patrick.net

PermaRenter,

I found that incredibly interesting! Now... I can't picture that being a "5 seater" but hey, whatever right? It seems Tata is into everything, telecom, chemicals etc.

I don't know what all the alarm is about? It's not like they're going to use them to make a bunch of seperate trips like WE... do!

Maybe the next bubble will not be 'alt engergy' but instead another stock bubble? To go from 'daytrading tech stocks' to 'selling homes to each other' then back to 'day trading stocks' sounds about right for an economy with a small manufacturing base. But in a recession this cant happen?

anyway i gave up trying to get richer quicker when i sold my POS rental homes to chumps 2 years ago. Now I live the Patrick Killea Lifestyle™ of the independent IT contractor who works half the year and blogs too much. Its awsome! Thanks Patrick!!!

It seems Tata is into everything, telecom, chemicals etc.

Tata is like GE of India. Also, there are many companies in the whole complex that completely independent - have their own stock etc. They just use Tata in their name - as they can trace their origin back to the Tata family.

Most companies are managed very well, conservatively and are generally respected.

So, due to the fact that analog photography has been replaced by digital photography, is silver no longer quite as bright an investment?

There still is a whole lot of silver in the ground here in Idaho. Up in Silver Valley over 1 Billion (!) ounces of silver have already been extracted. I'm sure there's lots more where that came from.

Megan Meier, a 13-year-old suburban St. Louis girl who committed suicide after receiving cruel messages on her MySpace page. The task force includes public safety and mental health professionals, lawyers and legislators.

Megan's suicide occurred in October 2006 but drew attention last year after her mother went public. The teen thought she was communicating online with a teenage boy named Josh, who turned out to be a fictional character in a hoax. A neighborhood mother, Lori Drew, and two girls played a role in the hoax.

Prosecutors declined to charge anyone, in part because no specific laws appeared to apply. But some communities, including Megan's hometown of Dardenne Prairie, have adopted or are considering adopting laws to go after those involved in Internet bullying.

Drew's attorney, Jim Briscoe, has said the girls designed the fictional boy's account and sent the messages to Megan. Drew wasn't aware of the hurtful messages sent just prior to Megan's suicide, he has said. Other Internet users also joined in with cruel taunts before her death.

CFC --- Full Time Employees: 54,655
That does not include temps and consultants on site that will be impacted..
those folks may been impacted early I would say conservativly at 5% of total workforce 10% during the boom or 6K that already got or will get axed.

Add to that the vendors outside the company, the small ones, where 25% or more of their business comes from CFC... They get hit!

And from what I recall in the media $6M/month of advertising dollar going to Yahoo and/or Google goes away.

This is a ripple effect!!!

Whether it is Tiger in SF Zoo or a teenage girl -- taunting may lead to death ...

Maybe the next bubble will not be ‘alt engergy’

Checking the Solar Companies stock...

PE over 100 x next years earnings...

Yes Sire! Thats a bubble alright!

Nuclear is undervalued while Solar is way overvalued.

The only alternative for oil in the next 20-30 years is nuclear.

@Permarenter,

there is a very good energy talk at Caltech by Koonin, you can go online to download the slides. It is all about scientific facts. However, the data he quoted in terms of USD is 2004 USD, so we need to adjust that accordingly. Essentially, what we are burning, or will be burning for the next billion barrels of oil (or carbon) costs $50 (2004 USD). That means $100 oil (2008 USD) is here to stay.

He also concedes that the only immediate alternative available is nuclear. Biofuels (not Foodfuel) are still some time away.

Nuclear powered cars are almost here! Well once removed anyway....the nuke plant generates electric for your plugin electric car.

So there you have the 1950 dream - nuclear powered cars.

BofA might be getting a pretty good deal in trying to salvage what would have otherwise been a miserable sunk cost. I don't have firm numbers but when CFC's stock was a little higher I read with some interest an analysis saying that basically the total share value was less than the book value of the company.

Keep in mind with solar that earnings figures represent a basically untapped market. That's not a bubble, that's investors expecting better market penetration in the future.

