Eng12345

Yeah I don't know about the whole crypto thing - I don't know much about crypto or ecoins, but I'm sure there's money to be made there in terms of using the stranded energy. It doesnt seem all that different than what TLNE is doing selling power from Susquehanna Nuclear Station to AMZN for an onsite data center. What's interesting though is in some places we have TOO much generation - you can see this via the LMPs (locational marginal pricing) going negative. Just today I looked at the CAISO LMP map and almost all of them were negative thereby indicating if you were an operator and you added generation to the grid you would be required to pay money for adding generation!

I mean where do I start? The thing that gets missed in all of this green energy debate is that energy is local. One area such as the southwest may be great for solar while in the northeast that is not so true. Why we continue as a nation to pay major subsidies for green energy generation sources in areas that don't make sense is beyond me. Why are we putting solar panels on roofs in the upper northeast? For that matter - every rooftop in Florida should be covered in solar, but it's not because of BAD policy. At this point I'm part convinced its a big capital destruction scheme propagated by propaganda - but ill reign it in. The truth is from an energy stand point - we can do whatever we want technologically the only question is cost and politics. We could cover the sahara in solar panels and feed europe solar power but the cost of doing so and the political risk involved is why you never hear about it. I'm of the mind that electricity generation should be a utility - you shouldnt have to be rich to have reliable 24/7 electricity. Understand when you see something from MISO as the above quote does these are guys who don't have any financial benefit in what generation source is on. They are paid to keep the lights on across the grid, period. The grid is broken up into a few various segments/markets and the simplest way to think about it is PJM is the northeast, MISO the midwest, the infamous ERCOT is Texas, and CAISO is the western us etc. These are the RTO/ISOs which are charged with keeping the lights on. Heres a good resource if you care to learn more about the management structure: Electric Power Markets | Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (ferc.gov) Each one of these RTOs have their own independent regulations that member utilities have to follow and are heavily dominated by various local politics. Understand the electric grid has to run at 60 Hz all of the time. There is more electrical engineering gobledey goop crap to it than that such as reactive power and power factor. But I'm a mechanical, generation side guy so I will keep it simple to avoid the risk of being wrong. In the absence of significant energy storage solutions what that fundamentally means is that load must match generation exactly. So, when you go home at night and flick on your lights or the factory down the road kicks on a big pump, somewhere somehow there must some incremental generation. In the case of you flicking on your lights it probably won't be noticeable, but if the whole city does it at the same time or there is a large change in load because the plant manager down the road came in drunk and started everything up and ran it balls out then it can become noticeable. So what happens if you have too much generation? The frequency starts to rise above 60 Hz - but ultimately the controls will start kicking generators offline causing them to have to go through restarts etc. The opposite is true with low frequency - so you will have to start adding more generation to the grid, but understand even spinning reserves take a couple minutes to ramp up. If a gas turbine is offline, it may take 5-10 minutes (for a modern one) to spin up to full load and really support the frequency. This can be seen to the extreme today in california: Understand the scales that graph is showing are nothing to sneeze at! That is dropping 10 gigawatts of solar generation in the course of an hour! 15 gigs in 4 hours. Understand a singular large scale nuclear reactor-steam generator is usually about 1 gigawatt. So now all of that lost solar generation has to be made up for with dispatchable power. If there's not enough available, then the grid operators will have to simply shut areas down to shed load (rolling blackouts) in order to maintain frequency to prevent a total collapse of the grid. Understand this happens every time a cloud passes over a solar field, or the wind stops blowing. The hidden cost of this whole wind/solar crap is what the utilities are now having to do to maintain frequency! They are having to build synchronous condensers and statcoms like crazy to account for the electrical crap that essentially comes down to maintaining grid frequency! You never see those figures in the cost per megawatt hour. As I type this out I realize nuclear is also probably not the silver bullet that people want it to be. Modulating steam valves to ramp like that is tricky and does severe damage to the valves. Steam is harsh shit and at the speeds it moves will eat away a lot. Im not sure how much NERC would allow that - for good reason. Which is why you always hear nuclear referred to as baseload power, but now certain areas of the country are in a position where they don't need baseload - they need dispatchable power, and I personally don't think that fits. It seems to me certain areas are severely overbuilt in terms of intermittent generation and other areas are severely underbuilt - all due to local politics.

I mean to be fair - saluki already started this topic a few weeks ago here From my long only position it seems like a lot of the opportunity has been closed in terms of value. If we want to just talk about the grid then that's a whole different game, one which I could write for days on.

Can you imagine being the lawyer that had to write this: Attorneys for GEICO disagree. "The Auto Policy does not cover liability for injury caused by the transmission of a sexually-transmitted disease merely on the basis that a covered vehicle was used as a shelter for, or as the situs of, sexual activity," GEICO wrote in its brief. Or being the court reporter for this: "It's foreseeable that people are going to have sex in the car, I mean, that's clearly foreseeable, right?" one of the judges asked. Kinda funny until you realize its ultimately just going to end up with much more restrictive language on automotive policies.

It's truly not dramatic. The sad thing is that it is all entirely self-manifested too. I guess when people start dying from rolling blackouts, we will wake up to the true costs of all this green business. In the meantime, I'll be cashing the overtime checks and dumping them into some of the ideas here.

