I'd guess that an imaginative person would be happy while poor or unpopular. I like to think of wealth as simply a magnifier or amplifier of the character of the individual in question. Unfortuanately too many people expect happiness to be derived from circumstances and are sorely dissapointed when it is not. That's what keeps marrage councilors employeed (people expecting the circumstance of marrage to increase their happiness or meet a deep need). If you reach that dissapointment after you have achived (or been handed) everything you would be one pitiful creature.
Actually from what I've seen and read most are not franchises. Starbucks owns the majority of the stores, unless they are a kiosk inside another retailer (Safeway or Barnes & Noble for example.
I think Ecclesiastes probably has a lot of good advice for modern folk, after all the guy writing it was desparate after gaining everything the world had to offer (wealth, women, wisdom, power) and none of them made him happy after a short honeymoon period. I'd guess that many Americans are getting to that point or will be there in a few years. I've always thought the saddest people in the world are like Paris Hilton. Unlike those of us who can dream that being wealthy, popular, or beautiful would make us happy; they know that they do not and have little left to look forward to.
The finance articles are also accurate and remain on the cutting edge of financial (quant) techniques. There isn't as much contriversy there, I've not yet delved into some of the more political economics articles (externalities, supply side theories, Ricardian tax policies etc). From what I have seen all were written by some very sharp folks.
I think humvee refers to the military version of the vehicle (I'd guess that it is the pronunciation of an abreviation). The (AMC?) company that produces civillian versions of the vehicle is branded Hummer, and the vehicles were known as H1 (really close to the military version) and H2 (a bit smaller--still a monstrosity) the H2 is far more popular as it costs about half as much and most folk do not seem to know or care that there is a difference. I think humvee would be more accurate in reference to a military version or H1 civillian vehicle and hummer includes H1 and H2s.
That said if I were gonna blow six figures on a car that measured efficency in gallons per mile, I'd get one of these. Getting two tons of metal from 0 to 60 in under 5 seconds pretty impressive. And you could probably drive the thing to an environmentalist rally. Odd considering it's only 1 mpg better than the hummer, I guess we are visual creatures.
I'd make a rough guess that $500 billion (in current dollars) has been spent on finding and extracting oil from the ground (no royalties or other wealth transfers just the economic costs). That same $500 billion would no doubt have improved our automotive technologies considerably, however I firmly doubt that alternate energy sources would be competitive with pulling the stored energy from the ground. Batteries are nowhere near the same energy density, and it requires considerable land, energy, and effort to grow corn or soybeans (or eventually algae) to replace the oil. Also if you go electric, would $500 billion pay for enough dams, solar power grids (and technology improvments), and wind farms to completely replace our transportation system? $500 million sounds like an awful lot of money, but on that scale it's pretty small. The world uses roughly 70 million barrels of oil per day. Each barrel contains roughly 5.8 million BTUs of energy, other than vegetable oil and ethanol, there isn't much that comes close, and I will put dollars to doughnuts (you gotta send krispy kremes if you have one) that it would take well more than $500 million to produce enough corn or soybeans to make the same 400 trillion BTUs of energy we get from the ground. Assuming Hibbert (and Hoteling) are right (I have almost no doubt either are) we will begin using alternate energy when the extraction costs are similar probably in the next two decades (that is a SWAG). That said you are considerably more long term in mindset than most American's or/.ers. My potential errors are grossly underestimating the productivity of R&D in alternate energy sources.
My issue was mainly the efficiency of your first conclusion. We haven't spent all that many resources (relative to the energy we got out) looking for additional oil reserves (it has all been low hanging fruit so far). Certainly nothing near the amount of improvement that would have to be accomplished in alternate power sources. The article mentioned that natives used the oil from these finds to seal their canoes prior to western arrival here. Doesn't take a whole lot of R&D to find that or get it out of the ground. Contrast that with the amount of time and resources required to substantially improve batteries, drive systems, materials and everything else necessary to get energy transfered from the sun into your car (If you don't use waste vegetable oil, bio-Diesel costs about $3/gallon. Ethanol is more expensive. Batteries have a long way to go to match hydrocarbon chains' energy density.
