Tuesday 29 January 2013
Monday 28 January 2013
One day Solar will be competitive
[T]he US DOE actually tries to calculate the cost of various energy sources using a complicated levelized cost model. Seehttp://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm. For power plants coming on line in 2017, their nationwide average estimates in $/MWH are:
Conventional Coal: 98
Convenional CC Gas: 66
Solar PV: 153
On average, PV has a ways to go. However, the lowest regional cost of PV is 119, while the highest regional cost of coal is 115 and advanced nuclear is 119.
So there are probably places today where PV is cost competitive. But the market can surely figure this out at least as well as the government.If these numbers are right, it means that we are just now hitting the point where solar power makes economic sense in a few places without any government subsidies. That's pretty amazing, if you ask me. I wonder how many of those places there will be in 7 years...
From Noah Smith
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.pt/2013/01/solar-its-about-to-be-whole-new-world.html
One thing i never figured out is this, if a Solar Panel cost USD 100,000 but lasts forever i can make power every day and one day in year 37 the amount i saved every month equals USD 100,000. I would like to know how are this numbers today? how many years do Solar Panels can keep running without big maintenance? how much can i recover from the initial cost every year? etc....
Biggest Wave Evert Surfed 2013
By Garrett McNamara in North Canyon , Nazaré Portugal (This Monday)
I don't see where is the jet-sky guy!
I don't see where is the jet-sky guy!
Lance
Someone send me this.....
Lance Armstrong should be applauded for being able to ride a bike so
well on drugs. I tried it once. Hit a dog and fell into the canal.
Sunday 27 January 2013
Rarissime!!!
Rarissime!!!
Aujourd'hui, il faisait tellement froid, j'ai vu un politicien avec les mains dans ses propres poches!!!
Aujourd'hui, il faisait tellement froid, j'ai vu un politicien avec les mains dans ses propres poches!!!
Wednesday 23 January 2013
Sunday 20 January 2013
Happiness is from within
“A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.”
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Our life is what our thoughts make it, Marcus Aurelius
Just for Today
|
Quality vs Quantity
Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. And perfect perfect perfect practice make super-duper ultra-perfect.
Roy Zornow,Training Insights From Star Athletes
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/training-insights-from-star-athletes/
I will need to improve here, sometimes i train hard and deep, but some times i just relax and do some nice (low intensity) bike rides. I have improved a lot since i work with my coach Nuno Sabido. Perhaps i could do even better!
Roy Zornow,Training Insights From Star Athletes
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/training-insights-from-star-athletes/
I will need to improve here, sometimes i train hard and deep, but some times i just relax and do some nice (low intensity) bike rides. I have improved a lot since i work with my coach Nuno Sabido. Perhaps i could do even better!
Still living with their parents
Well i lived in my mothers home until i was expelled. I already had my own flat but kept eating and sleeping in my mothers house.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/bad-economy-means-young-europeans-having-trouble-leaving-home-a-877616.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/bad-economy-means-young-europeans-having-trouble-leaving-home-a-877616.html
Tuesday 15 January 2013
The end of a certain world
There is a real risk that we are not just at the end of extraordinary economic cycle but perhaps the end of an economic, business and even social model, crowded with speculative leverage and Ponzi schemes supported by Governments in the West. From the pension bomb and other welfare models, to unsustainable energy and utility models, there is a great fundamental weakness in the funding mechanism that supports our standards of living.
The Abaco Finantials Fund
PS I agree with this analysis, with the pension bomb (People were promised pensions that can not easily be financed) The way out is to say that you are not going to get what you were promised or to print the way out. If it's the later one day you will figure out that the paper money is worthless. I don't know how long we could carry on. The way to proceed is to let the markets tell the story and react ASAP.
The Abaco Finantials Fund
PS I agree with this analysis, with the pension bomb (People were promised pensions that can not easily be financed) The way out is to say that you are not going to get what you were promised or to print the way out. If it's the later one day you will figure out that the paper money is worthless. I don't know how long we could carry on. The way to proceed is to let the markets tell the story and react ASAP.
