Interesting stuff

I can have a try at that one ID - say you are a Canadian tar sands producer, your oil is energy intensive to produce and takes a lot of rail/pipeline to ship to a refinery. At $100 a barrel with world production barely ahead of demand, no probs. But - in a coronavirus pandemic where a massive decrease in demand occurs (lockdowns) - the fields keep pumping, the refineries keep refining; then the refinery storage fills, then all other places of storage fill, but your field keeps pumping... You suddenly can't sell it at any price.. no one wants it from your location. So you end up 'paying' to get rid of your oil. Hence -$3.14 last night for one of the Canadian condensate spot prices.

So in a voluntary administration for Virgin, do the debts get written off, or assets - debts = return (if any) to shareholders? What happens to bondholders, if any bonds issued?

Do they try and keep the workforce flying (those gov routes) while all the financials are sorted out?

velocityjohnno

Ok thanks, i get the idea, wow that's crazy.

Here's oil storage full story:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/markets/world-e2-80-99s-biggest-oil-st...

Edit: Jaysus, WTI got as low as -$40.32 per barrel overnight! These are truly historic times, people!

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/oil-price-wti-positive-after-historic...

I think the Bight is safe for a while.

More financial questions: can you hire a supertanker and fill it with oil and park it for a few months, and is that OK to do that within a super fund?

"So in a voluntary administration for Virgin, do the debts get written off, or assets - debts = return (if any) to shareholders? What happens to bondholders, if any bonds issued?"

@vj, crikey I thought that was your department?! I've got nothing.
What I do know if you're an unused ticket holder you're probably last on the list to get refunded.

"We'll come back leaner, stronger and fitter,..."

No that's not a coach from a sports team. It was Virgin Australia boss Paul Scurrah today.

Time will tell.

Cheers for the link vj re the oil storage/price.

I've got a super-tanker for hire, but I'm not sure you could afford it ;)

WOL - I could afford it: I imagine shipping rates are through the floor (no demand) and if I scored the -$40.32 sale, I could be paid big time to load that big bertha tanker, which would probably pay for the hire costs!

All I would then need is Dennis Hopper and his goons on jetskis to protect it.

Not a good time to be in the shale or tar sands oil business. The USA and Canada are going to be in a world of shit for the foreseeable future.

Wow. What a trading session overnight. Total carnage. Here's a very good write up of what happened and why it happened:

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/who-was-forced-liquidate-oil-today...

" Today's move was similar, as many inexperienced traders suddenly realized that instead of an asset, oil had become a liability, having only hours to find a place where to receive delivery of physical barrels of oil, and failing to do that, finding a greater fool to dump the deliverable obligation to. Only it wasn't so easy.

As a result, a game of explosive hot potato (or rather highly flamable black gold) ensued around noon, when the deliverable WTI contract hit $10, its drop accelerating in an increasingly bidless market, before triggering hundreds of $0.01 stops, at which point oil plunged vertically, crashing $40 dollars in minutes.

As Roger Diwan explained in further detail, "speculators found themselves unable to resell the WTI contract, and have no storage booked to get delivered the crude in Cushing, OK, where the delivery is specified in the contract. This means that all the storage in Cushing is booked, and there is no price they can pay to store it, or they are totally inexperienced in this game and are caught holding a contract they did not understand the full physical aspect of as the time clock expires." "

And that is an event for the ages.

Social distancing Indo style (waiting for food handouts)

Ah the gloves. I've been using them when opening deliveries, but always making sure I'm near the Ms when putting them on my hands, and always with a suggestive lift of the eyebrows.

Shale oil production is highly polluting so big win for the environment atm. The drop in oil price should flow through to all energy commodities inc: coal and therefore a massive set back to Adani ..... faaark, barnyard is gunna explode

I will just leave this here.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/why-australian-white-supremacists-and-neo-na...

Towards the bottom of that article, pretty funny trying to link 5G and antivaxers to far right groups all that tin foil hat stuff sure isn't a right or left thing, people on either side are into it heavily id say the worst are what my wife calls "universe people" general far left leaning new age types.

I mean FFS look in the App thread most people here are left leaning but there is empty cardboard rolls all over the place in there.

GS - massive win for the environment, I think I read total 2020 emissions will be down 20% or so as well. The most expensive, polluting extractive energy should be going offline unless it's bailed out via the QE, IMO. Shutting China for a month saw far less pollution, and fish are returning to Venice waterways, etc

https://www.investing.com/indices/indices-futures

handy little page where you can see the futures for most things each night before NY opens. Tonight WTI seems to have shifted to the June contract and that's down 26%, index futures down a bit but well within recent volatility, commodity complex is copping a paddlin'.

I have a suspicion that some of those fish might have always been there just not visible because of the turbidity in the water. It'll take the flick of a boat prop to make it all invisible again though...

I have a suspicion that some of those fish might have always been there just not visible because of the turbidity in the water. It'll take the flick of a boat prop to make it all invisible again though...

I have a suspicion that some of those fish might have always been there just not visible because of the turbidity typical of the water there. It'll take the flick of a boat prop to make it all invisible again though...

What has been interesting is watching all the so called truths of investment being turned on its head.

For the last few years when a lot of managers and businesses have been racking up debt and paying too much for assets or funding bonuses for a job well done, guys like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger have refused to give up the principles of sound investing. They have copped criticism lately because the growth of their company was less than others mainly because even if a company was a good one, they wouldn’t pay an inflated price for it. Now they are sitting on $130 billion in cash and that’s not a misprint. Our government is spending $130 billion AUD on JobKeeper and Berkshire has $130 billion US in cash.

