Fun with numbers for Sep 1, 2019

Apple declines to burn 17 billion, Tesla boosters disappointed.

Ross Gerber, a Tesla booster who provides endless entertainment on TSLA twitter, had an interesting idea (the same idea he's had for the last 4-5 years), that Apple should burn 17 billion dollars instead of giving them to people who hold AAPL stock.

The first Tesla car that was targeted at the general public (as opposed to tech billionaires and centi-millionnaires who wanted to be thought as forward-thinking) was the Model S, introduced in 2012. So we'll use 2012 as the beginning of Tesla as a real car company.

As I write this it's Sunday, September 1st, 2019 and the last TSLA close was on Friday, August 31st at 225.61. We'll compare this number with the stock closing price for the closest date for all years 2012-2018 and compute the annualized growth. Then we use that growth to forecast the evolution of an hypothetical Apple stake of 17 billion.

Using a 5-year growth rate for that tweet was basically the textbook default, but looking at that table, the last two columns really tell an interesting story… didn't Ross suggest Apple buy Tesla in late 2017 and in late 2018? Because the numbers in that table say something about financial acumen.

Calories, calories, calories... What a bunch of nonsense!

This marvel of mechanical engineering is the Siemens STG5-9000HL gas turbine. Running in single-cycle mode at nominal power it takes in almost 59,000 kg of LNG per hour or around 900 MW (Calories in: 755 million kCal/hour) and delivers around 400 MW of spinning power to a generator, for about 360 MWe (Calories out: 310 million kCal/hour) of electrical power.

Wait, what? Isn’t it Calories-In-Calories-Out? Is the turbine getting fatter or something?

No. Running in single-cycle mode the system loses around 60% of its power to unrecovered heat.

This is the real problem with CICO and 'Just Get a Caloric Deficit' recommendations: because no one measures the energy lost in radiated, conducted, and convected heat, or the energy content of urine, feces, and ‘outgassing,’ and because those show large variation across people (and across different situations for the same person, including changes in diet), the whole thing is nothing more than pretend science: like astrology made with computers, adding the trappings of science to a flawed foundation yields nothing valuable.

Well, of no real value, but monetizable; and there’s also the moral posturing afforded by telling others that being fat is proof of their lack of willpower or moral failings. (And, of course, since it doesn’t work, leads to continuing supply of clients.)

Thermodynamics is not a magical incantation. But some people use as if it were.

(I'd be willing to bet that 90% of the people who invoke 'thermodynamics' as a magical incantation to ward off the evil spirits of low-carb diets couldn't have made the junior-high Physics computations in that first paragraph.)

More infrastructure

"How can you take photos of those ugly things when there are all these flowers and rocks?"

Me: because when you understand what these things are, you marvel at the detail, at the functionality, and at the fact that they work to begin with. Also, I photograph nature too.

Why I'm somewhat apprehensive about Apple's reshuffle

Though I'm not as pessimistic about the Apple executive shuffle as the markets and Joy Of Tech, I'm apprehensive regarding the future of Apple's products.

Jony Ive is a great industrial designer, but Human-Computer Interaction is not Industrial Design. And some of the design decisions in recent hardware (meaning Ive's decisions) seem to ignore realities on the field. Take the latest iMac.

The new iMac doesn't have an optical drive; some pundits (and, I think, Phil Schiller on the Apple event) say that's a normal evolution. After all there aren't floppy disks on computers any longer and Apple was the first to drop them. And look how pretty the tapered edges of the iMac are.

Floppy disks existed as part of a computer-only ecosystem. CDs, DVDs, and BluRay Discs are part of a much larger ecosystem, which includes dedicated players and big screen TVs, production and distribution chains for content, and a back catalog and personal inventory for which downloads are not a complete alternative. (Some movies and music are not available as downloads and people already have large collections of DVDs and BluRay Discs.)

Using floppy disks as an example of change, implying that it is repeated with optical drives, shows a complete disregard of the larger ecosystem and willful ignorance of the difference between the earlier situation and the current situation.

For a laptop, the absence of an optical drive may be an acceptable trade-off for lower weight; for a desktop, particularly one that is a "home" desktop with a HD screen, the lack of a BluRay/DVD/CD drive is a questionable decision.

But look how pretty the tapered edges are, here in the uncluttered Apple Store retail shelves — oops, those computers will be in cluttered real world environments, where the necessary external drive (what, no BluRay drive yet, Apple?) will add even more clutter.

But, on the empty tables and antiseptic environments of "minimalist" designers' imagined world, that tapered edge is really important.

In the rest of the world, there are scores of people who like watching really old movies (available on DVD, not as downloads or streaming — except illegally), new movies in 1080p discs with lots of special features (i.e. BluRay discs that they can buy cheaply in big box stores), or their own movies (which they already own, and could rip — in violation of the DMCA — for future perusal, as long as they want piles of external hard drives); or maybe they want to rip some music that isn't available in download format, say CDs they bought in Europe that aren't available in the US yet.

So, using a decision that is not isomorphic at all (dropping the floppy disk) as a justification, Apple ignores a big chunk of the value proposition (consumption of media that is not available via digital download) on behalf of elegance. And, perhaps some extra iTunes sales — probably too small to make a difference on the margin.

What will this type of philosophy do to software? As Donald Norman wrote in this piece, there's nothing particularly good about fetishizing simplicity. Even now, many power users of Apple products spend a lot of time developing work-arounds for Apple's unnecessary rigid limitations.

Steve Jobs's second stint at Apple had the advantage of his having failed twice before (his first stint at Apple and NeXT), which tempered him and made him aware of the power of ecosystems (not just network effects). This is a powerful learning experience for an executive. Jony Ive hasn't failed in this manner.

Yet.