reading “Did AMC just shoot itself in the foot?”

Zoom acquires Keybase (or, why companies buy companies)

There was an interesting Quora question recently, about why companies sometimes buy other companies, only to “shut them down”. Zoom just acquired Keybase (a startup, launched in 2014, to create a directory for public encryption keys). They performed such acquisition in order to solve their end-to-end encryption problem. These sound like different things. In fact, … Continue reading “Zoom acquires Keybase (or, why companies buy companies)”

A rare insight into how the oil supply chain works

Long before Descartes dismissed imaginary numbers as nonsense, the Greeks derided negative numbers as “meaningless” — there’s no such thing in the real world. Last week, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced they would allow futures to trade in the negative, and they promptly did, with the May futures contract for West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTI) … Continue reading “A rare insight into how the oil supply chain works”

Is “civil war” brewing in the U.S.?

A widely discussed and shared OpEd in Bloomberg pointed out Gavin Newsom’s (Governor of California) very clearly intentional use of language, using the terms “nation-state” and “export”. Prima facie, this is just politics and just Governor Newsom doing what he needs to do to ensure sufficient medical supplies for the citizens of California. The OpEd trolls … Continue reading “Is “civil war” brewing in the U.S.?”

The Internet continues to fragment

We tend to think of “the Internet” as a single thing, but, in reality, it has been fragmenting for a while (China is the biggest example, where the Internet inside the country looks very different than the one outside, but there are lots of similar fractures, both big and small, e.g., back in 2014 when … Continue reading “The Internet continues to fragment”

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