shaqbert

With the government owned oil co being the issuer, this looks like a pretty smart bet by Goldman.

If oilco does not default, great, you get a ridiculous discount and a high coupon.

If oilco does default, great, you have ample of collateral in tankers and other tangible assets you might be able to recover, so the recovery rate will be higher than the 30 cents that Goldman paid on the dollar. Also, whatever happens with the venezuelan government, the new government will also want to have a functional oilco.

100k or even "permanent" storage is a flawed concept, because that timespan is just too long to account for all possibilities.

Nuclear scientist have been advocating managed storage of 50 to 100 years instead for quite some time, because there is a chance that (a) we might figure out a better way to separate and then transmute the long lasting fission products to quicker decaying elements, (b) we might come up with better ways to safely store, or (c) we may want to mine the waste for reprocessing the useful uranium and plutonium.

Pricing mistake 101: You never ever change those old plans. Instead, you grandfather them. Especially so if you're still a young platform and have most growth ahead of you, the "loss" of not charging the new - and supposedly higher - pricing is gonna be trivial 2 years from now, with lots of new projects coming in. But the NPS hit from pissing your most loyal users off and the subsequent damage to your growth curve are huge.

Also, I do love Bezos mantra of always becoming cheaper over time. That is the core of Amazon's brand. Whereas Oracle, IBM, and the old guard always make you pot committed and charge an arm and a leg, the Amazon guys will leave money on the table. That is how you earn trust.

Good news is that the amount of health care spending is a choice. E.g. other western countries are running a health care cost to GDP ratio from 10%-13%, sometimes offering vastly superior and equitable outcomes than in the US.

The bad news is that this is a choice Congress and Senate are taking on behalf of the American people. And with the partisan divide and lack of agreement on fundamental values, things won't really change.

Add in a rapidly aging population, and being cognizant of the per capita health care spending steeply increasing at later stages of life, kicking the can down the road won't make the later adjustment any easier...

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” --Oscar Wilde

Wendelstein 7-x is really not fusion research, but plasma physics research. At the energy/temperature levels and magnetic field strength this machine is operating, plasma is showing all kinds of undesirable behavior, such as turbulence, radial forces... a little bit like the storms on Jupiter. This imposes many challenges, because as soon as the plasma escapes the magnetic field and touches the vessel, it rapidly cools - ending any potential fusion.

Wendelstein's goal is to find out the viability of the stellarator concept, to see if it could be on par with the Tokamak concept, which so far have shown a better ratio of energy invested and energy won back, but come with their own bag of problems.

What the folks at Wendelstein are doing is a step by step verification of some of the hypothesis. There is this excellent 3h podcast with the scientific leader of Wendelstein [0], unfortunately it is in German. It is fascinating to hear their story on how they build this ultra complex piece of kit. The current change is the shielding of the vessel, which now permits higher energy levels and longer runs. Their long term goal is to operate at 100m K for 30 min.

Regarding the "when we should stop trying" and "it is 30 years out" adage: There has been great progress made in improving the ratio of energy invested and energy won back, the G-factor. Right now no fusion reactor is crossing the G > 1 limit. But Iter would be design to yield about G = 5. Newer designs using high temperature superconductors could even yield G > 10 with a smaller footprint. For more on the current state of fusion research, this video [1] from MIT is fantastic, albeit 1h long.

[0]: http://alternativlos.org/36/

[1]: https://youtu.be/L0KuAx1COEk?t=37m23s

E.g. the nuclear waste problem: With the right shielding you'll get to radioactive waste that is much easier to handle and usually decaying enough in a 60 year time span. As opposed to the millennia from fission products. So yeah it is a problem, but manageable.

Or the parasitic power consumption problem. Yes, fusion reactors require a lot of energy to power that magnetic field, the cooling for the magnets, but the whole point of fusion research is to get an order of magnitude out of the energy put in, i.e. a G-factor which is > 1. Right now we don't have a fusion reactor that manages G >1, but Iter has the potential to operate around G = 5, and before long some smart kid will figure out a design that gives you G > 10.

The tritium breeding problem. There are indeed some smart solutions like a FLiBe salt blanket fill. Which also is great at absorbing the neutron "waste".

The nuclear proliferation problem. This is more of a theoretical problem, as there are way easier pathways to a bomb. E.g. the thorium fuel cycle to breed a U-233 based bomb is doable even with tech from the 1960'ies.

Mmmh, some of the claims in that article are debunked in this neat video from MIT (though over 1h long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk

Not surprising. In highly regulated markets such as Denmark, Uber has always had a hard time. In the early days they played the "ask for forgiveness card", but being a gigantic operation now, that does not fly anymore.

