Interesting read from American Affairs, delving into Uber’s pre-IPO financials and making the case that it’s not the great revolution in transport it claims to be admin a way resembles a Ponzi scheme with earlier investors making massive profits from the suckers lured in later.

Uber’s investors, however, never expected that their returns would come from superior efficiency in competitive markets. Uber pursued a “growth at all costs” strategy financed by a staggering $20 billion in investor funding. This funding subsidized fares and service levels that could not be matched by incumbents who had to cover costs out of actual passenger fares. Uber’s massive subsidies were explicitly anticompetitive—and are ultimately unsustainable—but they made the company enormously popular with passengers who enjoyed not having to pay the full cost of their service.

Uber’s financials don’t tell a great story…

Uber’s GAAP profit margin was –135 percent in 2015. It appeared to improve to –51 percent in 2017 and (adjusting for the divestiture and noncash equity gains discussed above) –35 percent in 2018. Yet these subsequent “improvements” were not driven by efficiency gains, but by the ability to force driver take-home pay down to minimum wage levels. If Uber drivers still received their 2015 share of each passenger dollar, Uber’s negative margins would still be in the triple digits.

I wonder how many of today’s unicorns are where they are today due to the essentially zero cost of money since the GFC supporting otherwise insupportable business models, or at least permitting those unprofitable business models to persist for far longer than would otherwise be the case. Tesla’s another candidate. Great cars by all accounts, and Musk is a great entrepreneur, but making the transition to established, profitable car maker seems perpetually out of reach.

Clearing up a common misunderstanding of the Butterfly Effect…

The only thing we can learn from the butterfly effect is that we cannot measure complex systems accurately enough to predict their behavior over the long term with enough precision. The big mismatch is that while the variation in ‘initial conditions’ is too small to measure, the variation in the outcomes is not.

Fascinating article on hyenas, though I’m not sure being outed as the Donald Trump of the savannah is an upgrade :-)

Even lone hyenas have been known to catch impressively large prey — one bold strategy being to lock on to the animal’s testicles and hang on until the victim bleeds out.

Grab ‘em by the bollix!

Thirty years ago today, the Chinese Government massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mainly students protesting in Tiananmen Square. Here’s an interesting article written by a Chinese woman, recounting how she only found out about Tiananmen when she went to the US for grad school.

“When I hear ‘Tiananmen,’ the first thing I think of is Tank Man,” said the boy from New Hampshire.

“What is Tank Man?”

“You gotta be kidding me.” He pulled out his laptop and typed into Google. “You have never seen this before?”

I explained how the Chinese government blocked websites and censored information, and that politics was taboo in my family. Nevertheless, I felt a deep sense of shame. I had just been taught something new about my own country from an American who had never been to China.

and earlier…

I started elementary school in 1994. That August, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party issued the “Outline for Implementing Patriotic Education in China.” With an extreme culling of collective memory, the campaign painted China as a historically aggrieved nation still under siege from external foes, and the Party as its heroic savior and rightful guardian. Unbeknownst to me, “patriotic education” was the Party’s solution to its crisis of legitimacy after the Mao-era disasters and the bloodshed of 1989.

A lot of common sense from Monday Notes on what the rumours related to an Apple Car could actually refer to and what Apple could, or could not, be up to.

Reality quickly kills the warm feeling. There’s trouble with the autonomous part of the dream: Sober people (see last two weeks’ Monday Notes) agree that full “Level 5” automation — no need ever for human intervention, from arbitrary point A to point B, in any weather — is decades away. Like anyone else’s EV the Apple Car will feature a mix of driver assistance services with no clear way to get to full autonomy, particularly when compared to Waymo and Tesla with their millions of test miles and mountains of real world data.

Long article from Der Speigel on the tail end of Angela Merkel’s Chancellorship and her pessimism at the current direction of global politics.

Like every long-serving chancellor, Merkel tries to escape the petty melancholia of domestic politics. In that sense, she’s no different from Konrad Adenauer and Kohl. What does distinguish her from her predecessors, though, is a deep pessimism, the fear that the world is sliding into the abyss. During her term in office, Turkey transformed from a hopeful democracy into an autocratic regime. The Saudi crown prince turned out to be a cruel despot rather than the young reformer many initially hoped he might be. Putin sought to make his delusions of grandeur reality. And then there’s Trump, whose most recent project is to attempt regime change in Iran, an experiment that already failed terribly one time before. In Merkel’s view, the fuse has already been lit.

There’s also a lament at her unwillingness to address the concerns she has now that she’s freed from re-election concerns.

