Piper Alpha was an originally designed as an oil producing rig in the North Sea approximately 120 miles North East of Aberdeen, Scotland. It was a fixed leg platform in water depth of 475 Feet of water. The installation sat close to 275 Feet above water to the top of the derrick.

2) It started production in December 1976 for OPCAL joint venture. OPCAL being Occidental Petroleum Caledonia, Texaco Britain, Thomson PLC, and Texas Petroleum LTD. Occidental was the majority stakeholder at 36.5%

3) Occidental being majority stakeholder took control of technical and operational duties with running and operating the rig. When oil production started in 1976 it started with a flow of 250,000 BBL/day and eventually increasing this amount to 300,000 BBL/day.

4) 300,000 BBL/day would account for approximately 10% of the UK’s oil production at the time, so needless to say it was one of the most important rigs in the area. Any gas that was flowing would be flared or consumed by gas turbine generators

5) Around 1980 there was a decision to convert the rig to also process gas along with the oil. This was a major conversion, and if it would have been scoped in from the beginning, most likely construction of the rig would have been more accommodating for gas.

I’m a firm believer that more & more entrepreneurial ‘builders’ will evolve their operating company into a HoldCo

Scaling initial capital light successes (like a service co) & redeploying cash flow into concentrated bets leveraging existing know-how, infrastructure, & expertise

Why?

- lower barriers than ever to building asset light/capital light co's
- existing co infrastructure makes acquiring/building another co easy
- more non-dilutive funding options available
- talented operators/investors can use brand, capital, & know-how to scale meaningfully

But first… what is a HoldCo?

It’s fancy term for “holding company” which is an entity that owns/controls the assets of other different companies

Most HoldCo portfolio companies operate autonomously... with their own team, balance sheets, systems, processes etc.

Major capital allocation decisions are performed at the “TopCo” (ie, primary owners of the HoldCo)

Most HoldCo’s are C-Corps due to structural/tax advantages, but sometimes you see them operate as LLCs

Distributions to shareholders are less common, w/ free cash flow used instead for new acquisitions, spinning up new products/services, or using for existing portfolio co needs

General Warning: don’t work for or hire @IanMmmm - he’s a zero-integrity-self-serving manipulator. He destroyed an entire org at AWS.

He’s the reason I left @awscloud. He’s not just incompetent, he’s dishonest in the extreme. You’re throwing away your career working with him.

Also, pro-tip: record every call you have with a manager that you suspect is lying to you.

Here's what happened: I lost my shit when I didn't get promoted, because I was a child. That's on me. I had worked my ass off for 3 years and Ian said that if I moved to Seattle and signed a non-compete then I would get my promotion. I did those things - I didn't get promoted.

What does losing my shit mean? I sent a message to Ian and others that said "Fuck you, I'm not moving to the depressive hell hole that is Seattle. I'm not signing a non-compete. I'm going to stop working 100 hours a week for a company that doesn't give a shit about me."

Later, I found out that Ian had never actually reached out to anyone about my promo document. He just lied. He just ignored it until the last second because he was too focused on taking credit for my work for his own promo document. He got promoted.

Below are some of the most interesting business stories I came across in 2020.

P. S The list is not exhaustive.

1) PSG unbundled it's 28.1% ownership of Capitec.

2) MTN sold a minority stake in Jumia Technologies for R2.3-billion.

3) Dischem has completed the acquisition of Medicare Health for R282million

4) TFG bought 381 Jet stores from Edcon for R480m.

5) Capitec entered into a partnership with SA Home Loans to offer home loans.

6) Food Lover’s Market has started closing outlets in Zambia.

7) Sasol sold 50% of the "base chemicals division" at Lake Charles which equates to ~25% of total Lake Charles project. Sasol will still retain around ~75% of the total Lake Charles Chemical Project.

8) Sasol agreed to sell its 50% stake in Gemini for R6.2bn.

9) Tongaat Hulett sold its starch and glucose business to Barloworld for R5.26bn. The group has used R4.64bn of this to pay down debt.

10) The Competition Commission approved Nimble Fund 1’s intention to acquire Edcon Book Debts.

11) Greg Maloka has decided to resign from Kaya.

12) Ethos Private Equity has won a contract with Ninety One to take on an advisory contract for Ninety One's Africa Private Equity funds.

Ninety One will maintain control and oversight of the portfolio, while Ethos will manage the assets

13) Bidvest Wits sold to TTM

Thanks to the growing number of people who @getMaiar & engage with the @ElrondNetwork ecosystem, the number of accounts doubled to over 320k & we’re over 2.5M TXs, an unprecedented adoption level for a 6 months-young mainnet.
#hypergrowth100 Day 40
Weekly #elrondtech ⬇️

1/ The Delegation Manager toolset has been released for testnet integrations, ahead of our imminent mainnet upgrade. It enables staking providers to set up & manage staking pools, nodes, fees & other parameters for their

2/ We updated the libp2p libraries to the latest release & found out that they work seamlessly with their old counterparts. Congrats @libp2p team for the effort put in backward compatibility. We know how complex that is.

