Oil accounts for 92% of its exports. Most of that must be imported to the U.S. Venezuela’s oil is heavy and loaded with sulfur, unlike Libya’s light sweet stuff. Nobody else can buy the stuff because there refineries can’t handle it..
The government is heavily dependent on this. The oil pays for subsidized food, payments on the national debt [which is growing rapidly], pay for Cuban security specialist and doctors. etc.
I think the U.S. could get by easier without Venezuela then the other way. The U.S. would face $5 gas. Venezuela would face ruin.
If you use uranium as you fuel [and most plants due] a by-product is plutonium. When reprocessing the fuel one can extract the plutonium easily.
Building a bomb out of uranium is hard. Nuclear fuel is “low enriched”. It needs to be purified to “highly enriched”. This is hard to do. Building a bomb out of plutonium, on the other hand, is hard.
Any country to reprocess fuel, could say with a straight face, that they had no intention of building a bomb – but verifying that would be next to impossible. So to close that door to nuclear proliferation the advance countries had to give up reprocessing. So what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Fairy Dust: Yes.
There are ways to reduce the amount of high level waste, but as people mentioned they fall afoul of the nuclear proliferation treaties.
There have been "table top" demonstrations of converting low level waste into safe stuff. Basically, you isolate the radioactive atoms and bombard them with neutrons until they fall apart into something safer. You don’t need nanotechnology to make this work – but close.
Step 1: Company takes excess cash and gives it to the insurance company, buying life insurance. Step 2: Insurance company invest the cash in bonds. It can be government bonds or high quality corporate bonds. Step 3. Wait until the employee dies. Step 4: Profit! How...
Insurance Company: Earns a management fee and a risk fee. Let's call it 100 basis points per year. Not much but you make it up in volume.
Company: It earns the interest on the bonds, less the insurance company's take - TAX FREE! Remember, the death benefit is tax free.
Dead Employee: Nothing happens to them. Their really not in the picture in any meaningful way. They are not doing anything horrible to the dead employee. They paid for the life insurance so it's not like they are stealing anything from the employee. Ghoulish - Yes.
Government: They lose. They miss out on the income which is normally taxable. Now, I am a small government libertarian - but I have issues with this. Not because it is ghoulish but because it is a tax dodge. Everybody should pay their fair share of taxes [low] - but this is a tax dodge that serves no economic purpose and tends to favor the large, well established companies - hardly fair.
So, this is the way it works. If a company has excess cash can could buy government bonds – or they could invest it – let us say in life insurance policies. On average they will have the same returns. Life insurance is going to be a bit more lumpy because you are not murdering your employees, but if you have enough employees the law of large numbers will smooth that out. So why would a company chose life insurance policies over government bonds? Because government bonds are taxed but life insurance payouts are not.
The example the author gives is not an example of a monopsony. Yes, Apple is a 600 pound gorilla, but they are nowhere near a monopsony when it comes to manufacturing components. Just because Foxcom builds factory A for Apple does not mean they [or anybody else for that matter] can’t build another factory.
Labor Unions are [or were] the classic example of a monopsony. If you wanted to buy labor you had to hire Union workers – they were the only supplier.
I suppose that an argument could be made for the ITunes store and IPhone/IPod, etc. [If you have developed an app only Apply will “buy” it – and then resell it] but I don’t think this is a good example because there are a lot of close substitutes.
2nd, you are looking at capital costs. What is going to be the running costs and lifespan of the project? Drop that into a spreadsheet to calculate the IRR and cost per Watt. [and what the heck - one could be generous and throw in some type of carbon credit / R&D thing too.]
P/E is a backwards number. In your example, Apple earned $1 last year - but that is not what it's going to earn next year.
P/E is a way to compare two different companies quickly. For example, a company with 1,000 shares at $10 to a company with 100 share at $100 that made the same profit would have the same P/E ratio. One can compare Berkshire Hathaway ($118,045 per share) with Microsoft ($24).
A better example may be to compare IBM, Google and Ford to get a better idea of how these things work. In some ways, Ford is a larger company. More employees, more revenue, etc. then the 4 companies you just gave. On the other hand, Ford's profit margin and it's expectation for growth is larger. So Ford's P/E is 8. People are putting a higher value on last year's earnings for MSFT then for Ford.
So, why is this? 2 big reasons.
First, future growth. By the way, this does not mean people think Google is going to grow 2x faster then MSFT. The growth curve of most companies are exponential [very fast growth] which then levels off.