Sorry about the confusion, energy==oil and gas in that context. E&P costs are miniscule compared to the amount of energy generated and its mobility. If you applied to alternative power sources the returns are nowhere near as good yet. As we use up more of the "low hanging fruit" althernate sources will become competitive. But when that happens depends on when (if) we hit peak oil. Assuming Hibbert is correct, a rought guess would be most alternate energy becomes competive about a third to half way down the curve (perhaps somewhere near the POI on the downward slope of the curve) wholesale untaxed gas prices in the $3/gallon range and oil in the $70-$90/barrel range.
I regularly read three "dead tree" publications, the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and the Economist. Until those three go competely online, I will continue reading them daily and weekly. Sure the Journal and Economist both usually suffer from reading yesterdays news (that I already read online in real time), but they all three add filtering and analysis which is unavailible elsewhere. And since I can take all three many more places (park, restroom, public transportation) the print versions have better layout and more utility at this point.
I've always liked the economist because they are willing to bash on anyone they disagree with (I happen to agree with them 99% of the time). Also the captions are usually wonderful.
Love the Times, too bad we canceled our office sub after the International manager left. Monday's WSJ lead column in section B is one of the more with it IT columns I've seen in any paper (excepting the economist). Lee Gnomes really knows his stuff, and that's probably where most PHB's first learned about Linux, the Friday column is interesting but usually about life sciences rather than physical sciences. Mossberg (Thurs) is almost as funny as the column 4 articles.
I think that doesn't include any royalties, refining costs, or transportation costs. For a reference I've heard that extraction costs are $2-$3/barrel in the middle east. Which (combined with their operation at 60%-70% capacity) is the actual reason Saudi Arabia exerts so much leverage on world oil prices. They can continue producing after it is no longer economical for others to produce and keep enough slack capacity to ajdust in either direction.
Probably not, in the whole scheme of things, very little gets spent finding new, better energy sources. The biggest cost to energy is converting sunlight to a more useful form (usually electric or chemical) the advantage with oil is that is complete you just have to find it, and most of the reserves already found it was either know for eons and was regarded as a nusiance (La Brea tar pits etc) as oil soaked ground is not as useful for travel or crop growing. We have put considerable resources into getting it out of the ground but that amount pales in comparison to the costs of developing a better method (and building infastructure to utilize) of converting energy from sunlight to chemical or electric energy. Besides very few alternate energy sources are as mobile as petroleum products. Ethanol and biodiesel are but batteries aren't close yet. These oil sands aren't new, prices just finally got high enough to make it cost effective to extract it (profitable at ~$35/barrel).
I have no problems with anyone* not wearing their seatbelts (might make them a safer driver).
*As long as they are carrying blue ribbon gold plated private insurance (indemnifying all other drivers of any medical costs regardless of accident fault), will not be using a subsidised public hospital, agree not to sue anyone, and won't claim the medical costs on their taxes. The problem hear is that many people who drive seatbeltless head to the ER and don't have any insurance (driving up the costs for everyone else).
Buy back programs are financing cash flow, not expenses. Normally a company uses them to repurchase shares and increase each remaining owners stake not just offset the compensation they gave to employees. One of the potential changes FASB proposed would move dilution offsetting repurchases to operating cash flow, or move the tax beneft to financing cash flow. Expenses normally deal with things directly related to the production of the product, which is part of the reason why you hear the big hubbub about options now.
It's mostly VIA's fault, while Intel delivers, normally, rock solid motherboard chipsets. AMD usually ends up with SiS and VIA's chipset of the quarter. Sometimes its good and sometimes its crash happy, so AMD gets a rap for being crash happy. The last really bad VIA chipset I recall was in the K6III/Early Athlon days, and my SiS 735 has been running like a champ for almost three years (not straight).
Yeah but usually you are issuing option exercised stock at somewhere between 25%-50% of current prices, and buying it back at current prices. The difference there never got expensed, and management claims to be reducing shares outstanding, which should not have changed in the first place.
The model does a pretty good job of estimating value based on actual transacted value of options. If you prefer market values you could use the Coca-Cola method of expensing in which an investment bank (or average of three) gives a binding offer to buy the options which the company uses (and can transact at with any of three). And the difference between log normal probablity estimated option values and true volatility option values is a whole lot lower than the current method of zero expense.
The advantage is that a better estimate of option cost will be in the headline EPS number that everyone follows. Currently companies are allowed to expense only the intrinsic value of options. This is always zero, since companies issue options at the current stock price. As a result of this treatment, companies give away too many options (since the cost is too low).
