The Market And Energy Page, T+59 -- March 20, 2017; New Definition Of "Cheap" Car -- $70,000; Starting To Make F-350's Look Affordable

Tesla: contributor over at SeekingAlpha on recent capital raise. Tesla to ship immediately once production stars; no "standard" testing according to contributor.

Tesla: Musk Melon kills the "cheap" Model S after less than one year of production.

Less than a year after reintroducing a cheaper 60 kWh battery into its Model S lineup, Tesla will kill off that option in order to “simplify the ordering process.” It sounds like Tesla’s doing that because most people just buy the more expensive version or upgrade to it later.

For those who have never really shopped for a Tesla, the 60 kWh Model S with the shortest range starts at $68,000 for rear-wheel drive. That car is called the Model S 60, and the 60 kWh version with all-wheel-drive, the Model S 60D, starts at $73,000.

That’s compared to the 75 kWh Model S starting at $74,500 for RWD and $79,500 for AWD, and the AWD 90 kWh car that starts at $89,500.

Tesla reintroduced the 60 kWh battery pack in June 2016 with a starting price of $66,000, which went up to $68,000 just a few months later in November.

The cheaper RWD option had a zero-to-60 time of 5.5 seconds and a range of 210 miles at the time of the reintroduction, while the AWD option was faster and had a greater range.

Disclaimer: this blog is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, relationship, or travel plans based on what you read here or think you may have read here.

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Swimming In Oil

A "talking head" on Fox Business -- who I think is very, very good -- says the tea leaves suggest that the world is preparing for war. If war breaks out in the Mideast:

• swimming in oil will mitigate any shipping problems out of the Strait of Hormuz 
• for Saudi Arabia: absolutely cannot survive if its flow of oil stopped

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Five Kingdoms:
An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth
Third Edition
Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz

foreword by Stephen Jay Gould 

 c. 1988 (1982)

DDS: 570.12 MAR

Wow, what a find. A book by Lynn Margulis with a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould. Incredible.

Based on what Stephen Jay Gould had to say in the foreword, it sounds like this book may have been one of the first, if not the first, such books to really make classification of life on earth approachable and understandable. 

I am very, very impressed with the book.

The Five Kingdoms

• Plantae, Animalia, Fungi
• Protoctista (until this book I had never heard of protoctista)
• Eubacteria/Archaebacteria (Archaea)

Copyright goes back to 1988; original back to 1982, and that explains why Margulis "lumps" eubacteria (true bacteria) with archaebacteria (ancient bacteria).

We now know that eubacteria and archaebacteria are entirely separate, and that it was the host cell -- an archaebacteria (somehow) engulfing an endosymbiont (an eubacteria) that eukaroytes appeared on the scene.

Margulis has four kingdoms under SUPERKINGDOM EUKARYA

• Protoctista
• Animalia
• Fungi
• Plantae

Margulis has one kingdom under SUPERKINGDOM PROKARYA; and

• Kingdom Bacteria (Prokaryotae, Procaryotae, Monera)
• Subkingdom Archaea
• Subkingdom Eubacteria

It is now known that Archaea and Eubacteria are two separate kingdoms.

The current three domains: Bacteria (true bacteria, eubacteria); Archaea (ancient bacteria -- turned out not be to be as ancient as true bacteria, it appears); and Eukaryotes.

Bacteria and Archaea are prokaryotes but have entirely different biochemistry.

Fungi: eukaryotes that form chitinous, resistant propagules (fungal spores) and chitinous cell walls and that lack undulipodia (that is, are amastigote, or immotile) at all stages of their life cycle.

Date from the Ordovician period, 450 million to 500 million years ago.

Fungi more closely related to animals than to plants, considering that chitin is the main component both of fungal cell walls and of the arthropod exoskeleton.

Yeasts and molds

• Yeasts: remain as single cells and do not form mycelia
• hyphae: slender tubes that grow from fungal spores
• mycelia: hyphae of an individual fungus collectively called mycelia
• yeasts: produce asexually by budding
• fungi, when forming a sexual stage: spore-bearing structures commonly noticed as molds, jelly fungi, and mushrooms.

Fungi: most resilient of the eukaryotes, though not invulnerable. (see page 351, red squirrels in New England, mushrooms).