I got this idea to track where I've been off reddit and thought it would be fun. Did the best I could based off memory. www.mapchart.net Has anyone else done this? Definitely made me realize I havent been to nearly the number of places in the US as I thought I had. I focused only on domestic trips in adulthood but theres lots of options

Got an open fill of JOE at low $53 Happy enough with that for the day.

Just watched this short 60 minutes clip that sparked my interest... thought it addressed some interesting questions I've had based on my own career thus far. Think there is a lot of merit to employee ownership. Starting out of college I worked at Kiewit which was employee owned by those with 5+ years. I never made it to ownership but heard a lot of the virtues of the program - and frankly it showed in how much the middle level management cared about making good, long-term decisions and putting in the requisite effort and hours. On the other side of the coin, I went to the exact opposite culture at a big 3 auto manufacturer and saw just how bad the employee culture can get when employee don't feel invested. Even many mid-level managers etc did not give a hoot about making good decisions or putting in the requisite hours. I'm beginning to realize that I capital structure matters for performance... the question is how much. I think Stavros had an excellent point that in some of these crappy firms employees feel the social contract is broken. I couldn't have stated my experience at big 3 more succinctly.

Theres a podcast on TLNE if you are interested... I have taken a small position, but I should have purchased two months ago when dinar pointed it out. I'm not interested in their tender offer.

I've been meaning to respond to this. I think you are a bit behind the 8 ball on this one - a lot of the run up has already occurred and potential been realized by the market. One of my best ideas and biggest mistakes of the past few years has been ETN. I got in at $128 in '22 on essentially the same premise you have here. I later sold for nearly breakeven as I typically don't like pure macro plays.

TLNE and FFXDF sold some more TPC even though she took a hit today

Sold more TPC - all I have left is taxable. Bought a small amount of CVS Looking to buy MSCI and CASH as trackers but have just been hovering around the buy button

Wow those are great course comments - I see youre even getting some upper classmen taking the course! That's great.

I think we say the same thing Castanza. To my friends and family I appear rich - my house is nice and we go on vacation 1-2 a year. What they don't see is that I will work 2800 hours in a year on average and she does overtime as well. My truck is 11 years old and only has 100k on it. I think its too rich for my blood to be honest. I miss the old ford ranger of college days. Decisions have consequences and half the population is below average intelligence, so its not surprising that half of Americans (taking the survery results lightly) have made a series of decisions to live paycheck to paycheck

Yes - I am an engineer and my wife is a pharmacist both from the same town of ~35k in middle America. I work a lot of overtime and so does she, and we are very much ahead of the curve of our friends but by no means wealthy. We can sock away an extra 2-5k a month depending on overtime and thats after my massive mortgage payment. However, by all friends and family accounts they think of us as "rich". I think not - we just work incredibly hard and have worked hard for the past 10 years. One or two bad events or decisions could wipe us all out. My dad was a truck driver - he lives on social security now. My mom has a minimal state pension and social security to look forward to in retirement. Her retirement job is the most money she has ever made - $18/hr. I made that in 2016 working as an intern. The hard truth is when you get down to it most of America doesn't have two nickels or two brain cells to rub together. We are incredibly blessed not only financially to be able to have these discussions on this forum but also from an intellect perspective. One of the greatest things my mom did for me growing up was fostering a love for reading and learning - taking me to the library every weekend and making me entertain myself there. Looking back I know why she did that - she couldn't afford to do much else. Most peoples homes are their biggest assets not their retirement funding. They have no hope. I hope to never lose my hope.

Apparently, the forum does not like the spotify embed... https://open.spotify.com/episode/0C6AdCLd8vSNvF3ppmEhv2?si=d1648543d714467a

Worth a listen if you got an extra hour but definitely not the best episode ever. What was notable was that as I listened the whole housing shortage thing that greg and others have been screaming from the rooftops finally hit me in the face... After listening I think I'm going to look for some multifamily REITs to look into - I've always stayed away from REITs so I'd be open to some suggestions.

Thank you. I'm still holding a lot of Aecon and small amount of TPC. It seems Aecon is the better company of the two.

Sold some TPC and bought something me NTDOY

Interesting what's the thesis here?

I have recently been writing some admissions letters for grad school. I have used chat gpt heavily during this process but was thoroughly underwhelmed. What I found is that it requires a lot of prompting and even then it doesn't always make sense or phrase things clearly. It lacked in grammar and phrasing as well as substance (the only substance it has is what limited substance you may give it). The chat gpt paragraphs were useful to flesh out an idea. However, beyond that it was utterly useless and required heavy revision to be of the appropriate standard. I am left wondering, if people think this is so great then what quality of work were they already putting out?

The essay read well. I really connected with it. Did you preorder and are you planning on reading immediately?

Thanks this is why when I start a spreadsheet I try to finish it. Also why I'm not an accountant - I thought things balanced p well with my expectations, ha.

This was a good exercise in forcing myself to build out my spreadsheet...realizing I'm not nearly as concentrated as I like to think I am. The last 4 lines are general index funds or dry powder waiting.

Yeah and because it's not a truck stop it's super clean.