drinkzima

Commissions don't decide peak power prices, the marginal producers of power do. And, yes, natural gas is a large portion of the power stack, but peak days (which only happen a nominal number of times per year) are driven by plants that come online for short periods of time at high marginal costs.

Power companies just pass through market rates, they are mostly ambivalent to driving down rates as they just tax tolls on each transaction.

People don't fully appreciate how long the tails get on power pricing when alternate sources have to come online. Not uncommon to see 10x base pricing a few times per year: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=9510

He also fails to mention that the last 3 TC Disrupt winners in SF have been Crunchfund companies...

Layer - http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/11/and-the-winner-of-techcrunc... YourMechanic - http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/techcrunch-disrupt-sf-2012-... Shaker [edit, they may only be in the runner-up, Prism Skylabs] - http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/and-the-winner-of-techcrunc...

I'd love to see an analysis of the risk embedded in the future profits that everyone talks about. What these analyses completely ignore is that Amazon's future cash flows are risky, while the current cashflows at the dying business are not.

There are countless examples of giant companies that haven't realized the enormous future cashflows embedded in their stock prices. It is obvious that Amazon generates lots and lots of revenue, no one disagrees with that. What remains an open question is will they be able to ease off of massive infrastructure investment and actually harness the future profitability that everyone seems certain of at this point.

These straw man arguments that profit-less companies have huge market caps so they will turn hugely profitable ignores the actual argument of whether they can actually achieve that. Can profit does not equal will profit.

Perspective: http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=TSLA&p=D&yr=3&mn=0&dy=0&id=...

TSLA has been on a moonshot, it is "tumbling" all the way back to September prices.

It probably makes the most sense to just look at advertising as a share of GDP or some sort of sales metric (this page indicates it has been pretty stable for the last 50+ years: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/can-newspaper-publishers-su...).

There isn't any obvious reason it would drop over time, I think the bigger question is how will advertising evolve over time.

Did I miss something or is there a massive correlation vs causation issue with this article?

I actually agree with the premise, but I also know that my lowest-value, highest-boredom moments are spent on Facebook, so it seems like there could be a pretty large variable in the analysis that is getting ignored (underlying boredom levels).

Here is the actual report: http://electrificationcoalition.org/sites/default/files/EC_S...

Let's also not ignore the obvious conflict of interest in a group promoting electric vehicle sales trying to speak about actual statistics. As mentioned, BMW sold 172k cars, Mercedes Benz 182k, Audi 87k for total of 441k. Tesla at ~10k, 2% of above (though all ~$100k).

If you want model to model comparison, the model S clearly doing fine though, all depends on the headline you want I guess: http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/13/autos/tesla-sales-bmw-merced...

The Taproot Foundation is exactly that mission, donation of pro bono work: http://www.taprootfoundation.org/

My fault, numbers backwards, 1-2% should be 98-99%.

TLDR: Lots of businesses don't succeed in venture and if you are of the 1-2% of businesses that receives funding and doesn't succeed than you should have postponed/avoided VC.

Bad logic and even worse advice.

As mentioned above, this launched in mid 2011: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/09/early-look-at-our-f...

Also accompanied by Google Hotel Finder: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-hotel-finder... https://www.google.com/hotelfinder

It seems to be the AirBnB's effort to build more and more community into the platform puts the business at odds with its ultimate growth driver (replacing/substituting hotels). This just feels like another step to move the company further away from a hotel-replacement and more towards an online community, which feels more niche.

I'm not sure what the solution is to making hosts feel more comfortable with strangers, but stuff like this just makes me want to use the platform less.

Love this, to chime in with suggestions, something with color indicating inbound/outbound would be awesome for seeing through some of the noise. Love the line selection idea as well.

The title obviously isn't your fault, but this is nothing but click bait. Not really related to Google other than existing in their store.

You can pretty much stop reading any article once you hit 'stock dropped because', save maybe earnings announcements. Cause and effect of a 2% move in a stock as volatile as FB is just silly.

The math looks off on the 50% vol 30 day option. No way a $50-strike option on a stock at $25 would be pricing at $20. Unless you mean 50% non-annualized vol, which would not be very conventional.

Wildcard operator pretty much solves this: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=I+cant+stand+all+*+your+li...

https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=11&sourc...

From quarterly report: As of June 30, 2012, cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were $1.6 billion

This is out of their current market cap of ~2.5B. Facebook down 7% after hours too. Honestly looks like an over-reaction that shows investor worries about new business models.

Dangerous time trying to exit a social gaming company methinks.

Between the 0% real rate of return on investments, 0% cost of selling your home, no HOAs, this seems to low-ball cost of ownership by at least 10%. Couldn't even come within 10 years of the NYTimes rent vs buy with my assumptions. Not to mention that this uses a 4% mortgage rate and then offers consumers 4.65% loans.

But when putting people in loans in the only way to monetize, it is going to be hard to give unbiased advice.

Im guessing author used data like this (http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/02/01/rich-o-meter-20/) which is household, not individual

Only 5M US millionaires. So math problems somewhere: http://www.cnbc.com/id/47631154

He could just divide the CPC by the conversion rate and figure this out in about one sentence:

$1.53/0.015 = $101.33

Isn't the whole point that if these Hacker News G+ results are good they should be shown to everyone and if they aren't then they should not.

This isn't a 'social' problem it's a ranking problem, right?

Google doesn't editorialize. What do you mean allowed?

We have not seen any good numbers, so we stuck with the assumption nytimes uses. 10% does seem generous.

Thanks for the reply. I agree that there are indeed cases where daily deals do make sense. We actually highlight zero fixed cost businesses as being an excellent candidate for daily deals, which is almost exactly the walking tour you highlight.

We don't mean to infer deals do not work, but rather opportunity costs are very important to consider.

We definitely agree that the market for daily deals is over-saturated, and there will be tons of failures/exits (see Facebook, Yelp). That said, the doesn't really change the calculations for small businesses. They are either being helped by the current structure of daily deals or they aren't.

It is obvious that the model needs to be tweaked if these companies actually want to help local businesses. Things like Groupon Now are trying to do that, but the factors we discuss in this post hopefully lay out what small businesses need to be thinking about before they sign up for deal. Opportunity cost is a real cost.