My share of the pie
In an interview (April 16, 2012, along with Larry Bird) on the David Letterman
Show, Magic Johnson made a great comment, that what made the Lakers so great
back then was that ‘the goal was not to
score, but to win.’ In other words,
individual scores didn’t matter as much as playing as a team to win. I think all the members of US Congress should
consider watching that interview and think about Magic’s point. Similar, it seems that people these days
focus more on their share of the pie, rather than the overall size of the
pie… They might also want to consider
Magic Johnson’s point.
Stephen L Jen (London)
January 10, 2013
Stephen L Jen (London)
January 10, 2013
Constancy of purpose.
The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and began to produce masterpieces.
There is no special trick about writing or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
[…]
The thing of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
The point of being an artist is that you may live.
Sherwood Anderson, April 1927
Most people just drift
I am constantly amazed at how
little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about
business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Sherwood Anderson, 1926 Letters of Great Americans to their children
PS I took this advice as a call to specialization and focus. Most people don't go deep. In order to go deep you need to repeat and investigate and above all, you need constancy of purpose.
Monday 14 January 2013
The Fool does it in the end
The greatest of all investment adages states that “what the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.”
The wise man invested aggressively in late 2008 and early 2009.I believe only the fool is doing so now. Today, in place of aggressiveness, the challenging search for return should incorporate goodly doses of risk control, caution, discipline and selectivity.
Howard Marks from Oaktree
A No brainer is a passport for loss
The riskiest thing
in the investment world is the belief that there’s no risk. On the other hand, a high level of
risk consciousness tends to mitigate risk. I call this the perversity of risk. It’s the reason for Warren
Buffett’s dictum that “The less prudence with which others conduct their
affairs, the greater the
prudence with which we should conduct our own affairs.” When other people love investments, we should be cautious. But when others hate them, we should
turn aggressive.
Howard Marks
Regulation makes people feel safer than they should
When all traffic controls were removed from the town of Drachten, Holland, traffic flow
doubled and fatal accidents fell to zero, presumably because people drove more carefully.
(Dylan Grice, Societe Generale)
So the lesson is clear: it’s not asset quality that determines investment risk.
The bottom line on this is simple. No asset is so good that it can't be bid up to the point where it's overpriced and thus dangerous. And few assets are so bad that they can't become under priced and thus safe (not to mention potentially lucrative)
Howard Marks, Oaktree 2013
Thursday 10 January 2013
Wednesday 9 January 2013
Diet
Today before breakfast i weighted 72,6 kg.
How is it possible that i weighted 75 kg yesterday and now almost 2,5 kg less in 1 day
I cut on the carbs yesterday big time
When you cut the carbs you lose some water too.
Yesterday and today are going to be zero carb days
Yesterday i ate ratatouille & black beans for breakfast with Earl Grey tea
I had a lunch in a very good restaurant and i ate
cheese (no bread)
some hummus & some salami
ate 2 rucula salads with Parmesan
drank 2 glasses of red wine
I eat nothing all afternoon
I did 2 hours workout from 6 to 8 pm, low intensity
For dinner i ate soup & one salad
after training normally i am not hungry so i don't eat a lot
I want to go to 70 kg because the day before a race day i eat a lot of carbs and i gain 1 ou 2 kg with water. This season i would like to race with 71 or 72 kg max.
In order to do that i need to stabilize at 68 to 70 kg.
In this picture i was with 78 kg.
How is it possible that i weighted 75 kg yesterday and now almost 2,5 kg less in 1 day
I cut on the carbs yesterday big time
When you cut the carbs you lose some water too.
Yesterday and today are going to be zero carb days
Yesterday i ate ratatouille & black beans for breakfast with Earl Grey tea
I had a lunch in a very good restaurant and i ate
cheese (no bread)
some hummus & some salami
ate 2 rucula salads with Parmesan
drank 2 glasses of red wine
I eat nothing all afternoon
I did 2 hours workout from 6 to 8 pm, low intensity
For dinner i ate soup & one salad
after training normally i am not hungry so i don't eat a lot
I want to go to 70 kg because the day before a race day i eat a lot of carbs and i gain 1 ou 2 kg with water. This season i would like to race with 71 or 72 kg max.