It's getting a ton of political pressure because current option plans really do not do a good job of aligning shareholder and management issues. The goal of these plans is to make a considerable amount of management's pay to be based on the same (or similar incentives) as shareholders have (increasing stock prices, preferably faster than competitors). The political issue is that management only has to increase the stock price long enough to cash out their options, and may engage in risky behavior in the hope of a one time payoff. A better plan to do this would be to lengthen the period when an owner cannot exercise their options and index the strike price to either an index (like the S&P 500) or a group of competitors. ie if you issue options at $100, and after the first year the average return of your competotors was 10% at the end of the first year the new strike price is $110. If you couldn't exercise for 10 years, this would be much closer to what shareholders want.
The black magic comes from the Black-Scholes model, which uses an estimate of volitility to estimate value based on the chances that an option will finish in the money.
Companies already do have to report numbers, and estimated value, of options issued, the ranges of strike prices of options outstanding, but this information is not used on the income statement, which is all most investors look at.
Personally, I'd like to see operating cash flow reduced by the amount of cash required to not dilute current option related stock issuances, and see option plans that were longer and indexed (all but the crappiest company didn't go up over a 10 year period, which is all current options require to start transfering management value).
Did you ever see Equilibrium? In their futuristic society all individualism and emotion is removed from people. All the desks are laid out precisily the same. I want a patent on that layout.
From what I have heard, WaMu uses a very non-traditional layout of their branches. Rather than a seires of desks on one side of the room, with a wall of tellers and a rope arrangement, they have several podiums scattered around the lobby area, which allow users to walk up to their choice of tellers and conduct their busines. While I haven't been to one of the kiosk style branches (mine was a traditional branch, I've always found WaMu to be one of the better banking choices I've used. They offered better deals on checking accounts than anyone other than a credit union. Customer service was excellent, although I was friends with several tellers so that could be part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess that an imaginative person would be happy while poor or unpopular. I like to think of wealth as simply a magnifier or amplifier of the character of the individual in question. Unfortuanately too many people expect happiness to be derived from circumstances and are sorely dissapointed when it is not. That's what keeps marrage councilors employeed (people expecting the circumstance of marrage to increase their happiness or meet a deep need). If you reach that dissapointment after you have achived (or been handed) everything you would be one pitiful creature.
Actually from what I've seen and read most are not franchises. Starbucks owns the majority of the stores, unless they are a kiosk inside another retailer (Safeway or Barnes & Noble for example.
I think Ecclesiastes probably has a lot of good advice for modern folk, after all the guy writing it was desparate after gaining everything the world had to offer (wealth, women, wisdom, power) and none of them made him happy after a short honeymoon period. I'd guess that many Americans are getting to that point or will be there in a few years. I've always thought the saddest people in the world are like Paris Hilton. Unlike those of us who can dream that being wealthy, popular, or beautiful would make us happy; they know that they do not and have little left to look forward to.
The finance articles are also accurate and remain on the cutting edge of financial (quant) techniques. There isn't as much contriversy there, I've not yet delved into some of the more political economics articles (externalities, supply side theories, Ricardian tax policies etc). From what I have seen all were written by some very sharp folks.
I was a bit befuddeld by my lack of anything unusual until I realized I was clicking on my open page in new tab button.
I think humvee refers to the military version of the vehicle (I'd guess that it is the pronunciation of an abreviation). The (AMC?) company that produces civillian versions of the vehicle is branded Hummer, and the vehicles were known as H1 (really close to the military version) and H2 (a bit smaller--still a monstrosity) the H2 is far more popular as it costs about half as much and most folk do not seem to know or care that there is a difference. I think humvee would be more accurate in reference to a military version or H1 civillian vehicle and hummer includes H1 and H2s.
That said if I were gonna blow six figures on a car that measured efficency in gallons per mile, I'd get one of these. Getting two tons of metal from 0 to 60 in under 5 seconds pretty impressive. And you could probably drive the thing to an environmentalist rally. Odd considering it's only 1 mpg better than the hummer, I guess we are visual creatures.