3/ Redesigned the async call & token transfer syntax in our Arwen WASM VM. Interactions between contracts are now “return types”, which makes execution flow more intuitive. Callbacks have also been

4/ Arwen WASM VM updates continued:
- Integrated new Arwen and new features of Arwen into elrond-go. Added a set of integration tests for different scenarios.
- Fixed a bug in Arwen VM which did not let one contract to deploy multiple contracts.

THREAD:

Employees vs Employers

“We who toil for other people have all in some way been captured by pirates and sold into slavery.” –Law 24

It should be said plainly; employment is nothing more than the next step in the evolution of slavery.

The corporation you are employed by has a psychopathic level of indifference as to whether you live or die.

This is not Leftwing political rhetoric; it is a machiavellian reality you will have to contend with.

Your employer is not your ally; they are your adversary.

It is in your best interest for wages to be as high as possible, while it is in your employer’s best interest for wages to be as low as possible.

Compliance is fundamentally at odds with innovation and continuous improvement

Compliance tends to constrain operations to narrow sets of approved sequences of tasks as the means to assure the secure attainment of certain business outcomes. But at what cost ?

🧵

Operational practices have an emergent nature to them. They’re affected by people, their expertise, their relationships, their team goals, role perceptions and also member needs as humans and professionals.
In this entangled mess of variables, aspects practice-as-done are

Constantly morphed as a response to economic pressures (deadlines, business demands), workload demands (as people tend to automate or agree patterns to reduce cognitive load of tasks and become more efficient) and understanding of safety and security related barriers.

All of these tend to be fluid and non fixed. In this continuous interaction with the environment and different pressures acting on it, there are numerous opportunities for improvements which have local relevance and emerge out of local needs and interactions of elements. However

In order to do so, and to support innovation and continuous improvement the practices need to have a requisite level of variability so practitioners exercise their Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feel) for what works and what doesn’t, within their constraints and pressures

I interviewed 5 billionaires this week

I asked them to share their lessons learned on startups, life and entrepreneurship:

Here's what they told me:

A startup idea isn't "one" idea

It's a 10000 ideas, 100,000 decisions and 1,000,000 headaches

You will lose some friends. Kiss most of your high school friends goodbye

Certainties of life:

- Death
- Taxes
- Losing friends

A sign of wealth:

No longer needing an alarm clock to wake up

When in doubt, please don't send that angry email response

Wait 24h. Go for a walk

Angriness makes you drunk. Send emails sobers

1. A thread on Downtown #Vancouver's office construction boom. When it's all said and done there will be roughly 10 million SQ FT of space will be added to just the core.

Here's a brief rundown on what is already approved and under construction...

2. We'll start with what is dubbed as Amazon's unofficial HQ2, or at the very least it's Canadian HQ. At 1.1 million SQ FT this is the largest office development in the city and will help shift DT east as it will house 7500 jobs once occupied.


3. The Amazon building is also significant because it will animate that stretch of West Georgia, Homer, Hamilton and Dunsmuir. It will no longer be a black hole for pedestrian activity. There will be approx. 185,000 square feet of retail and food hall space.

4. Next up is the Stack Tower to be anchored by EY. It's at the western edge of the Central Business District (CBD) and will become #Vancouver's tallest office building when complete. It clocks in at roughly 540,000 SQ FT and 530 feet in height.

5. Recently approved Steam Plant tower has a unique design and large floor plates. With nearly 600,000 SQ FT of office space, this is the second largest office tower that we could see. My bet is that this tower will start to take shape in a year or

A small thread to explain the tax implications of dividend of Rs.974 per share declared by #majesco Ltd which is winding up its business🧵👇

1. For starters, Majesco is declaring such huge dividend on account of it selling its US business. But, as an investor, should one think of buying the shares now? Let us find out.

2. The current market price per share of Majesco is Rs.980. This is almost at par with the dividend per share. Now, if you buy shares of Majesco, you will be entitled to dividend of Rs.974 per share.

3. Please keep in mind that dividend income is not exempt in the hands of the shareholders. It will be taxed as per regular slabs.

4. Say you are in highest slab of 30%, you will be taxed at that rate. To simplify you will be getting a net amount of Rs.681 per share (Rs.974- 30% tax).

🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 1/12

🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 2/12

🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 3/12

🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 4/12

🇺🇸#TreasonAgainstAmerica 5/12

Over the last week, I've been blocked by various people, including an MSP, for allegedly being a conspiracy theorist, trying to sow division within @theSNP and #indy ranks.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I want independence for Scotland, plain and simple.

But I still have the right to challenge people if I think something is wrong, legally or morally, as recent events within the SNP seem to be.

But anyway, I'm not talking about that. Today I'm looking at the @NowScotlandNow logo.

