beerbaron

Thanks for the recommendation. I red the article and placed myself a reminder to revisit in 3 months when the intelligence community has done it's job. At this point I have little opinion, it's quite possible it came from a lab but really the question should be how to make sure it never comes from a lab? Here is my prognostic of the findings in 3 months, I'll post in this thread then. You can claim I was wrong but I'm putting my neck down. US intelligence findings will be: There are circumstantial evidences that Covid might have come from a lab but no solid proofs. Understanding a virus genome is complicated because it changes a lot over time. China has not been cooperating with our investigation so our findings are not strong. BeerBaron

It seems like a very valid question if the Virus was man made in China and was the results of incompetence. But to me its sounds like witch hunt. It is plausible that it was actually the case, and I would not be surprised if it happened, after all incompetence or human error is a function of our species. China, Japan, China, Europe, Russia all made monumental mistakes on projects... , Chernobyl, Mars Climate Orbiter, Challenger, etc... But what I fail to understand is what is the outcome here? First, it's almost impossible that we could be able to take the genome of COVID and come out with great confidence that it was man made. Analysis, peer review, fact, counter facts, etc... this can take 5 years of scientific debate and when we'll be finished all we will have in front of us is a 1000 pages document with a spaghetti of nuances. Nothing concrete will ever come out of it. Most importantly, what's the end game here? Would we go to war with China over this? An why? It's not like they would ever admit it and it's not like we could ever be close to proving this with let's say... 98% certainty. So why do all this if we won't do anything over this? Seems like a distraction IMO. However, you don't need proofs that China screwed up to improve things. Actually if any of you ever worked with Asian cultures you would know that not losing face is way above truth. Give them a way out and they will collaborate with you. The pandemic has made everybody very aware of the risks so we have a good opportunity here to reduce risks. Our focus should be on answering the following questions: How are each country handling their biological labs? Do all labs handling virus have proper procedures in places? How we better secure those labs? Which equipment's and knowhow are critical to making bio weapons and how do we control this? Pointing fingers is not going to help. Identifying the risks and make sure we have a unified approach and proper funding to avoid those BeerBaron

Quite a sensationalized title and only if you extrapolate November 2017's monthly 25% energy growth rate over 3 years (as that part of the article mentions). The full analysis is found here: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Which estimates that today, the bitcoin network uses about as much energy as Chile. On a per-transaction basis, each bitcoin transaction uses 741 kWH of energy as of 2020, up from 686 kWH in 2019. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/) By comparison, 741 kWH would power approximately 497,000 transactions on Visa's network. This is why I don't think Bitcoin can work for high volume of transactions. How could as humanity justify building power plants to support something that can be done 1000000 cheaper in energy. If you are a government that wants to nail Bitcoin for taking over your currency just control the supply of electricity. Furthermore, wait till bad press related to CO2 emissions get there... Farms in China are not powered with solar. Technology will not save Bitcoin, we are already at ASics. Only a major protocol change can do it. Will it happen? Beerbaron It's only "cheaper" when you're only considering energy as a cost input and not wages/time/buildings/marketing/etc. all required for the current financial system On an all-in basis, BTC is cheaper and faster and is getting even cheaper and faster with the advent of new technologies to exist on top of the blockchain so not every individual transaction has to be run through the blockchain. You used to transact in gold/silver. Then we found out its cheaper and easier to transact on the second layer which was paper representing that gold and silver. Then we went even further and found it's cheaper to transact with eltronic blips that represent the paper money that used to represent gold and silver. BTC is likely to be the foundational layer for payments (gold and silver) and there will be improvements and developments on top of it that make it even easier/cheaper to transact in going forward - we're already seeing this. Visa and all their employees do not consume the energy of Chile. Beerbaron

Quite a sensationalized title and only if you extrapolate November 2017's monthly 25% energy growth rate over 3 years (as that part of the article mentions). The full analysis is found here: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption Which estimates that today, the bitcoin network uses about as much energy as Chile. On a per-transaction basis, each bitcoin transaction uses 741 kWH of energy as of 2020, up from 686 kWH in 2019. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-consumption-transaction-comparison-visa/) By comparison, 741 kWH would power approximately 497,000 transactions on Visa's network. This is why I don't think Bitcoin can work for high volume of transactions. How could as humanity justify building power plants to support something that can be done 1000000 cheaper in energy. If you are a government that wants to nail Bitcoin for taking over your currency just control the supply of electricity. Furthermore, wait till bad press related to CO2 emissions get there... Farms in China are not powered with solar. Technology will not save Bitcoin, we are already at ASics. Only a major protocol change can do it. Will it happen? Beerbaron

