Liberty

At this size and without a huge engine of organic growth (like FB/AMZN/GOOG), beating the market will be hard, but I think risk is also much lower than with the market, so keeping up with the market while providing better sleep at night looks pretty much like a win on a risk-adjusted basis.

Too many... But if you haven't, you should probably read 'With the Old Breed' by E.B. Sledge. It's a memoirs.

I think they just remove the dividend from it and add the retained free cash, but I haven't looked at it in a bit.

Once in a while I check this one, just for general learning, and every time I'm reminded that this must be an incredibly tough business. In the period that oil went from $29 to $71 (since around early 2016), the stock has basically been more or less flat, with negative gross margins, operating margins, and FCF. Not what you'd expect from a high-fixed-asset business with supposedly high leverage to commodity prices. Can't imagine what they'd have done with flat oil prices, or declining ones (which could happen in the coming years from current level). Too hard for me.

That's great, there's more than enough market for everyone. Like with EV's, Musk giving these things a much higher profile will help the rest of the industry. A bunch of towns and grid operators are paying close attention to the autralian battery, and they might not have been with a lower profile project.

Doesn't work for me, even if I go in private browsing mode. What I liked about the old Google Finance was the speed of it, the automated news tracking next to each chart, the "related" stocks from the same industry, and the real-time watchlist in a pretty small amount of vertical space. Could keep an eye on a long list of 50-100 stocks, and if something suddenly pops up 10% or down 10%, I can quickly have a look and see if there's any news, and if it's something from my "patience" watchlist, maybe decide if a buying opportunity is coming...

When I was in Toronto last month someone there told me that they were still on the old Google Finance too. Could just be a delayed local rollout for some random reason (they forgot to flip the switch in that datacenter?). I wish they'd just turn it back on (even if they keep the new in-search stuff) and just put a couple engineers on the project of modernizing it (rewrite the flash graph engine in HTML5 and fix a few big bugs)...

The hottest days tend to be the sunniest, so solar panels produce the most when demand for A/C is highest. That's a nice benefit.

Looks like grid-scale batteries work pretty well: https://electrek.co/2018/05/11/tesla-giant-battery-australia-reduced-grid-service-cost/

Interesting: http://www.ettsa.eu/uploads/documents/ETTSA%20Hotel%20Distribution%20Cost%20(Summary)%2002052018%20(1).pdf Via: https://twitter.com/FullySynergized/status/994750046108307456

Neat: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/05/apple-paves-the-way-for-breakthrough-carbon-free-aluminum-smelting-method/

I'm pro nuclear, btw. The life-cycle analysis for solar PV is much better than for the current mainstream alternative, which is natural gas (new coal plants are not being built, hydro is rarely built, and nuclear isn't being built). Gas never gets in positive territory when it comes to carbon footprint while PV gets there after a few years and then stays positive for a few decades. But the idea is that as the grid becomes cleaner, the manufacturing plants that make the solar panels also run on clean energy, so the maths gets better and better over time, which isn't the case for fossil fuels. I'd be fine with removing all subsidies for clean energy if we also removed all subsidies for fossil fuels, and idealy could somehow retroactively remove past subsidies for fossil fuels (direct and indirect, like military protection for oil routes and such, which amount to hundreds of billions). But that's not looking like it's happening. There's a huge double-standard going on. People are quick to look into the impact of building batteries (which can be recycled, the materials aren't destroyed, unlike when you use fossil fuels) and solar cells, but they don't hold other things to the same scrutiny. They'll complain about relatively small subsidies for new technologies that are in the steep part of their cost decline curve, while they rarely even think about decades and decades of large subsidies for old industries that are mature and don't need any help.

There will be downsides to this too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17023226

If catalytic converters in cars were useful, people would just voluntarily add them in as options. If coal plant particulate scrubbers were useful, coal plant operators should just be left to voluntarily install them. When you can externalize your costs to the rest of society, life's good. Defaults matter, all behavioral studies show this. There are a lot of things that are good for people and that make sense for them but that they don't do because of inertia/ignorance/etc. In think that in a very sunny state, where power is relatively expensive and where solar panels will actually reduce a house's monthly cost of energy by more than it increases the mortgage payments while also providing benefits to society at large, it's not a bad idea to make it a default (with exceptions for when it doesn't make sense). Just like having smoke detectors/banisters on staircases/breakers in the electrical box installed by default in new houses is a good idea even if they make sense and everyone should, in theory, add them in if they were not a default.

Interview with Greg Maffei: http://variety.com/2018/biz/features/liberty-media-ceo-greg-maffei-1202803710/

Q1: http://ir.bookingholdings.com/static-files/8b051eaa-2069-4504-8bca-d8c6b9e2d443 Stock down 7% after hours.. History repeats itself. The company has a great quarter but sandbags the next one, stock sells off, then they surprise everyone the next Q.. happened last year.

Doesn't work for me. Could be some weird local datacenter that wasn't updated yet? Are you traveling?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/california-votes-to-require-rooftop-solar-power-on-new-homes

Looks like they finally did it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/walmart-agrees-to-buy-77-stake-in-flipkart-for-16-billion-1525864334

Re-org: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/one-family-under-cox/

Here we go: https://www.wsj.com/articles/vodafone-confirms-deal-to-buy-some-of-liberty-globals-european-assets-for-nearly-23-billion-1525845601 Presentation: http://www.libertyglobal.com/pdf/presentations/Liberty-Global-Q1-2018-Earnings-Presentation.pdf

Finally? https://seekingalpha.com/news/3353843-ft-vodafone-closing-18b-asset-deal-liberty-global

Again: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-liberty-global-m-a-vodafone/vodafone-closes-in-on-game-changing-liberty-global-deal-idUSKBN1I41PE

Another good interview, different enough from the one above: http://capitalallocatorspodcast.com/2018/02/05/annied/