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NigelM
Recovering Member
Nobody should doubt that LPP is a huge gamble; it's basically all or nothing. There's no real value in the current shares and no market for them, no on-going way to track development, value or results; but if you win, you win big. OTOH don't forget it's also quite possible that, even if the whole thing works, investors will be relying on one scientist working in a garage not changing his mind and selling out.
NigelM
Recovering Member
I agree his credentials are good but I'll still admit to some skepticism that a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement is going to make millions for his shareholders. An anti-capitalist who'll make you rich sounds like an oxymoron.
Now, I don't know the man at all and can't vouch for his moral credentials, but it occurs to me that someone might simply find it a more palatable option to make a number of small retail investors rich rather than the usual big bail-out bank conglomerates that symbolize Wall Street and the 1% - given a choice. Just a thought.
NigelM
Recovering Member
Put it together with other stuff...
http://luxemburgism.org/node/14
http://luxemburgism.org/node/16
http://www.nycga.net/group-documents/public-forum-dec-13-should-ows-demand-jobs-for-all/
http://luxemburgism.org/node/8
.....yeah, a little bit. BTW, when I googled him I got pages and pages of that stuff. It was good of you to advise us to do some research, thanks.
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Cool. The man cares about working people (and about the "appalling poverty" -- his words -- in much of the world). That seems inconsistent with your concern that he may sell out.
But did your research indicate that he objects to using capital and the rich to accomplish larger goals? I recall that someone else had that plan.
The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me) | Blog | Tesla Motors
Personally I look at this as two separate businesses.
1. The R&D phase business of trying to get commercial fusion to work.
2. The business that happens if it does work.
(2) Is relatively simple to answer. All heck would break loose. Commercial fusion would stand the world economy on its head and a working reactor design somewhere in Lawrenceville would instantly become the most significant strategic asset for the Federal Government to secure, more so than all of the world's oil fields combined. I can picture a Zefram Cochrane style statue on the White House lawn with Lerner's name inscribed on it and that would be all that was left to mark the passage of LPP as a commercial entity. I cannot pretend to know what would become of private shareholders, maybe they all get to share a Nobel Prize. The idea that cracking open the most directly useful and valuable secret of the universe would go quietly from a privately held stock of patents to a series of licensing agreements is (to my way of thinking) obnoxious naievety. In the event I would not even blink in surprise if every private investor was rounded up by the CIA and forced to sign the Official Secrets Act in return for their liberty.
I think it is quite important to separate the idea of a working fusion reactor from what is actually on offer in a holding in LPP. A holding in LPP is to be a backer of an interesting horse in a very interesting horse race. However it has to be the race that is interesting in order to get involved, winning needs to be regarded as an unexpected bonus.
Back on planet Earth: The actual business at hand (1) - The R&D phase business of trying to get commercial fusion to work - needs to be the item of interest with regards to investment. I think this phase needs to pay and I think it can with a bit of management input. Just like Tesla with the Model S and X or more aptly SpaceX a promise to change the world with sustainable transportation or to colonise Mars is all very well, but these things are investable now (publicly or privately respectively) because the path towards the lofty goal is paved with gold. Right now the LPP opportunity has been presented analogously to an opportunity to invest in colonising Mars with nothing but cost between now and then. I think that is unnecessarily limiting and absolutely typical of an R&D centric view of how things ought to be. That is why I believe LPP has struggled for 25 years to get what is basically a very sensible and potentially very valuable line of research into hard core testing and I think it is worth a bit of forbearance for those of us with a business-centric background to see through that just a bit.
I am just as confident that Lerner and team is not a scam in equal measure to my confidence that Blacklight and Andrea Rossi eCat is a scam. The fact that LPP is underfunded speaks to the fact. The scammers are off selling licenses by the MWh for a technology that does not exist and makes no sense, LPP has nothing to sell besides a simple request to help fund some science that is grounded in reality and actually does make sense.
As alluded to in previous comments, I actually think LPP has much more going for it in terms of things it can sell during Phase 1 than it has the existing management competence or resources to realise. This is where I think it gets interesting.
As it stands, the opportunity to get a bit of LPP exists before any of the things I am about to mention come to pass and I am sufficiently intrigued give them a hand to help make it happen.
I want to see LPP pre-negotiate an exit strategy for angel investors. I am not satisfied with the R&D-centric assumption that once the science proves itself then the finances will take care of themselves. Instead of leaving outcomes to chance, I am supremely confident that it is possible in the here and now to take a tour of government funding agencies from the DOE to military as well as investment banks and industry and sign LPP up to conditional offers of massive funding upon defined success milestones. I would like to see that funding structured such that it includes rewarding angel investors with a healthy exit for carrying the R&D risk. I suspect on such a roadshow, offers of Phase 1 funding will emerge, simply for the sake of shocking traditional R&D funding sources by not asking for any money.
