All those folks in California so scared about the earth getting warmer (they seem overly scared about everything these days), don't realize just how cold our planet is. Where I live, it's been below freezing for months and largely will be until next May.
In fact, last week, it was colder here than on Mars and parts of an asteroid belt.
We have a long, long way to go to being a warm planet.
The problem is that what the "oil" companies these people envision from 20 years ago no longer exist - they're now energy companies and also one of the largest investors in renewable energy. Isn't this kind of contradictory to their goals?
Fair enough, but this principle is not evenly applied in our society. It's ok for the insurance company to charge me higher premiums because I'm a male, but it's illegal to not rent your apartment to a black person (and you can easily produce statistics that a black person is more likely to be convicted of a crime). Extreme examples, yes, but there are many more.
I'll tell you what I do understand - I don't trust the UN or the politicians involved one damned bit. When this is being run by an organization so political it refuses to authorize journalists who don't subscribe to their group think, and the ultimate goal is to figure out how deep they can reach into your wallet, people ARE IN THE RIGHT to be skeptical of this. When you call people stupid and stand on your high horse, they end up voting for Trump because personally, Trump seems a far better choice than standing with these self-righteous douchebags.
The reporting organization linked above is definitely a "right wing" publication that has been critical of climate change based tax regimes. I don't agree with most of what they say, but when people won't stand up or protect their right to say it, those people have lost their principles anyway, so best case is they're not the ones to listen to in solving this problem.
Yes, tax your high wage earners into oblivion for earning and consuming, the foundation of what people consider quality of life. The group that includes a few very rich people but mostly your well trained specialists, experts, small business owners and investors, and watch them flee to another country. Sorry, you need to be more competitive in your tax regime, the world is too mobile now.
Your utopia of controlling what people earn is a bad idea.
So who goes out and earns all that money that you give freely to people doing their hobbies all day long? Or do you think money, or what is represents, is infinite?
No! This general disbelief in society is the right behaviour and to be encouraged. Hear me out.
Climate is complex, and what is really happening is people are being skeptical of government and rich people trying to convince them of something they don't fully understand. Millennials seem to be more quick to jump to trust the government and celebrities, but being skeptical is the right approach, especially when someone wants in your wallet without actually explaining anything about how we fix the problem. Carbon taxes are the prime example. So taxes go up - any reasonable person is wondering just how that reduces their use of gas or anything other than making someone else rich.
And sorry, doesn't science involve something about verified experiments with repeatable results? Isn't that at the core? How is that possible with ANY climate model that has been put forth? I'm not saying they're totally wrong - they're just guesses, and you CANNOT SAY with a straight face they may be completely wrong either way as we don't fully understand the variables. Plenty of reasonable (sounding anyway) evidence (ice ages) of recent significant climate changes without man, so when people are dismissed as stupid they become more skeptical. As they should be.
So what's "noticeable"? The problem is that the changes occur so slowly we aren't likely to notice.
I live in a major city - we had our first major snowfall over two weeks ago and temperatures have been at or below 0C for nearly a month. There are still THOUSANDS of kilometers of land (many million square km) between me and the north pole, btw. Also, this snow cover will likely last until next May (8 months out of the year).
What does this mean? We are still largely a cold planet. Most of the rabid AGW activists seem to live in California where it's warm all year and perhaps a slowly rising ocean is a threat. Sucks for them, the rest of the world has to put up with long harsh winters. A warming trend seems like a good thing, and if you're telling me I'll live to see a point where we don't have winter like conditions for over two thirds of the year, we're all just going to laugh.
Not defending Trump here, but I think the primary reason is he invested heavily in gambling-mecca-hopefuls like Atlanta and New Jersey. These turned out to be bad bets for a lot of people, as these places couldn't compete with Vegas.
As the industry suffered in those places, the long term valuations of those places would be written down quickly, so it's really not surprising to lose $1B when marking down assets of those size.
Agree, but consider this: the Big Bang is generally accepted amongst the scientific community, so does that event not imply there is some natural process through which energy is created from (seemingly) nothing?
I know it's a crazy concept, but I also vehemently disagree with the folks here saying this is impossible due to current "laws". Imagine, a process discovered in which we could create energy, or observe energy being created. This would redefine what we think about the universe, and particularly, interstellar travel.
Also, a Dyson sphere would become a useless device, as why would you need to harvest energy when you can simply create it?
I have to admit that the clearly racist part of his base is
Well, part of the problem is that population of people has been called racist so many times for their personal beliefs over the last decade, they're starting to not care and the word doesn't mean anything anymore.
