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BS check: $8T is $1000 per person on this planet. A healthy P/E ratio of 25 would translate to earning $40/year in profit from every person on the planet. SpaceX/Starlink obviously doesn’t just walk in and get everyone as a customer though. They have roughly 10 million customers right now. Let’s be generous and say they have 20 million. That $8T works out at $400K per customer valuation which at a 50 P/E would mean $8K/year/customer profit per customer or $666/month/customer profit. Those are generous numbers. Scaling back to 10 million customers and 25 P/E would require $2666/month/customer in profit to get to $8T valuation. For Internet service?

Not that it materially changes your point, but I would not be surprised if Starlink reaches 200 million customers at some point, even with my other comment about Musk personally being increasingly seen as a political security risk, the increasing distrust of globalisation, and the new trend of sovereign-shoring.

$8T/(unreasonably high 50 P/E)/200M customers/12 months = $66.67 profit (not revenue) per customer per month.

The moment Musk's reality distortion bubble stops functioning, his brands' PE ratios are likely to revert to the 5-15 levels of comparable businesses.


7/11 Japan really benefits from urban density, which in turn makes the distribution of fresher food and smaller footprint stores much more of a factor.

The distribution network even shows up in maps. There will be clusters of 7/11 in Japanese cities which is more efficient than spreading them equally.

https://conbini.kikkia.dev/


Billable hour rates would need to increase by 25%.


You really missed the opportunity here. You were meant to bill for the review, assessment, report production, and risks judged when coming up with that 25%.


Most businesses don’t grow just by churning out more units of software. At some point, it doesn’t matter how quickly you can churn out features if you’re not solving customer problems and convincing customers that they should pay for those solutions.

Once software becomes cheap, the bottleneck to growth shift to product design, infrastructure/manufacturing, sales and support.


Our local toy store is a member of marketing cooperative and yours might be too.

They are wonderful and a perfect example of a local toy store - a wide variety, personal service and free gift wrapping on all purchases (a life saver for anyone with kids and a birthday party to go to seemingly every other weekend).

A map of the network is here.

https://stoysnetpartner.com/our-retail-clients/


> So why not license the shape then?

Because - until it makes its way through the courts - it’s not established that Fender has the rights to claim ownership of on the shape in the first place.

In the US, there’s three routes for that - design patent, trade dress and artistic copyright. AFAIK they don’t have a design patent. Trade dress is hard to prove association - would most people on the street say “yep, that’s 100% a Stratocaster” if they say the outline? Probably not. The shape isn’t separate from the functionality so artistic copyright hasn’t upheld either. The fact that Fender has not successfully enforced copyright concerns for over 70 years is also a sign that they never had IP protection on the shape.


In the US, I'm pretty sure they have no protection. They lost a US case to establish a trademark in 2009 [1] (2009 article title says copyright, but text is about a trademark suit). A design patent would have expired, unless it was filed in 1954 and was pending until recently or is still pending... US patents filed before 1995 don't start their validity period until issuance, but that'd be a big stretch.

It's possible there's a US copyright claim, but on a 1954 design, you would have to have registered it, marked the works with the copyright (on at least most of the copies), and timely renewed. There's also, IMHO, a solid question of if US copyright applies to the shape of a guitar. If they had a strong case, I think they would have tried to enforce on it in 2009 when they tried to enforce on trademark.

[1] https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/fender-loses-guitar-...


There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that the first electric guitar demo was a bunch of strings nailed to some basic lumber and it received a negative reception. The designer went home, tore apart his acoustic guitar and mounted the electronics inside. The sound was not changed by this. The critical reception however was much improved. And the rest is history.

The shape might not be purely functional—and that seems to be the basis for their attempted lawsuit.


It’s a true story, and it’s about Les Paul and “the log.”

https://guitar.com/features/opinion-analysis/how-les-pauls-l...


The "log" (generally dated to 1941) is the railroad sleeper ("tie" for Americans?) with wings made in the Epiphone factory in Manhattan attached to the side, and is in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. This is the guitar that Gibson turned down until Fender and Bigsby (via Merle Travis) popularized the solid body guitar.

The predecessor was a single string on a piece of actual rail and two spikes, amplified by a telephone receiver in the mid-late 1920s.


Interesting yes.

Money wouldn’t just be diverted from other US stocks though.

Foreign money has increasing buying power as USD weakens against certain currencies and the upside of these IPOs is certainly more attractive to global investors than parking money is lack luster real-estate or bond or cash alternatives.

TINA (to US stock market) and all that.


The competitors to Photoshop right now are promoted image manipulation tools, not another menus-and-layers based Photoshop clone.


Wow… at 1.5% annual return wouldn’t they be better off just renting those assets (aircraft) to other airlines?!


The majority of airliners are on 'dry lease' to their respective airlines to begin with.


Ryanair is 3rd by passengers and 7th by passenger miles, according to this wiki page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_airlines_in_the_world

Obviously their model is different to the big American carriers. Perhaps there’s something about the homogeneity of the US domestic market compared to the EU market that favors loyalty based airlines versus budget airlines.


The comments here seem to suggest that the loyalty program funded with credit card margins are to blame for the difference.

It suggests we'd be better of eliminating the absurdly high hidden taxes paid to the credit card companies, that in turn act to gamify the business. In the end they raise the cost of doing business, for virtually no benefit at all. It's a monopoly extracting as much wealth they can get away with.

The question at the heart of this: How can "the shining light on a hill" be so stupid? It's digging its own demise.


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