347 karma · joined August 28, 2012
I've coached a First team that has qualified to go to worlds the last four years and been on the Einstein field once in that time. I think you'd learn a few things - robots are built to solve problems and the most technically complex and advanced robots don't always solve problem better than simple elegant designs. - Robots involve multiple skills and usually get built by teams where members are specialists in specific fields. Some people will understand all of the robot sub systems but
The US does import some low quality cheaper crudes (heavy, sour) to be processed by US refineries that have much higher complexity and capital investment than other regions. Effectively people send their OIL to the US to be refined and that is where most of our imports come from.
Also they often engineer things so the money the fund put into the deal comes back very fast. In this case they sold the companies real estate which got a big chunk of their initial investment back ASAP.
the simplified view - red lobster they bought it for $2.1b - they sold off the real estate for $1.5b and 25% of the equity for $575m - so the PE fund has $25m of their original investment in the deal. They borrowed a bunch of money and then paid out dividends on that $25m that were multiples times that amount.
A sweep account is a very common business account and most banks offer this, if you don't pick it based on your balances they'll call you up and try and sell you this service. SVB strangely did not have this product for some reason.
What happens in pipelines is a lot of the same stuff goes into the pipeline aka "one big slug" at the same time. In between slugs stuff gets mixed and that becomes transmix which gets bought and sold (at a discount) and usually reprocessed and reused. Pipeline scheduling is done to reduce transmix - if high grade gasoline is next to low grade gasoline the transmix could potentially be sold as low grade gasoline.
Here is a simple overview on blending https://inside.mines.edu/~jjechura/Refining/11_Blending_Opti...
If you want good information you don't go to youtube videos. There is a huge crossover between gold standard videos and a lot of other fringe and hate group ideas so I'd really suggest you don't watch them.
Just the wiki article on the Gold standard is going to be much better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard
If you really want to understand read any editions of economics by samuelson from after 1980 that textbook has been in print and updated since 1948.
Tether, well who knows? Tether has cash + nothing which very likely is less than the redemptions they may face. If people want to get real cash out tether has no one to go to to make sure they have cash.
Not that people pay attention today but if you read your states laws there are limits to what corporation can do, be named, etc.
But there are some fringe ideas that float in the silver world. The market manipulation people are largely people who don't understand how commodity markets work. Yes big traders can push the market around a bit, but they do it to make money. This is a very different thing from GME.
Silver may go up, but I'd be pressed to see it crack $100 an ounce for more than a moment. Lots of stashed silver will flow into the market pushing the price downwards.