If anyone on the Democrat side ever wants to bring these voters over, they'd try and do their best to understand that wanting to protect one's culture, even if you're white, doesn't amount to racism.
You make it sound like rich people have bank accounts within hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, just sitting there, and if we only take a bit or a chunk of it we'll solve our problems. The vast majority of rich people do not have high personal incomes - their wealth comes from the capital they have ownership and control of. And in most cases, they can deploy that capital most efficiently as evidenced by their becoming wealthy in the first place.
Imagine they took a billion $ from Warren Buffet, and gave $10k to everyone here. Do you think we'd make wiser choices as to how to reinvest that money into the economy? That we'd buy better stocks? You may laugh and say the poor won't be buying stocks, but quickly enoough they'll just aggregate those funds to business owners buying groceries/whatever, and those business owners will be back investing it.
I don't know what you two are advocating for here - how is it the failure of the government to diversify the economy? Private companies make investments, and they are going to go where the greatest return is. Doesn't it make sense to milk that cow for what it's worth while you can, if economics is the argument road you're going to take? Look at how much massively higher the GDP per capita in Alberta is than the other provinces (by 100% in some cases). Are you saying people should have invested into something that made them poorer through that? Even if the industry totally fell apart, they'd still be in a better position, with money and no almost zero debt, to begin investing in something new.
And if you didn't know, Alberta is already home to a pretty big movie industry. In fact, most of the movie which won the most oscars this year was filmed in Alberta.
You are living in the past. Technology makes it cheaper and during downturns the companies have shown capable of cutting costs below production cost. That $60/barrel (or whatever number you heard) accounts for current costs during boom times where spending is high. That cost can quickly be shaved down by prudent management as has been done.
Second, keep in mind these are Canadian companies which report earnings in Canadian dollars. At the same time that oil went down, the dollar retreated to about 75c (well today it's 76). When oil was high the Canadian dollar was much higher (at times worth most than USD). So these companies are making an extra 30% or so on their barrels (which the oil price you see is in USD).
Simply put, that statement isn't, has never, and never will be true, unless oil drops to the $15 or so per barrel rate. Please stop repeating it.
Just how realistic does that sound? Remember, you can find a journalist or analyst who takes ANY position out there.
Electric-only (and to some degree hybrid) vehicles currently sell at pitiful rates compared to ICE vehicles. There are arguably some pretty good commuter-type electric vehicles out there now. I live in Canada and see plug in parking spots in all downtowns and new shopping centers, even in "hippy" places like Victoria and Vancouver - and none of them are ever in use.
Better yet, we can see the market reacting now to the low oil prices that set in almost a year ago.. people flock back to big trucks and SUVs. Look by how wide of a margin trucks outsell cars in North America. It's shocking. People want bigger, more powerful, and long range - until it becomes cost prohibitive people will not willingly accept less and have shown this market behaviour AGAIN and AGAIN (same thing happened in 2008/09). And until something radical changes, batteries have a long way to go to match the convenience and the cost of running an ICE isn't anywhere near prohibitive.
Good luck. I'll keep investing in big gas guzzlers. Let's see who does better by 2030.
They've all rebranded as energy companies anyway. They'll go wherever the return is and their interest is in the long term sustainability of the company in the interest of shareholders (most of whom are large pension/retirement/union funds). It only makes sense to diversify for all possible futures. Are you crazy enough to think any board nowadays would say "we're 100% all in in the oil industry forever!"?
You can guarantee this is about someone looking for money for their pet cause/business, regardless of which one listed it is. To think anything else is incredibly naive.
I've seen lots of these outsourcing arrangements. It's highly unlikely these were actual H1B workers, that's just kind of a label people have grown to attach to foreign workers.
Usually what happens is they fly a few of their "key" staff or "experts" over to America to learn face-to-face (who are usually average to below-average skillsets compared to North American workers). They are then flown back home to India (etc.) afterwards to train another larger amount of staff. They are temporary work visas, and those are easy to get. Why would they keep the person in the US anyway when that just means higher wages? Send them back home, you can pay them a third (also worth noting that will probably buy them the same or better quality of life).
Price to Earnings is just a number, a qualitative look at the situation helps. Although it's a ratio which helps in the comparison to other companies, with someone like Apple it's foolish to discount the actual magnitude of the actual magnitude of their numbers as they're massive. Apple still needs to sell HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to recoup the investment cost (the "price" of the company as measured by it's stock). Sure, again it's a ratio so that PE of 10 means Apple is already making a tenth of that in a year, but that still implies ten more years of massive, massive sales of a single product.
