Love, Luck, And Technology

It was 20 years ago today/Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play.
The Beatles

Tim is always with me.

That’s not a metaphor.  It is a biological fact.

You see, 50 years ago, I was diagnosed with kidney disease.  Back then, such a condition was often a death sentence.  I knew kidneys excreted waste products and looked for ways to help mine out.

So, I started running – 30 to 50 miles a week.  For decades.  In the middle of that, in the early 1980s, I met Tim Schreiner while at Lockheed Martin, and we became friends.  He ran with me too, and we liked the same bands and the cool stuff we helped build at LM.

Some 21+ years after my diagnosis, the kidneys failed, and I went on dialysis for a year and a half.  Then I got a cadaveric kidney transplant, but it never worked right, and after another 6+ years, I was once again on the verge of kidney failure.

Enter Tim.  Ten people offered to give me their kidneys.  Tim demanded to be put at the front of the line.  He tested, matched, and decided to save my life.  I knew life would be better with a good kidney, but I never knew how much.  Tim offered me so much; I can only hope to repay society a fraction of what he did for me.  20 years later, we’re both doing fine.

#transplant #love #luck #technology

How To Lose $1B

Irony is wasted on the stupid.
Oscar Wilde

In his 9/1/2021 article, Jon Hemmerdinger discovered Aerion, a company tied to its AS-2 supersonic business jet (C), was going to put its assets up for sale (E).  He further found Aerion had hired Development Specialists (DS) to manage the process, and DS had “not set a sale price, saying, ‘The market will tell them what their assets are worth.’”

I nearly choked on the irony – Now they knew market reactions counted.  They sure didn’t previously.

Had they studied their Demand Frontier (D) before they started, they would have known while there was a possibility of hitting their targeted sale figure of 300 units in a decade, those chances were slim.

The US Presidential Helicopter program had a similar fate, failing to realize its Demand limits (A, B), and lost over $4B. The USG sold it for parts at four cents on each dollar spent.

Aerion will sell intellectual property; its AS2 didn’t go into production.  Maybe they can get a dime on the dollar.  Based on their $4B development cost estimate, they likely spent $1B by the time they stopped.

Next time, model the market first.  It costs a tiny fraction of the losses suffered forgoing market analysis.

#hypernomics #innovation #technology #management #markets

Structure Turns Up

Things don’t turn up in this world until somebody turns them up.
James A. Garfield

In the mid-1900s, there was a race to find the mechanism that passed on genetic instructions.  The double helix structure of DNA that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered was a simpler solution than many biologists thought possible and caught many of them by surprise (A).

Imagine the surprise of many, then, when no one else thought to look, the law of supply and demand is supplanted by the Law of Value and Demand from Hypernomics, which, like DNA, is a long-standing structure which only turns up with lots of hard work and a little imagination.  As shown in B, two market dimensions, Dividends and Earnings Per Share, describe a surface (P-Value 1.55E-06) that drove the Value of the Dow 30 stocks yesterday (stocks above it may be overpriced, those below it, undervalued).  That Value determines Price, a third market dimension, which, in turn, limits the Quantity sold, a fourth market dimension.

The secret, such as it is, is that such structures occur in mathematical, not physical space.  But they turn up in all markets since they began, just as our DNA has always been with us.

#marketDNA #technology #markets #innovation #hypernomics #4D

Got Guano?

If you try any preversions [sic] in there, I’ll blow your head off.
Col.” Bat” Guano, Dr. Strangelove

Hypernomics notes that of all the perverted ways to start a war, Bolivia’s imposed tax on Chile is one of the most strange. I mean, who fights for bat poop? Countries looking for saltpeter, that’s who.

Hungry for part of the burgeoning saltpeter trade, Bolivia imposed a tax on a Chilean company mining bat guano from its soil. That violated a treaty to which both countries were parties. It started the War of the Pacific. In it, Chile took on a secret alliance of Peru and Bolivia.

Before the War, Bolivia had sea access, and Peru’s lands included part of the Atacama Desert (A). When the conflict ended, both countries lost ground to Chile, Bolivia became landlocked, and Peru surrendered its Atacama claims (shaded areas in B).

Scant years later, Fritz Haber (C) worked out a catalytic formation of ammonia, for which he won the Nobel Prize. The process drove Chilean nitrate mining employment and prices down by two-thirds.

Looking for a quick buck, Bolivia and Peru endured tens of thousands of casualties for a technology that quickly became outdated. Don’t go to war for short-term gains without considering long-term consequences.

#technology #markets #innovation

Interactive Redundancy

Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens-usually. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Life assures little.

Recognizing that, many create contingency plans. Backup aircraft flight controls systems and duplicative car safety features save lives. Emergency generators keep hospital lights on.

As history shows judges favor local athletes, many sports force even-handed results through mandated redundancy. In A, only three of the seven scores will count for the diver (B).