Buffet says you have to have reserves too look after yourself at all times. A good lesson for households not just companies.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das is a good read about how we got here.

"Extreme Money" - great read.

Flipid yep the fundamentals never go away and what a time to buy!

.

Because the estimates haven't eventuated, then models aren't science and cannot predict the future. Therefore, we must have been lied to and 'thems' are controlling us?

Lay off the choongs, china plate.

The interesting question related to modelled predictions failing is which assumptions (inputs into the model) ended up being incorrect and why.
(Of course it's possible that the model is made to look worse than it is due to being compared to bad real-world data too - could that be the case here?)

Anyone got anything on that?

I'd say the most likely reason is social distancing reduced the R nought value here.

For Indo and other tropical asian and African countries it might be as simple as temperature/UV light.

The models are basically very simple. Look up SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) modelling.

The first tricky part is knowing how infectious and how fatal a virus is, which is really fucken hard without perfect and perfectly consistent data. And that doesn't exist :-)

The second tricky bit is then applying the model to a country's specific demographics, socio-economic factors, seasonal bias (flu is a killer in N Hemi winters), social habits (Italians kiss and gather in churches; Swedes are stand-offish, etc), and so forth.

So it quickly becomes a complete Charlie Foxtrot, and I do think that some modellers got a bit carried away. Otherwise it'd be hard to see where they'd get the 80000 deaths in NZ from, e.g.

On the other hand, science would not exist without modelling. For instance, Newton's Laws are models, and they a simple and beautiful and have worked for centuries. But they only describe so much, and only at some levels.

Others are infinitely more complex and works in progress.

On the other hand, science would not exist without modelling. For instance, Newton's Laws are models, and they a simple and beautiful and have worked for centuries. But they only describe so much, and only at some levels.

Thanks for some clarity, Island Bay. The Heliocentric model comes to mind too! I think people under and overestimate the usefulness of models.

Thanks IB, I'll look that up.

My background is in physics, maths and engineering, and I did a thesis in computational fluid dynamics, so I understand models in general but I've got very little knowledge of medical science.

Pops I have a mate in WA whose expertise is pumping slurries. I'm sure you two could pass hours and hours in fascinating discussion.

I don't either, Pops :-)

I have a physics degree and work as a meteorologist, but have boned up a lot on med/epidemics modelling lately.

My comment was mostly for Blowin's benefit, as he seemed to have lost the faith in science. Don't, mate!

Cromwell, I've been cooped up for long enough in the bloody lockdown that I can't tell if that's a dig at me or not anymore (if it was, fair enough, I'm probably coming across as a bit of a wanker).

To be fair I'm sure I'd be able to learn something from your mate.

There’s an amazingly high level of expertise across many scientific disciplines on this forum. As for me, we’ll if you need a hole smashed in the side of your house and then filled in again with some random building products for an outrageously high price then I’m your man. Ha ha!

Not a dig Pops, just a factoid. He used to try and explain the wonders of complex fluid dynamics to me as we travelled around. My eyes glazed over after 30s. It occurred to me that you would have something to say to each other and that you might have run into him along the way. He gets around. His name is Jeff Bremer.

Right, my bad. I was reading sh*t in that wasn't there.
I'm not working in the CFD area - no jobs in CFD-based analysis of surfboard design, and I don't have the cash or knowhow to set up my own business yet - so I probably wouldn't run into him, but I probably actually would enjoy chatting to him!

Have you done much on the fluid dynamics of surfborads Pops? I have always argued that design progressed primarily by artificial selection......good boards breed more copies than bad ones.

That's what my thesis was on, yeah. Can't make too many broad-sweeping statements since I was more looking at developing techniques for analysis and applying them to fairly rudimentary design aspects as test cases.

I did a bit of research into the history of board design as part of it too, and it seemed that yeah, good boards bred copies, but so did competitively successful boards, perhaps more so, whether "good" or not. Designs that contests were won on tended to sell better.

@Blowin

Im confused about Indonesia and it's numbers too

But just saw this:

Testing per one million people

Indonesia= 136
Malaysia = 2,988
Singapore=16,203
Australia =16,600

I agree, i don't totally understand it.

They say that the heat isn't really a factor, but if it was it would explain a lot.

CFD on surfboard design has been bouncing around in the back of my head for a while! I'd love to experiment with parametric / algorithmic design of boards or fins using CFD. But once you start considering the environments in which they're used you start to realise working out what question you want to ask is as hard as answering it.

On the environment stuff. I'm actually pretty concerned that a crash in fossil fuel prices will prolong their use and negatively affect the uptake of renewables. Thinking electric cars are dependent on a high fuel price to be competitive. Could for example delay some of the hydrogen commercialisation by a couple of years - I'm really hanging out for this to take off. If we're going to live under a free market / capitalist rule (can't see this changing) then we need this stuff to be cheaper than fossil fuels as soon as possible.

If anyone's interested, here's a primer on exponential growth:

And for further geeking, a video on modelling an epidemic:

This guys is freaking good maths communicator, and uses visual tool really well.

Just looking at the stats https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Indonesia is at 7,135 cases and 616 deaths

India is at 20,111 cases and 645 deaths

So realistically Indonesia could really be closer to 20K cases.

But per capita or per one million of population they are still very low figures even for India 0.3% compared to us and NZ at 3%

You would have thought places like India would be like over a million by now.

birdfood, yup, it's really bloody difficult to use it as a tool for ground-up design; I found it more useful for comparative analysis (take two different models and look at the performance differences between them in a qualitative & quantitative way).