nafregnum

I had to check Google to see, and found this link that says if the big battery really fails then the whole car is dead in the water: https://carbrain.com/blog/what-can-i-do-if-my-hybrid-battery-dies

https://www.reddit.com/r/rav4prime/comments/so3t6h/in_case_anyone_was_curious_as_to_how_much_the/ I remember looking it up and thinking about it some - it looks like the battery costs $10k at present, but it does come with a 10 yr 150k mile warranty for the battery specifically ... https://www.toyota.com/electrified/warranty/ I think I'd most likely swap to a newer PHEV model before 10 years are up.

I was curious yesterday, so I ran some basic calculations on how much wind or solar capacity it would take if all of the miles driven in California were EV miles instead of gasoline miles. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation In 2021: 340 billion miles driven 13.8 billion gallons of gasoline sold. (implying 24.6 mpg average fuel efficiency) If at the current $5.25/gallon that'd be $72 billion in gasoline sales. 260 Terawatt hours of electric power consumed in the year (33 Terawatt hours came from in-state solar) (15 Twh from in-state wind) Electricity costs $0.26 per Kwh in California (expensive compared to my state!) RAV4 Prime car has 18.1 Kwh battery times 0.26 = $4.706 is cost to charge about 40 miles of range If all the cars there were RAV4 Primes, and could get 40 miles on a charge of 18.1 kwh then in order to drive 340 billion miles it would take 8.5 billion charges, times 4.706 which would cost 40 billion dollars (less than 72.45 billion spent on gas) ... 8.5 billion charges times 18.1 kwh per charge would require 8,500,000,000 * 18.1 * 1,000 or 153,850,000,000,000wh which is 153 Twh I used the RAV4 Prime as the hypothetical every-car, it gets 2.8 miles per Kwh of battery charge (0.36 Kwh per mile) -- not super efficient - the best are doing 0.25 Kwh per mile or 4 miles per Kilowatt hour, so these numbers are probably a little on the high side. So it would take 153 Terawatt hours of power to charge EV cars to drive 340 billion miles in a year. California currently uses 260 Twh in a year (of course, some of that is for battery charging of whatever EVs and PHEVs are already in state) SOLAR In California in 2021, the installed 15.2 Gw of solar capacity made 33.26 Twh in the year. So, you can take the Gigawatt capacity of the solar farms and just about double it and change Giga to Terawatt hours (2,188x) This means that if we want to make 153 Twh we divide 153 by 2.188 and get 69.9 Gw of needed capacity. Call it 70. [ land space requirements ] 70 gigawatts is 70,000 megawatts of capacity. Each megawatt of installed solar takes about 2.5 acres. 175,000 acres is just 273 square miles. The Mojave desert has 47,877 mi² in it, and about half of it is in California, so 273 might fit in there somewhere without too many objections. Using an estimated cost of 890k per megawatt of solar capacity buildout... The state would need to pay 70 * 0.89 billion dollars = $62.3b to build 70 Gw of solar capacity. WIND https://weatherguardwind.com/how-much-does-wind-turbine-cost-worth-it/ Looks like it costs 1.3 million per megawatt of capacity, so to make a gigawatt of capacity it'd cost 1.3 billion in investment... California has 5.7 Gw of built-out wind capacity, which generated 15.1 Twh in 2021. At that ratio, the state would need to build 58.5 gigawatts of wind capacity to generate 153 terawatt hours in a year. Building that much would cost around $76 billion (58.5 * 1.3) https://www.aeraenergy.com/8-facts-you-might-not-know-about-oil-and-gas-in-californias-economy/ California produces about 400k barrels of oil per day, and uses 1.8m barrels. So if you said that the locally produced 400k per day would still be needed for jets and other uses, you might be able to free up 1.4m barrels of demand on the ~99m barrels of global oil demand. Soapbox moment: What my estimation game made me think about is this... (1) Unfortunately for the global emissions problem, the barrels of oil that are not demanded by California would likely flow to many other places where emissions standards and fuel efficiency standards are crap, meaning that those 1.4m barrels/day would cause even more emissions. (2) Since we don't have unlimited yearly production of lithium for batteries, the transition to EV cars is a little like the trolley problem where 1 full EV car is on the tracks and 3 or 4 plug-in hybrid cars are on the other path. If we want to maximize EV miles driven and minimize gasoline miles driven, we'd have to sacrifice the full EVs for now so that WAY MORE plug-in hybrids can be produced. But so many of us are so individualistic, we put cheesy virtue signaling vanity plates like "NOPLANETB" or "LOL OIL" on our full EVs and think "I'm saving the planet!" while doing slightly less than we imagine. https://www.notateslaapp.com/tesla-reference/774/tesla-vanity-license-plates-clever-ideas-for-a-custom-plate (3) Building enough solar and/or wind capacity to power all cars in California is a lot cheaper than I guessed it would be. It's about the same as all the gasoline sold in a year. (4) California is likely to be unusually blessed with Solar and Wind capacity compared to other regions (coastal is good for wind, plus a lot of desert for solar) so what works there likely wouldn't work as well for other states.

