Friday Funnies

Is it Too Early to Call Black Friday?

Aug 02, 2024

For the past few days I’ve been doing what I used to call my day job, but which only appears so sporadically I’d at this point call it an occassional financial bonus when it does show up. For those who don’t know this involves editing and publishing earnings transcripts from publicly traded companies. My Thai language is not that great but my English is number one (even if mispellings are common on my Substack: editors need editors. It’s called fresh eyes). Due to both AI and outsourcing these calls have become less common. Usually they only leave the number one priority publishes up during what is the middle of the night in the USA so that someone can double check the numbers.

The only Magnificent 7 stock call I’ve listened into was for Amazon (AMZN), though I just missed Meta while I was trudging through a lower priority edit. I’m aware of the market turmoil this week. I am not invested in anything, as Buddha had a joke for me that I could gamble all that I wanted to but I’d always lose.

The numbers aren’t that bad per say. These companies are still raking in billions every quarter and are usually growing. Are they keeping up with the infrastructure spend? Is it becoming too bubblelicious to live in fake world any more? Or is something else going on behind the scenes in the capital markets? Could the ghosts of unreliable and censor happy Internet be haunting them?

I’ve listened in on AMZN, SNAP (Snapchat), SQ (I got to listen to Jack Dorsey pontificate about CashApp, which has an even lower satisfaction rating than Chime Bank does), Doordash, Metlife, Booking.com, Wendy’s and a few others. At the same time as I was hearing about the joys of the cloud, google forced me to use docs for editing, would not let me work offline, and would not let me switch to offline mode. An hour got wasted on my side over this forced change. On the plus side Metlife mentioned an abnormally low death rate in the second quarter for 18 to 44 year olds. Are the jabs done doing their damage yet?

Perhaps the war is just starting. It hasn’t been Black Friday in awhile so why wouldn’t that be on the 2024 bingo card? Once you go without electricity, you never really go back to the certainty of always having it. The same is true for Internet. I don’t trust my stuff on the cloud.