In my home country Germany, Uber also essentially retreated and only has a token presence at very few cities, as the regulatory environment just does not allow the Uber economics to work.

So focusing on the markets where regulation is soft or where Uber has leverage to change regulation is the winning strategy here.

Vincent Vanhoucke deserves a lot of credit for his naming skills... Bloaty McBloatface[1] is the best name I've seen in ages.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boaty_McBoatface

The historic data for extended periods of super low interest rate is "sparse" to put it mildly. Pretty much never happened before, so the "consensus view" by economists is not that much of a "consensus" after all.

Also, historically a leader of the various Feds does not necessarily have to be an economist - similar how supreme court judges don't necessarily have to have a legal/judge background. Given there is a whole committee of opinions, having some "fresh" outsider views may actually help the discussion. (Though I am not saying that having a former Goverment Sachs fellow necessarily is a poster child of fresh ideas here :)

They are growing fast. They have decent margins. But where is the sustainable competitive advantage? Can somebody enlighten me?

The building permit/ titles to land limit really only applies in countries with proper property rights. In a lot of emerging countries, this tech should have a bright future.

Berliner here.... the sad truth is that most living rooms are dominated by Ikea furniture and are nowhere near like the stylish and classical ensembles presented in the article.

The country I am coming from does not have this kind of distinction.

It just feels that the US system is really unsatisfactory in actually resolving an incident. Is Amit a baddie or not? Who can tell. Here we're in a state of limbo.

If credible illegal behaviour has happened, why did Google not forward the information to law enforcement?

If Amit did do something bad, allowing him to resign makes Google complicit in letting him off the hook scot free. In that case how would the poor victim feel?

If Amit did not do something bad, how can he ever clean his name from the allegation?

Really poorly handled by Google. And now made even worse by leaking stuff to the press. Stuff like that belong in a court of law, not in some HR department.

Don't overanalyze it. It just happens to be excellent science fiction.

Glancing at that first patent quoted in the article makes you think the patent office follows a "first at the goalpost" strategy of awarding patent protection, and ignoring ingenuity. To think that this patent gets the same kind of IP protection as the light bulb or the combustion engine ... Edison, Otto, Tesla all would feel offended.

Prior to world war I, the economy was pretty globalized and numerous e.g. german companies had a big US presence, and vice versa. Trade did not prevent a war then...

Why don't get is why there is so little discussion of systematic governance system shortcomings in the US.

Gerrymandering, a primary system empowering extreme positions, the role of money in politics, the extreme level of noise and lack of signal in the media, house and senate rules enabling obstructionism, lack of clarity in the constitution (e.g. senate being able to stall a supreme court judge for a year), etc.

As a general rule of thumb, money and power don't mix all that well ...

Anyone surprised that they'd eventually be profitable? Being the largest hospitality company in the world without holding any assets ... how could anybody ever have been doubting in the first place.

The real question is rather if they are leaving growth opportunities behind if they are profitable too early. Still a lot of lobbying to be done.

What hypocrisy to even consider bypassing the parliament in the first place. Thank god the Surpeme Court still stands up for the Parliamentary supremacy [1]. Have a non-binding referendum and then the government bypassing the parliament altogether would have really put the UK in a constitutional crisis and created lasting damage to the very institutional stability that is behind the success of UK governance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...

Xiaomi turns out to not have a big moat. And run on extremely thin margins. Top line growth has been flat. And the writing on the wall is that we might be seeing revenue contraction ahead.

I wonder what their private market valuation is doing?

Unbelievable that there is no way to access the global object cross-platform yet...

So Hillary ran on WP... no wonder she lost :) Sorry, just trolling you.

The "nudge" effect has had significant positive results [1] where it got introduced. It basically is the difference between a many year organ waiting list and getting a rapid transplant.

[1] http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916...

Agreed. Vanderbild, Rockefeller, Morgan, and all the other robber barrons went Scot free. So will Zuck, Larry, Sergey.

Mark my words: Just as the robber barons a century ago has lead to antitrust law, today's "data" robber baron tech giants will lead us to data competitive law 15 years from now.

The gist: have your content folks work with a CMS, while having your devs work with an API. So that the content folks don't mess up the email templates.

"Post Apple, Ireland's new tax structures are the most competitive in the world.... For more information call Ireland's Embassies."

Yupp, that is an official site advertising the virtues of Ireland the tax haven.

(1) Get hammered by the EU for poo pooing the union by offering sweetheart tax deals to internationals while completely disregarding the tax interests of fellow union members.

(2) Publicly atone for some past sins and abolish some of the more egregious offences (e.g. double irish sandwich). And promise to not do these kind of shenanigans again.

(3) Go creative and create a whole slew of new "tax optimization" vehicle and aggressively market those.

Oh Ireland...