I didn't get it new, and I didn't get the $7,500 rebate - it's a 2021 that was manufactured in November and delivered to a dealership in Alabama, purchased by a guy in Dallas who already had one RAV4 Prime -- he had gotten himself on three or four different waiting lists with refundable $500 deposits at whatever nearby dealerships he could find which weren't charging above MSRP. When I was trying at first, I called all kinds of dealerships in California, Oregon, Washington and Colorado and all of them either (1) charged a dealer markup of 5-10k over MSRP with short-ish waiting lists, or (2) charged normal MSRP and had huge 12+ month waiting lists or (3) some dealerships said they only sell their Primes to locals (one in Oregon said within 25 miles of their address) ... I was too proud to put myself on any of the (1) lists and all of the (2) lists were so long they weren't accepting. One dealership in San Diego told me they had one on the lot that their waiting list people had passed up, but then revealed that they charge a 10k dealer markup on top of MSRP. Reddit has a r/rav4prime subreddit and I was reading posts for tips and tricks and just saw a guy there who posted that he had an XSE fully loaded that he'd be willing to sell for what he owed on it. I messaged him and he still had it -- he could've sold it for $5k over if he had put it in local classified ads, in fact a guy he met at the grocery parking lot offered to buy it off him a few days before the day of the sale. He sent some pictures of it and of the dealer paperwork to show how much they had charged him for it, right around $55k (this included his taxes and a few non-negotiable dealer add-ons that the dealership said they always put on, which amounted to like $2k more -- so technically I did pay over MSRP for it -- it had 3,800 miles on it ... I did a bunch of online reading to make sure I knew exactly how the process would work for buying a car from a guy out of state... then got a cheap Southwest flight out to Dallas and we met up. The guy had LOTS of solar capacity on his back roof and in his back yard. He said you can get 2 of the $7,500 tax credits per year -- this year he's still on waiting lists at a couple of Texas dealerships but he told me that Toyota had only delivered like 2 RAV4 Primes to all of Texas for the month of May, and they were shifting deliveries to places like Europe where they could still take advantage of tax incentives. That's scuttlebutt I don't know how to confirm for sure. He's on waiting lists to get the new Subaru Solterra, which will have the $7,500 tax credit now that Toyota's tax credits are phasing out due to having hit their 200k vehicles limit (I think it happened this summer, but haven't verified since reading about that in June) ... the Solterra will have plenty of tax credit available -- he mentioned Subaru is 20% owned by Toyota. I really only wanted to get a PHEV since I'd like to not worry about charging during potential road trips. All of the Primes are being manufactured in Japan, and allocations just trickle in slow -- I wish you could just put an order in for exactly what you want and then just make a down payment and wait for it, like you can do with some other car brands. The best advice I found was on that r/rav4prime subreddit ... there might be an updated advice post -- there was someone maintaining a spreadsheet of allocations -- the link to it is in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/rav4prime/comments/rwhvzg/2022_rav4_prime_allocation_spreadsheet/ I gave up the idea that I'd be able to get the $7,500 tax credit in time, but I might have just been too impatient - there might still be a half credit of $3,750 or so for another 6 months, so getting on a few different waiting lists might still work. Good luck!

I bought a RAV4 Prime back in May and love it! Love the electric acceleration -- I'm calling it my mid-life crisis car. I didn't want a Tesla because in my state there are only 3 places you can get them repaired. We pull out the RAV4 for all our errands, and still haven't gone through a full tank of gas yet (4 months on 1 tank!) Totally agree with @CorpRaider that it'd be more rational to make 3x to 5x more PHEVs than Teslas since it would result in a more effective reduction of emissions without spiking lithium demand so much.

https://www.mystateline.com/news/national/california-asks-residents-not-to-charge-electric-vehicles-days-after-announcing-gas-car-ban/ Makes me wonder if any agencies have done the necessary modeling to figure out how much more green energy a state like California would need if all its cars were electric today. Instead of mandating "All cars EV by 2035" I wish they'd say "All cars Hybrid by 202X" and "All cars plug-in Hybrid with at least 35 miles of EV capacity by 202X+4" ...

