June 15, 2022

s12e21: What's more profitable than...?

0.0 Context Setting

It’s Wednesday, June 15, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and there is slightly more blue than white or grey in the sky.

I have some tea and I have some toast and the toast has marmite on it.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Shorts

74 Minutes

I learned that the longest observation of a total solar eclipse happened back on June 30, 1973, for 74 minutes. 74 minutes is quite long, normally you’d get, what, less than ten? This observation lasted 74 minutes because that’s what happens when Paris Observatory astronomer Pierre Léna persuaded test pilot André Turcat to get permission to use a Concorde prototype to chase the eclipse¹. So they did.

Caught my attention because: I am of the age where Concorde is a charismatic megaproject to me, one of the protrusions from the imagined flying jetpack future that managed to pierce into our world. An example of British/French cooperation (see also: the Chunnel), a 70s/80s triumph of engineering, and yet also one that hadn’t quite woken up to the externalities of flying everywhere super fast.

Side note: the Vice article linked to into the footnote for this has one of my favorite design features, which is a big “FYI. This story is over 5 years old.” as part of its design, above the headline, and below the hero image. My only note is that the aged article banner is very much in Vice’s design language and happens to look like a blanked-out ad unit, which is why I skipped over it the first time I read it.

Definitely, definitely this time

So I write about the negative externalities of commercial supersonic travel, and obviously that’s fairly close to the “what are passenger airships doing these days?” concept in my head. The answer is partly this: 10 passenger airships have been sold by Hybrid Air Vehicles to Air Nostrum, in Spain, to be delivered and in use in 2026.

Caught my attention because: well, airships. But also this throwaway line in the Guardian report:

The craft was originally designed as a surveillance vehicle for intelligence missions in Afghanistan. (The Guardian)

Look, I know it’s not a new observation to notice the military industrial complex, right? But at the same time, the difference between the technology required to deliver anything you want in one hour (from enterprise resource planning, inventory control, logistics, pick/pack, deliver, mapping, and even, if you want to, those drones and humanoid robots), and killing any target you want in one hour is more or less non-existent (sorry to all the DARPA heads who disagree and point out all the actual implementation differences that you’d need to care about), but it’s just another example of “well, war pays for a bunch of stuff” and then “well if war won’t pay for it, what will?”

What’s more profitable than…?

I will paraphrase a conversation I had a long time ago with someone which went a bit like this:

“Yes, well. Owning a sports team is pretty profitable, but it’s a bit small fry. Owning a league, that might be a bit better. But you know what might be best? Owning an entire sport.”

And then we went off and did things for someone who had control of a frankly obscene amount of money, but don’t worry, they weren’t Saudi.

Anyway. Apple bought the ten-year, exclusive, worldwide rights to MLS, which is not some sort of patent or licensing deal for enabling technology for more bikes but for computers, but instead Major League Soccer, which is what Football would be called in the United States but for a namespace collision. Heh. Collision. Get it?

I mean, it makes a bunch of sense and it’s cheaper than buying rights to the other football, and anyway the other football is tied up with a whole bunch of ads. It would be, I’m guessing, more complicated (just difficult, not impossible, just more work, not easy) to buy out all the NFL games. Not that they don’t have enough money to, but that it would be quite involved in the implementation detail.

But MLS – which really, really feels like it should be a streaming technology in my head – is a young-ish sport in the US, it’s got a whole bunch of headwind behind it as it’s picked up by schools, it’s got terrific gender representation in that womens’ teams are doing super well (although with the same issues with pay). But at this point I feel like thinking: yes, yes. Owning the worldwide exclusive streaming rights is interesting. But when and under what conditions would it make sense for Apple to own a sport? (It wouldn’t. But that’s the point of the intellectual exercise. Under what conditions would it make sense? Some of those conditions might also include “Apple isn’t really Apple anymore”, but here we are with consumer credit financing).

As another aside that I won’t bother putting in brackets, Apple seems to have figured out its car strategy, which is to let everyone else make cars and persuade them to let Apple take over all the screens.

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Okay, that’s it for today. Much easier than yesterday. I think part of the difficulty is that we’re in summer holidays mode now? Transitions are hard.

How are you?

Best,

Dan