In order to do that i need to stabilize at 68 to 70 kg.
In this picture i was with 78 kg.
Tuesday 8 January 2013
USA is doing the homework?
In the past two years, the government’s share of the US economy has been declining faster than at any time in post-war history. This has been true whether measured by the weight of government as a % of GDP at constant or current prices, as dollars spent, adjusted for inflation or simply as employment (which has been clearly falling among civil servants and clearly rising in the private sector).
Gave Kal
PS In Portugal a public worker can not be fired even if he has nothing to do! I think most of Europe is in the same boat.
Why i don't live in a farm? yet
The Greek island of old age
The inhabitants of a small Greek
island live on average 10 years longer than the rest of western Europe. So
what's the secret to long life in Ikaria?
It could be the fresh air and the friendly, easy-going, open-door lifestyle.
It could be fresh vegetables and goat's milk.
It could be the mountainous terrain. Everywhere on Ikaria is up, or down, so
getting around keeps you fit.
It could even be the natural radiation in the granite rocks. But Stamatis
Moraitis thinks he knows what it is.
"It's the wine," he says, over a mid-morning glass at his kitchen table.
"It's pure, nothing added. The wine they make commercially has preservatives.
That's no good. But this wine we make ourselves is pure."
Stamatis celebrated his 98th birthday on New Year's Day. He says he's older,
but his documents put his date of birth as 1 January 1915. Outside his
whitewashed house are his beloved olive trees, his fruit trees, and his vines.
He makes about 700 litres of wine a year, he says.
PS I think a lot about this kind of pieces. I have enough money to buy a small farm and live there with a small Vineyard, some trees, some vegetables and water. I could train mountain bike every morning and plenty of reading in the afternoon. Why don't i do it? Because the people i love don't live in small villages and because i like to travel and meet new people. Of course i will probably die earlier than these Greek people but i love to live near my kids & my friends and to change.
Never give up
Every day is a new life to a wise man
Dale Carnegie
PS Don't think about the past and don't live the problems of the future before they come. Live today, have a good day today. Nothing better than a good day of work to clean the head.
Monday 7 January 2013
Supply & Demand (as always)
Even for more seasoned grads the trend is similar, says Katie Bardaro, lead economist for PayScale.com. "In general, it seems that M.B.A. pay is either stagnant or falling," she says.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324296604578175764143141622.html
Ps If there are very few people with an MBA in your country you can take one. Otherwise since you learn nothing useful in an MBA , don't. Unless someone pays for it. Learn something no one knows.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324296604578175764143141622.html
Ps If there are very few people with an MBA in your country you can take one. Otherwise since you learn nothing useful in an MBA , don't. Unless someone pays for it. Learn something no one knows.
Passion
A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.
Charles M. Schwab
Charles M. Schwab
Sunday 6 January 2013
Crash of 1987 (19th of october 500 points)
I’m looking at a chart of October ’87, and the Dow was about 2700 in the beginning of the month. Before we even got to that Wednesday (the 13th), the Dow was down to 2500. The volume really started ticking up on that 13th, 14th, 15th. The 19th and 20th were both the biggest-volume days of the selloff.
That’s right. Actually, the interesting thing about 1987 is that most people incorrectly say ‘it just came out of nowhere.’ That the market was going up one day and suddenly crashed. And yet, we had a whole series of classic warning signs that the market was weakening. For example, the advance/decline line, which is a simple measurement of the number of stocks going up vs. the number of stocks going down, topped out in early April of 1987, showing that that was the point in which the largest bulk of stocks was starting to peak in price.
Paul Desmond, president of Lowry’s Reports, is known as a “technician’s technician.
PS If you react you almost always have time to prevent disaster. The phrase "it just come from nowhere" is almost always not true. Just look at the signs and react. As someone said if there is a bank run, it's logic to participate & make sure you run fast and beat the crowd.
