Liberty

Nuclear is way safer than other forms of power, even despite all these decades old plants and some plants that were built near seismically active zones (not the best idea). Probably safer than wind and solar, if you count accidents building and maintaining these things. It's similar to how people fear air travel more than car travel even if one is much safer than the other, it's a cognitive bias. Chemical spills and exploding natural gas plants and mercury poisoning from coal fly ash and such have killed and contaminated way more people, but it doesn't get people's imagination going quite the same way... I remember this book being a good introduction to some of the science and technology behind it: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy-ebook/dp/B001FA0J0U Yeah, that's why I said we need to do R&D into thorium. I'm thinking long term. It was always among the very best approaches, but it was put aside because you couldn't make nuclear bombs with these reactors, and back when the nuclear industry grew up, the government really wanted more bombs. But this isn't like fusion, we know how to make thorium reactors and have built working ones in the past, we just need to build big ones. These things are so safe, it's basically that you have to keep them in a precise equilibrium to get the reaction, and if anything at all changes (any kind of failure, a rise in temperature, a lack of power, etc), the molten salt just drains into a big underground container and the reaction stops by itself. Orders of magnitude less waste too, and breeders can generate their own fuel from thorium, so no enrichment process. "Comparing the amount of thorium needed with coal, Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia of CERN, (European Organization for Nuclear Research), estimates that one ton of thorium can produce as much energy as 200 tons of uranium, or 3,500,000 tons of coal"

New Russo podcast: https://capitalallocatorspodcast.com/2019/03/03/russo2a/

I think it's mostly that people fear what they don't understand, and nuclear is inherently harder to understand for the average person, and this makes these people easy to scare and manipulate by both the pro-fossil fuel lobby and the more romantic/religious aisle of the environmental movement. The association with nuclear weapons is also a big issue. That's another benefit of thorium reactors; you can't make bombs with them. For those who are curious, this site is a good resource: https://energyfromthorium.com

Solar and wind are great and they keep falling in cost, as does storage (V2G tech in the future as well as smart grids with demand-response features will help a lot). But nuclear is also needed, I'm a big fan of it. I wish we'd put some serious R&D and money into LFTR tech (liquid fluoride thorium reactors) and breeder reactors. People need to be educated on the safety of modern designs, especially the passive safety measures of something like a LFTR (you would have to try really hard to make anything bad happen to it).

Bill Gates having a chat with MKBHD: Bill Gates talking about energy at Stanford:

Undoing Project was fun, nice to know more of the backstory on these people who I've been reading about for years, many good anecdotes. Doesn't replace reading the papers, or at least Thinking Fast and Slow, though.

Short interview with Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/02/28/amazon-cloud-ceo-we-have-a-30-billion-run-rate-in-the-early-stages.html

Agreed. You can bring a horse to the water, but you can't make him drink.

I enjoyed it. The grand-father of silicon valley VCs.

Even with Tesla present, we are getting mostly that. As much as I'm concerned about Tesla service, I'd be doubly/triply concerned about pretty much any conventional manufacturer electric car service. Since they don't give a crap about their electric models. (It might be different in Europe, I don't know). Yeah, but we'd get more of that, and dragged out over a much longer period of time... The incentives are all wrong. Musk truly has changed the course of things here, whatever else happens. Other things that could've done it would've been much higher oil prices for much longer and with no foward expectation that they'd come down much (but fracking has mostly stopped that) or a high carbon tax (probably combined with gov fuel economy standards that ratchet up fairly quickly). Without those, everything is pushing carmakers to stretch out the transition to EVs for as long as possible...

I really wish they would get it together operationally and financially, because as someone who's interested by the tech of EVs (couldn't care less about the investment angle for this industry), I think it's great to have a new company selling hundreds of thousands of EVs and pushing all other automakers to move faster and make better vehicles than they otherwise would have (otherwise we'd get a bunch of weird-looking low-volume compliance cars, because they really don't want to cannibalize their other sales or sell a lot unprofitably for a while, having huge sunk costs in legacy tech and dealers that make most of their margin on ICE maintenance).