With a defined exit in place, that would allow LPP stock to be exchanged for a bond that can be exercised at a known rate of return upon success. That rate of return can be very large and very much more definite than the concept of multiples of $5000 in a small private R&D lab somehow translating into to whole digit percentages of the world energy economy without any realistic thought given to the execution risks in-between - including for example the risk of the whole project getting classified by the DOE energy security branch. I would be much happier to know that the DOE had agreed in advance to pay up big times as part of the process of removing the project from private hands and I think that is a deal that could and should be struck in advance of that eventuality.
I want to see a business unit dedicated to making money out of spin-off technologies and IP licensing for things already available to work (Massive X-Ray source camera for example). It is ridiculous not to get some money flowing into the project for existing deliverables that are off the critical path.
I want to see a media-savvy business unit (me if necessary) that is selling high-value corporate sponsorship by association to the quest of changing the world and taking mankind to the stars that can be attributed to the marketing of big brands in the here and now. There is a right place for monetizing flights of fancy into the world of tomorrow and that is called infotainment and consumer brand advertising, not so much investor relations. This by the way is also a defensive strategy for the day the science actually proves itself. Much more difficult to bury the object of a press release from a major brand declaring the project they have been backing has achieved its aims than burying Lerner and a couple of anonymous lab-techs. Also by this mechanism I can see the balance sheet of LPP actually starting to look healthy. In other words LPP can start to look like a well funded biotech startup researching an important breakthrough rather than the ridiculous image of a bunch of scientists on a philanthropic mission to end world poverty without a dime in their own pockets.
Just some musings while LPP is currently giving away shares.
1. The R&D phase business of trying to get commercial fusion to work.
2. The business that happens if it does work.
(2) Is relatively simple to answer. All heck would break loose. Commercial fusion would stand the world economy on its head and a working reactor design somewhere in Lawrenceville would instantly become the most significant strategic asset for the Federal Government to secure, more so than all of the world's oil fields combined. I can picture a Zefram Cochrane style statue on the White House lawn with Lerner's name inscribed on it and that would be all that was left to mark the passage of LPP as a commercial entity. I cannot pretend to know what would become of private shareholders, maybe they all get to share a Nobel Prize. The idea that cracking open the most directly useful and valuable secret of the universe would go quietly from a privately held stock of patents to a series of licensing agreements is (to my way of thinking) obnoxious naievety. In the event I would not even blink in surprise if every private investor was rounded up by the CIA and forced to sign the Official Secrets Act in return for their liberty.
I think it is quite important to separate the idea of a working fusion reactor from what is actually on offer in a holding in LPP. A holding in LPP is to be a backer of an interesting horse in a very interesting horse race. However it has to be the race that is interesting in order to get involved, winning needs to be regarded as an unexpected bonus.
Back on planet Earth: The actual business at hand (1) - The R&D phase business of trying to get commercial fusion to work - needs to be the item of interest with regards to investment. I think this phase needs to pay and I think it can with a bit of management input. Just like Tesla with the Model S and X or more aptly SpaceX a promise to change the world with sustainable transportation or to colonise Mars is all very well, but these things are investable now (publicly or privately respectively) because the path towards the lofty goal is paved with gold. Right now the LPP opportunity has been presented analogously to an opportunity to invest in colonising Mars with nothing but cost between now and then. I think that is unnecessarily limiting and absolutely typical of an R&D centric view of how things ought to be. That is why I believe LPP has struggled for 25 years to get what is basically a very sensible and potentially very valuable line of research into hard core testing and I think it is worth a bit of forbearance for those of us with a business-centric background to see through that just a bit.
I am just as confident that Lerner and team is not a scam in equal measure to my confidence that Blacklight and Andrea Rossi eCat is a scam. The fact that LPP is underfunded speaks to the fact. The scammers are off selling licenses by the MWh for a technology that does not exist and makes no sense, LPP has nothing to sell besides a simple request to help fund some science that is grounded in reality and actually does make sense.
As alluded to in previous comments, I actually think LPP has much more going for it in terms of things it can sell during Phase 1 than it has the existing management competence or resources to realise. This is where I think it gets interesting.
As it stands, the opportunity to get a bit of LPP exists before any of the things I am about to mention come to pass and I am sufficiently intrigued give them a hand to help make it happen.
I want to see LPP pre-negotiate an exit strategy for angel investors. I am not satisfied with the R&D-centric assumption that once the science proves itself then the finances will take care of themselves. Instead of leaving outcomes to chance, I am supremely confident that it is possible in the here and now to take a tour of government funding agencies from the DOE to military as well as investment banks and industry and sign LPP up to conditional offers of massive funding upon defined success milestones. I would like to see that funding structured such that it includes rewarding angel investors with a healthy exit for carrying the R&D risk. I suspect on such a roadshow, offers of Phase 1 funding will emerge, simply for the sake of shocking traditional R&D funding sources by not asking for any money.
