That's why they call it Gawker

While it is de rigueur among observers of Silicon Valley’s Game of Thrones to dismiss questions of profitability as short-sighted hand-wringing, the detailed documents obtained by Gawker demonstrate conclusively for the first time that Uber has been financing its astronomic growth by taking staggering losses.
 

This unaudited revenue and expense breakdown for 2013 and 2014 shows that, though Uber’s net revenue has grown substantially, the company lost more than $56 million in 2013. By the first half of 2014 alone, that number had leapt to more than $160 million. 
 

Another document, laying out quarterly profits and losses in 2012 and part of 2013, shows the same dynamic: healthy growth in revenue coupled with steadily deepening losses. In 2012, Uber’s losses totaled $20.4 million; from the first quarter of 2012 until mid-2013, quarterly losses more than doubled from $3.5 million to $8.1 million.
 

Juicy get by Gawker on Uber's financials, but the financial analysis is about the quality you'd expect. The original version of the article included this line:

“Net revenue” typically refers to the money you have left after the cost of doing business—profit.
 

Yikes. I give lots of tech journalists grief for not knowing the subjects they're covering, but I'd venture to say most anyone with the a basic finance or econ course under their belts knows the difference between net revenue and profit. This hilariously defiant correction was later added:

Correction: Although net revenue is sometimes used as a synonym for profit, in accounting terms it means simply gross revenue minus the cost of sales. Two sentences that confused this meaning have been removed.
 

If I were an investor, I think I'd be ecstatic to see these internal financials. In a commodity market where the last company standing will be incredibly valuable, Uber is subsidizing a price war that favors the company with the scale advantage (i.e., Uber). Try calling an Uber Pool and compare it to calling a Lyft Line and you'll get a sense of how much thicker the Uber market is, on both the driver and rider side.

The subsidized pricing in a variety of cities are a worthwhile customer acquisition cost for what might be a lifetime rider. The last time I was in Los Angeles, riding Uber all over town was so cheap it fell into the category of no-brainer, and I contemplated not renting a car next time in town. I was in New York City recently and whereas a year ago a lot of Manhattanites still took cabs most of the time, now most of them are Uber converts. Once the introductory rates and subsidies go away, I suspect most of them will still be customers. That's when the profits come.

And yes, someday one of Uber's chief costs, the drivers, may be replaced by driverless cars, adding to their gross margins, and also their profits.

No moral judgments here, just some impressed gawking at Uber's flawless execution. That wouldn't have made for a Gawker-worthy story, but that should've been the headline.

The new writing fundamentals

Spidery scrawls across faintly lined paper or the carefully penned love letter will be the stuff of fairytales for many young Finns thanks to a new government policy. Schools in Finland are phasing out cursive handwriting classes in favour of keyboard skills, as officials accept that texting, tapping and tweeting have taken over as the primary means of communication in the modern age.
 

“We used to do joined-up writing so that we could write faster, but these days kids only start learning it in grade two [aged eight] and have a year to get it right before moving on to concentrating on what they write, rather than simply how they write it,” said Minna Harmanen of Finland’s National Board of Education. “They don’t have time to become fast at cursive writing, so it’s not useful for them.”
 

Joined-up writing has also become more difficult since Finns introduced new ways of writing their letters in 1986: “We moved from the old Swedish-derived handwriting style to a more modern one and now a few letters look very similar to each other in joined-up writing,” explained Harmanen. “It’s not easy for children to write – or for teachers to read. When they write in print, it’s clearer.” From 2016, pupils will be taught only print handwriting and will spend more time learning keyboard skills – “something we recognise is very important for the job market,” said Harmanen.
 

Full story at 10.

My niece is nearly turning two, it's probably time for me to teach her how to switch to the emoji keyboard in iOS, followed by Advanced Instagram Filtering and the Spatial UI Basics of Snapchat. If the schools won't add this stuff to their curriculum, I'm on it as an uncle who wants his nieces and nephews to be digitally fluent.

Sneaky feminism

Feminism has been sneaking around. Don’t believe me? A recent New York profile of TV host Katie Nolan hailed the “woman bringing a sneaky feminism to Fox sports.” A few days later, the New York Times went long on Amy Schumer’s boisterous feminism, which it characterized as her “sneaky power.” Like Broad City (another purveyor of “sneak-attack feminism”), Schumer’s work is something of a trysting spot for furtive sisterhood; last year in Slate Willa Paskin declared Inside Amy Schumer the “most sneakily feminist show on TV.”
 

Psst! Do you know what else is “sneakily feminist?” Showtime’s The Affair. Meanwhile the Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal flick Hysteria is “slyly feminist,” as is Pixar’s fable Inside Out(which, according to a separate reviewon Slate, accomplishes a “subtle but surprisingly feminist” swerve). Plus, the show Trophy Wife has bloomed, like some nocturnal desert flower, into “secretly one of the most feminist shows on TV.” Sundance chose the “top ten secretly feminist films” of all time (with Thelma and Louise at the mist-shrouded apex). Spy is “secretly a feminist attack on the patriarchy.” Not even academic books prove immune from such subtlety, secrecy, surprise: In a chapter on Ursula Le Guin’s invented folklore, scholar Jarold Ramsey notes that the “slyly feminist … appropriation of the mystique of ‘Old Man Coyote’ can be illustrated by the beginning of a Kesh myth about a war between bears and humans.”
 

