Liberty

Congrats, that's very good. Do you use leverage?

A little upbeat video from the Bank of Canada for the holidays:

http://torontolife.com/city/life/jim-estill-the-man-who-saved-200-syrian-refugees/

The reservoirs of some of those large hydro dams are truly gigantic. If right now you run them in a ratio of day/night of say 70/30, if you switch that to 30/70 because the daytime demand goes to solar, that's still the same amount of water flowing through, you just moved it around, and the reservoirs don't even have to be modified (and most have quite a bit of buffer to compensate for years when there's a lot of precipitation versus very dry years).

That is some really great unbiased reporting there. Aly Nazerali is described as "a Candian stock promoter", while Deep Capture is a "website that retails fake news, conspiracy theories and personal attacks on journalist and whistleblowers". And Mark Mitchell is a "right-wing conspiracy theorist" who "maliciously fabricated wild accusations". And that is just how the article starts. The same journalistic integrity is in abundance throughout the article. This is a blog, so I don't think it claims to write in AP-style. But I posted because the court document is embedded and you can read for yourself.

http://garyweiss.blogspot.ca/2016/12/canadian-court-wallops-overstockcom-ceo.html?m=1

Or installation of a DC power grid to ship the energy around the globe from where the sun is shining to where it is not, http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid That makes the most sense out of anything else I've seen. Let the free market and the law of competitive advantage work its magic. Generate electricity wherever in the world it is cheapest and easiest to do so and move it to the places it is most needed. The one flaw is that people will worry about terrorism and/or acts of war cutting them off from the grid and money will still be wasted on local power generation even where it doesn't otherwise make much sense to have it. Technology, markets, and people are awesome. Politics, radical religion, and people suck. Nothing says the price of solar won't keep falling a while further. At a certain point, panels are cheap enough that they'll be distributed everywhere, on roofs (especially with the kind of new SolarCity roofs that are basically better than traditional roofs) and there'll actually be less concentration of sources than there was with coal and gas plants. V2G systems with EVs will help store energy in the grid, as will cheaper batteries over time, and as other mentioned, hydro can also help (ie. Norway can act as a battery for parts of Europe). We'll see how it plays out, but one thing that solar won't do is make geopolitics more unstable. EVs + solar will solar all kinds of problems on that front in the fullness of time.

Watsa must think the stock is on the high side of he's considering issuing that much.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-energy-hits-a-turning-point-solar-that-s-cheaper-than-wind

Adorable kid, congrats!

I thought it was interesting, particularly the part about job churn and the dynamism of various economies near the end: http://www.theverge.com/a/verge-2021/marc-andreessen-horowitz-verge-interview

Good review of it by Rational Walk: http://www.rationalwalk.com/?p=15450 Also a podcast interview with Michael Lewis about it (mostly anecdotes about Kahneman and Tversky, but some good ones): http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/161212a-kwr-lewis/

Official press release: http://ir.pricelinegroup.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=1004490 They mention that he was "one of the primary drivers" of the Booking.com acquisition. Good to have on your resumé!

:o

Finally!

Fiscal Q4: https://globenewswire.com/newsarchive/hei/pages/news_releases.html?id=897387

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/amazon-prime-announce-india-launch-955619 Amazon Prime Video apparently coming to India soon.

Looks like the Ziggo-VOD JV in the Netherlands is ready to move forward: https://www.telecompaper.com/news/acm-approves-t-mobile-takeover-of-vodafone-thuis--1175876

http://basehitinvesting.com/what-is-your-edge/ I enjoyed it, and thought many here might like it too.

I put my son's RESP money in an index. I'm fine with a market return for it.

On the lighter side, some trivia/backstory on the Get a Mac campaign 10 years ago: https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/09/get-a-mac-ad-campaign-team-10-years-on/

Air Force one isn't just a plane, it's a flying nuclear command center and a bunch of other things. I read that Trump tweeted that like 22 minutes after an interview with Boeing's CEO was published where he said critical things about Trump... So could just be a form of cyber-bullying.

I think we've just discovered that finding quality retail staff is very hard to scale up because the number of people-friendly computer geeks is more or less a constant in the population but Apple's retail operation is way, way bigger than it was 10 years ago.

http://boeing.mediaroom.com/2016-12-06-Boeing-Statement-on-Air-Force-One

Might be a positive effect on churn at Sirius from bundling better quality internet streaming + siri content.