Second is risk/uncertainty The riskier a company is the lower it's P/E ratio.
First, find some books by Benjamin Graham. Their a good read. He had a famous student you might of heard of - Warren Buffett.
Second, realize that in the short term the stock market is a voting machine - or a beauty pageant. In the long run [5+ years] it is a weighing machine.
Third, realize that the past is gone and that you are buying a company on it's future performance. Or, as Yogi Berra said "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future".
Look up SEC reg SHO. You can't legally do it in the first 30 days.
Now, mind you, I will grant that you can do it if 1. you naked short sell [which only mark makers are supposed to do] or 2. fail to delivery [Which you are not supposed to do and which you can't do if your using a discount broker. This was common during the dot.com boom, but SEC/FINRA have been cracking down hard on this as well.]
I would think they would enlist the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Not many people know it, but the US does have a Uniformed Service stuffed full of docotrs and vets. And they do work closely with CDC all the time. Because you know the Surgeon General is a real General. [And yes, I say this a bit tongue in cheek.]
Netflix and Red Box have blown a hole in DVD sales. It used to be that people would spring ~$15 for a new release to build up their DVD Library. Instead of buying 2 DVD a month they can rent 10 to 30 instead. This is a seachange. Zediva should be able to get away with even fewer DVDs because their turnover is going to be much faster. They won't have to wait for people to mail their CDs back or drop it off. As soon as somebody is done watching they can roll it over to the next.
Streaming, by the way, is not going to make up for lost DVD sales. The studies gets about 80 cents per steam vs a few dollars on a DVD.
Yes. Their retired. They have acted in movies, circuses, etc. putting in a lot of hard work. And if we go any futher we are going to wind up in a odd PETA type conversation.
Chimpanzees want to be more like us. "Retired" chimpanzees given the choice between a "wild" setting and a apartment setting chose to split thier time between the two. They like laying on a sofa and watching TV. Tarzan's Chimp like to lay around and watch reruns of himself. or, as Mencken said "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” This may well be true for the rest of the animal kindgom.
OK, this is somewhat off topic, but what the hey – it about honesty and controls.
I just heard a story about the person who ran the gift store at Kennedy Center. For those of you who don’t know, this is where the president goes when he wants to hear a little light opera or what not. The gift store was run by volunteers, mainly older retired people who like high culture. Not the profile of the average criminal. And yet people where ripping off the till right and left. A few dollars here to pay for a cab, lunch, whatever.
The manager puts in some really simple controls. Goes away from the honor system to sings with prices, receipt books, etc. Shrinkage drops from 40% to 8%. Remove all controls and yeah, a lot of honest people will chisel the system a little. Sigh.
This American Life, Esp 431, See No Evil, Act Three. I Worked at the Kennedy Center and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
So we have $7,500 tax juridictions. o.k. National Database at $500. o.k.
Slanket: Do I tax it as a clothing or a household good? Pillow Pet: Do I tax it as a toy or a household good? Artistic Sword Cane from a local vendor, no SKU: Art? Personal Weapon? Medical Device?
It’s not a question about punishment, it a question about incentives.
Let say you need X dollars to run the Government. I am a small government type, but even a small government needs X dollars to run. You can raise those X dollars 1 of 2 ways.
Income Tax / Corporate Tax Rate: Tax these and you reduce the incentive to work or you reduce to incentive or corporations to invest. I will now point the silly examples of when Briton had a top income tax of 90%. Higher taxes meant lower GNP and lower tax rates. Why go out and become a doctor or what not.
Sales Tax: A person has money. He can buy stuff with it. He can buy a house which gives him tax credits [kind of like a negative sales tax.] Houses are nice but they are productive assets – unlike factories or a college education. You could spend it. Or you could invest it. If one has a low income tax / high sales tax all of a sudden it looks a lot better to invest it for the future instead of spending it now.
And since future GNP growth is partly based on investing today, tax policy should encourage that choice. Of course, if you want a progressive tax you have to do a bit more.
Also, codexes [i.e. bonded books]are able to access information dynamically [flip to page x] vs. sequentially. [i.e. unbounded books]
If you want to find a good example of why this matters, look at early Christianity writings vs. Judaism writings on the same subject. Codexes were invented about the same time as Christianity was founded. The Torah is always read linearly on a scroll. The sense of time, relationships to the texts, etc. are very different.
From what I have read they guessing the cause is cracks in the values, not because of a containment failure. If true, it means it going to be a lot easier to fix.