If Merkel were to take her own speech that she gave in Munich seriously, she would have to explain to voters that Germany – together with the Europeans – must feel a sense of responsibility for its periphery, North Africa and the Middle East. She would have to get Germans used to the idea that the German military needs more money and that in the future, German soldiers will be deployed more often on more dangerous missions. After the refugee crisis, who could honestly argue that civil wars in places like Syria or Libya doesn’t have a direct impact on Germany?

Merkel knows all this. She speaks theoretically about Germany needing to do more. But when it comes to suggesting a concrete strategy, she hardly says a word.

A couple of months ago, I got a call from my mate, Stu, asking me if I wanted to do the Port to Port MTB Race. When I’d bought my MTB in advance of the move to Brisbane, I’d looked around for some events and this had grabbed my eye, but I’d put it down for next year as I hadn’t been riding much. However, Gareth had suggested it to Stu, who suggested it to me, so with two mates keen it was an easy decision to do it this year, despite the lack of training.

Last week saw me fly down to Newcastle to meet up with the guys for my first MTB event. I was underprepared, but the rough outline was that Stu was the fittest but with the least MTB experience, Gareth had the most MTB experience, having ridden the Scott 24hr many years ago, but possibly the least endurance, and I was somewhere in between. We had four stages to ride, with varying amounts of single track, and we had to maintain 10-12km/h average pace. On my local singeltrack I was getting 13km/h, but that was at a pace that I couldn’t sustain for four hours, so there was some apprehension about how thing would pan out.

Day 1

This looked like the easiest stage on paper. 48km of minimal single track, so the pace should be fine. One large climb near the start, then a rolling out-and-back course before the descent to the finish. Oh how wrong we were! The climb was on a steep, rocky 4WD road, so the pace was super slow. As expected, Stu was quickest up the climb, being able to stop to answer work emails while waiting for us! Once we had the main climb out of the way, we were faced with more rollers with a bias towards climbing, a brief bit of singletrack before a technical descent just after half way. The climb back out was ridiculously steep, with most people walking significant parts of it. Not what I was hoping for and I was getting annoyed. We finally made the top and looked forward to some descending back to the start, but things rapidly went wrong as Stu crashed hard as his front wheel washed out on a descent.

That was race over for him, with a 4WD ambulance coming to take him off the mountain. Eventual diagnosis was a broken shoulder blade and a few scrapes. Thankfully nothing more serious. Myself and Gareth continued on after the ambulance had left, but the downhills weren’t as plentiful as we’d hoped, there were a few more hard uphills requiring more walking and we eventually crossed the finish a man down and completely wrecked. Between Stu’s crash and the stage being way harder than anticipated, we weren’t off to a great start.

Day 2

Lots of singletrack on the second stage, so we were really looking forward to it. Stu had checked himself out of hospital and got an Uber to the start to have a pre-race coffee with us. We were so slow yesterday we’d been added to the final group to start, which didn’t really bother us as we had extra time to get organised in the morning. We’d had a 45min wait after Stu’s crash the day before, which the organisers had subtracted from our overall finish time, but we hadn’t asked them to change our start group. As it turned out, this meant we’d be riding the singletrack with all the slow and inexperienced people, so it took a while to get through the traffic and to be able to ride without interruption. This was definitely the highlight of the event, with almost the full 46km being singletrack, starting with the Killingworth trails and finishing off on the Holmesville network. Another four hours in the saddle, but chalk and cheese compared to yesterday.

Day 3

The longest stage of the race, coming in at 58km, with another huge climb to face. After about 8km of farm tracks we got to the Awaba trail network for some more fantastic singletrack. Fun trails which are really well looked after put smiles on faces and got everyone in a good mood to tackle the 5km climb immediately afterwards. I was slightly quicker than Gareth, so I’d ride a kilometre, stop and wait for him and repeat. Although the claimed gradient was 8%, it felt steeper than that and it was a long slog to the water station at the top. After a quick refuel we took off on the rollers across the top, with 17km to go before the second water station and the long descent to the finish. It quickly became apparent that Gareth was struggling, with his stomach staging a revolt, so we had no choice but to slow down to a sustainable pace. We made the second water station only to be told we were too slow and would be diverted to a shorter finish, so the fun downhill section got replaced with a fairly normal road ride back to the start. Not much we could do about it - part of the challenge of these events is being able to eat and exercise at the same time and sometimes your stomach just gives up.

Day 4

The final day, the shortest at 40km and also a point-to-point stage meaning we’d have to do some car shuffling. Stu waved us off in the morning as he was heading back to Sydney, and Gareth’s partner, Kirsten, got roped in to meet us at the finish. This was another day of mainly singletrack with some nice trails around Whitebridge to start off and the well-known Glenrock trails to finish. Whitebridge was enjoyable, but again, we were constantly getting held up behind riders who were forced to stop at anything technical. Glenrock was OK. I suspect we were sent down some of the easier trails as the organisers figured everyone would be exhausted and prone to mistakes after four hard days. Once off the trails it was a quick road downhill and across the finish line at Dixon Park Beach to a well-deserved burger and beer!