Positive Sign
If people around you try to discourage you from taking a certain course of action, or ridicule your ideas, take that as a positive sign.Sure it can be difficult not to run with the herd, but the truth is that most long-term success stories are written by folks who've done exactly that.
Jim Rogers, A Father's lessons for life and investing 2009
Market Bottom
We knew that the most important consideration of a market bottom was panic; the final step in a downtrend is that investors panic and throw in the towel. They want to abandon the stock market without any consideration of the value of their portfolios.
The classic expression is, just get me out, I don’t care about the price, I gotta make the pain stop.
That’s exactly right.
Paul Desmond, president of Lowry’s Reports, is known as a “technician’s technician.” In 2002 he won the Charles H. Dow Award for excellence in the field of technical analysis for his studies on how market bottoms are formed.
PS it's difficult to find them but sometimes you feel everybody trows the towel, that is the mark of a bottom.
Thursday 3 January 2013
How to Gain or Lose 30 Minutes of Life Every Day
If you smoke two cigarettes, you lose 30 minutes of your life (top
graphic). Exercise for 20 minutes, and you gain two units of microlife. Over
time bad habits accelerate your aging, and good habits slow it down (bottom
graphic). “That seems to resonate with people,” Spiegelhalter says. “No one
likes to get older faster.”
PS To me the reason do do"some" sports and to eat vegetables most of the time it's because i feel better and sleep better. I don't think about expected life, i do it because i want a good life now. If it help, the better.
Do difficult things!
Force yourself and the people who work for you to do
difficult things. It’s usually easy to make
things go well if you’re willing to do difficult things. We must act as
trainers in gyms act in order to keep each other fit. That’s what’s required to
produce the excellence that benefits everyone. It is a law of nature that you
must do difficult things to gain strength and power. As with working out, after
a while you make the connection between doing difficult things and the benefits
you get from doing them, and you come to look forward to doing these difficult
things.
Ray
Dalio, Principle nº75
Ray Dalio (born 1949) is
an American businessman and founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates. In 2012, Dalio was
named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100
most influential people in the world assembled by Time.[1]
In both 2011 and 2012 he was included by Bloomberg
Markets in its 50 Most Influential
ranking.
After
completing his education, Dalio worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and invested in
commodity futures.[3]
He later worked as the Director of Commodities at Dominick & Dominick LLC.[4]
In 1974, he became a futures trader and broker at Shearson Hayden Stone.[3]
In 1975, he founded the Westport, Connecticut based investment
management firm, Bridgewater Associates. As of January 2012,
the company is the largest hedge fund in the world with nearly $120 billion
under management.[3]
Ray Dalio has
written a pdf called "Principles" to share his life and business
management principles with his employees.
PS If you do difficult things you will have less competition. You will fail more but when you win yon can make a lot. In training you have to do intervals if you want to progress. It's not easy to do interval's, you have to leave the comfort zone.
Hiring
Hire Right, Because the Penalties of Hiring Wrong Are Huge
Ray Dalio, Principle nº52
PS The best management system i have seen is from the Jesuits, where they train hard (from St. Ignatius' "Spiritual Exercises", whose purpose is "to conquer oneself and to regulate one's life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment) and then they let them go and do their work. Instead of hiring a lot and keep a leach in their members. I like this system.
Ray Dalio, Principle nº52
PS The best management system i have seen is from the Jesuits, where they train hard (from St. Ignatius' "Spiritual Exercises", whose purpose is "to conquer oneself and to regulate one's life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment) and then they let them go and do their work. Instead of hiring a lot and keep a leach in their members. I like this system.