Most breakthrough work is done before a person is 25 – [Well, 30] – so I am not sure what that proves.
It’s is not so much people burning out. It is the difference between a young flexibly mind who is willing to put in ungodly hours to write an original thesis vs. a family man of the status que who needs to teach classes and shepherded Phd candidates.
You may want to check out how the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates CPI. www.bls.gov/cpi/
It does count oil. It does count food.
Yes, it does count the cut in Apple, but the weight given to such items is low. Look at housing instead. That has been keeping overall inflation low for the past few years.
I think you are talking about "headline" inflation, which is something different. That excludes oil and food. The fed can cut / raise short term interest rates. That can affect manufacturing and housing. It will not affect food [wait until next year when we can plant some more] or oil [since we import a lot.]
Most of the episodes are still around. Some have been lost. Others have not been released to DVD yet.
You can get An Unearthy Child, the first episode from Amazon or whatnot. Now, mind you, it is "live teleplay" and in black and white, so it is going to be a lot different then today's doctor who.
I will echo what a lot of people have been saying. Start with the reboot with "Rose". It not that the older stuff is bad - it is just very different.
For example, I would recomand "Robots of Death" - a Tom Baker / 4th Doctor story - when you get done with the "modern" stories. I think it was 3 [or 4?] 1/2 hour episodes that's now a 90 minute "movie". The pacing is very different.
I will disagree – It’s a lack of vision. Blame it on our Presidents [and I do use plural] or our Congress – but it’s a vision thing.
Do we want to
Build a space station?
Go to Mars?
Go to the Moon?
Go to an asteroid?
All of these are valid, but each of these requires something a little different. Instead of a clear voice [We shall put a man on the moon in 10 years] we have these ½ measures for the past 20 years. And this leaves us with what? No replacement for the Space Shuttle?
And it’s nice that the private sector is doing what it can – but the private sector responses to supply and demand – and right now it’s the government and big science which is providing the loin’s share of demand. I am not trying to marginalize space tourisms or commercial satellites – but they don’t have the big bucks like government.
Slashdot Mirror
Oil accounts for 92% of its exports. Most of that must be imported to the U.S. Venezuela’s oil is heavy and loaded with sulfur, unlike Libya’s light sweet stuff. Nobody else can buy the stuff because there refineries can’t handle it..
The government is heavily dependent on this. The oil pays for subsidized food, payments on the national debt [which is growing rapidly], pay for Cuban security specialist and doctors. etc.
I think the U.S. could get by easier without Venezuela then the other way. The U.S. would face $5 gas. Venezuela would face ruin.
If you use uranium as you fuel [and most plants due] a by-product is plutonium. When reprocessing the fuel one can extract the plutonium easily.
Building a bomb out of uranium is hard. Nuclear fuel is “low enriched”. It needs to be purified to “highly enriched”. This is hard to do. Building a bomb out of plutonium, on the other hand, is hard.
Any country to reprocess fuel, could say with a straight face, that they had no intention of building a bomb – but verifying that would be next to impossible. So to close that door to nuclear proliferation the advance countries had to give up reprocessing. So what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Fusion Engery: No
Fairy Dust: Yes.
There are ways to reduce the amount of high level waste, but as people mentioned they fall afoul of the nuclear proliferation treaties.
There have been "table top" demonstrations of converting low level waste into safe stuff. Basically, you isolate the radioactive atoms and bombard them with neutrons until they fall apart into something safer. You don’t need nanotechnology to make this work – but close.
So this is how it works:
Step 1: Company takes excess cash and gives it to the insurance company, buying life insurance.
Step 2: Insurance company invest the cash in bonds. It can be government bonds or high quality corporate bonds.
Step 3. Wait until the employee dies.
Step 4: Profit! How...
Insurance Company: Earns a management fee and a risk fee. Let's call it 100 basis points per year. Not much but you make it up in volume.
Company: It earns the interest on the bonds, less the insurance company's take - TAX FREE! Remember, the death benefit is tax free.
Dead Employee: Nothing happens to them. Their really not in the picture in any meaningful way. They are not doing anything horrible to the dead employee. They paid for the life insurance so it's not like they are stealing anything from the employee. Ghoulish - Yes.
Government: They lose. They miss out on the income which is normally taxable. Now, I am a small government libertarian - but I have issues with this. Not because it is ghoulish but because it is a tax dodge. Everybody should pay their fair share of taxes [low] - but this is a tax dodge that serves no economic purpose and tends to favor the large, well established companies - hardly fair.
