antstrangler

I'm mainly on the Scandinavian market, so I'm not sure specific companies I've bought are of any interest to you.

As a general rule I've looked for big companies with low debt and high net margins (above industry average) because they are less likely to be forced to do something bad for the long term to survive the short term.

As of a few years I've been building/maintaining 15-20% liquid assets that just keep pace with inflation. I'll lose a few percent of growth every year I'm wrong, and I will be wrong most years.

I know what it costs me to be wrong. I don't know what the profit is when I'm right.

Yes. The good news is that most of the mass will probably not reach escape velocity and eventually gravity will do the job of pulling it together.

You have to add velocity to the earth along it's orbit to raise it.

Would the moon do it: Size does not matter (despite what my ex may tell you). You can accelerate a bowling ball by throwing a tennis ball at it hard enough. You can do the same with the earth and moon if you throw it hard enough.

Lets give it a whack to increase perihelios by 0.89M km so that we average 150M km and a more circular orbit. We'll need a velocity increase of about 0.33 km/s. If we assume that it's an inelastic collision we'd need to throw the moon at the earth at about 27km/s.

It's popular to measure energy in comparison to nuclear weapons. That is about 10E14 times the energy of the most powerful nuclear bomb ever designed.

You should dobule check my calculations before sending out RFQ for your doomsday device. If you just send this out to a contractor you will run the risk of looking silly to people who know what they're doing.

ST is a somewhat crude language and it turns out ugly most of the time. However it's simple and gets the job done. That being said the implementation varies between vendors.

Beckhoff allows non standard stuff to hide the worst offenders like the 10-ANDs in an IF condition with something that looks like a function call.

If you can use FBD (and your vendor implementation is good) you can make overviews useful for debugging while implementing the details in ST.

In the end changing what language I write code would not save much time between getting the specification to the customer pushing the start button in my case.