FBI alleges that DC Solar Scammed Berkshire Hathaway for Millions
bloomberg.com
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Ross Chastain, an amazing driver who was a watermelon farmer, was finally getting his big break and going to a very good car with full season sponsorship from DC Solar. (Most drivers in order to succeed need some kind of sponsorship connection and this was one of those amazing talents with few connections guys so fans were super excited).
Literally within a few weeks of the announcement of sponsorship came the news that DC Solar had been raided by the FBI and the sponsorship was off.
Ross Chastain is back running subpar equipment sponsored by his family's watermelon farm business.
It is literally people driving around in a circle in last-century technology, mainly as an advertising platform for selling inefficient non-race vehicles.
We can do better in 2019, and I'd personally be ok if the whole sport shuttered, not just one team.
As a criticism I think this lacks perspective. Presumably you want them to be driving electric cars in a circle. Electric cars are 19th century technology:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/223/electric-car-timeline.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-02/the-history-birth-dea...
Formula E is good. It's improving year by year and the Gen2 car is a clear improvement over the Gen1 car. You can watch past races on their YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/FIAFormulaE
But let's not kid ourselves. Formula E is not yet at the level of Formula 1.
I quit watching hydro races when they switched from Allison V-12s to jet engines. Maybe if they added afterburners, it would make it fun again :-)
No surprise I love steam locomotives, too. Diesel-electric, sorry.
I think we could drive in a figure eight (turn left AND right), or better yet create a Mobius race course.
An amazing innovation of 1970 was the Chaparral 2J race car which used a secondary engine and fans to generate up to 1.5G of downforce.
I'm sure (49 years later) we could come up with some interesting techniques to keep the cars "up on the road" if we go to 3 dimensions.
Doesn’t have to be. It could be a celebration of pointless conversion of electric energy into mechanical energy!
I imagine you don't like Polo much either, but I still find this to be a bit of an odd critique - some sporting events go back thousands of years. In my experience, the intersection of sports and modern technology tends to be controversy - performance enhancing drugs, swimsuits, and the like. What sports do you watch that showcase modern technology?
Secondly, the Venn diagram of NASCAR fans and HN readers shows very little overlap. I am a fan but I don't pretend to think people upvoted me because I mentioned NASCAR. It's because I validated their negative feelings towards DC Solar by giving another example. Maybe bonus points for the quaintness of a family Watermelon farming business sponsoring the scion's racing career.
I'm guessing they are gone because I don't see them on https://www.plugshare.com anymore.
I took a picture of it when I charged there back in February https://jasondavis.org/2019/02/06/SolarDcCharger.html
The question I'd have is why haven't the federal government closed this loophole either way? I understand incentivising solar, but this is rather having the federal government pay the full cost (or more in some cases).
I'm all for that once someone comes up with a rigorous, apolitical calculation for what that value is. It's much easier to identify the existence of unpriced externalities than it is to quantify them. I know people associated with the IMF have attempted to do so[1], but they still admit the calculations are "contentious".
[1] https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA...
Which is just code for "I'll never support this because I'll never believe you". Dismissing something as "policital" is the easiest out. All it takes is for your political enemies to support something and you have a built-in excuse to refuse to believe it. That is exactly the behavior that led to the circumstance we're in right now, where literally half the voting population of the USA straight up refuses to recognize scientific consensus.
So... this isn't helpful. If you really want good analysis, get in there and help with it. Or at least be willing to accept something as "good enough". But what you wrote there is nothing more than a fancy excuse.
I don't believe this is possible for something as wide-ranging as the effects of increased climate change.
Every paper that attempt these estimates use a 'local' projection of (predicted change) * (current prices to mitigate those changes).
But even ignoring the huge error bars around the scale of changes we'll see, the large-scale changes that reach across all of society will also change all the prices as well; not to mention it's not easy to predict far future prices anyway.
This also ignores the fact that the marginal impact of a ton of CO2 in the future depends on how much CO2 is then in the air, which means you're now in the realm of predicting what current politicians will do ... which is inherently political, since it'll make some people look good or bad.
Supposedly, Carbon Engineering is on track to do that for $100/ton CO2.[1] One gallon of gasoline produces 20 lbs of CO2.[2] So 100 gallons makes a ton of CO2 and $100/ton would add $1/gallon to the price of gasoline, not counting a little extra for the energy expended by refineries and so on, and the cost of sequestration.
Climeworks is also targeting $100/ton, and Global Thermostat thinks it can do half that at scale, while the CarbFix project has demonstrated permanent sequestration in basalt formations for $30/ton. [3]
[1] https://www.greenbiz.com/article/case-investing-direct-air-c...
[2] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentIncludes/co2_inc.htm
[3] https://qz.com/1100221/the-worlds-first-negative-emissions-p...
Surely that's more or less an upper bound to the cost of the externality? If it were higher, we would undo it by scrubbing the air, if it were lower, scrubbing wouldn't make economic sense.