So, this is the way it works. If a company has excess cash can could buy government bonds – or they could invest it – let us say in life insurance policies. On average they will have the same returns. Life insurance is going to be a bit more lumpy because you are not murdering your employees, but if you have enough employees the law of large numbers will smooth that out. So why would a company chose life insurance policies over government bonds? Because government bonds are taxed but life insurance payouts are not.
The example the author gives is not an example of a monopsony. Yes, Apple is a 600 pound gorilla, but they are nowhere near a monopsony when it comes to manufacturing components. Just because Foxcom builds factory A for Apple does not mean they [or anybody else for that matter] can’t build another factory.
Labor Unions are [or were] the classic example of a monopsony. If you wanted to buy labor you had to hire Union workers – they were the only supplier.
I suppose that an argument could be made for the ITunes store and IPhone/IPod, etc. [If you have developed an app only Apply will “buy” it – and then resell it] but I don’t think this is a good example because there are a lot of close substitutes.
So – 600 pound gorilla – Yes. Monopsony - No
1st, the loan is 737m. That's not the total cost.
2nd, you are looking at capital costs. What is going to be the running costs and lifespan of the project? Drop that into a spreadsheet to calculate the IRR and cost per Watt. [and what the heck - one could be generous and throw in some type of carbon credit / R&D thing too.]
P/E is a backwards number. In your example, Apple earned $1 last year - but that is not what it's going to earn next year.
P/E is a way to compare two different companies quickly. For example, a company with 1,000 shares at $10 to a company with 100 share at $100 that made the same profit would have the same P/E ratio. One can compare Berkshire Hathaway ($118,045 per share) with Microsoft ($24).
A better example may be to compare IBM, Google and Ford to get a better idea of how these things work. In some ways, Ford is a larger company. More employees, more revenue, etc. then the 4 companies you just gave. On the other hand, Ford's profit margin and it's expectation for growth is larger. So Ford's P/E is 8. People are putting a higher value on last year's earnings for MSFT then for Ford.
So, why is this? 2 big reasons.
First, future growth. By the way, this does not mean people think Google is going to grow 2x faster then MSFT. The growth curve of most companies are exponential [very fast growth] which then levels off.
Second is risk/uncertainty The riskier a company is the lower it's P/E ratio.
I hope this helps.
And to answer your last question
First, find some books by Benjamin Graham. Their a good read. He had a famous student you might of heard of - Warren Buffett.
Second, realize that in the short term the stock market is a voting machine - or a beauty pageant. In the long run [5+ years] it is a weighing machine.
Third, realize that the past is gone and that you are buying a company on it's future performance. Or, as Yogi Berra said "Prediction is very hard, especially about the future".
Look up SEC reg SHO. You can't legally do it in the first 30 days.
Now, mind you, I will grant that you can do it if 1. you naked short sell [which only mark makers are supposed to do] or 2. fail to delivery [Which you are not supposed to do and which you can't do if your using a discount broker. This was common during the dot.com boom, but SEC/FINRA have been cracking down hard on this as well.]
Saddly you can't short sell the stock for the first 30 days.
I would think they would enlist the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Not many people know it, but the US does have a Uniformed Service stuffed full of docotrs and vets. And they do work closely with CDC all the time. Because you know the Surgeon General is a real General. [And yes, I say this a bit tongue in cheek.]
Netflix and Red Box have blown a hole in DVD sales. It used to be that people would spring ~$15 for a new release to build up their DVD Library. Instead of buying 2 DVD a month they can rent 10 to 30 instead. This is a seachange. Zediva should be able to get away with even fewer DVDs because their turnover is going to be much faster. They won't have to wait for people to mail their CDs back or drop it off. As soon as somebody is done watching they can roll it over to the next.
Streaming, by the way, is not going to make up for lost DVD sales. The studies gets about 80 cents per steam vs a few dollars on a DVD.
Yes. Their retired. They have acted in movies, circuses, etc. putting in a lot of hard work. And if we go any futher we are going to wind up in a odd PETA type conversation.
Chimpanzees want to be more like us. "Retired" chimpanzees given the choice between a "wild" setting and a apartment setting chose to split thier time between the two. They like laying on a sofa and watching TV. Tarzan's Chimp like to lay around and watch reruns of himself. or, as Mencken said "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” This may well be true for the rest of the animal kindgom.
Just to put a finer point on it, it sounds like non-cumulative Preferred Stock [a type of non voting stock with very few rights].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_stock
OK, this is somewhat off topic, but what the hey – it about honesty and controls.