Wednesday 2 January 2013
There are two types of successful people in this business
"I'm glad the mostly trendless market of 2012 is behind us. Good
times tend follow bad so we're due. In this business, longevity is
key. You must experience a variety of markets: The print money
phase when you can't wait to see how much money you made
overnight. The chop phase when you sit mostly out of the market
wondering if there will ever be any opportunities. And, something
in between where you make a little but then give it up-rinse and
repeat-and wonder if you'll every make any progress. If you
survived 2012, then pat yourself on the back. Your expectations
have been tempered and it won't go to your head when the
market begins to trend. There are two types of successful people
in this business: 1. Those who start during great times but
abandon a simple methodology and begin chasing rainbows as
soon as conditions change. Then, around 10 years later, they
realize that there is no Holy Grail. They then come back to the
simple methodology they started with and grind it out. 2. Those
who start during mediocre conditions and wonder if they'll ever
make a buck consistently but hang in there until conditions
improve. And when conditions do improve, they know that they
won't last forever so it doesn't go to their head. So, if you started
last year and are still here, congratulations! You might have just
shaved 9 years off of your learning curve."
- Dave Landry
PS Last year was a very humiliating year because nothing worked as expected. Last year not to lose money was a wonderful thing. Eventually the markets would be easier to read and the people who stay the course would profit from it.
The only power evil has is the power to destroy itself
No fiat money has lasted for as long as a century. The US has had prior experience with fiat money -- the Civil War Greenbacks, the "Bills of Credit" of the original American colonies, the ill-fated Continentals during the Civil War. None of these have survived, and neither will the Federal Reserve notes that we now refer to as "dollars."
I dislike falling back on the morality argument, but consider this. I may work a lifetime for five million dollars. Yet some academic working for the Federal Reserve can press some keys on a computer and create ten billion dollars instantly without working up a sweat. Is the ten billion dollars he creates moral money? Did anyone work for the money? Did anyone take a risk for the money? Did anyone drop a bead of sweat for it? No, then I claim it is immoral and actually evil money, and as such it is doomed. The only power evil has is the power to destroy itself. I affirm that the Federal Reserve note is doomed. When the Federal Reserve note goes down the drain, all fiat money in the world will go down with it. Today information travels around the world with the speed of NOW. People around the planet will see that fiat money is a fantasy and a counterfeit fraud foisted upon them by unconscionable and unscrupulous bankers. It is then that the crowd will turn to gold, in much the way that people turned to gold back in 1978 to 1980.
Richard Russell
PS I'am not here yet. if the market forces are left alone i think we will witness deflation. There is too much of everything in the world, too much supply! Too many factories, to many worker's too many product. In this kind of world you would expect prices to go down, some players would close shop and the demand supply equation would rebalance at a cheaper price. But governments in the world don't want to hear about factories closing, they want to win the next election! We have a fight that could end as the great Richard Russell says with Gold as the only currency standing alone. But as i said at the moment we have a fight going on.
Tuesday 1 January 2013
What is your job?
Those who work in an office often feel that, despite the proliferation of contrived metrics they must meet, their job lacks objective standards of the sort provided by, for example, a carpenter’s level, and that as a result there is something arbitrary in the dispensing of credit and blame. The rise of “teamwork” has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches. Managers themselves inhabit a bewildering psychic landscape, and are made anxious by the vague imperatives they must answer to. The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. Is all his hard work in school somehow just for show—his ticket to a Potemkin meritocracy? There seems to be a mismatch between form and content, and a growing sense that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false.
PS This days there are many jobs that you can't explain to your mother. If you are a plumber you can explain what you do. It didn't work and now it's working.
Barbell
Nassim Taleb explains the (old, wise) idea of a barbell, or bimodal, strategy as it applies to investments as so: The lion’s share should be allocated extremely conservatively, while the small remaining proportion (perhaps ten percent) should be allocated to the risky business.
That way, roughly ninety percent of the portfolio is (actually) safe, while, therefore, at most ten percent may be lost and much more may be gained.
PS Good point here if you want to make 5% you should put the bulk of your money in safe asset's that can pay 2% and 10% in "crazy" investments that can pay more than 30%. Why is this wise? Because when you buy a Mezzanine product (Nice name that says a little risk) that is designed to pay 5% when there is a crisis (1998,2008, etc...) there is a big migration and the Mezzanine is no longer low risk!