> The company, valued at around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.
...used the ticker to build stock hype that will bring in another $50M:
> The company, which according to the release will be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.
...and is planning on using that $90M of capital to sell a few extra shovels to the marginal buyer in the latest hype market.
> “The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,” the company said in the announcement.
This is really just picking the corpse clean... company lost 99% of value, dropping from $4B to $0.04B. This is just redirecting what little capital is left into something that might get a small return for whoever is left holding shares.
Calling Japan Rail privatized is a "ehhh, kinda, in some places, if you squint" kinda thing.
Technically, yes, the JR's are private companies.
But track construction is generally done by a government construction company financed with Japanese sovereign debt. The completed tracks are then long-term leased to the JR's at favorable rates.
Is it really a private company if the key capital outlay is done by the government and given to you with a sweetheart deal? ehhhhhh.... you can call the operator company private, but you're being dishonest if you call the system privatized.
I like the story, I struggle to see how to outplay PE.
Yes, PE enshittifies the experience. You can be a better human and win customers that way.
The headwinds are the usual david-v-goliath going up against scale/consolidation stories:
- consolidation gives more purchasing power. When all the PE-controlled pest control vendors in the state are negotiating as one, they get bigger cost breaks
- PE has a bigger war chest. They'll enshittify eventually, but they'll undercut you longer than you can stay solvent. At that point, they'll happily buy you for pennies.
- The end-game is always monopolization. A PE firm bought up something like all the concrete mills in Georgia or one of the southern state. Any building or municipal project in the state effectively buys from that one company, even though it looks like a bunch of different local concrete mills.
- Any AI you throw at the problem presumably PE can handle more efficiently at scale.
In this toy model, the strategy that (may) outcompete is delivering a better service.
> The end-game is always monopolization
This is one happy end state of PE but let’s be clear that for large swathes of human history it has not been the goal of most participants in local economies. If PE’s edge is diluted they may find themselves less able to achieve this on the margin.
Where there's a consolidated critical asset like the concrete plant, they can monopolize the area. Different with PC when the work is being done by individual techs on their routes.
Also I'm starting with the goal "Be the best pest control company" and building up from there, rather than to monopolize it.
Utterly unqualified to suggest any causes (wait for the NTSB report on that), but couple compounding factors I've read elsewhere to begin to understand the situation and context:
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
> Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
"stop stop stop, truck 1 stop stop stop" I mean maybe it was ambiguous for half a second but he pretty quickly said "truck 1 stop". I guess we'll have to wait for the sync up to see if it was too late to stop by then
I did make a snarky derivatives comment elsewhere in the thread, but I do see you're not wrong about oil prices peaking at $138 in June 2008 (Lehman collapsed in September 2008): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILBRENTEU
I thought it was by the layers upon layers of interconnected unregulated derivatives valued at a few orders of magnitude above the underlying subprime mortgages given to anyone with a pulse.
> it was by the layers upon layers of interconnected unregulated derivatives valued at a few orders of magnitude above the underlying subprime mortgages given to anyone with a pulse
It was interconnected derivatives and structured products linked to banks that caused a liquidity crisis in the former to cause a crisis of confidence in the latter.
Meanwhile: "In the letter, Morgan Stanley said the fund wasn’t designed to offer full liquidity because of the nature of its investments, and that credit fundamentals across the underlying portfolio have been broadly stable. The bank's shares fell 2% in premarket trading Thursday" [1].
> liquidity crisis in the former to cause a crisis of confidence in the latter
Wait what? Your thesis is the GFC was caused by a liquidity crunch/bank run? Isn't that... not true?
Isn't the proximal to distal chain of events government encouraged subprime loans -> inaacurately valued MBS -> exponential, unregulated derivative instruments -> leveraged contagion. What does market confidence have to do with any of that?
> your thesis is the GFC was caused by a liquidity crunch/bank run? Isn't that... not true?
It's absolutely proximally true and it's not just my thesis. From Wikipedia: "The first phase of the crisis was the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and bank runs in several countries" [1].
The subprime crisis shouldn't have been bigger than the S&L crisis [2]. What turned it into a financial crisis was the credit crunch that followed. That crunch was caused by folks running on banks that had sponsored these products.
On "inaccurately valued MBS," note that the paper marked AAA mostly paid out like a AAA security. It would be like if you were perfectly good for your word and I lent you money, but then I wanted to sell on that debt to a third party who didn't trust you at a 50% discount. What does "properly valued" mean in that context? It's ambiguous in a dangerous way. (In this analogy, you wind up paying back the debt at face value. But years later, albeit on schedule.)
Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think it's the only solution.
Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.
Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers.
Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.
At least for some time I imagine a hybridization may pop up. For example you grow a community of humans that keeps bots under control. Because of this all actors are humans, and valuable because of that.
Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on tying them with real world identities and then serving them more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing with the open internet.
Protection of one's attention is our generation's luxury product.
Whether it's the TV hardware or the streaming service in your house, your standard of living is now judged by whether you pay extra for the ad-free tier.
Apple tends to skew luxury purchase, so it makes sense it hasn't been riddled with adware yet. The Apple logo is a status symbol that you're not being bombarded with ads in every corner of underutilized screen real-estate.
They sold the Allbirds brand and IP for $39M:
> The company, valued at around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.
...used the ticker to build stock hype that will bring in another $50M:
> The company, which according to the release will be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.
...and is planning on using that $90M of capital to sell a few extra shovels to the marginal buyer in the latest hype market.
> “The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service,” the company said in the announcement.
This is really just picking the corpse clean... company lost 99% of value, dropping from $4B to $0.04B. This is just redirecting what little capital is left into something that might get a small return for whoever is left holding shares.
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