I don't think "Let's put the absolute maximum tax on this" is a strategy that works very often.
So we can't just say that the cost of damage must not be so high, or we would already be cleaning it up. There is no "we," there's individual actors and messy politics, full of entities making personal profits who are good at influencing politicians.
On top of that, the costs aren't even paid by us today, they're paid partly by our future selves decades hence, even more by future generations, and impossible to exactly predict. That makes it even easier to focus on today's personal profits and ignore the externalities.
Put another way, this is a public goods problem, where individual efforts make little impact unless everyone does them. Everyone is better off if the problem is fixed, but individually profits more by freeloading. The game theory says individual contributions go to zero. Once again, the only solution we have is political.
And finally, the technology to clean up the mess for $100/ton is just now beginning to emerge. We're not doing it already because we can't do it yet.
Most climate economists estimate the cost of carbon at several hundred dollars per ton. So yes, the cost is higher, and yes, we should scrub the air, once we're able.
You’re already in the game. The clock is ticking and not playing is not an option.
is this something that exists in the realm of economics (nee "political economy")?
Would you agree that the longer we wait, the higher that number will be (Because we will need more drastic reductions, faster)?
> apolitical calculation
Economics is, by nature, political. If we're waiting for that criteria to be met, we are going to be waiting forever.
The issue isn't $10/gallon gas. The issue is $10/gallon gas suddenly.
If everybody knows that gas is going to go up every quarter for the next 10 years, things will adjust. Businesses will start making long-term decision around the increase. People will buy smaller cars and will start screaming for mass transit.
https://theconversation.com/heres-what-the-carbon-tax-means-...
Considering the hysteria that $10/tonne is causing in Canada, I don't think my riots statement is hyperbolic either.
Then you have the fact that transport, and hence fuel, affects the price of most goods, so fears of a recession (decrease in purchasing power) are not unfounded.
Also consider that, while justified as addressing a "tragedy of the commons scenario", rarely do such tax dollars go towards mitigating the externalities in question. The tax would sting less if it was being spent building renewable energy rather, than initiatives that are charitably described as contentious and perhaps more accurately described as pandering. If we could avoid the graft and self-dealing usually associated with federal spending, that would likely cut down on the complaints as well.
And giving the carbon tax back to people as a dividend is not pandering, it's making a highly regressive tax progressive.
Giving money directly to people is the purest and most effective form of economy pumping. So while carbon-intensive businesses are hurt other's will benefit; recession fears are completely overblown.
And the carbon tax is the most efficient form of carbon mitigation strategy. Did you see the recent news about Doug Ford's plan being twice as expensive as the carbon tax?[1] And it is imposes the costs almost exclusively on industry, increasing the chance of a recession much more than the carbon tax it would replace.
1: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/costs-of-ontario-clim...
300$/ton * 8.65kg = 2.6$ per gallon (0.6$ per liter)
100$/ton * 8.65kg = 0.87$ (0.23$ per liter)
30$/ton * 8.65kg = 0.26$ (0.07$ per liter)
7 cent per liter seems quite acceptable. And people are reporting that some companies are targeting that price point for sequestration. Please correct my if I miscalculated something.
People would have to switch to smaller, more fuel efficient cars as they did in Europe, where this is roughly the average price.
You want a carbon tax, put it where it belongs, tax vehicles that return less MPG and priced beyond average car price purchases of the middle class. That Vette over there, bam, 10k extra. That Ferrari, 50k. See that lovely Audi S5 sport coupe, tack on another 10k there too. Tax small planes, tax motorcycles beyond a certain CC and size, but never tax the fuel. To encourage a change in what is an acceptable method of transportation means taxing what you don't want more of, not punishing those who are least able to withstand it let alone are not causing it.
Carbon fee and dividend can avoid the regressive effects of a plain flat carbon tax.
Pretty sure that's already what europeans pay.
The original URI was https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/warren...
"The company was supposed to use the money to build mobile generators, which supply power at sporting events and other outdoor venues. But evidence suggested DC Solar “engaged in nearly no legitimate business,” the government said."
This is uncharacteristic slip of Berkshire Hathaway, isn't it? I am surprised.
Can anyone recall when (if) Berkshire Hathaway invested in a Ponzi scheme before this?
> Here is the essential fact of that alleged scam: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway invested $340 million in it, and in exchange claimed $377 million of income tax benefits.
> The health of the underlying business is irrelevant. Investors don’t need to go to the factories and sporting events to see if the generators are good, because they are not really buying the generators. They are buying the tax benefits, and those are mostly not manufactured in a factory; they are manufactured in spreadsheets and legal documents.
It sounds like you couldn't help but know.
No. I've got the same thing in my RV. Solar panels, big-ass battery, big-ass inverter. It serves the exact same purpose as the propane-powered generator built into the RV (were it not for the air conditioner, I'd just remove it), and it runs on solar. I don't even know what the hell else you'd call it but a "solar generator".