Rather than rely on a single Value estimate, Hypernomics takes redundant cuts at market reactions. In C, the general aviation aircraft market values horsepower and speed. However, those features correlate with one another. We can use that to our advantage. Equations 1 and 2 use horsepower to drive Value. The 3rd equation uses speed. Equation 4 combines them. Various groupings of valued traits should be tested, with outlying results discarded as in diving.

Excel has many handy controls in its Developer menu. In C, Scroll Bars drive inputs for Equations 1-4, letting users place products in market gaps interactively, in the manner of my most recent post.

#hypernomics #markets #innovation #sales #technology

Gap Maps

If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction – Sam Walton.

Lots of people will tell you to discover your niche. What if you could map it?

Hypernomics shows you how.

On September 16, 1893, tens of thousands sought such openings in the 4th Oklahoma Land Rush as guns went off at noon, signaling the crowd the game was on. Those who waited for the cannons were “Boomers” (A), but many “Sooners” jumped the gun and got some of the best plots in the Cherokee Outlet’s eastern part. As many would discover, its western end was prone to drought and later formed part of the Dust Bowl with a moving Frontier (B). Figuring which tracts were viable was tricky.

But in C & D, market maps reveal several flourishing models (blue dots) bounding spaces without competitors. If a new model enters a region in C (red circle) and offers the indicated and other features that create value (through analysis not shown), it may by design enter a price gap (D). By interpolation, we know buyers will accept its specifications and price. It then has open market space for both, thereby not so much finding as creating its niche.

#hypernomics #markets #innovation #sales #technology

Dude, Where’s My Geometry?

Let me tell you how it will be/There’s one for you, nineteen for me
The Beatles, Taxman

Hypernomics loves geometry. It touches markets in many ways, including the Demand Frontiers, notably as they mature. Ignoring market geometry can lead to unwelcome multimillion-dollar surprises.

In 2014, CO and WA legalized recreational marijuana. CO taxed it 30%. Seeking vast riches from this new revenue source, WA taxed it about 108% (it varied by county). At years-end, WA, with a third more people than CO, made $51.7M in recreational pot tax monies. CO made $375.4M.

What WA didn’t understand because they didn’t study it was the cannabis demand curve slope. While we don’t have the WA pot data on hand (they do), we have a like curve for cars. If we apply another 100% tax on vehicles, the number sold, given the demand slope, falls by about 70%-80%. As steep as these reductions are, they still don’t match the WA experience in 2014, suggesting the actual slope for recreational cannabis in that year was even flatter than that for automobiles.

But there is no need to guess about this. If you study it, within statistical bounds, market geometry will “tell you how it will be.”

#innovation #hypernomics #business #technology #management

Fast Trains

“I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.”
Yogi Berra

So, what’s the right train?

Specifically, what are the most appropriate specifications for new trains we need to move people about here in the United States? Happily, the world already has some blueprints for success.

With over 50 years of experience and a perfect safety record, Japan has been using high-speed rail for some time. They’ve blazed a trail followed by Europe and later by China. Any new railroad project should consider the Shinkansen. In 2011, I had a look.

I found the Value (sustainable price) of a Japanese train ticket as a function of its trip length, MPH, and seat area (all P-values < 0.001) with a 91.3% adjusted R2. Tripling the distance traveled and speed pushed prices up by 88% and 27%, respectively. The added fare for distance made sense, but the speed change seems low. I used net speed, however, which likely understated the Value of the train going fast when it could.

Interestingly, as seat square area increased 47% from unreserved (A) past reserved (B) and green (C) to gran (D), ticket prices went up 88%.

What is the demand for this service compared to its Value? See the next post for some insights.

#innovation #technology #travel #strategy #tips

 

Electrifying

Helicopters are highly versatile machines able to take off and land in tiny areas. They’re perfect for landing on buildings in dense urban areas. But since they beat the air to death with thunderous rotors turned by noisy jet fuel turboshaft engines, they’ve been banned from many a city. What to do?

Let’s go electric.

Nine years since the first manned all-electric helicopter flew, https://lnkd.in/eXi3bV8, there’s a race to build versions that can take passengers. With battery energy densities tripling since 2010 and prices falling simultaneously, there’s a vast potential market. Several firms are in it.

Perhaps the one closest to putting an electric rotorcraft up for sale is newcomer Volocopter, with its 2X (in A). It uses 16 motors, one to a rotor, and carries a pilot and one passenger.

Longtime manufacturer Bell offers its Nexus 4EX (B). More capable, it transports four passengers and a pilot. An entirely different configuration, it has four ducted, rotating propellers mounted atop wings.

If flights in these new machines are substitutes for cab rides, given Yellow Cab data for NYC in January 2017 (C & D), which part of the market would you address first?

#innovation #technology #entrepreneurship #travel #business