A vast majority (as you point out) of their revenue comes from the iPhone. A good portion of that "non-core" revenue comes from software and services around that same product. The revenue stream needs more diversity to be worth more.
No, then people would cancel their Netflix subscriptions when left only with their country-of-origin content. Netflix doesn't want that, and I think they're putting up a false fight.
When most any plant gets over about 100 degrees, it "shuts down"; its stoma close, for example, which renders it unable to respirate. You know nothing about plants.
...and I would say you know nothing about "Life". Life on this planet, especially flora, has evolved to handle greater changes in even shorter periods of time. I always laugh at the environmentalists who assume all life on this planet will just remain the same and die out when something changes.
I had to tell this story, because I see it regularly. I've had some interesting observations on the work culture to two sides of a border, Canada and the US.
I happen to work at a company with subsidiaries on both sides of the border, though it's a Canadian company and head office is in Canada. We have some large offices in southern US, too. I never thought of us (I'm on the Canadian side) as particular hard workers. We get lots of paid vacation, free days off galore, and pretty damn good pay to boot. On a Friday afternoon the office is dead, we do lots of "fun" events, people read newspapers in the morning, and mood is generally pretty relaxed. (though we do have people on call for critical IT support). In other words, there's a good amount of slack and if we have a reason not to be in the office we'll take it.
I would almost say we're pretty lazy - until I see us relative to our US counterparts. There is a just a pervasive culture there of not getting things done. Here, we expect expediency and resolution to problems.. when things were passed to our US offices, it was almost impossible to get them to commit to any dates, which was just standard practice here. Here, there was pressure to have things done quickly, and it is self-created too, this just doesn't exist in the US. Any or no reason at all to avoid a task or simply not following up on things.
I do however consider this might be a southern attitude towards work as well, as most of my interaction is with offices based in the US south (Texas to Florida).
Slashdot Mirror
All those folks in California so scared about the earth getting warmer (they seem overly scared about everything these days), don't realize just how cold our planet is. Where I live, it's been below freezing for months and largely will be until next May.
In fact, last week, it was colder here than on Mars and parts of an asteroid belt.
We have a long, long way to go to being a warm planet.
The problem is that what the "oil" companies these people envision from 20 years ago no longer exist - they're now energy companies and also one of the largest investors in renewable energy. Isn't this kind of contradictory to their goals?
Yes, sad but true. What the majority of the world calls "triage", Americans call it "government death panels".
And every bleeding-heart, pronoun obsessed social justice warrior I know voted for Clinton. Both are despicable groups to me - so what's your point?
Fair enough, but this principle is not evenly applied in our society. It's ok for the insurance company to charge me higher premiums because I'm a male, but it's illegal to not rent your apartment to a black person (and you can easily produce statistics that a black person is more likely to be convicted of a crime). Extreme examples, yes, but there are many more.
I'll tell you what I do understand - I don't trust the UN or the politicians involved one damned bit. When this is being run by an organization so political it refuses to authorize journalists who don't subscribe to their group think, and the ultimate goal is to figure out how deep they can reach into your wallet, people ARE IN THE RIGHT to be skeptical of this. When you call people stupid and stand on your high horse, they end up voting for Trump because personally, Trump seems a far better choice than standing with these self-righteous douchebags.
The reporting organization linked above is definitely a "right wing" publication that has been critical of climate change based tax regimes. I don't agree with most of what they say, but when people won't stand up or protect their right to say it, those people have lost their principles anyway, so best case is they're not the ones to listen to in solving this problem.
Yes, tax your high wage earners into oblivion for earning and consuming, the foundation of what people consider quality of life. The group that includes a few very rich people but mostly your well trained specialists, experts, small business owners and investors, and watch them flee to another country. Sorry, you need to be more competitive in your tax regime, the world is too mobile now.
Your utopia of controlling what people earn is a bad idea.
So who goes out and earns all that money that you give freely to people doing their hobbies all day long? Or do you think money, or what is represents, is infinite?
No! This general disbelief in society is the right behaviour and to be encouraged. Hear me out.
Climate is complex, and what is really happening is people are being skeptical of government and rich people trying to convince them of something they don't fully understand. Millennials seem to be more quick to jump to trust the government and celebrities, but being skeptical is the right approach, especially when someone wants in your wallet without actually explaining anything about how we fix the problem. Carbon taxes are the prime example. So taxes go up - any reasonable person is wondering just how that reduces their use of gas or anything other than making someone else rich.
