Facebook: still growing

From today’s New York Times:

The social network on Wednesday reached the latest milestones in its quest to dominate the world, topping 1.79 billion monthly visitors as of the end of September, up 16 percent from a year ago. Facebook also added a record number of new daily users and said for the first time that more than one billion people regularly used its network exclusively on their mobile device every month.

And those numbers do not even include Facebook’s other properties, such as the photo-sharing service Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp.

Facebook’s user growth defies the usual trajectories for social media companies, which often start strong out of the gate and then sharply slow down. Twitter, which added four million new visitors last quarter, now serves a user base roughly one-sixth the size of Facebook’s. Snapchat, while popular among young users, has about 150 million daily users, about half as many as Twitter…

Impact of autonomous vehicles on (mostly male) employment

From a Guardian column by Paul Mason:

these battles between regulators and the rent-seeking monopolists who have hijacked the sharing economy are, in the long term, irrelevant. The attempt to drive down cab drivers’ wages and reduce their employment rights to zero are, in their own way, a last gasp of the 20th-century economic thinking.

Because soon there won’t need to be drivers at all. Given that there are 400,000 HGV drivers in the UK, that at least a quarter of Britain’s 2.5 million van drivers are couriers, and that there are 297,000 licensed taxi drivers – that is a big dent in male employment.

The most important question facing us is not whether Uber drivers should have employment rights (they should), but what to do in a world where automation begins to eradicate work. If we accept – as Oxford researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne stated in 2013 – that 47% of jobs are susceptible to automation, the most obvious problem is: how are people going to live?

The road from serfdom

From The Economist:

AS MORE CVs glitter with university degrees and straight A-grades, companies have devised a new tiebreaker for admission to the best jobs: the internship. Careers in finance, the media, politics and other popular fields now often begin with a temporary stint lasting from a few weeks to upwards of a year. The government reckons that at any time up to 70,000 interns are toiling in Britain. Yet about a third of them are unpaid. This gives rich, London-based candidates an edge.

There are growing attempts to level the playing field by making companies pay up. On November 4th Alec Shelbrooke, a Conservative MP, is due to present a bill to grant all interns the minimum wage, as long as they are above compulsory school age and their internship is not part of a degree course. The spread of unpaid internships means that bright graduates are being leapfrogged in the labour market by richer rivals who, at university, “pissed about a bit, got a 2:2, but got the job because they had money put behind them,” he says.

Private members’ bills such as Mr Shelbrooke’s tend to fizzle out. But Damian Hinds, the employment minister, let it be known on October 30th that the government, too, was “looking at” the question of unpaid internships, which he linked to social mobility, the subject Theresa May has put at the centre of her domestic agenda…

Quote of the Day

“For the waking there is one world, and it is common — but sleepers turn aside, each into a world of his own”.

Heraclitus

Always comes to mind when I claim that we may be sleepwalking into a networked nightmare.

Stumbling along…

solperstein2-blogsize

We’ve been in Berlin for a few days. Walking along a residential street in Prenzlauer Berg I came on these brass squares outside the door of an apartment block and suddenly realised what they were: Stolperstine, literally “stumbling stones”, memorials to people, mainly Jews, who once lived in that building and who were deported and murdered by the Nazis. These three commemorate the Holzmann family — father Fritz, mother Dora and son Gerhard — who were all deported on the same day, 29 October, 1941. Father and son went to a forced labour camp and were murdered within a month of one another in 1943. Dora was murdered in another camp in May 1942. According to Wikipedia, over 50,000 stolpersteine have been laid in 18 European countries, making the stolperstein project the world’s largest decentralised memorial.

Why the Web is making high-quality journalism unsustainable

From Frederic Filloux:

Today, the economic value of a journalism item stems from its popularity, i.e. the number of clicks (or views) it generates. A well-crafted listicle put together by a clever Millennial will generate more revenue that any public-interest piece, this in total disregard for who actually reads it, for how long, etc. That’s the absurdity of today’s system.