I'd make a rough guess that $500 billion (in current dollars) has been spent on finding and extracting oil from the ground (no royalties or other wealth transfers just the economic costs). That same $500 billion would no doubt have improved our automotive technologies considerably, however I firmly doubt that alternate energy sources would be competitive with pulling the stored energy from the ground. Batteries are nowhere near the same energy density, and it requires considerable land, energy, and effort to grow corn or soybeans (or eventually algae) to replace the oil. Also if you go electric, would $500 billion pay for enough dams, solar power grids (and technology improvments), and wind farms to completely replace our transportation system? $500 million sounds like an awful lot of money, but on that scale it's pretty small. The world uses roughly 70 million barrels of oil per day. Each barrel contains roughly 5.8 million BTUs of energy, other than vegetable oil and ethanol, there isn't much that comes close, and I will put dollars to doughnuts (you gotta send krispy kremes if you have one) that it would take well more than $500 million to produce enough corn or soybeans to make the same 400 trillion BTUs of energy we get from the ground. /.ers. My potential errors are grossly underestimating the productivity of R&D in alternate energy sources.
Assuming Hibbert (and Hoteling) are right (I have almost no doubt either are) we will begin using alternate energy when the extraction costs are similar probably in the next two decades (that is a SWAG). That said you are considerably more long term in mindset than most American's or
My issue was mainly the efficiency of your first conclusion. We haven't spent all that many resources (relative to the energy we got out) looking for additional oil reserves (it has all been low hanging fruit so far). Certainly nothing near the amount of improvement that would have to be accomplished in alternate power sources. The article mentioned that natives used the oil from these finds to seal their canoes prior to western arrival here. Doesn't take a whole lot of R&D to find that or get it out of the ground. Contrast that with the amount of time and resources required to substantially improve batteries, drive systems, materials and everything else necessary to get energy transfered from the sun into your car (If you don't use waste vegetable oil, bio-Diesel costs about $3/gallon. Ethanol is more expensive. Batteries have a long way to go to match hydrocarbon chains' energy density.
Sorry about the confusion, energy==oil and gas in that context. E&P costs are miniscule compared to the amount of energy generated and its mobility. If you applied to alternative power sources the returns are nowhere near as good yet. As we use up more of the "low hanging fruit" althernate sources will become competitive. But when that happens depends on when (if) we hit peak oil. Assuming Hibbert is correct, a rought guess would be most alternate energy becomes competive about a third to half way down the curve (perhaps somewhere near the POI on the downward slope of the curve) wholesale untaxed gas prices in the $3/gallon range and oil in the $70-$90/barrel range.
I regularly read three "dead tree" publications, the Wall Street Journal, Barron's, and the Economist. Until those three go competely online, I will continue reading them daily and weekly. Sure the Journal and Economist both usually suffer from reading yesterdays news (that I already read online in real time), but they all three add filtering and analysis which is unavailible elsewhere. And since I can take all three many more places (park, restroom, public transportation) the print versions have better layout and more utility at this point.
I've always liked the economist because they are willing to bash on anyone they disagree with (I happen to agree with them 99% of the time). Also the captions are usually wonderful.
Love the Times, too bad we canceled our office sub after the International manager left. Monday's WSJ lead column in section B is one of the more with it IT columns I've seen in any paper (excepting the economist). Lee Gnomes really knows his stuff, and that's probably where most PHB's first learned about Linux, the Friday column is interesting but usually about life sciences rather than physical sciences. Mossberg (Thurs) is almost as funny as the column 4 articles.
I think that doesn't include any royalties, refining costs, or transportation costs. For a reference I've heard that extraction costs are $2-$3/barrel in the middle east. Which (combined with their operation at 60%-70% capacity) is the actual reason Saudi Arabia exerts so much leverage on world oil prices. They can continue producing after it is no longer economical for others to produce and keep enough slack capacity to ajdust in either direction.
Probably not, in the whole scheme of things, very little gets spent finding new, better energy sources. The biggest cost to energy is converting sunlight to a more useful form (usually electric or chemical) the advantage with oil is that is complete you just have to find it, and most of the reserves already found it was either know for eons and was regarded as a nusiance (La Brea tar pits etc) as oil soaked ground is not as useful for travel or crop growing. We have put considerable resources into getting it out of the ground but that amount pales in comparison to the costs of developing a better method (and building infastructure to utilize) of converting energy from sunlight to chemical or electric energy. Besides very few alternate energy sources are as mobile as petroleum products. Ethanol and biodiesel are but batteries aren't close yet.