Thanks a lot for the extra info! I see what you mean now about how nobody would consider a fall to $100 likely if it already fell to $140 over the course of a number of months. Big sudden swings in price are where the options seem to pay out the best.

It's a compelling thesis -- I ended up buying just 1 put so I can watch it swing around without feeling euphoria/dread and get a handle on it. What I really can't figure out is "If X happens, how will the put options respond" for various values of X. Just trying to understand the expected outcomes and how the option would realistically behave. Example: I bought some OBE Jan'23 12.50 strike calls for 0.60 a few weeks ago, just to watch them. They were up 40% a couple days ago when OBE jumped 10%, and I could've sold them for an 80% overall gain that day. Since then they're back down to $0.95 for an overall gain of around 56% ... seems like something I just need to pick a big up day to sell.

Thanks, so are you saying, "No chance" meaning the price of the put wouldn't swing that much on such a small decline as $169->$140? And by "Especially if it takes two quarters of time" are you saying that the option's value would improve the best if the price decline occurred really fast like a 5% drop in a day kind of thing? I bought myself just 1 put option ($100 strike Mar'23) today just to watch it swing around and try to learn how it behaves over time.

The thesis is interesting. I've never used puts before, does this sound reasonable below? Looking at the March and April '23 puts at the $100 strike which look to be going for about $1 right now. If AAPL disappoints in the next couple quarters and drops from today's $169 down to say $140 by January '23 then it seems like the puts might be going for $4 at that point (about 2-3 months from expiry) ... I honestly don't see it going as low as $100, but am just curious if it would be reasonable to see today's $1 put price be worth $4 if the current price deteriorated from $169 to around $140 with about 3 months remaining before the options expire.

I've kept my eye on MSOS and stuff like Verano and Green Thumb - there's a little breath of life in these the last few days -- I'm curious if anyone knows if something's about to turn around?

Hey, wow, that's some hopeful news! This sentiment from the LA Times editorial quoted in the article: --snip-- There are “better ways to fight climate change,” a Los Angeles Times editorial sniffed. Any hardships imposed by closing the plant should “serve as an impetus for California to accelerate the shift to renewable energy.” --end snip-- That sounds like what my brother said last week after I described why oil prices are high and likely to remain high. "Well, maybe oil should be expensive so we work harder to get away from it." In other words, instead of considering that the green agenda may need to participate with reality in the solution, it's somehow more noble for everyone to suffer through high prices? ... I'm not too sure that kind of "green masochism" will get us far. It's more likely to stoke consumer anger. Maybe Newsom saw that writing on the wall.

Currently my biggest bet is on the energy sector, mostly O&G producers in Canada... It's not really the way I typically invest, which is to buy things I'd be comfortable owning for five to ten years. I find myself watching this thread and reading articles about the oil market on a daily basis. As concentrated as I am right now, and knowing I probably won't be holding these O&G companies for five to ten years, I feel like watching my thesis like a hawk. It's been really helpful to get input from the skeptics as well as the optimists. I'm starting to worry about strange notions -- like trying to guess the incentives of major players like the National Oil Companies. For example, it seems like oil moves up or down just on the hint of fluctuation in supply or demand, so with a high oil price there's an incentive to increase production and capture a little more while it's extra profitable. But there's also the incentive (I imagine) to keep your capacity/production gains a secret in order to keep prices higher for longer. Could Aramco or other NOCs or other players in the market be doing this and keeping mum about it? Are there other strange risks that worry you?