With a defined exit in place, that would allow LPP stock to be exchanged for a bond that can be exercised at a known rate of return upon success. That rate of return can be very large and very much more definite than the concept of multiples of $5000 in a small private R&D lab somehow translating into to whole digit percentages of the world energy economy without any realistic thought given to the execution risks in-between - including for example the risk of the whole project getting classified by the DOE energy security branch. I would be much happier to know that the DOE had agreed in advance to pay up big times as part of the process of removing the project from private hands and I think that is a deal that could and should be struck in advance of that eventuality.
I want to see a business unit dedicated to making money out of spin-off technologies and IP licensing for things already available to work (Massive X-Ray source camera for example). It is ridiculous not to get some money flowing into the project for existing deliverables that are off the critical path.
I want to see a media-savvy business unit (me if necessary) that is selling high-value corporate sponsorship by association to the quest of changing the world and taking mankind to the stars that can be attributed to the marketing of big brands in the here and now. There is a right place for monetizing flights of fancy into the world of tomorrow and that is called infotainment and consumer brand advertising, not so much investor relations. This by the way is also a defensive strategy for the day the science actually proves itself. Much more difficult to bury the object of a press release from a major brand declaring the project they have been backing has achieved its aims than burying Lerner and a couple of anonymous lab-techs. Also by this mechanism I can see the balance sheet of LPP actually starting to look healthy. In other words LPP can start to look like a well funded biotech startup researching an important breakthrough rather than the ridiculous image of a bunch of scientists on a philanthropic mission to end world poverty without a dime in their own pockets.
Just some musings while LPP is currently giving away shares.
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So many interesting topics here. I think it would be fun to have a thread on just what would happen if LPP succeeded. I mean we have barely touched on the ramifications. Energy is a 5 trillion dollar/yr industry, and about 8% of all economic activity (source: the first result on google).
To Julian's point about government seizure, many great technology have weapons/defense ramifications, but in this case is the product itself not literally a weapon?
To Julian's point about government seizure, many great technology have weapons/defense ramifications, but in this case is the product itself not literally a weapon?
NigelM
Recovering Member
On the contrary, Lerner has advocated on many occasions (when does he find time for his science research btw?) that society should tax the rich and tax corporations to pay for one-off construction projects and have millions of people employed by central government:
High taxes and massive centralized employment didn't work out too well for the Greeks, although Lerner congratulates them on overturning their own governments austerity plan and walking away from the folks (mainly Germany) who loaned them money.
Musk is a self made billionaire who is changing the world and has zip2, Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX (not to mention SCTY) on his resume. Lerner has been working on his idea for 25 years and is scrabbling around for a few dollars, working in the back of a rundown storage unit. I don't see much of a comparison there.
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Nigel I have to disagree. Respectfully. Capitalism 2.0 as Warren buffet would implore does include taxing the 'rich' more so and one can definitely from his venerable point of view say that there is a greater good that can be achieved by modified capitalism.
Austerity hasn't really been such a success now has it?
Now let's try to allow this very intriguing conversation continue. Thanks Julian et al for your continued dialog.
Full disclosure...I have invested in lpp.
Austerity hasn't really been such a success now has it?
Now let's try to allow this very intriguing conversation continue. Thanks Julian et al for your continued dialog.
Full disclosure...I have invested in lpp.
NigelM
Recovering Member
Well I was just responding to PeterJA but I do think there's relevance to the discussion. LPP is nothing but a bet on Eric Lerner, which is fair enough, so I think it's ok to take a closer look. I'm surprised he apparently spends so much time on Occupy Wall Street and the International Luxemburgist Network.
Luxemburgism is a Marxist tendency also known as Council Communism consequently Lerner's substantial involvement in that is a valid business concern e.g. What sort of investor exit will be available? Will there ever be an open market for the shares? How will LPP create value? Etc. Julian asked similar questions albeit in a much more elegant way than I have.
And some would say retirement on Mars is an eccentric involvement. Some of these brilliant men are capable of significant multitasking.
NigelM
Recovering Member
Yeah right, that's the same. ;-)
Good luck with your investment though. I suspect it's going to be many, many years before we ever find out if this was a good bet.
Musk can say some kooky things. It is one thing to say "I want to go to Mars"-- kook. Saying "I want to go to Mars" after creating a multi-billion dollar rocket company-- much less kooky. He has always been careful to guage what he claims to be within sight of his accomplishments. I am not saying Mr Lerner isn't special either, but rather that EM is keeping his claims and accomplishments progressing apace. Even the hyperloop which I think is on the silly side wasn't a laugher in any quarter due to his history of doing the impossible.
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