Nuclear power is a declining market. In fact SDG&E bills even contain a nuclear decommissioning charge. You have to differentiate between mature or declining markets and young markets. The VC model doesn't take into account current earnings, it takes into account the future potential of a market.

I now don't own any gold, I'm completely out.

mmmm, bookvalue of CFC - that would be their outstanding mortgages to people right and the expected revenue they will get from said solid mortgages to people that are definitely able to pay the mortgages back?

Okay so Hubby getting a bit fed up with the housing in this area being so expensive and he is buying into the "house prices won't go down in this area - Mountain View/Los Altos" - can anyone give me some good rebuttals - I am quietly hoping they will go down, but it taking such a long time!

it = it's - sorry

The best rebuttal, "I'm not putting my signature on that."

Roughly speaking, yes the book value of the company is the assets minus liabilities. Income streams also get factored in different valuation methods. A company like that factors an allowance for bad debts into its books as a liability. I don't have an opinion as to what their book value really is, I just thought the analysis was interesting but since the company was rumored to be on the verge of bankruptcy I'm skeptical. Then again it might have been BofA that leaked the rumor. Believe it or not it happens.

Malcom,

check back with you on nuclear vs. solar in 3 years, and on gold as well. Time will tell.

Hope this site will still be around by then.

Claire :

Use Trulia to show him th e foreclosures and NODs happening in whatever area he is interested in. It will take a long time.

OO :

Coming back to our discussion on the short side. This is the reason I don't like to short stocks. It's so easy to manipulate. The market makers have far more insight into how much is the short interest at what stops and they can start a squeeze. Or some plain low tech device like a rumor can do the job as well.

When you are short on the indexes (or indices) you only have to worry about surprise moves by Fed. Even then the downside for shorts is nowhere near what happened for CFC.

:)

The site will still be around.

RangyH said:
Things will get much worse before they get better, I’m afraid.

welcome back, and could you clarify what "things" you refer to? i.e. from what perspective will things get worse? Recession? Unemployment? Inflation? Bank-failures?

this site generates A TON of replies now.

PATRICK: I recommend you consider the news links on main page each have its own comments link/thread for that story. Just what Drudge.com and others do. There IS enough traffic now to support this. take the site to next level.

those links are really good stories and even though i see them elsewhere sometimes rarely does a site allow comments on them ( try commenting on cnn.com)

who else thinks this would be great? thus the 'cfc bankruptcy rumor' comments would be contained to its own thread automatically since patrick is sure to not miss that story. and this thread can remain of course its own glory.

Hey Randy H.,

I never really understood the answer you gave before your hiatus so I've got to ask one more time.

SHOULD I BE WORRIED ABOUT INFLATION (NOW)?

(just kiddin')

Happy New Year.....

OO says: Nuclear is undervalued while Solar is way overvalued. The only alternative for oil in the next 20-30 years is nuclear.

Are you kidding? Have you actually looked at uranium prices over the last 4-6 years? The price has skyrocketed! Much like gold, traders are pricing in the anticipated value you just mentioned. Thus a spectacular expected upside is built into the price, but any disruption could result in a serious downside. I am personally treading with caution.

In contrast, photovoltaics are getting more efficient all the time. There's a firm in Silly Con Valley manufacturing them using semiconductor processes. And while that's expensive now, I anticipate a Moore's Law style march towards improved efficiency/geometry and greater economies of scale (acknowledging that from a physics standpoint, the efficiency is probably approaching an asymptote and thus decreasing ROI). And we're probably going to have a lot of 8-inch and lower fab capacity in the U.S. within a few years... why not compete with depreciated assets (yeah, yeah, I know that the manufacturing technology isn't 100% the same, but most of the infrastructure is reusable).

NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE.

By all means, we should have more nuclear power.

The National Academy of Science has declared that there is no safe level of radiation.

The carbon-generating process of mining uranium is very intensive.

Nuclear power is so uneconomic that without huge government subsidies and insurance exemptions, it never would have survived in the "free market."

Throw this idea in the trashcan where it belongs.

