Assorted Current Events

1. The DOJ is finally putting pressure on the Chinese government hackers that have been attacking multinational corporations for the past decade.  

It seems like the main difference between the Chinese and the Russian hackers is that Russian hackers are more often working purely for ways to immediately enrich themselves via theft/fraud, while the Chinese hackers have also mounted operations to support their state-owned enterprises. 

I wonder if the calculation of real return on equity for state-owned companies in China included these services as part of their hidden subsidies. 

2. The seemingly increasing closed mindedness of the political youth is an interesting phenomena. Between these graduation speaker protests and requests for trigger warnings on class material, it's hard to tell if the college students have gotten crazier or if the rest of society has gotten used to taking crazy people more seriously. 

3. Twitch TV, online game streaming platform, is rumored to be in talks to sell themselves to Youtube. This would make sense for Twitch for numerous reasons. Most obviously, tech valuations are relatively high but have been unstable recently so it makes sense to look to sell while values are still high. (Whether or not one billion dollars is a high price for Twitch is unclear, in 1999 Broadcast.com was able to sell themselves to Yahoo for $5.7 billion)

Beyond the volatility around technology valuations, a further risk to Twitch is that a very significant portion of their viewers come from a single game - League of Legends (LoL). Many of the popular LoL streamers are paid directly by Riot, the owner of LoL. If Riot decided to make their gamers stream on a platform of their own creation then Twitch could lose a lot of eyeballs/advertising revenue. 

If Riot does this successfully, it shows that those who own the games can choose to monetize their streamers directly unless Twitch works to keep them on board. This could lead to a situation where the economics of Twitch resemble music streaming services more than Youtube channels. If viewers left to watch their games on other services, this would also show that Twitch viewers aren't necessarily as sticky as Twitch would like buyers to think*. 

*Whether or not users will stick around in the long run seems to be one of the big questions when it comes to the valuation of many current tech companies.