Commentary -- July 24, 2015

I recently received a note from my bank that terms have changed. The fee for a "returned check" or a "bounced check" or an "overdraft" or whatever  you call it, has been raised from $24 to $27 or something like that. I didn't pay much attention to it. It's the cost the bank says it incurs when they have to hire someone to electronically punch in changes to your checking account, what with all the ObamaCare costs and the Dodd-Frank (or is it Frankly Dodge?) law.

With net metering, one has solar panels on one's roof or wind turbines in one's back yard. If the system generates more electricity than one is using, one argues that one can simply reverse the flow back to the utility and get full credit. What happens if there's a lineman on the pole and thinks he has cut the electric power and doesn't know that Farmer Joe is sending electricity his way (I don't know how electricity works, so maybe that's not a problem)?

Although the wires and poles are already there, Farmer Joe is using said wires and said poles, and certainly there must be some fair value Farmer Joe should pay for using said wires and said poles. Sort of like if I put my private locomotive on BNI or CSX or UNP railroad tracks; hey, the tracks are already there, I should be able to use them for free.

And, then of course, you have that same someone at the utility who has to manage the meters and manage the computers to account for all that electricity coming and going. Something tells me this portion alone costs more than what it costs a bank to cover overdrafts.

The utilities also have to add additional conventional capacity to provide back-up for those times when the sun isn't shining or the wind is blowing too fast or too slow.

The utilities also have to hire programmers to manage the grid to account for spikes in in-coming electricity when the sun comes up and then the drop-off of electricity coming in when the sun sets. And do the same on rainy days.

I don't know, but it seems all of that would cost someone some money. German utility companies learned the hard way.

So, now we have this story from Midwest Energy News: Iowa farmer says he will remove solar if co-op's $85 fixed charge stands.

A small rural electric cooperative in Iowa has informed its 3,000 customer-members that, should they install solar panels or other distributed generation, they will pay what appears to be one of the highest monthly charges in the nation.

Pella Cooperative Electric sent out a notification on June 18 alerting customers that the “facilities fee,” which is the fixed part of the monthly bill, will triple from $27.50 per month to $85 per month – but only for customers with solar panels or another source of their own generation.

If the co-op does back off, it's making a huge mistake. Even if Farmer Joe says he won't ask for payment for the electricity he's putting back into the system, he still adds the cost to the system as noted above. 

A public utility is regulated by PUCs/PSCs. My hunch is that PUC/PSCs have watched this play out in Germany and will proceed with caution. I do not know if co-ops are similarly regulated by PUCs/PSCs; I suppose I could look it up. But I won't. The story says Farmer Joe will file a complaint with the Iowa Utilities Board.

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Apple

Disclaimer: I am Apple fan boy #3. I think I grabbed that position about 20 years ago; I forget when I first used that as my screen name over at Macrumors or some such site. And no one has challenged; statute of limitations has run its course.

Anyone that follows Apple has to aware of the hubbub over the Apple Watch. There are two issues commonly discussed:

• the Apple Watch is a toy; an unneeded solution to what?; a cultural flop; etc...
• the Apple Watch will never move the earnings needle

With regard to the first question, whether the watch is needed? Prior to Apple launching the watch, all we heard was "when is Apple going to launch a smart watch?"  The underlying assumption was that a trillion-dollar fashion company needed to have a watch to complete its stable of devices, from the very, very tiny to the very, very big. Apple without and Apple Watch would always be  and "Apple, but no Apple Watch, Company."

Even if the first iteration "fails" miserably, Apple needs to keep its Apple Watch line.

With regard to the second question, whether the Apple Watch will ever move the earnings needle? This is what's wrong with accounting in American. Apple investors see the Apple Watch, like all products in "cost/profit" terms.

In fact, the costs of developing the Apple Watch need to come from Apple's advertising budget. Apple Watch is the biggest advertisement for Apple right now and mainstream media is doing it for free. Quick: take away the Apple Watch and is Farmer Joe interested in Apple any more. Nope, it's just a phone company.

But much more importantly, the costs of developing the Apple Watch need to come from Apple's R & D budget. Jobs and Cook (or is it Cook and Jobs? which has a better ring to it) gave the Apple engineers an impossible job. Squeeze a battery that lasts seven days into a watch. The watch needs to have a bluetooth component so it can communicate with other devices. It needs a computer chip, the best in the market, to run a gazillion apps. It needs to have a device to pick up human speech in order to take verbal commands. It's needs to have something inside it to sense movement so it can alert the wearer that she has not moved in 20 minutes. It has to monitor the wearer's heart rate. And, again, put all of this this inside something incredibly small and something incredibly thin.

The engineers succeeded in most areas -- not the battery. Maybe it last 36 hours depending upon how you use the watch. But the engineers learned a lot and Apple learned a lot. A lot of those smaller components are going to be found in other Apple devices.

I assume I will eventually get an Apple Watch, maybe version 10.5 when I get an iPhone, some years from now. I'm thrilled that Apple has the Apple Watch because it will make all the Apple devices I'm already using that much better.

If Apple can squeeze all that stuff into an incredibly small and incredibly thin watch, think how much they can cram into the dashboard of your Honda Camry.

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Amazon Shares Surge 20%; Market Cap Surpasses Wal-Mart

CNBC is reporting:

Amazon shares spiked in early trading Friday after the online retailer blew past quarterly earnings and revenue estimates, boosted by growth in the North American market and cloud computing segment.

Shares rose 20 percent, giving the retailer a larger market capitalization than bricks-and-mortar behemoth Wal-Mart.

The surge also generated a huge windfall for CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns 83,921,121 shares of the company. At Friday's early prices, his fortune rose some $8.05 billion—a gain that by itself would be enough to put him in the world's 200 richest people. 

Someone once said that $8.05 billion is more money than anyone needs. Why do people need so much money, they ask, suggesting that it needs to be redistributed. 

Let me tell you why some folks need $8.05 billion. This is from the "food and drink" review section near the front of every issue of The New Yorker, June 29, 2015, page 15, on a review of Lupulo, an up-scale restaurant on Sixth Avenue, NYC:

Giant, ruby-red prawns known as carabineros, flown in seasonally from Portugal, are grilled, head on, until they're just cooked, their perfume nearly floral, their flavor lush and buttery. At thirteen dollars per shrimp, their juices must be sopped. 

And that's why some people need $8.05 billion. 

Having said that, grilling the shrimp head on seems to be something important I had not thought about before. Next time I grill carabineros, I will grill them with the head on.