Financial topics

[Higgenbotham]

This article was referenced last year regarding the tax loophole looting effect.

"At times, the politically active bankers succeeded in freeing themselves from duties and taxes. In Florence the totality of the burden was shifted to the surrounding countryside, whose landowners and peasants finally had to sell everything to the bankers."

http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2008/ ... risis.html

[aedens]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728
If they wanted this finished they would.

[Higgenbotham]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5728
If they wanted this finished they would.

"We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network,...This core can be seen as an economic "super-entity" that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers."

http://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Super-Co ... 0521461561

"This analysis of the Peruzzi Company produces a radical reassessment of what made the Florentine super-companies so exceptional: commodity trading, especially in grain, which required heavy capital, sophisticated organization, and an international network."

[aedens]

The fourth crusaders helped them dethone Alexius III a usurper in Constantinople in 1202 -1204 for payment of transport to Egypt. Zara from Hungary was conquered first for them also for the trade networks. Baldwin of Flanders was made Emperor.

[Reality Check]

Merry Christmas.

[aedens]

Merry Christamas all and the HFT hopefully an endless nap.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazin ... ntPage=all

http://www.scribd.com/doc/104546616/Min ... ppen-Again

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=Security+Analy ... min+Graham

[OLD1953]

Merry Christmas

Baseline power vs carbon, interesting points, especially note 4.
http://colinmcinnes.blogspot.com/2012/1 ... state.html

This has enormous potential. Even just allowing for updates on business card phone numbers would be a huge thing. Peel and stick flexible circuits are going to be cheaper than the solid silicon substrate too, note that the silicon wafer is usually undamaged and can be reused, thus enabling a large process savings. There will likely be production devices using this tech within two years or less, IMHO, the potential profit increase is just too big to pass up.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1440 ... olar-cells

[aedens]

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2012 ... /212250356

LDLHA-IBCSYWA

[Reality Check]

Merry Christmas

This has enormous potential. Even just allowing for updates on business card phone numbers would be a huge thing. Peel and stick flexible circuits are going to be cheaper than the solid silicon substrate too, note that the silicon wafer is usually undamaged and can be reused, thus enabling a large process savings. There will likely be production devices using this tech within two years or less, IMHO, the potential profit increase is just too big to pass up.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1440 ... olar-cells

Wow, this is like saying the challenge to making wind power cost effective is cheaper bearings in the wind mills.

The headline on this marketing press release calls this process high efficiency, then goes on to define "high efficiency" to mean not any worse than one of the competing low efficiency soloar technologies.

Seven and one half percent efficient, as this press release is "claiming" the "new" technology is, remains just one of the gargantuan challenges to cost effective, durable - ( as in it just keeps on working for decades, not just a few years before it has massively reduced capacity and massive maintenance costs ) that solar energies true believers are unable to wish away.

The suggestion that the cost of the "solid silicon substrate" is the reason that solar power is prohibitively expensive is like claiming expensive bearings, and not lack of sustained winds 24x7, is the reason wind power is prohibitively expenive.

[Reality Check]

It is true that industrial scale electricity production using focused, and reflected, solar energy to melt and store liquid salts and indirectly produce steam on demand for electricity production in steam turbines is a many, many levels of magnitude more cost effective means to generate electricity from solar energy than any of the other technologies for electricity production via solar energy.

But what this proves is that until industrial scale production of electricity using liquid salts heated by solar energy becomes cost effective, all other known solar technologies for generating electricity are never going to be competitive.


Currently liquid salt storage and steam production is not even close to being cost competitive with any other commercial form of industrial scale electricity production.

To my knowledge, the United States government abandoned the only small scale demonstration project of the most effective solar energy technology many years ago, and the ongoing European Union attempts to subsidize this industrial scale solar energy technology, in the form of the guaranteed purchase of electricity at rates many, many times the commercial rates of electricity in Europe, have failed to complete a functioning industrial scale electricity plant that could afford to sell electricity even at many, many times the current cost of electricity.

This remains true even if the Billions of dollars borrowed to build these plants is written off and never paid back. They can not even be operated at a profit, even if the price they are paid for the electricity being produced is heavily subsidized by the European Union governments.