Around July 21-23 The Economist ran some articles and podcast episodes critical of ESG in its current form. (Special Report: A broken idea. ESG Investing) https://www.economist.com/special-report/2022-07-23 (Economist Money Talks podcast, July 20, 2022 - The backlash against ESG) https://overcast.fm/+JXrTTNtN0/0:35 A good quote: "E. and S. and G. independently, all have their merits. Where it goes wrong is when they're put together into one ugly acronym." Personally, I do care about all three letters. The problem is: you can't boil down measurements on all three of these domains and come up with a meaningful single score... I worry that ESG funds might be selling the feeling of moral purity and righteousness without really doing a whole lot -- which is a problem because (a) people who care may be lulled into a false sense of security/virtue, and (b) the vilification of O&G is leading to a kind of chronic undersupply. John Curtis (Republican US representative) has some great thoughts about the bigger picture -- he says U.S. natural gas burns 40% cleaner than Russian natural gas. The USA represents 14% of worldwide emissions. So even if USA got to zero, it wouldn't mean a whole lot on its own. If NG from North America is so much cleaner, and if it's more responsibly sourced (less methane leaks, more oversight, etc) then why wouldn't the USA want to celebrate its NG industry? There's just a lot of confusion in the thinking as we humans muddle our way toward a greener future. At a dinner in Scotland, the president of Scottish Power told him that they're 100% renewable, because they have so much wind that they can power the whole country with wind. Curtis asked him innocently: "What do you do when the wind doesn't blow?" And he said, "Oh, that's easy. We import Russian NG when the wind doesn't blow." Two minutes later he looks at Curtis and says "We are 100% renewable." having not made the connection that they were still very dependent on natural gas. ... One more example of confused thinking: https://www.inputmag.com/tech/gmc-hummer-ev-carbon-dioxide-emissions-electric-truck I'm sure there'll be plenty of EV Hummer owners with virtue signaling vanity plates, despite the fact that they're dirtier than ICE sedans (charging that huge battery with power from the U.S. grid causes more emissions than a gas engine sedan emits.)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-02/europe-may-turn-to-manure-in-switch-away-from-russian-fertilizer Sounds like it'd take some years to transition to manure for some reason. If Nitrogen is so expensive to make with high NG prices in Europe and BASF isn't doing it there now, it seems like NG prices in USA will remain low enough for someone to build up a few nitrogen plants in America and export it over to Europe?

I started listening to Peter Zeihan's recently published book "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" after watching these videos where he makes a bunch of bold predictions -- his presentation to the pork industry was packed with information, and very entertaining. A lot of the info was new to me since I don't follow agriculture very closely. (and part 2) Now I'm trying to chase down and verify a lot of this information... For example, just in the first 90 seconds he says Ukraine with 17% of global corn exports has already fallen off the map and is not coming back. Same with Brazil and soy exports (55%) which he says is falling off the market and won't be coming back either. He explains why: Nitrogen fertilizer inputs are too expensive now. China imports 59% of its soy, so their hog farming seems like it'll be pretty wrecked. He's was hired to make this presentation to the US pork producers industry, and his conclusion for them was that a lot of their competitors will be gone within 3 years and it'll be fat years for US pork producers. I'm not sure what I think. If we get a global food crisis, wouldn't humanity switch to eating the corn and soy directly rather than feed it to pork? If nitrogen fertilizer stays expensive, what crop yields suffer most, and where else does this cascade? The price of gasoline is already causing uprisings in parts of the world. Won't it be even worse if the price of bread skyrockets? Is there really a credible risk that Russian oil fields in the permafrost will get stopped and we'll lose 4-6mbd of Russian crude? If it happened, would losing that much supply just wreck the whole world? I'm interested to hear what anyone else thinks about this stuff...

This is definitely a factor, and seems to be an elephant in the room for the political parties. I don't think either party is brave enough to say we NEED immigrants. The Economist has a current article (the July 30 2022 issue) titled "Not coming to America" about recent declines in immigration. An estimated 1.8m working age foreign migrants are missing relative to the post-2010 trend (graph below) A lot of older migrant workers from Mexico have moved back, and the US hasn't been moving quickly enough to get through a huge backlog of H1B visa interviews. ...one quote: "The Pew Research Center calculates that without new arrivals America's labor force would decline to 163m in 2040 from 166m in 2020. If net immigration were to return to pre-pandemic levels, the labor force would instead grow to 178m by 2040." ...the conclusion paragraph: "There is no shortage of sensible ideas. Connecting migrants with employers before they reach America's southern border would reduce pressure on crossings and help businesses. Marianne Wanamaker, who served as an economic advisor in Mr Trump's White House, argues that getting rid of visa caps for specific occupations would also alleviate worker shortages. "We have tools available to us to resolved labor issues that we don't appear willing to use," she says. "That is the result of years and years of making immigration a third rail of American politics." The conclusion is a dismal one: the headaches of the past year from worker shortages, far from being temporary, will be a recurrent problem in an ageing America that has forgotten how immigrants made the country what it is." Add to this the demographics of China itself. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-population-expected-start-shrink-before-2025-2022-07-25/ Sam Harris recently interviewed Ian Bremmer about his new book, "The End of the World is Just the Beginning" ... he says China's one child policy had wrecked their demographics and undoing the policy was among the first changes Xi made when he came into power, but the demographic problem is unavoidable and will be impossible for them to fix without massive immigration (which isn't very common in China as far as I'm aware) https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/288-the-end-of-global-order Here's a bit of the discussion where Ian mentions how the census data is worse than it appears, starting around 2m22s into it.