I just heard a story about the person who ran the gift store at Kennedy Center. For those of you who don’t know, this is where the president goes when he wants to hear a little light opera or what not. The gift store was run by volunteers, mainly older retired people who like high culture. Not the profile of the average criminal. And yet people where ripping off the till right and left. A few dollars here to pay for a cab, lunch, whatever.
The manager puts in some really simple controls. Goes away from the honor system to sings with prices, receipt books, etc. Shrinkage drops from 40% to 8%. Remove all controls and yeah, a lot of honest people will chisel the system a little. Sigh.
This American Life, Esp 431, See No Evil, Act Three. I Worked at the Kennedy Center and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
So we have $7,500 tax juridictions. o.k.
National Database at $500. o.k.
Slanket: Do I tax it as a clothing or a household good?
Pillow Pet: Do I tax it as a toy or a household good?
Artistic Sword Cane from a local vendor, no SKU: Art? Personal Weapon? Medical Device?
It’s not a question about punishment, it a question about incentives.
Let say you need X dollars to run the Government. I am a small government type, but even a small government needs X dollars to run. You can raise those X dollars 1 of 2 ways.
Income Tax / Corporate Tax Rate: Tax these and you reduce the incentive to work or you reduce to incentive or corporations to invest. I will now point the silly examples of when Briton had a top income tax of 90%. Higher taxes meant lower GNP and lower tax rates. Why go out and become a doctor or what not.
Sales Tax: A person has money. He can buy stuff with it. He can buy a house which gives him tax credits [kind of like a negative sales tax.] Houses are nice but they are productive assets – unlike factories or a college education. You could spend it. Or you could invest it. If one has a low income tax / high sales tax all of a sudden it looks a lot better to invest it for the future instead of spending it now.
And since future GNP growth is partly based on investing today, tax policy should encourage that choice. Of course, if you want a progressive tax you have to do a bit more.
Mod parrent up.
Also, codexes [i.e. bonded books]are able to access information dynamically [flip to page x] vs. sequentially. [i.e. unbounded books]
If you want to find a good example of why this matters, look at early Christianity writings vs. Judaism writings on the same subject. Codexes were invented about the same time as Christianity was founded. The Torah is always read linearly on a scroll. The sense of time, relationships to the texts, etc. are very different.
From what I have read they guessing the cause is cracks in the values, not because of a containment failure. If true, it means it going to be a lot easier to fix.
Most breakthrough work is done before a person is 25 – [Well, 30] – so I am not sure what that proves.
It’s is not so much people burning out. It is the difference between a young flexibly mind who is willing to put in ungodly hours to write an original thesis vs. a family man of the status que who needs to teach classes and shepherded Phd candidates.
You may want to check out how the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates CPI. www.bls.gov/cpi/
It does count oil. It does count food.
Yes, it does count the cut in Apple, but the weight given to such items is low. Look at housing instead. That has been keeping overall inflation low for the past few years.
I think you are talking about "headline" inflation, which is something different. That excludes oil and food. The fed can cut / raise short term interest rates. That can affect manufacturing and housing. It will not affect food [wait until next year when we can plant some more] or oil [since we import a lot.]
Most of the episodes are still around. Some have been lost. Others have not been released to DVD yet.
You can get An Unearthy Child, the first episode from Amazon or whatnot. Now, mind you, it is "live teleplay" and in black and white, so it is going to be a lot different then today's doctor who.
I will echo what a lot of people have been saying. Start with the reboot with "Rose". It not that the older stuff is bad - it is just very different.
For example, I would recomand "Robots of Death" - a Tom Baker / 4th Doctor story - when you get done with the "modern" stories. I think it was 3 [or 4?] 1/2 hour episodes that's now a 90 minute "movie". The pacing is very different.
I will disagree – It’s a lack of vision. Blame it on our Presidents [and I do use plural] or our Congress – but it’s a vision thing.
Do we want to
Build a space station?
Go to Mars?
Go to the Moon?
Go to an asteroid?
All of these are valid, but each of these requires something a little different. Instead of a clear voice [We shall put a man on the moon in 10 years] we have these ½ measures for the past 20 years. And this leaves us with what? No replacement for the Space Shuttle?
And it’s nice that the private sector is doing what it can – but the private sector responses to supply and demand – and right now it’s the government and big science which is providing the loin’s share of demand. I am not trying to marginalize space tourisms or commercial satellites – but they don’t have the big bucks like government.