Courage, Hope, and Exercise

Here is Tom Friedman on Liz Cheney and Neil Young.

What do they have in common?  Courage.

Hey, long-suffering shareholders — here is the Borealis annual report.

The Chairman’s Letter is upbeat.

I can accurately paraphrase the otherwise incomprehensible financial section this way: there were no revenues, there were expenses, they’re still in business.

The company is currently valued at $25 million (5 million shares outstanding at $5 each).  That’s less by a lot than the cost of a single new narrow-body commercial jet, of which, last I looked, there were about 17,000 in service worldwide.  By cutting what could wind up being 15 minutes or more off the ground time of each flight — 75 minutes, say, for a plane that makes five hops a day — the WheelTug system in which Borealis owns a majority interest could wind up adding 10% or 15% more capacity to the global fleet, the equivalent of perhaps 2,000 new planes . . . and without airlines’ having to hire a single new pilot or flight attendant.

Airports would gain significant capacity, as well . . . without having to build a single new runway or terminal.  Just by having planes sitting at the gate a shorter time.

Will this ever come to fruition?

Dunno.

Hope so.

(I’ve been listening to David McCullough’s wonderful The Wright Brothers.  There’s so much I never knew about “Kitty Hawk!”  Amazing what they did, how it changed the world, and how far we’ve come from 1903 in the virtual blink of an eye.  Obviously, the significance of what WheelTug is attempting is vanishingly small by comparison.  But in both cases, it had never been done; almost everyone said it couldn’t be; and, at least in the case of Wilbur and Orville, they just kept at it and at it and at it and at it . . . and guess what?)

Have you done your BrainHQ today? 

Did you see how Tom Brady’s stats compare with everyone else’s?  One thing he’s long swore by that could account for his being such an outlier — an edge he’s had over the competition to keep him sharp — is BrainHQ.

The studies just keep coming.

For example, from a Defense Department study of mild traumatic brain injury:

Participants who used BrainHQ made significant gains in cognitive performance – four times bigger than the computer games control and comparable in size to moving from the 50th to the 74th percentile on a bell curve. The benefits persisted when measured three months after training.

Hit the deck, buster!