Let’s read that myth! Once upon a time, a lady Coyote tried to dissuade the King of the Bears from attacking humankind. “We should all live in peace and love each other,” the Coyote pleaded, and “all the while she was talking,” Le Guin writes, “Coyote was stealing Bear’s balls, cutting them off with an obsidian knife she had stolen from the Doctors Lodge, a knife so sharp he never felt it cutting.”
 

Katy Waldman on that verbal tic of an adjective that must precede the word feminist or feminism. Anyone referring to Amy Schumer as sneakily feminist must be an extreme feminist indeed.

Efficient aggregation of repugnance

The cycle of outrage on the internet seems to have a well-defined pattern by now, so if you're on your game, you have a contrarian piece which is the backlash to the backlash prepped and ready to go as soon as the outrage descends, and if you're really advanced you have the backlash to the backlash to the backlash volley in your quiver. It's an advanced play. Or you can float above it all with a meta piece about the workings of the internet outrage cycle, which I guess this post is some variant of.

In his great new book Who Gets What and Why, about market design, economist Alvin Roth defines repugnant transactions as ones that some people want to engage in that others object to even if they aren't directly harmed. For example, it's forbidden in most countries to buy and sell kidneys. If you spread a wide enough net across the world, you'll find all types of cultural practices that are repugnant in some societies, legal in others. In America it's illegal to eat horse meat; it's a delicacy in Europe. In medieval times the idea of lending money and charging interest was forbidden; today it still is in a few places, but it's a bedrock of the banking system most everywhere else.

The shooting of Cecil the Lion was a flash fire on social media this week. And of course, suddenly everyone was outraged at the hunting of lions, leading inexorably to the backlash wondering why we aren't more outraged at the shooting of unarmed black teens, or 5 endangered elephants. Why aren't we more outraged at ourselves for eating chicken?

It is too exhausting for most people to live in a state of moral outrage all the time, and so it largely simmers below the boiling point of our consciousness. Every so often, though, some event occurs that comes in a weaponized package, in the perfect form to capitalize on the viral amplification powers of the internet. For example, the murder of a lion so beloved that he is, despite being an apex predator, referred to by the adorable name of Cecil.

And so a practice that many people probably objected to but rarely thought of—trophy big game hunting—suddenly swells up like a tsunami and exceeds our collective dam of ignorance. The internet is more efficient at transmitting information than any human invention ever, but not all information travels equally efficiently. I had never heard of Cecil the Lion a week ago. Now he's up there with the MGM lion and Simba as the most famous lions in the world. His face showed up in every one of my social feeds again and again, his title a perfectly compact hashtag: #CecilTheLion.

More and more, we'll see these flash floods of outrage, because the internet is the most efficient aggregator of repugnance in history. Formerly disparate, even mild pockets of repugnance can carry disproportionate magnitude on social media if formatted optimally to fit into the entry slot of the internet's megaphone. It's one reason something can lie dormant for years, like Bill Cosby's sexual crimes, and then suddenly become the nexus of national outrage. As one victim Tamara Green said:

In 2005, Bill Cosby still had control of the media. In 2015, we have social media.
 

It goes both ways. Lobbying is one area where this dynamic can take on a destructive power. A narrow interest can aggregate its strong feelings into targeted, weaponized money that can overwhelm the mild objections of the majority. And so we have corn subsidies and other oddities locked into place. It's not great for most of us, but most of us don't care as much as the small but vocal corn lobby.

But for many other issues which have long wished to ignite the public imagination and support, there is no better time. Buzzfeed was one of the first media companies to recognize that some types of news, packaged a certain way, attain exponential organic distribution given the way most people discover news through social media.

Alan Moore predicted this all in his great graphic novel Watchmen. Those of you who've read it will recognize this as an early predecessor of Cecil the Lion:

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Expense reports I'd want to audit

It might be incongruous to think of spies having to account for expenses, like any old suit on a business trip, but in reality, people working for intelligence services do have to keep track of the money they're spending, file expense reports, and even hound their company (the Company, in this case) to reimburse them. "They're the same as the reports any businessman would submit after meeting a client," says Chris Lynch, former FBI and CIA counterintelligence officer and author of The C.I Desk. "Meals, miles, parking, small gifts, other expenses, receipts if they had them, some kind of 'certification' if they didn’t."
 

Information about expense reports for intelligence operations is somewhat hard to come by, both because it's mundane and potentially revealing. Spy memoirs don't spend a lot of time recalling the hours spent on filling out paperwork, but, on the other hand, boring paperwork, if it included line-by-line accountings of expenses, could show how an officer operates—and how lavishly he or she spends. The expenses for setting up an operation might include sourcing equipment, creating supply caches, arranging safe houses, and training people; one court case in Italy revealed records of U.S. intelligence officers staying at luxury hotels and spending as much as $500 a day eating out.
 

But some of the most intriguing expenses that intelligence operations rack up come from the requests of agents—the well-placed people that intelligence officers recruit to secretly pass along valuable information. Some agents simply want to be paid for their efforts. But some have much more unusual requests. 
 

Spies have to submit expense reports, too.

Tumblr idea: imagined renderings of James Bond's expense reports from each of the movies.