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Tesla's Battery Revolution Just Reached Critical Mass (bloomberg.com)
Tesla is all set to cut the ribbon on a massive battery storage facility in the California desert -- the biggest of its kind on earth. It joins similarly huge facilities built by AES and Altagas, which are both set to launch around the same time. Combined, the plants constitute 15% of the battery storage installed globally last year. From a report: Tesla Motors is making a huge bet that millions of small batteries can be strung together to help kick fossil fuels off the grid. The idea is a powerful one -- one that's been used to help justify the company's $5 billion factory near Reno, Nev. -- but batteries have so far only appeared in a handful of true, grid-scale pilot projects. That changes this week. Ribbons will be cut and executives will take their bows. But this is a revolution that's just getting started, Tesla Chief Technology Officer J.B. Straubel said in an interview on Friday. "It's sort of hard to comprehend sometimes the speed all this is going at," he said. "Our storage is growing as fast as we can humanly scale it."
That's about index fund rate.
S and P 500 went from 640 - 2100
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
He got a royalties from books, his money will have been in the hands of some kind of fund manager who was investing it in a blind trust. It doesn't sound implausible, mostly due to the book royalties. At least he is publishing this, unlike some other presidents...
You didn't read the article you are replying to. Here, I'll help sort that out for you: The president received royalties between $35,000 and $115,000 on his three books.
$115,000 != $12,200,000.
From that article that was quoted:
2007: Obama earns $3.3 million off book royalties from Random House and $816,000 from Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.
This is yet another case of "we don't have laws for this because nobody's ever broken the social norm before". It's similar in nature to those idiotic warning labels on things (like that "warning: hot" on coffee cups), whereby nobody thought it was necessary to have it explicitly labeled until someone blatantly didn't get it and sued for it.
Several reasons:
1) The voters didn't care (enough) that this was his long-running modus operandi (using any position of influence or power for personal gain, even at the expense of everyone else around him, has been a consistent theme for him), or that he made a particular point of ignoring/flouting political norms and expected behavior (this was seen as a plus by many, in fact).
2) Congress has become so completely polarized that it is at best hindered in, and at worst incapable of, acting as a check on a president of the same party.
3) Independent ethics groups hold no sway over him because he has no apparent shame, although they have resorted to suing him over the matter (whether that amounts to anything at all is another matter entirely).