And sorry, doesn't science involve something about verified experiments with repeatable results? Isn't that at the core? How is that possible with ANY climate model that has been put forth? I'm not saying they're totally wrong - they're just guesses, and you CANNOT SAY with a straight face they may be completely wrong either way as we don't fully understand the variables. Plenty of reasonable (sounding anyway) evidence (ice ages) of recent significant climate changes without man, so when people are dismissed as stupid they become more skeptical. As they should be.
So what's "noticeable"? The problem is that the changes occur so slowly we aren't likely to notice.
I live in a major city - we had our first major snowfall over two weeks ago and temperatures have been at or below 0C for nearly a month. There are still THOUSANDS of kilometers of land (many million square km) between me and the north pole, btw. Also, this snow cover will likely last until next May (8 months out of the year).
What does this mean? We are still largely a cold planet. Most of the rabid AGW activists seem to live in California where it's warm all year and perhaps a slowly rising ocean is a threat. Sucks for them, the rest of the world has to put up with long harsh winters. A warming trend seems like a good thing, and if you're telling me I'll live to see a point where we don't have winter like conditions for over two thirds of the year, we're all just going to laugh.
Not defending Trump here, but I think the primary reason is he invested heavily in gambling-mecca-hopefuls like Atlanta and New Jersey. These turned out to be bad bets for a lot of people, as these places couldn't compete with Vegas.
As the industry suffered in those places, the long term valuations of those places would be written down quickly, so it's really not surprising to lose $1B when marking down assets of those size.
As an add, perhaps this could partially explain what we think of as "dark energy/matter".
Agree, but consider this: the Big Bang is generally accepted amongst the scientific community, so does that event not imply there is some natural process through which energy is created from (seemingly) nothing?
I know it's a crazy concept, but I also vehemently disagree with the folks here saying this is impossible due to current "laws". Imagine, a process discovered in which we could create energy, or observe energy being created. This would redefine what we think about the universe, and particularly, interstellar travel.
Also, a Dyson sphere would become a useless device, as why would you need to harvest energy when you can simply create it?
I have to admit that the clearly racist part of his base is
Well, part of the problem is that population of people has been called racist so many times for their personal beliefs over the last decade, they're starting to not care and the word doesn't mean anything anymore.
If anyone on the Democrat side ever wants to bring these voters over, they'd try and do their best to understand that wanting to protect one's culture, even if you're white, doesn't amount to racism.
You make it sound like rich people have bank accounts within hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, just sitting there, and if we only take a bit or a chunk of it we'll solve our problems. The vast majority of rich people do not have high personal incomes - their wealth comes from the capital they have ownership and control of. And in most cases, they can deploy that capital most efficiently as evidenced by their becoming wealthy in the first place.
Imagine they took a billion $ from Warren Buffet, and gave $10k to everyone here. Do you think we'd make wiser choices as to how to reinvest that money into the economy? That we'd buy better stocks? You may laugh and say the poor won't be buying stocks, but quickly enoough they'll just aggregate those funds to business owners buying groceries/whatever, and those business owners will be back investing it.
I don't know what you two are advocating for here - how is it the failure of the government to diversify the economy? Private companies make investments, and they are going to go where the greatest return is. Doesn't it make sense to milk that cow for what it's worth while you can, if economics is the argument road you're going to take? Look at how much massively higher the GDP per capita in Alberta is than the other provinces (by 100% in some cases). Are you saying people should have invested into something that made them poorer through that? Even if the industry totally fell apart, they'd still be in a better position, with money and no almost zero debt, to begin investing in something new.
And if you didn't know, Alberta is already home to a pretty big movie industry. In fact, most of the movie which won the most oscars this year was filmed in Alberta.
I think you're way underestimating how many families tow a trailer or boat out to the lake for a weekend.
And sorry, the charging problem has not yet been solved. Nobody is going to wait 30 minutes at a "gas" station for an 80% fill.
It is not economical even at the current price.
You are living in the past. Technology makes it cheaper and during downturns the companies have shown capable of cutting costs below production cost. That $60/barrel (or whatever number you heard) accounts for current costs during boom times where spending is high. That cost can quickly be shaved down by prudent management as has been done.
Second, keep in mind these are Canadian companies which report earnings in Canadian dollars. At the same time that oil went down, the dollar retreated to about 75c (well today it's 76). When oil was high the Canadian dollar was much higher (at times worth most than USD). So these companies are making an extra 30% or so on their barrels (which the oil price you see is in USD).
