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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Whoopdee shit.

If Exxon and Google were both liquidated today which one would produce more cash? Google share prices reflect a speculator's premium. Exxon's better reflect the value of the underlying assets.

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By all means sell Google and buy Exxon. Check back with us in 10 years about how that went.

> Exxon's better reflect the value of the underlying assets.

That's like valuing a car based on the price of the steel it contains instead of where it can take you.

> By all means sell Google and buy Exxon. Check back with us in 10 years about how that went.

I am actually going to try to track this (and I don't mean that in a bad way). I am honestly curious about this over the next 10 years.

You don't really have to track it. Just set a google calendar event for 10 years from now, and look back at the stock history then.

If somehow google services go away and you don't get that event reminder, the question may be moot by then... not really, but an interesting thought anyways.

    By all means sell Google and buy Exxon. Check back with
    us in 10 years about how that went.

Note that the expected growth of Google relative to Exxon is already priced into their market caps.

Exxon is sitting on a resource that will soon be replaced with a more efficient one: electricity. It is much, much, much cheaper to produce electricity in coal or nuclear plants and charge cars to run on the road than it is to refine gasoline and pump it into cars.

Google is sitting on top of the most amount of information ever collected by any profit-seeking organization ever.

Skate where the pucks going man.

25 years ago, you might have said DEC was the puck.

15 years ago, Yahoo.

The ball is round, the game is 90 minutes. Everything else is just theory.

And 15 years ago you might have said Apple was overvalued. It goes both ways. But "value of the underlying assets" is a poor way to gauge a growth stock.

15 years ago Apple was a dividend paying manufacturing company. It had not been a growth stock for many years. 15 years ago the standard wisdom was AOL and Pets.com.

More efficient? Are you on drugs?

In fact electricity driving cars is so much more efficient that you could burn gas in power plants and it would still outpace crude internal combustion engines.

That's mostly the difference between large, highly efficient internal combustion engines, and the small, less efficient but extremely portable, performat, and actually-obscenely-sophisticated internal combustion engines in cars.

Electricity is simply efficient-enough of a transmission medium that it does not eat up all of the savings.

How does it make coal or atomic energy more efficient than oil? You get electricity by burning them. When you burn either coal or oil, you loose 70% of energy. Then, you loose delivering the electric power and charging the accumulators. Finally, you have losses in the electric car. You are left with at best 10% of what the coal has supplied. Oil is higly concentrated energy. It could provide you 30% of the energy it contains into kinetic energy of the vehicle.

So, which efficiency are you talking about? Is it the efficiency of warming the planet up? You are on the right track! Burning more carbon fuel is what we crucially need in our age of peak-everything!

Because you only use the explosive power of gasoline when you use it in a car and because you idle much of it away. The savings from transmission and charging do not account for the biggest waste of energy: lack of thermo use in internal combustion engines.

I speak about efficiency per unsubsidised dollar which is generally a rough correlator for usable work per input fuel.

What?

When you use liquid fuel in an engine you are taking advantage of the fact that the fuel converts into a gas quickly and thus increases the relative pressure enough to transfer momentum to the piston head which ultimately powers the drivetrain.

In an electric power plant, this is only part of the equation, the other part is that you also use the excess heat to drive a glycol or water / steam turbine system, recovering much more energy from the fuel.

This makes up for the losses of electricity in the lines. furthermore, nuclear power is by far the safest and most energy efficient source of power. Cheaper, safer, and far more environmentally friendly than a distributed gasoline delivery and combustion system.

Oil isn't only used as a motor fuel, and the pace at which it is displaced as a motor fuel is unlikely to be great enough to prevent oil companies from continuing to make increasing profits selling it.

This is a very cut-and-dry explanation that sells Exxon's future value (and our reliance on petroleum products) way short.

Production of electricity is more efficient than production and refinement of fossil fuels. BUT, Expenditure and distribution of that energy as electricity is less efficient for use as a transportation fuel (as I understand it; correct me if I'm wrong!). This is particularly true for heavy-load transportation like 18-wheelers and industrial applications. Until battery and electric motor technology improves to provide more torque for longer periods of time, fossil fuel will be responsible for moving our STUFF around via diesel motors. The moving of that STUFF still represents the majority of our transportation fuel burned.

Exxon is also a very large investor in electric vehicle battery tech, which will be one of the key technologies to change our transportation reliance from fossil to renewable.

Also don't forget about plastics as a petroleum product; I think it will be some time before we replace plastics as a common building material.

Granted, Exxon only spends ~3% of their profits on research of any sort, which is probably less than their advertising budget, and they spend less in a year on R&D than Google does in a quarter.

I don't really mean to start an argument, and I do hear your point. Exxon is the leader in a dying business. Still, Exxon isn't ignoring the puck. They're probably as aware as anyone where the short-comings of fossil fuel transportation start and stop, and they are as interested as anyone in technology that will upend that industry.

It is more efficient to generate power in a power plant, transmit the energy, then drive a car with it.

This is especially true when you take into account cheaper electricity at night, and regenerative breaking.

The expensive part right now is the upfront cost of lightweight batteries, and the small economics of scale.

But battery technology is continuously improving, so is economics of scale, and electricity production from non-fossil fuel sources.

I'm not saying Exxon is dead, I'm just saying that it is insane to ignore what is right in front of us. If gasoline doubles in price once more (in real terms) then the internal combustion engine is over.

My thoughts exactly, but you said it so concisely.

>If Exxon and Google were both liquidated today

Well, that's exactly it, isn't it? Google has more potential for the future than Exxon.

Assessing future value is the point of the stock market, isn't it?

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