Yep. Insightful piece, well worth reading in full.

Apple mania

This morning’s Observer column:

It’s that time of year again. Apple has released its results for the fiscal quarter ended 24 September 2016 and we are immediately plunged into “Has Apple peaked?” speculation. How come? Well, the company posted quarterly revenue of $46.9bn and net income of $9bn. Not bad, eh? Ah, yes, but not if you’re a Wall Street analyst, because these numbers compare to revenue of $51.5bn and net income of $11.1bn in the same quarter the year before. And – shock, horror! – the company’s gross margin was only 38% compared to 39.9% a year ago. The numbers are down, in other words.

Cue fevered speculation about the fate of the company. The numbers, burbled one analyst, show “the danger of being a one-trick pony when everyone already owns a pony. The company’s reliance on the smartphone, which is now a mature and saturated market in the developed world, is starting to create a growth problem for Apple. Breaking through will be a challenge, reminding investors Apple’s fundamentals and stock price have peaked.”

Pause for a reality check: Apple has cash reserves of $237.6bn, up $32bn from last year. At $622bn (at 26 October 2016), it is the most valuable company in the world…

Read on

Apple’s iWatch in iDecline?

iwatch

From Statista:

According to IDC’s most recent data, Apple Watch shipments declined by 71.6 percent in the past quarter compared to the same period last year. It’s the second consecutive quarter of high double-digit sales declines for Apple’s smartwatch, indicating that demand is quickly fading after a decent start. As our chart illustrates, the Apple Watch’s early sales figures were as good as the iPad’s and much better than the iPhone’s were in 2007. However, it took the iPhone nine years and the iPad three years to see their first year-over-year sales decline. Apple Watch sales started going downhill after just one year on the market.

Frankly, I’m not surprised. Although I continue to wear my Apple watch most days (especially on busy days when I’m expecting urgent emails or messages), I find it more or less useless for everything else. I’ve given up bringing it with me on overnight trips — can’t be bothered lugging a charger and cable. And of course at home it sits in its charging dock every night. Leading-edge uselessness, methinks.

The amnesia of post-Watergate liberals

There’s a fine essay in The Atlantic by Matt Stoller on how post-Watergate liberals forgot about the menace of corporate power.

For most Americans, the institutions that touch their lives are unreachable. Americans get broadband through Comcast, their internet through Google, their seeds and chemicals through Monsanto. They sell their grain through Cargill and buy everything from books to lawnmowers through Amazon. Open markets are gone, replaced by a handful of corporate giants. Political groups associated with Koch Industries have a larger budget than either political party, and there is no faith in what was once the most democratically responsive part of government: Congress. Steeped in centralized power and mistrust, Americans must now confront Donald Trump, the loudest and most grotesque symbol of authoritarianism in politics today.

“This,” wrote Robert Kagan in The Washington Post, “is how fascism comes to America.” The nation is awash in commentary and fear over the current cultural moment. “America is a breeding ground for tyranny,” wrote Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. Yet, Trump’s emergence would not be a surprise to someone like Patman, or to most New Dealers. They would note that the real-estate mogul’s authoritarianism is not new in American culture; it is ubiquitous. It is consistent with how the commercial sphere has developed since the 1970s. Americans feel a lack of control: They are at the mercy of distant forces, their livelihoods dependent on the arbitrary whims of power. [Wright] Patman once attacked chain stores as un-American, saying, “We, the American people, want no part of monopolistic dictatorship in … American business.” Having yielded to monopolies in business, the nation must now face the un-American threat to democracy Patman warned they would sow.

Great essay. It chimes with a book I’m reading at the moment — Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal: or whatever happened to the party of the people? — which is about how the Democrats came to represent certain kinds of elites rather than real people. And which of course is also about why Hillary Clinton is such a depressing candidate for president.

It reminds us also that

[Bill] Clinton stripped antitrust out of the Democratic platform; it was the first time a reference to monopoly power was not in the platform since 1880.