Simply put, that statement isn't, has never, and never will be true, unless oil drops to the $15 or so per barrel rate. Please stop repeating it.
Just how realistic does that sound? Remember, you can find a journalist or analyst who takes ANY position out there.
Electric-only (and to some degree hybrid) vehicles currently sell at pitiful rates compared to ICE vehicles. There are arguably some pretty good commuter-type electric vehicles out there now. I live in Canada and see plug in parking spots in all downtowns and new shopping centers, even in "hippy" places like Victoria and Vancouver - and none of them are ever in use.
Better yet, we can see the market reacting now to the low oil prices that set in almost a year ago.. people flock back to big trucks and SUVs. Look by how wide of a margin trucks outsell cars in North America. It's shocking. People want bigger, more powerful, and long range - until it becomes cost prohibitive people will not willingly accept less and have shown this market behaviour AGAIN and AGAIN (same thing happened in 2008/09). And until something radical changes, batteries have a long way to go to match the convenience and the cost of running an ICE isn't anywhere near prohibitive.
Good luck. I'll keep investing in big gas guzzlers. Let's see who does better by 2030.
They've all rebranded as energy companies anyway. They'll go wherever the return is and their interest is in the long term sustainability of the company in the interest of shareholders (most of whom are large pension/retirement/union funds). It only makes sense to diversify for all possible futures. Are you crazy enough to think any board nowadays would say "we're 100% all in in the oil industry forever!"?
You can guarantee this is about someone looking for money for their pet cause/business, regardless of which one listed it is. To think anything else is incredibly naive.
I've seen lots of these outsourcing arrangements. It's highly unlikely these were actual H1B workers, that's just kind of a label people have grown to attach to foreign workers.
Usually what happens is they fly a few of their "key" staff or "experts" over to America to learn face-to-face (who are usually average to below-average skillsets compared to North American workers). They are then flown back home to India (etc.) afterwards to train another larger amount of staff. They are temporary work visas, and those are easy to get. Why would they keep the person in the US anyway when that just means higher wages? Send them back home, you can pay them a third (also worth noting that will probably buy them the same or better quality of life).
Price to Earnings is just a number, a qualitative look at the situation helps. Although it's a ratio which helps in the comparison to other companies, with someone like Apple it's foolish to discount the actual magnitude of the actual magnitude of their numbers as they're massive. Apple still needs to sell HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to recoup the investment cost (the "price" of the company as measured by it's stock). Sure, again it's a ratio so that PE of 10 means Apple is already making a tenth of that in a year, but that still implies ten more years of massive, massive sales of a single product.
A vast majority (as you point out) of their revenue comes from the iPhone. A good portion of that "non-core" revenue comes from software and services around that same product. The revenue stream needs more diversity to be worth more.
No, then people would cancel their Netflix subscriptions when left only with their country-of-origin content. Netflix doesn't want that, and I think they're putting up a false fight.
When most any plant gets over about 100 degrees, it "shuts down"; its stoma close, for example, which renders it unable to respirate. You know nothing about plants.
...and I would say you know nothing about "Life". Life on this planet, especially flora, has evolved to handle greater changes in even shorter periods of time. I always laugh at the environmentalists who assume all life on this planet will just remain the same and die out when something changes.
I had to tell this story, because I see it regularly. I've had some interesting observations on the work culture to two sides of a border, Canada and the US.
I happen to work at a company with subsidiaries on both sides of the border, though it's a Canadian company and head office is in Canada. We have some large offices in southern US, too. I never thought of us (I'm on the Canadian side) as particular hard workers. We get lots of paid vacation, free days off galore, and pretty damn good pay to boot. On a Friday afternoon the office is dead, we do lots of "fun" events, people read newspapers in the morning, and mood is generally pretty relaxed. (though we do have people on call for critical IT support). In other words, there's a good amount of slack and if we have a reason not to be in the office we'll take it.
I would almost say we're pretty lazy - until I see us relative to our US counterparts. There is a just a pervasive culture there of not getting things done. Here, we expect expediency and resolution to problems.. when things were passed to our US offices, it was almost impossible to get them to commit to any dates, which was just standard practice here. Here, there was pressure to have things done quickly, and it is self-created too, this just doesn't exist in the US. Any or no reason at all to avoid a task or simply not following up on things.
I do however consider this might be a southern attitude towards work as well, as most of my interaction is with offices based in the US south (Texas to Florida).