tanzam75

44 ms·

331.
by tanzam75 13y ago
> The US government ended up spending a decade and over eighty million dollars just to research and rediscover the manufacturing process for this one particular component. Well, we didn't exactly "rediscover" the process
332.
by tanzam75 13y ago
The environment in the US is so jingoistic that it is political suicide to vote against certain national-security measures, even ones that you disagree with. This is particularly true for Democrats -- they must vote hawkishly if they want
333.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Credit cards have been around in their present form since the 1960s. And magstripe credit cards have been around since the 1970s. So patents on the basic technology have long since expired. (Of course, there are all sorts of ancillaries
334.
by tanzam75 13y ago
> Yeah, AMEX used to allow one-time use numbers with its Platinum Corporate Card (maybe other cards as well). But, they stopped years ago. Don't know if it was hard to manage or if I was just the only one using it, but I loved it.
335.
by tanzam75 13y ago
> I don't know why the author keep talking about world economy while the only examples he presents are U.S. only: mortgage crisis, debt fuelled spending, etc. In Europe there wasn't nothing like that and yet Europeans have bee
336.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Australia was not kept afloat by Asian immigration, but by digging up their land and selling pieces of it to China. 30% of Australian exports are to China. More than half of that is coal. As for immigration, it is much easier to immigrate
337.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Some deregulated markets are already paying for the turbines as infrastructure. For example, the PJM interconnection holds an annual capacity auction. This essentially pays for the capital costs of keeping gas turbines around, at idle. Th
338.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Thanks for the correction. So I'm curious -- do NYSE and NASDAQ have an agreement not to assign the same ticker?
339.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Pandora and Zillow just wanted the ego boost from having a single-letter ticker symbol.
340.
by tanzam75 13y ago
But you really can't afford to self-insure, even if you're young and healthy. There's always the small but real chance of getting a catastrophic illness and running up a million dollar bill. Therefore, you really need to buy
341.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Insurance companies usually lose money on underwriting. However, GEICO is not a good example, because it is the exception to the rule. GEICO usually makes an underwriting profit -- often a very large underwriting profit. In fact, all of Be
342.
by tanzam75 13y ago
> Rough number: (sell 6.8M handsets per quarter) / (expected $1B loss this quarter) = they're losing $147 on every handset. That's not how it works. $934 million of that $965 million loss comes from a non-cash charge for
343.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Not misleading at all. "Market share" means exactly that -- the share of the market for smartphones. Installed base is a different concept from market share. Statcounter is a proxy for installed base rather than market share. It
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by tanzam75 13y ago
> It's amazing that BlackBerry can sell almost 6 million phones a quarter and be considered a failure. But they can't. Blackberry sold 6.8 million phones in Q1 of fiscal 2013. But only 3.7 million phones in Q2. This is not
345.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Those are nearly full-sensor images. If you download the supplemental materials, the large images are all 3492 x 2205. That's 7.7 megapixels -- and the Canon 40D is listed as a 10.1 megapixel-camera. They shot the photos with a hand-
346.
by tanzam75 13y ago
In fact, the Microsoft IPO was so long ago that it didn't even start out at a billion. The IPO valuation was $519 million. But what really established the options mentality is that Microsoft grew another 1000-fold to the peak of the d
347.
by tanzam75 13y ago
> As a sidenote, I find this obnoxious: > "I hate Quora, so I'll just steal their content and post it here." It's not Quora's content. Quora's TOS explicitly states that users retain ownership over their
348.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Many doctors have given placebos to patients. Actual placebo pills, with no active ingredient. The problem with prescribing antibiotics for a viral infection is not that it is useless -- it is no less effective than a placebo. The problem
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by tanzam75 13y ago
> What we haven't learned of, at least yet, is rampant industrial espionage by NSA to steal R&D and a pipeline for dealing with the stolen results. China, at least according to US allegations, has precisely that. China would s
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by tanzam75 13y ago
The W39 is a revision of the Mark 15. According to Wikipedia, the Mark 15 had a real thermonuclear second stage that generated significant yield. However, its second stage was also packed with enriched uranium, and it obtained most of its
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by tanzam75 13y ago
The marketplace rewards all sorts of things that are not related to the brilliance of the idea. Access to capital, management expertise, skill of execution, plain dumb luck, etc. Therefore, the marketplace encourages companies to take a fa
352.
by tanzam75 13y ago
> Maybe they can use a box full of old pinball parts. That would be Pu-239, not Pu-238. Remember, the Libyans wanted him to build a bomb -- not a spaceship.
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by tanzam75 13y ago
> Buy it from ... whom? As the article points out, Russia "reneged on a deal to sell 22 pounds to the U.S." and might not have any left for sale. Now, that's interesting. The Chinese are planning to land an RTG-powered s
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by tanzam75 13y ago
Contamination with plutonium-240 was a big problem during the Manhattan Project. They'd done the preliminary calculations based on cyclotron-produced plutonium-239, which was pure enough that a gun design with a long tube was feasible
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by tanzam75 13y ago
Yes, LEDs will last longer without heat issues. But unless you're running the LED in a refrigerator, that's not a particularly informative statement. As stated in the DOE that I linked to: "The primary cause of LED lumen dep
356.
by tanzam75 13y ago
What year are the numbers from? I have a hard time believing that New Zealand pays 3x as much for its LEDs as the United States does. 800-lumen LEDs are already down to $15-20 unsubsidized in the United States. Some utilities also provi
357.
by tanzam75 13y ago
No. In fact, the LED lifetime stated on the packaging is actually the time it takes to decrease in brightness to a specified reference level -- usually 70% of initial brightness. Since it is solid-state, though, the LED is expected to cont
358.
by tanzam75 13y ago
Microsoft has been buying back shares and increasing its dividend since 2004. This is just a continuation of the existing program. It would have been more noteworthy if Microsoft had stopped buying back shares, or stopped paying the di
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by tanzam75 13y ago
Do note that Microsoft has an ongoing $40 billion share repurchase program that's ending in two weeks. So they're just renewing the buybacks with another $40 billion. It would actually have been a bigger deal if Microsoft had all
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by tanzam75 13y ago
No -- but the banks are overcompensated for their work on M&A. You could hire a strategic consulting firm -- McKinsey, Bain, BCG -- to do M&A due diligence for half of what the investments banks charge. They hire from the same poo

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