Well, I'm a Director of R&D and let me tell you what you are asking is almost impossible to measure. First, R&D can be applied to anything, to use a baseball analogy, singles, doubles or home-run. Who wins the game depends on skill and luck but you can't measure the skill in a short timeframe, home-run R&D projects takes years to materialize into sales. Furthermore there are companies that are R&D and patent heavy (IBM for example), but in reality their patent portfolio is so broad that they can't seem to be able to enforce their rights. To enforce your right you must have: 1- A rock solid patent. This is rarer than it seems. 2- People that find the infringers. If you are not focused it's likely going to be under your radar. If it's very technical it will very likely go below your radar. 3- A profitable proposition to enforce your patent rights. So how exactly do you spot good R&D spenders? Well the first I'd look at is consistency in market success (singles). If there is a lot of singles that means the product group identifies opportunities for the R&D team to work on. That also means the product teams know when a homerun is feasible. If you can, you should try to identify an all star R&D head. Usually that all star will not be the one solving problems but will have enough leadership to steer the product and marketing group away from technical pitfalls. I' recommend that you read Skunk Works, it's about the engineer that led the development of the first stealth plane. I'd call that a home-run... but it's boss (who was very competent and a legend) told him to drop it. It goes to show that luck and vision plays a role as much as skill. BTW, I take R&D spending at face value when reading annual report, if it's within the industry norm that is fine. Thanks BeerBaron

That is a bit of BS, if could setup a mirror of the drive and try again and again. Painfully long but for 240M I'm sure he could even give it to a firm that would do it for him. That is especially true if the password is somewhat short 12 characters of less. BeerBaron

Hi Greg, I fully understand your feelings. I have no problem if he attacks Prem, me or whoever. But he knows he's been warned countless times about keeping politics/religion/non-investment topics out of other boards/threads. He wanted to piss me off by quoting me...on religion...while the subject was Fairfax in the Fairfax thread. You don't do that. Yeah, once in a while you'll post outside of the Politics thread, but for all intents and purposes you do try to follow the rules, no matter how blunt you get. Cubsfan does too...LC and the liberal contingent do too. But Cardboard not only ignores the rules, he is often the instigator and I've had tons and tons of complaints against him...that I've ignored because he posted here so long. But I can't ignore it forever. If he's purposely going to be a dick, so be it...he's gone! Cheers! Cardboard is probably a good investor but he polluted my RSS feed with political non-sense so much in the last few years that it's image reflected badly on this site. I'll miss it's 5% of investment discussion, but certainly not the 95% rotten leftover. Parsad, you are the Sheriff. It's not a democracy, it's an investment board. Glad you are using your badge. BeerBaron

This report gives you some idea: https://www.asminternational.org/web/fort-wayne-chapter/asm-industry-news/-/journal_content/56/10180/39738678/NEWS INTC is at 817k/200mm wafers month. That would be 0.817M*(8/12)^2*12=4.36M 12” wafer equivalent/year. I don’t think that just the wafer throughout is the right matrix without taking into account the process used. S9me fabs are old and almost worthless. There are still fabs that use 50 or 65 nm processes which are useless for leading edge CPU’s, but can be used for automobile electronics etc. Analog chip plants sometimes use decades old equipment because smaller feature size isn’t necessarily better (if you need certain current outputs etc). Just eyeballing I don’t think that INTC manufacturing capacity is worth close to INTC EV, if that’s your ultimate thesis. Thanks for the input. What I'm trying to do is to assess the break up value of Intel. Because, if there is a huge value gap... it will happen. If not it will not. For example TSMC has let's say 10M capacity and is worth 470 Billions. INTC manufacturing with 4.3M should be worth 95G. Haircut it by 30% for temporary technological lag and call it 65G. If I look at Wikipedia most of their fabs are 14nm or better which does not show a portfolio that is that old. Now, we would be left with the question of, is INTC design and IP worth 189G-65G=124G$? This one is harder to evaluate but can be somewhat approximated. We could say their X86 IP is worth as much or more than AMD x86 and use that as a a base. Then, bundle everything else into others. If others is free we have a pretty good deal. BeerBaron BeerBaron

