FNF #4
By Handzalah / Black Swan Research 21 August 2026, 1:32am MYT
Topics discussed in tonight’s FNF:
- Abu Dhabi is a major city by size of sovereign wealth fund
- Night culture in Saudi with malls seen packed with people in the food court past 10:00 PM
- The concept of “The Era of Digital Inception”
- The “cloud” is just someone else’s computer
- A handful of companies spending on capital expenditure exceed some countries’ spending on everything
- Cheap AI is not the business but rather an advertisement for one
- Netflix never intended to hold their subscription price at $7.99 (back in 2011), they have raised subscription to $19.99 in recent times
- Apps first appear free and good, then they squeeze you with raising prices, lastly they extract you with expensive costs and poor services
- New Apple phones will be shipped with AI compute from phone itself rather than from cloud
- John D. Rockefeller incredible work ethic
- Rockefeller family to defy the norm of wealth passed down ends by the third generation, Rockefeller family is still wealthy at the current seventh generation
- John D. Rockefeller had a feeling of religious obligation to accumulate as much wealth in order to distribute them in charitable manner
- Arguments arose during the discussion of whether being a workaholic is efficient
- On member says that if you keep working it will not allow for thinking and pondering to take place which is a large aspect of creative thinking, however another member countered saying that such people tend to do these thinking and pondering while walking long distances
- Mental health affects the physical health
- Do not be quick to judge a man’s faith, you truly do not know what he has gone through
- Indonesian company had a very appealing facility that invokes positive corporate culture
- PDI, Power Distance Index, as a measure of acceptance of power inequality and shows prevalence of hierarchy (The higher the PDI, the higher the acceptance)
- East Asia including India have high PDI
- Malaysia is the highest PDI country
- In India subordinates will present problems to bosses and not solution as they view the boss as the sole decision maker
- Indian workers do not argue with seniors
- In terms of questioning the bosses, most of Asia just follow the boss with no one really questioning the boss
- In Germany there is a lot of questions thrown at the boss
- India is in between Asia and Germany in questioning the boss, they discuss the scenario rather than challenge it
- USA has 3 main manufacturers for school buses
- Many reasons for why school bus market is an oligopoly, some of the reasons are but not limited to, specialty products, economies of scale, and strict regulations on safety
- Blue Bird, one of the 3 US manufacturers of school buses, has a long track record of high returns on invested capital which makes it an attractive business
- There seems to be a shifting of the economics of electric school buses in terms of total cost of ownership(TCO), of which some factors that favorably drive down TCO thereby making the economics of electric school buses better are:
1) V2G (Vehicle-to-Grid) makes the buses able to get some dollars from channeling surplus electricity back to the grid. One estimate came up with a $3000 savings due to V2G which over the 15 years useful life of the bus will equate to a savings of $45000.
2) Grants for using clean and non-diesel powered buses
3) Lower cost of electricity
4) Lower cost of battery - Over the years the industry has stagnant and stable units produced annually which equate to 31K units
- Blue Bird’s unit is similar to that of the market, stagnant
- Therefore, Blue Bird can grow mainly due to expanding total addressable market by going into the commercial and RV business
- Or Blue Bird can increase the average selling price of its buses, this can be achieved by moving to electric buses where the average price of electric bus is 3.5x that of the diesel counterpart
- Blue Bird grew average selling price over the past decade at a CAGR of around 6%