Interesting article about a company you probably haven’t heard of, but one that owns far more onshore oil and gas wells than Exxon.
The strategy is one of buying old “dying” wells to squeeze more life out of them.
The company isn’t short on controversy – the environmental cost of such wells is high (they leak gas) and once done they need to be plugged, which the company seems to do at a fraction of the cost of others.
Interesting contrast in a world of rising energy costs.
“A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.”“
“Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.“
Behind one is a car 🚗. Behind the other two are goats 🐐.
You pick a door. The gameshow host opens another, revealing a goat.
You can choose to stay with your original choice or switch. What should you do? [Give it a try!].
The Monty Hall problem became famous when a columnist, Marilyn vos Savant, known as the world’s smartest woman, said you should switch, resulting in hundreds of letters, including from the brightest minds in mathematics, arguing she was wrong.
This engrossing article by Steven Pinker shines a bright light on this dilemma.
“People’s insensitivity to this lucrative but esoteric information pinpoints the cognitive weakness at the heart of the puzzle: we confuse probability with propensity.”
“A propensity is the disposition of an object to act in certain ways. Intuitions about propensities are a major part of our mental models of the world.“
Probability is “the strength of one’s belief in an unknown state of affairs“
“The dependence of probability on ethereal knowledge rather than just physical makeup helps explain why people fail at the dilemma.“
“They intuit the propensities for the car to have ended up behind the different doors, and they know that opening a door could not have changed those propensities. But probabilities are not about the world; they’re about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.“
Since 2016 net migration from the EU to the UK has fallen.
The pandemic has likely pushed it into negative territory.
Certain sectors – like hospitality, transport, manufacturing, administration and construction – will be hit the hardest as they rely on EU labour for 10-15% of their work force.
Yet according to this article, reality is very far away, if not unachievable.
First, you need a bioreactor facility – even one that is equivalent to 1/3 of all the volume of the entire biopharmaceutical industry today would only yield 22m pounds of lab-grown protein or 0.02% of US meat production.
To get to 10% of global meat consumption in 2030 you need 4,000 of these at a cost of $1.8 trillion.
The bigger problem is these are live animal cells and hence are very vulnerable to any contamination. Bacteria would crush these cells as they grow much faster, while viruses would infect as the culture has no immune system. These cascade shutting down entire production facilities.
The solution – clean rooms – are very expensive.
Full paper on the topic and h/t NZS Capital (which lists many other problems from the article).