Summary

Overall a really enjoyable event and well run. Trails were very well signposted, so it was always clear where you should be going. I’d definitely do more training before doing another one as you definitely work harder on the MTB than you do on the road. I was pretty shattered but he end of it, despite being able to ride at my own pace all the time. Looking forward to the next one!

The TLS has a nice article on the memory of ice and a journey to Greenland to see glaciers up close.

Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. Unlike our hard disks and terrabyte blocks, which are quickly updated or become outdated, ice has been consistent in its technology over millions of years. Once you know how to read its archive, it is legible almost as far back – as far down – as the ice goes. Trapped air bubbles preserve details of atmospheric composition. The isotopic content of water molecules in the snow records temperature. Impurities in the snow – sulphuric acid, hydrogen peroxide – indicate past volcanic eruptions, pollution levels, biomass burning, or the extent of sea ice and its proximity. Hydrogen peroxide levels show how much sunlight fell upon the snow. To imagine ice as a “medium” in this sense might also be to imagine it as a “medium” in the supernatural sense: a presence permitting communication with the dead and the buried, across gulfs of deep time, through which one might hear distant messages from the Pleistocene.

Pros: Bagnères-de-Luchon to Saint-Lary-Soulan Col du Portet, 65km, Mountains

Me: 15/15/15m SST, 5m RI

A super short stage for the pros with three solid mountains. Doing my ‘mountains as intervals’ thing saw me well over the usual one third of race distance, with a total of 45km under my belt by the time i finished. The intervals themselves were fine, apart from the last one which was tough.

I’m away for the weekend, flying South to Victoria tomorrow until Monday evening, so that’s the end of my ‘Third de France’. I’ll write up a little summary later, but for now, happy to be done and dusted and wondering how sore my legs will be when we go MTBing or snowboarding at the weekend.

Pros: Carcassonne to Bagnères de Luchon, 218km, Mountains

Me: 73km Z2, 10/15/15m Z2, 5m RI

Not great. Got the first two intervals done, but, during the second, the wind was blowing somke from some sort of industrial fire. Decided I’d rather not deeply inhale that crap so opted to skip the remaining 40km. Turns out it was a fire in a steel yard, so made the right call.

Legs felt OK after the rest day. Intervals weren’t too hard.

Pros: Millau to Carcassonne, 181.5km, Hilly

Me: 60km Z2, 5/10/15m SST, 5m RI

Well that’s the second week over with and not a day too soon. Despite a bit over 9 hours sleep last night, I still woke up tired. The first 100m from my house are slightly uphill, maybe 2% gradient, which is enough to feel the pain in the legs as they get going for the ride. I wonder what the cause of that is? Am I re-tearing damaged muscle fibres or something? It can’t be lactic as there hasn’t been a chance for any to build up.

Anyway, legs were OK once they’d warmed up. The SST intervals were fine, though the final 15m effort was a little bit tiring. Once that was out of the way I’d 30km still to ride and that was a bit of a struggle. My legs were OK, it was just overall fatigue wearing me down.

Totals at the end of Week 2: 24h27m, 642km, 1364 TSS

Not massive totals really. If I was fit that would be a decent, but not extraordinary, two weeks’ training. However, trying to do the same work from a low fitness base it takes its toll!

Rest day tomorrow!

So, a bit of perspective. Above is a screenshot posted by Pierre Rolland, riding the real Tour de France for EF-Drapac. It’s his totals for the second week of the Tour, so will be an interesting comparison to my last week doing the Third de France.

What’s interesting is the relationship between TSS (Training Stress Score) and Work. Pierre did 1907 TSS for the week, or 2.5 times my TSS. However, he did 32,247kJ of work, or 3.9 times the work I did. Work is a measurement, in kilojoules, of exactly how much physical work you have put into the pedals, whereas TSS is an approximation of the amount of stress that work has placed on your body. So despite Pierre doing almost 4 times the work that I did, it only stressed his body 2.4 times as much as my work stressed me.

The reason for this is that TSS is based on your FTP (your threshold, measured in watts), so that Pierre riding 1 hour at his threshold will generate the same TSS as me riding one hour at my threshold. However, Pierre’s threshold is probably 50% higher than mine, so he will do 50% more work at his threshold. He’s also at least 20kg lighter than me, so along with being able to do 50% more work than me at threshold, that work is moving a system (body + bike etc.) >20kg lighter, so he’s even faster again.

The other notable figure above is his Fitness score of 153. Fitness is measured in TSS per day and is the average amount of work he’s done over the previous three months and therefore also the amount of work he can now do per day without getting tired. At 153 TSS/day he’s three times fitter than me, though as we’ve seen above, TSS is based on threshold etc. etc. so he’s actually way better than that.