I think all time highs won't be back so soon either. 1) Interest rates are higher and we won't be back to ZIRP this year. 2) Ukraine war and European energy's spooky disharmonious conflict hell ride coming up this winter. 3) Oil, which won't get cheap unless national recessions kill demand because supply is constrained by green dogmas. Almost a year ago, in the thread "THE TOP is coming" there was the idea from an interview with Jeremy Grantham that referenced 'confidence termites' which would cause the risky stuff to start trending downward while money moved into safer places, until even the safest places would be sliding downward as well. Now I find myself wondering what sectors will bounce back first as confidence starts to build...

Interesting detail I heard this morning about inventory levels and discounting that's upcoming. Animal Spirits podcast today mentioned that some liquidator companies are picking up container deliveries directly instead of having those products flow through their intended retailers first -- that kind of seems like a bullish indicator for stores like TJ Maxx and Ross, but it also seems like there'll be some better than usual deals on appliances and such in another month or two, and Black Friday -- and that may push inflation down a little more as well.

I think learning about Stoicism is a huge benefit to investing mindset. We can't stop strong emotion from happening during an emergency moment, but we CAN recognize when everyone is losing their head and ask ourselves whether panicking is helping the situation. I think Marcus Aurelius was caught in a squall at sea and everyone was freaking out and he was the guy who got calm first and helped everyone else to do what was necessary to keep the boat from sinking. Buffett's Inner Scorecard analogy seems like a pretty stoic concept. The practice of negative visualization (imagining what could go wrong) seems similar to Charlie's "Invert, always invert!" Focusing on those things inside our own control and not worrying about things outside of control -- that sounds so much like the advice to stay in the circle of competence. I wouldn't be too surprised to find Stoic influences in the life of Ben Graham or his mentors. Ok, I just googled "Ben Graham stoicism" and found this nice essay: https://macroops.substack.com/p/a-value-investors-guide-to-stoicism (quote is from Graham's "The Intelligent Investor") If you've already read Meditations, my favorite book on Stoicism after that one is "How To Think Like A Roman Emperor" by Donald Robertson. The Audible version is great for me because I love listening to UK accents and he sounds Scottish. It's got a lot of biographical details about Marcus Aurelius' life that brought him more to life. Some very good stories in there.

From where we are today, which sectors will benefit most if inflation cools off? Housing because of the return of low mortgage rates? Tech? Which will benefit most if inflation remains higher longer? Oil (think OXY) + financials (banks, due to higher rates)? To use Parsad's metaphor: Which springs are coiled tightest right now?

Thanks, by the way, to everyone in this thread as well as the energy sector thread and the inflation thread. I've gained a lot from your contributions and experiences.

I really like this question. I once read the market is priced for what people think conditions will be in 18 months. If that's true, I imagine we'd see a bottom after the first official readings show inflation cooling off. Mr Market will see a light at the end of the spooky Fed rates tunnel. @Ulti contributed this link in the other thread about inflation, with some evidence that we may already be past the inflation peak. https://ritholtz.com/2022/06/revisiting-peak-inflation/ Question is... will it be the real multi-year bottom, or a head fake? For example, there are 1M barrels of oil per day coming from the US strategic petroleum reserve until September 30. What happens to oil prices after that point? Will speculators pile back into oil and cause inflation fears to resurface? https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-sell-up-45-mln-bbls-oil-reserve-part-historic-release-2022-06-14/ I know I shouldn't enjoy thinking about the macro stuff this much. None of my thoughts are very original, but it's still pretty fun to dream up this big Rube Goldberg machine and imagine it in motion.

Thanks for that earlier recommendation, @Spekulatius! I've been watching Station Eleven this week (finished episodes 5 and 6 last night) ... I might need to review some Shakespeare plots just to appreciate it better. The show has really grabbed hold of me -- I keep thinking, "I sure do appreciate civilization and the internet." Just imagining the trauma for all the pre-pans is super heavy.

I wish I knew a lot more about the oil hedging that airlines and oil producers do. About 12 months ago oil was $20 and now it's around $120. During the lows you'd hope all the airlines locked in some extremely cheap gas hedges. And now oil producers are going to to lock in at these highs. Is this the kind of wild volatility that ends up bankrupting the insurers (is this all done with derivatives?), or are these financiers making money hand over fist and loving every minute of it?