Last weekend, Josh and I hosted our final party together in the "hacienda." I had just taken my CFA exam the weekend before and his birthday was two days earlier, so we had a lot to celebrate. Tons of our NY friends showed up and all of my siblings happened to be in town for it. We made Caribou Lou and Rum Punch. I wore a Captain's hat and drank out of a pineapple all night. It was quite the bash.
I am sure Jobs is smugly popping some hella expensive champagne tonight. The company he brought back from the brink is now worth more than the most dominant tech company ever.
Market cap doesn't tell the whole story. Microsoft still makes far more money than Apple (>$6B more). The stock just trades cheap because investors won't pay any sort of growth premium, sadly because they have no reason to get excited about growth there. I guess two slowly declining monopolies and a healthy dividend is not enough.
I have always thought that Microsoft should focus on completely dominating their core growth businesses (enterprise IT and business productivity software) and only launch entrants to new markets when they have cooked up something truly disruptive vs. launching some half-ass, laughable copy of their competitor's product AND they are 100% committed to ensuring the new business is extremely successful.
Any 'softies think otherwise? I am not buying the whole "its different when you need to grow by 2-3 YHOO's a year" argument now that there's another $200B tech company on the block.
I have to say, it is still kinda weird seeing my buddies faces (like Will's here) on Pandora when I am listening to music they have favorited on Facebook. I guess its only been a week since Facebook released this feature. With more time, I'll get used to seeing my peeps pop up all over the intarwebs.
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IMO, this graphic (from a presentation by Sadad Al Husseini, the retired head of E&P at Saudi Aramco) is really all you need to see to understand peak oil. The bottom line is that there is a point around 105-110mbpd where you just can't meaningfully increase oil production no matter how much people are willing to pay for oil.
The solution for the US (don't know about China, India, etc.) is actually really simple: heavily tax gasoline and use the proceeds to subsidize more fuel efficient vehicles until we have completely turned over our vehicle fleet from a 20mpg fleet to a 60mpg fleet. It should take about 10-15years and doesn't require any new technology: just make cars smaller, lighter and slower and then drive them less.
From Consumer Energy Report:
"Unsurprisingly, California led the way in shifting toward solar power, installing 220 megawatts last year, compared to New Jersey which was a distant second at 57 MW. The surge pushed California to a cumulative total of 1,102 MW of solar power, nearly nine times as great a capacity as second place New Jersey’s 128 MW."
I can't believe NJ is second in solar power. That is so stupid. Yo, Texas, New Mexico, muthaf*ckin A-to-the-Z, where you been?
I really wish the DoE would step up with some big Manhattan Project-style initiative that concentrates our solar power investment dollars in the desert where it is actually an efficient place to generate solar power. It doesn't make sense for every state to invest in every kind of renewable energy. Some states probably shouldn't invest in renewables at all and instead, build more nuclear.
Seeing the Banksy movie tonight, hopefully it's dope.
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