Market -- March 6, 2019

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Dow: down slightly in early trading. 

TSLA: up $1.45, trading at $277.27.

• Tesla competitor Nio abandons factory plans; steep financial loss; shares plummet; link here; 
• Tesla faces the same headwinds as Nio in China: smaller subsidies for EVs going forward
• Nio Inc:
• Chinese EV carmaker
• abandons plans to build its first factory
• will instead contract out to a larger automker
• shares fell more than 17% in early trading
• the company had a quick start to 2019
• employs several hundred people at US HQ in San Jose, CA (Silicon Valley)
• it began selling its 7-seater SUV, the ES8, in China in June
• ended the year delivering 11,348 cars to customers
• Palo Alto-based Tesla and Nio locked in a race for China
• China remains the world's single-biggest market for electric cars
• scheduled to release its 5-seat ES6 SUV later this year
• reason for slowdown in deliveries: yup, you guessed it -- smaller Chinese subsidies for EVs
• again, renewable energy can't compete without subsidies (upstream, midstream, downstream)
• with the one-child rules for decades, why would anyone in China need a 7-seater SUV?
• 2018:
• revenue: $720 million
• profit/loss: $1.4 billion loss

GE: down another 5% in early trading.

NOG: down 2% in early trading; now, trading below $2.27.

CVX: flat to slightly red

SRE: flat to slightly red

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Re-Posting

The Word For The Day: Trope

Originally posted January 19, 2015.

Trope: A literary trope is the use of figurative language – via word, phrase, or even an image – for artistic effect such as using a figure of speech. Kenneth Burke has called metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony the "four master tropes."

I think we all "know" irony and metaphor even if we don't always use the former correctly. The word "metonym" is less well known but used all the time, such as "Wall Street" to refer to the US financial sector, or "Hollywood" to refer to the US film industry.

I see "synecdoche" often but never seem to remember what it means. Very similar to synonym but a bit more imaginative, such as "hired hands" for workers; "bread" for food; "cat" for lion, and so forth.

Early on with the blogging I discussed how "the Bakken" was used in at least three different contexts. I began using "the Bakken" as a literary trope for US unconventional oil some years ago.

I am re-posting this because of this in Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, c. 1986, page 461, around April, 1943, shortly after Robert Oppenheimer move to Santa Fe:

[Robert Serber] was already calling the bomb "the gadget," its nickname thereafter on the Hill (Los Alamos), a bravado metonymy that Oppenheimer probably coined.

I'm wondering if "the gadget" is more of a synecdoche for the "nuclear bomb being developed" rather than a metonym.