Brand-

PVs have generally been crystalline silicon based, and hence utilized traditional semiconductor fab technology. The recent-ish boom about using waste chip material for cheap PVs (nice concept, but as I understand a monumentally bad idea) was eclipsed by NREL work on CIGS and CdTe thin films. Wiki away...

OO has it right, solar money has gone silly. Question is; are we talking 2000 tech silly or '98? Looking out over acres of useless flat land interspersed with grid-borne wind generators has my attention.

-Brent

To Claire:

There's some interesting data here: http://rereport.com/scc/mountain_view.html

But it will require some interpretation.

There's far more thorium in the earth than uranium, and it's harder to make weapons grade byproduct materials from thorium. Avoiding exposure and disposing of nuclear waste is always going to be a problem, given its 10,000 year half-life or whatever...

Randy H Says:
Some “genius” on CNBC earlier this morning — one which was supposedly so wise that everyone was fawning over him — stated “Absolutely nobody anywhere saw this credit crisis coming or had any clue it would be this bad”.

Make sure you have a nice backup of all these archives stored somewhere safe. If for no other reason than perhaps you can submit them to some economic historian in 25 years for research.

They just want to let idiots off the hook with a nice folksy message, and lots of ego esteem massaging. An 'expert' told all these underwater debtors they're not to blame for believing in fairies, so it's OK. There, there, we'll put the picket fence back up, and you're not an idiot, the big bad credit market did this to you. The nice bankers didn't even see it coming, how could you be expected to.

Steve Keen told me he started his site so it would be there for the record once this was all over also -- www.debtflation.com (with an uncanny resemblance to patrick.net :) )

er, never mind, this will have to do:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blog

if not http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs - i'm a bit over WP :(

How economical is solar at scale without subsidization? No cheating, you don't get to treat maintenance cycles as external. I spent long enough launching a "greentech" to have had the pleasure of becoming familiar with the underbelly of the solar industry. It's nowhere in the same realm of efficiency offered by the current generation of nuclear reactors; the greater the scale the greater the efficiency. The yield curve of advancements in solar has been underwhelming--especially when compared to the yield curve of competing clean techs like wind or nuclear.

The carbon footprint of energy production does not include extraction or fabrication. Not in CDM, not in JD, and not in most voluntary schemes. If it did then solar wouldn't fare well either, given the processes involved in fabricating silicon.

*No* level of radiation is safe? Does that mean that cosmic rays and background radiation present everywhere on Earth and in the Universe is a dire problem? I assume you avoid the sun, walking on concrete sidewalks, and entering brick buildings then.

In fact, if *no level of radiation is safe*, then solar power must be of the devil. Those lil' electrons don't get excited just because they want to be green, after all.

That's right, no level of radiation is safe, not dental x-rays, nor any other kind. Certainly not CT scans, which are tens of times more intense.

So we want to set up radiating power plants that generate waste that no one has ever figured out what to do with?

Except the Defense Dept., which came up with a brilliant plan to sell it to manufacturers who proposed to make silverware out of it!!

This is a major reason why Iraq is destroyed forever; our use of depleted uranium in munitions. As well as Iraqis, our service people, etc.

Throw this idiotic conventional wisdom out with the other trash.

Peter P,

Please step forward and accept your CBA (Certified Bubble Analyst) (TM) Award!

Moments ago Steve Leesman on CNBC cited a Dallas FRB Study that showed it was the lack of price appreciation in homes (not the reset) they attribute accelerating defaults to!

What would you like us to engrave on it?

Near as I can figure (CFC's 2007 Annual Report not out just yet) their "book value" is $ 26.36. (Marketwatch) So I guess that must mean BAC is getting a steal!

I'll agree w/ Thomas P (Paine?) this is anything but a done deal.

monkframe,

I had thought that depleted uranium was only typically used in the Phalynx type system (6K rounds per minute) to "flatten out" in trajectory and assure destruction of incoming missles etc. A 50 Cal. HB (Heavy Barrel) machine gun is armed w/ conventional rounds, no?

Either way it isn't good, but I didn't think there were that many A-10 "Tank-Busters" in country and thus far the Navy hasn't fired a round?

gmail is not working for me -- I get blank white screen ....