Restructured segments: http://www.ropertech.com/sites/default/files/190304_New%20Segments%20Press%20Release%20-%20FINAL.pdf

Competitive advantage: first mover. Altius has invented the asset category of renewable energy royalties. They’ve secured a package of royalties on the best wind farms on the planet. Ideal location, massive scale, ideal social acceptance, best available turbine technology. Doesn't sound like a competitive advantage to me. A royalty is just a way to structure a financial deal and probably dates back to before the Pharaohs (what is a tax but a royalty on someone's income or revenue?), and I don't see how there's a first mover advantage in the field (this isn't technology where doing R&D takes time or there are trade secrets). Anyone with money can go offer it to RE developers on similar terms if it's somehow preferred by them. Without a competitive advantage, why do we expect the IRR on the money they invested in that wind farm to be much above the average return that some other source of capital would've gotten? If you invest 30m and get back 400m over 100 years, that's a CAGR of 2.62%. If you invest 30m and get back 45 over 15 years, that's a CAGR of 2.74%. (and this is the generous math where I assume the principal is received on top of the amounts you stated and that 100% of the amount is FCF) I can't say I find that very exciting...

https://digiday.com/retail/brand-people-trust-new-online-brands-adding-amazon-pay/

What competitive advantage does Altius have with renewable energy that would allow it to earn superior returns compared to other players in the space?

TDG definitely has a better business all else equal. But I don't think all else is equal.. Heico is very conservative financially and seems to be very employee-friendly, run by a family of owners that bought most of their stock (and don't just have a crazy number of options). TDG uses a lot of leverage, is pretty aggressive with pricing and, based on some reports, doesn't seem to be very employee-friendly (lots of cuts, kind of a cutthroat culture... but that's just what I've heard). Heico mostly grows through volume, taking a shared economics approach of sharing more of the value with its customers, which certainly helps them as they introduce hundreds of new parts each year. They also have a really good M&A track record and have been going up the quality ladder over time, driving up their margins. And yet Heico as a stock hasn't been doing that much worse than TDG if you look at a decent period (say about the past 10 years). Seems much safer, better liked by customers, less of a regulatory moat, and more focused on building the right culture for the long term, with untapped pricing power if they ever need it. It's riding a lot of the same secular tailwinds, and recently some new avenues have been opening up (recent EU decision..). I think the idea that nobody cares about the price of TDG parts might not be quite as right as TDG would want us to believe. If that was the case, I don't think the OEMs would be trying to muscle back in the space, and Heico wouldn't have the organic growth it has (almost all in volume, while TDG's organic growth includes a bunch of price). I think they're both great companies, but it feels like Heico will probably lead you close to the same place over time without running everything close to the redline. That feels a bit more comfortable to me. I've owned TDG in the pasts, so I'm not negative on it. It just has different trade-offs.

Quite a list of names: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/640-amazon-ad-nyt/23be553f1bef2065302d/optimized/full.pdf#page=1

Thanks. Unfortunately, they only have 1991 for TCI.

TCI 1991 annual report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xc-EI_a19yeXdESnIcOnk9goIax4XIzL/view h/t

AMZN adding a tool to help fight counterfeiters: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/amazon-announces-project-zero-to-reduce-counterfeit-products.html

Podcast interview with the author on Kevin Rose's show: https://www.kevinrose.com/single-post/matthew-walker (great interview, I recommend you forward it to friends and family that you know won't read the book. The health implications of sleep that science has been uncovering lately as well as the tips to improve should definitely be more widely known) A new one that came out today: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/matthew-walker

Acquisition at FSG: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190228005240/en/HEICO-Corporation-Subsidiary-Acquires-Decavo-LLC

Q4: http://ir.jd.com/node/8101/pdf Stock up 13.25% pre-market.

Indeed, in the end all that matters is the price. The efficiency is one of the factors that goes into the costs, but a 10% efficient system that could capture energy at 2c/kwh round-trip is better than a 90% efficient system that captures it at 3c/kwh round-trip.

BKNG Q4: http://ir.bookingholdings.com/static-files/65572aa4-8f00-4ad9-ba1e-d9f447e72285