I'm not a fan. Just to be clear, I want Scottish Independence. But the logo for the new organisation, unfortunately, doesn't work as well as the previous YES ones. It's a mix of the colour and the font used, which presumably is referencing Charlies Rennie Mackintosh.

The italics and thin font means it doesn't stand out. Plus, I associate Mackintosh more with Glasgow than Scotland as a whole. So I took some of the elements of the last two and looked at alternative fonts (that are all free BTW)

This font is called ChuckFive. It's big, bold and brash and you can read it a mile off.

A THREAD on how most real estate folks structure deals with outside investors.

Most people utilize the "preferred equity" structure when they raise money from outside investors. They "syndicate" deals.

Here's the basics:

The person (or team of people) putting the deal together is the "sponsor". Also called general parter. Referred to on twitter as the GP.

They find the property, do all the work, hire the management company and take fees. They often co-sign debt and always secure the financing.

The investor is generally passive, doing no work and putting in cash. This is the "limited partner". Referred to on twitter as the LP.

They don't co-sign debt. They simply read reports and ask the sponsors questions and cash checks every month (if the deal is going well).

There are two equity classes.

"Preferred equity" belongs to the LPs. Cash talks, so this is a higher class of shares. They are first in the "capital stack" behind the debt (bank loan).

"Common equity" belongs to the sponsor. They are generally last in the capital stack.

Sponsors generally co-invest. That means they hold both equity classes. A 10% co-invest is standard.

That means the GP has skin in the game. His 10% co-invest makes him both an LP and a GP.

As part of our commitment to keeping our customers/community protected & informed, we are releasing a blog that shines light on transition between Stage 1 and 2 of #Solorigate/#SUNBURST campaign, custom Cobalt Strike loaders, post-exploit. artifacts, IOCs: https://t.co/b0ReHMa63u

Here are some highlights:
The missing link between the Solorigate backdoor and the custom #CobaltStrike loaders observed during the #Solorigate is an Image File Execution Options (IFEO) Debugger registry value created for the legitimate process dllhost.exe (ATT&CK ID: T1546.012).

Once the registry value is created, the attackers wait for the occasional execution of dllhost.exe, which might happen naturally on a system. This execution triggers a process launch of wscript.exe configured to run the VBScript file dropped by the SolarWinds backdoor (Stage 1).

The VBScript in turn runs rundll32.exe, activating the Cobalt Strike loader DLL using a clean parent/child process tree completely disconnected from the SolarWinds process. Finally, the VBScript removes the previously created IFEO value to clean up any traces of execution.

On the custom Cobalt Strike Loaders: we identified several second-stage malware, including TEARDROP, Raindrop, and other custom loaders for the Cobalt Strike beacon. During the lateral movement phase, the custom loader DLLs are dropped mostly in existing Windows sub-directories.

If you're new to real estate twitter this is a must-read.

A thread on how most real estate folks structure deals with outside investors.

Most GPs utilize the "preferred equity" structure when they raise money from outside investors. They "syndicate" deals.

Here's the basics:

The person (or team of people) putting the deal together is the "sponsor". Also called general parter. Referred to on twitter as the GP.

They find the property, do all the work, hire the management company and take fees. They often co-sign debt and always secure the financing.

The investor is generally passive, doing no work and putting in cash. This is the "limited partner". Referred to on twitter as the LP.

They don't co-sign debt. They simply read reports and ask the sponsors questions and cash checks every month (if the deal is going well).

There are two equity classes.

"Preferred equity" belongs to the LPs. Cash talks, so this is a higher class of shares. They are first in the "capital stack" behind the debt (bank loan).

"Common equity" belongs to the sponsor. They are generally last in the capital stack.

Sponsors generally co-invest. That means they hold both equity classes. A 10% co-invest is standard.

That means the GP has skin in the game. His 10% co-invest makes him both an LP and a GP.

Pratik Sinha founder of ALT news is trained comrade! He is working on Communist agenda!

Thread

How many fact check he has done about any left party?No he won’t do it!
He will do fact check of Congress and few other non Left parties just to tell the world that he is unbiased!

Mukul Sinha, father of Pratik Sinha was Comrade and her mother is also comrade. They were active member of left parties!

Mukul Sinha tried to pleased Musl!ms after 2002 Riots with his fake evidence for huge donation from Musl!m Countries.

Mukul Sinha contested Gujarat Assembly elections in 2007 from a Muslim-dominated seat Shahpur in Ahemdabad, but got just 255 (0.44%) votes, losing his deposit. 😂🤣

In 2012, Sinha contested as an independent candidate from Sabarmati in Ahemdabad, and lost again, securing just 1860 (1.23%) votes!🤣🤣

As per affidavit in 2007 he had total movable asset of Rs.23,82,309

But shockingly In 2012 he had huge hike in movable assets! He has Rs.1,08,65,799 movable assets as per affidavit.
(this information are available in affidavit. This is not privet information)