These oil sands aren't new, prices just finally got high enough to make it cost effective to extract it (profitable at ~$35/barrel).
I have no problems with anyone* not wearing their seatbelts (might make them a safer driver).
*As long as they are carrying blue ribbon gold plated private insurance (indemnifying all other drivers of any medical costs regardless of accident fault), will not be using a subsidised public hospital, agree not to sue anyone, and won't claim the medical costs on their taxes. The problem hear is that many people who drive seatbeltless head to the ER and don't have any insurance (driving up the costs for everyone else).
Last i checked (admitedly about a quarter ago) broadband penetration in the us was about 10%.
Buy back programs are financing cash flow, not expenses. Normally a company uses them to repurchase shares and increase each remaining owners stake not just offset the compensation they gave to employees. One of the potential changes FASB proposed would move dilution offsetting repurchases to operating cash flow, or move the tax beneft to financing cash flow. Expenses normally deal with things directly related to the production of the product, which is part of the reason why you hear the big hubbub about options now.
It's mostly VIA's fault, while Intel delivers, normally, rock solid motherboard chipsets. AMD usually ends up with SiS and VIA's chipset of the quarter. Sometimes its good and sometimes its crash happy, so AMD gets a rap for being crash happy. The last really bad VIA chipset I recall was in the K6III/Early Athlon days, and my SiS 735 has been running like a champ for almost three years (not straight).
After that all I have to say is ding ding ding dadading ding *ding* ding ding ding dada ding ding. Word to your motha, or something.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yeah but usually you are issuing option exercised stock at somewhere between 25%-50% of current prices, and buying it back at current prices. The difference there never got expensed, and management claims to be reducing shares outstanding, which should not have changed in the first place.
The model does a pretty good job of estimating value based on actual transacted value of options. If you prefer market values you could use the Coca-Cola method of expensing in which an investment bank (or average of three) gives a binding offer to buy the options which the company uses (and can transact at with any of three). And the difference between log normal probablity estimated option values and true volatility option values is a whole lot lower than the current method of zero expense.
The advantage is that a better estimate of option cost will be in the headline EPS number that everyone follows. Currently companies are allowed to expense only the intrinsic value of options. This is always zero, since companies issue options at the current stock price. As a result of this treatment, companies give away too many options (since the cost is too low).
It's getting a ton of political pressure because current option plans really do not do a good job of aligning shareholder and management issues. The goal of these plans is to make a considerable amount of management's pay to be based on the same (or similar incentives) as shareholders have (increasing stock prices, preferably faster than competitors). The political issue is that management only has to increase the stock price long enough to cash out their options, and may engage in risky behavior in the hope of a one time payoff. A better plan to do this would be to lengthen the period when an owner cannot exercise their options and index the strike price to either an index (like the S&P 500) or a group of competitors. ie if you issue options at $100, and after the first year the average return of your competotors was 10% at the end of the first year the new strike price is $110. If you couldn't exercise for 10 years, this would be much closer to what shareholders want.
The black magic comes from the Black-Scholes model, which uses an estimate of volitility to estimate value based on the chances that an option will finish in the money.
Companies already do have to report numbers, and estimated value, of options issued, the ranges of strike prices of options outstanding, but this information is not used on the income statement, which is all most investors look at.
Personally, I'd like to see operating cash flow reduced by the amount of cash required to not dilute current option related stock issuances, and see option plans that were longer and indexed (all but the crappiest company didn't go up over a 10 year period, which is all current options require to start transfering management value).
Did you ever see Equilibrium? In their futuristic society all individualism and emotion is removed from people. All the desks are laid out precisily the same. I want a patent on that layout.
From what I have heard, WaMu uses a very non-traditional layout of their branches. Rather than a seires of desks on one side of the room, with a wall of tellers and a rope arrangement, they have several podiums scattered around the lobby area, which allow users to walk up to their choice of tellers and conduct their busines.
While I haven't been to one of the kiosk style branches (mine was a traditional branch, I've always found WaMu to be one of the better banking choices I've used. They offered better deals on checking accounts than anyone other than a credit union. Customer service was excellent, although I was friends with several tellers so that could be part of it.