I'd add that overdose death was trending up big time pre COVID. COVID does not help... but doing A-B is a bit misleading. COVID did not slow the opioids, I'd probably attribute 10-15% increase du to COVID, similar to alcohol usage. I remember a year ago there was a thread talking about opioids epidemics... before COVID. BeerBaron

"Breakthrough"... anybody has a patent to disclose? BeerBaron

I'm trying to assess the value of INTC production capacity. They have 6 wafer production site but I have a hard time finding how many 12 inch wafer equivalent those represent. TSMC for example says they have a capacity of 10.1M/Y... it would be interesting to know INTC number. Anybody has something along those lines? BeerBaron

I'd like to argue that Intel will get their 7nm process together, they have been doing wafers for 50 years. It's not like they suddenly forgot. They will regain competitiveness in the x86 because well, it's easy for AMD to be ahead because they have a lead on the fabrication side. I'd even argue that Intel on the design side is probably being pressured to be innovative quite a bit more so than before when they had the manufacturing lead, great thing will be seen in 2 years... it's do or die for the design side. On the supply constrains from TSMC, what we are seeing shows that the fabrication side of Intel might be worth more than expected. It takes a long time to build a plant and major R&D risks are involved. Not a lot of players can enter. My feeling is that in the lab they had a great process to make 10nm and rolled out the process on the production floor. Something went wrong with the process and they have been trying to fix a a bad solution since then. It seems to me they dropped that idea and went back to less risky improvement for the 7nm. Can't really blame them, it's R&D and you can't know what you can't know. You can always screw up even if you do all the right things with the information's you have. I personally do not own shares but I've been eye balling INTC for a while and there is certainly lots of ways to unlock value. Here is what I'd see: 1- Split the fab and design side. 2- On the design side - put x86 in one division and ARM division into another 3- Increase spending on the GPU / NN side to become competitive in that space BeerBaron

ARM will not take over server any time soon. Consider how sticky a software is to an entreprise, once implemented accross the group it's nearly impossible to get rid of it. Now, imagine all your infrastructure running each of those software on X86 and someone coming to say: "Wanna save on your electricy bill? All you have to do is convince all your software providers to compile into ARM, move all your data and servers...". Operationally there is no point to do all that (if possible) for saving a cost that probably is less than 1% or your operating expense. What will happen is a word of x86 and a word of ARM living in parrallel. Does anybody know how many chips are now released that use 10nm? Intel was saying they targetted 9 by the end of 2020 and that yields are above expectations. We are now near the end of the year, if they are close to delivering their 9 maybe that means the 10nm is now in order and ready to start competing with TSMC 7nm. Thanks BeerBaron

The anti-Trumpers wont agree, but if you follow the Great Barrington Declaration Herd Immunity is not a strategy, but inevitable. Herd Immunity, Dr. Bhattacharya says is like gravity. The plane is going to come down sometime. The question is how to land safely. This makes the therapeutics and vaccines much more important and only US government with Warp Speed project got them developed very fast. The shortest vaccine development I believe is for mumps with four years. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/31/us/coronavirus-vaccine-timetable-concerns-experts-invs/index.html The timetable for a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months. Experts say that's risky (April 1st) White House started working on warp speed project with aggressive timelines, and seems to be beating the 18 month time line which it self experts were skeptical. To quote from article "Dr. Emily Erbelding, an infectious disease expert at NIAID -- which is part of the National Institutes of Health -- said the typical vaccine takes between eight and 10 years to develop. " I'd say warp speed vaccine is something that makes me unwary if that means steps are being skipped. China and Russia are already bragging that they are ahead of the vaccine race. I suspect part of their lead is skipping steps. But what if skipping a step brings death to 0.1% of the population? That's 1.5M death... I'll trust to get a vaccine if all the steps of the stages have been properly respected. Anything else is just rolling dice. Apparently, the FDA is holding their stand toward pressure. Let's hope it stays that way. Trump has little to do with how fast a vaccine gets released... provided he does not force to skip steps. Tests take time and you can't make a baby in one month by making 9 women pregnant. You can however provide funding and make sure the production capacity is ready when it gets approved. But again, any government can calculate the risk/reward over 4T$ deficit VS 10B$ wasted production capacity. I'm sure even Canada, say's to it's pharmaceutical industries, money is no object. BeerBaron

So with the federal govenrment borrowing like crazy and the housing market exploding... How levered are househould and goverments together? Do we have historical data to compare? BeerBaron