Pros: 188km, Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux to Mende, Hills

Me: 63km Z2, 10/5/10m SST, 5m RI

Tired today, but the SST intervals felt OK. They were shorter than earlier in the week which helps. However, my HR was quite a bit lower than when I first did them a few days ago. Looking back over the week, each day I’ve done SST intervals my HR has been lower. Not sure whether that’s due to cumulative fatigue, or my body ‘remembering’ how to do SST again. After all, in March I could do a straight 1hr @ 280W, whereas now I’m doing up to a total 1:10 @ 255W broken up into 4 parts. Only one more day until a rest day. Woo hoo!

Totals for the week: 13h 03m, 351km, 768 TSS.

Pros: Bourg d’Oisans to Valence, 169.5km, Sprint.

Me: 58.5km Z2, 5m SST, Sprint.

Had a relaxing start to the day and headed out for a ride just after midday. Nice weather and nice to have a plain Z2 ride again. All went well, legs felt OK albeit a bit tired and slow to get going and it was only when I got home and uploaded the ride that I realised I’d forgotten to do the 5m SST. Didn’t forget the sprint though - happy enough with 10s > 1000W too.

Pros: Bourg-Saint-Maurice Les Arcs to Alpe d’Huez, 175.5km, Mountains

Me: 58.5km, 20/10/20/20m SST, 7m RI

The last of the big days in the Alps for the pros with a mythical finish atop Alpe d’Huez. Lots more sub-threshold intervals for me. I really wasn’t looking forward to this at all as I was pretty tired from the last two days of intervals. Going to bed at 2am after watching the stage, followed by waking at 7.30am for work conference calls, meant I didn’t get much rest/recovery either.

I put if off for as long as possible, but it wasn’t too bad in the end. The first 2-3minutes of each interval were a bit of a struggle to maintain the power, but then the legs remembered what to do and it was OK from then until the last couple of minutes, which were hard work mainly as my lower back was getting tired/tight. Glad that’s over and I’m looking forward to some easy sprint stages.

The hardest part of the Tour is finished for me. There are still intervals next week when the pros hit the Pyrenees, but not the same volume as required in the Alps. My fatigue will still increase, simply from riding every day (and because I was starting from such a low fitness base), but the worst of it is done.

Pros: Albertville to La Rosière Espace San Bernardo, 108.5km, Mountains

Me: 36km Z2, 20/20/10/15m SST, 5m RI

Another big day in the mountains for the pros. The scenery around Bourg-Saint-Maurice was spectacular, so I think that sorts out where I’m going to go after my few days in Andermatt in August!For me, the scheduled intervals put me well over the required third distance, with 56.7km done. The intervals were hard - not the actual effort, but the cumulative fatigue as they went on. I’d dialled the target effort back by about 5W from yesterday, but the last two intervals were tough - had to concentrate to stay on target power. Made them all, so a solid 65mins of SST in the bag.

Another tough day tomorrow and then it’s back to an easy sprint stage ;-)

Pros: Annecy to Le Grande Bornand, 158.5km, Mountains

Me: 53km Z2, 15/20/15/15m SST, 5m RI

No messing around today. Last night got serious for the pros with the first day in the Alps and four big climbs. That means lots of sub-threshold intervals for me. Things went pretty well until the last 15min interval. I cracked half way through - my legs went bang at just under 9 minutes. I haven’t done any intervals in almost three months, so jumping straight in with a planned total of 65mins was perhaps a bit ambitious! More of the same on the cards for tomorrow too!

Pros: Rest Day Me: Rest Day

Well, normal work day, groceries, cooking dinner etc. No sitting around with my feet up getting massages like the pros ;-)

Feel a bit slack taking a rest day when I missed two days last week, but things are about to ramp up now as the pros head into the Alps, so I need the break.

Pros: Arras Citadelle to Roubaix, 156.5km, Cobbles

Me: 52km Z2, 3 x 5 x (1m Z3, 1m Z5, 1m Z1), 5m RI

The pros are riding a mini-Paris-Roubaix, featuring 15 cobbles sections. The dynamics of a cobble section are (very roughly) a fast run-in as the main guys want to be among the first few onto the section, the section itself is ridden at a hard pace and then things ease up when the section finishes. For me, that translates to 15 bouts of a minute Z3, a minute Z5 and a minute Z1, split into 3 groups of 5.

Pros: Dreux to Amiens Métropole, 181km, Sprint Stage

Me: 60km Z2, sprint finish

No riding today. Out for dinner & drinks last night and in tourist mode with visitors today.

Week 1 Totals: 11h23m, 291.1km, 595 TSS (training stress score)