On Dec. 21, 2012, drying off from Hurricane Sandy, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space.
On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy spaces and eight in the fossil fuels spaces. The results:
Earth from Space. Courtesy NASA & the American Taxpayer
Coral Davenport, in the New York Times, writes (here),
“President Obama could leave office with the most aggressive, far-reaching environmental legacy of any occupant of the White House. Yet it is very possible that not a single major environmental law will have passed during his two terms in Washington.
“Instead, Mr. Obama has turned to the vast reach of the Clean Air Act of 1970, which some legal experts call the most powerful environmental law in the world. Faced with a Congress that has shut down his attempts to push through an environmental agenda, Mr. Obama is using the authority of the act passed at the birth of the environmental movement to issue a series of landmark regulations on air pollution, from soot to smog, to mercury and planet-warming carbon dioxide.”
The coal industry skels from both parties consider this a “War on Coal.” Environmentalists could argue that it is a war for our grandchildren, a war for the biosphere, and even a war for a competitive 21st Century economy. Political hyperbole aside, it seems that any “War on Coal” is being waged by the methane and fracking industries, OPEC, and the “Invisible Hand” of the marketplace, not the President of the United States and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, EPA.
On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. At the close of trading, Nov. 21, 2014, that would be worth $24.3 Million and all of the increase is in the sustainable energy portfolio.
On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. Between December 21, 2012 and October 21, 2014
By 10/15/14, GT Advanced Tech had filed for bankruptcy protection, and other stocks in the portfolio dropped to points near their Dec. 2012. The portfolio as a whole dropped 55% from Sept. 19, 2014. Stay tuned, and keep your seat belt on. Continue reading
Ft Calhoun Plant – Arial View
The Fort Calhoun nuclear plant reopened in December, 2013. The plant, on the west bank of the Missouri River about 20 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska, closed for refueling in April, 2011, and was flooded in June, 2011. Refueling a nuclear plant typically takes about 6 – 12 weeks. Due to the flooding, the Fort Calhoun plant was closed for 970 days, from April, 2011 until December, 2013. (NY Times / Associated Press, here). Back in June, 2011, the cost estimate by David Lochbaum, Union of Concerned Scientists, was roughly $970 Million in lost revenue, plus the costs of repairs. Continue reading
The Deepwater Horizon Spill
“You can’t have oil without oil spills.” – Markwayne Mullin, R, Oklahoma. (Official / GovTrack)
Wind and Sun Won’t Spill
In a period when the Dow Industrials rose 30%, the S&P 500 rose 40%, and the Popular Logistics “Sustainable Energy Portfolio” rose 223%, the “Fossil Fuel Portfolio” rose 21%.
This suggests that a paradigm shift is underway in the energy industry.
Conclusions:
Observations:
On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; $8.0 iMil in the Sustainable Energy space and $8.0 iMil in the fossil fuel space.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 30.16 % from 12/21/12.
The S&P 500 is up 39.3% from 12/21/12.
The Fossil Fuel Portfolio continues to dramatically underperform the reference indices. It is up 18.36% from Dec. 21, 2012 and down 5.67% from July, 2014.
Californians have grown almonds for a long time. “Almond Grove At T. H. Selby’s Residence, Fair Oaks, Cal.” ca. 1870. NY Public Library
2006 was something of a banner year for both beekeepers and growers. A high fraction of beekeepers experienced better than 50% losses. Many growers could not rent bees at any price. Lots of almond groves in California went without pollination that year, and, as with many species of nuts, if the pollen isn’t carried over from an unrelated plant, nuts do not develop. Almonds, like many crops, (and most nuts) do not self-pollinate. Unless pollinated by an agent like a honey bee, they just don’t bear fruit. The price of almonds shot up in 2006 and has not dropped very much since.
Now you see her; now you don’t.
There aren’t enough bees to perform all of the pollination work in the United States. So, if you like to travel, make money doing it, and don’t mind a sting now and again, then professional beekeeping may just be for you. And hey – it’s a seller’s market.
About 1.4 million hives get hauled to and around California every spring. They travel by plane, semi or pickup trucks. 60% of the American hives are engaged in commercial pollination. They pollinate almond trees, and other key crops:
You can take your bees “On The Road” and make money without writing a word. And if you actually hate to travel, you can just send the bees.
Just make sure they all don’t all disappear.
Bill Thompson
Behind Oz’s Curtain of ‘Law and Order’
By C.C. Reilly
Bill Thompson: Schools not Prisons
“The [$34 million] the city wants to spend on [the Brooklyn House of Detention design] contract would be better used as a means to reduce class sizes and build more schools.”
NYC Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr.
November 19, 2009
On Dec. 21, 2012, I put $16 Million imaginary dollars in equal imaginary investments in 16 real energy companies; Eight in the Sustainable Energy space and eight in the fossil fuel space. Here are the results since Dec. 21, 2012:
The details are below.
Qatari Emir Hamad al-Thani with Ismail Haniya, Oct. 2012, Photo NY Times.
In October, 2012, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, as reported in the NY Times, here, “pledged $400 million to build two housing complexes, rehabilitate three main roads and create a prosthetic center, among other projects” in Gaza.
The $400 Million could have built 133 MW of offshore wind or 100 MW of PV Solar electricity generation capacity.
Marilyn Monroe
Scarlett Johansson
Relational Databases, RDBMSs, circa 1999, such as DB2, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Informix and Sybase, implementations of E. F. Codd‘s work at IBM and built according to Codd’s 12 Rules, are effective for solving OnLine Transaction Processing, or OLTP problems. These might be termed “Blue Quadrant” problems, if you consider Stonebraker’s Matrix, 1, below.
Broken arm, courtesy C. Bethel, MD, and A. Dean, MD.
They are billing systems, trading systems – accounting systems. Relational databases are useful for tracking widgets and money, as long as those widgets can be described with words or numbers. Processing simple data, even with a high volume of transactions.
Relational databases could also be used to store images, such as those of Scarlett Johansson or Marilyn Monroe, above, or X-Rays, left. However, these are stored in the database as Binary Large Objects, aka “BLOBs.” While RDBMSs could operate on large volumes of data in various ways, there are just two operations they could do on on BLOBs: store and retrieve. They could not query on intrinsic properties of a BLOB. They could query on data that describe a BLOB, but not the BLOB itself. There is no other processing in a traditional RDBMS. And they could not search on images, only on text describing images.