Friday Morning Links

• This paper extends a simple economic model of the regulated firm to include a wider range of both management objectives and of regulatory constraint. The authors find that these generalizations in the assumptions are able to effect profound alterations in the conclusions. For example, if a firm is constrained to a fair return on invested capital, we find that the profit-maximizing firm would have an incentive to overcapitalize (the Averch-Johnson result), while the sales or output maximizing firm would have an incentive to undercapitalize. [John C Malone]
• Below, in bullet point format, is a list of the ticker symbols across the midstream and MLP universe that have disappeared since the August 2014 peak. In total, 73 names have been removed from the universe (or become irrelevant due to size). In addition, a further 9 tickers that were created after the peak are gone too (names like DM, PTXP, RMP). [MLPguy]
• The U.S. produces plenty of gas, but bottlenecks abound, said Kevin Greiner, CEO of Gas South, which supplies natural gas to about 500,000 customers in the eastern U.S., including curtailed manufacturers. “We just don’t have enough pipe capacity to get the gas from where it’s being produced to where it’s needed,” he said. [WSJ] 
• The argument for the paleo V8 runs thusly: In the past two decades, emission and fuel-economy requirements forced pickup manufacturers to downsize engines and increase complexity, using turbocharging, variable cam phasing, direct fuel injection and other means to squeeze more efficient power out of fewer cc’s. But as a generation of buyers can attest, these hard-revving little gassers suffered a host of maintenance, reliability and durability issues. The last decade has been particularly hard on Ford buyers, who have endured a string of recalls affecting the “EcoBoost” 2.0-liter, 2.7-liter and 3.0-liter engines, 10-speed automatic transmissions and other mission-critical components. Let me take a moment here to say, recalls suck. [WSJ]
• Those who have lived in software land don’t realize they’re about to have a hard lesson in hardware. It’s actually very difficult to build power plants. You don’t just need power plants, you need all of the electrical equipment. You need the electrical transformers to run the AI transformers. Now, the utility industry is a very slow industry. They pretty much impedance matchto the government, to the Public Utility Commissions. They impedance match literally and figuratively. They’re very slow, because their past has been very slow. So trying to get them to move fast is... Have you ever tried to do an interconnect agreement with a utility at scale, with a lot of power? [Elon Musk]
• Our aggregates business once again delivered record profitability and meaningful margin expansion, reflecting strong strategic and commercial discipline and a consistent focus on what we can control. Our highly complementary Specialties business also achieved record revenues and gross profit, underscoring its differentiated value and strategic importance within our portfolio. Notably, we delivered these results despite single-family housing and nonresidential square footage starts, the two macro indicators most highly correlated with aggregates demand, remaining approximately 20% below their post-COVID peaks. [Martin Marietta Materials, Inc.] 
• When I can combine two of my passions, cycling and visiting French villages, I’m about as happy as I can be. At some point around 2003 or 2004, on one of my first cycling trips to France, I picked up a big, coffee-table book called Vu du Ciel: Villages – Des Alpes-Maritimes et du Var (you can find it in many bookstores in France and on amazon.fr). It features 73 villages from the Alpes-Maritimes department and 59 from the Var department. There are beautiful aerial photographs of each village along with a short, one paragraph description. Some of these villages I was already quite familiar with (Eze, La Turbie, Peillon, Peille, Gourdon, etc.) but many more were new to me. I made a goal to cycle to each and every one of the 73 villages in the Alpes-Maritimes section. It took me nine years (I was only able to cycle in France about three to five weeks each year), trying to reach as many as I could every summer when I was here, and in 2013 I finished. I can’t begin to tell you the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when I rolled into that village (Tende). [Steve and Carole in Venice]
• I think if I had to do this all over again, coming out of COVID or I'll say post-COVID, I would not have -- when they went on allocation, I'd have told them to keep their trucks. That's what I'll tell them next time. They keep their trucks and when they jack prices, they can keep their trucks because I can sweat out 2, 3, 4 years, and I think my customer will support me. I think I was over eager to buy trucks because we had such a nice balance in '16. I wanted to get back to that balance quickly. And I didn't stand firm enough when they came through with massive price increases. I just don't know it's unsupportable. Now they had all this talk, and we all saw it and I think everybody is a little guilty of this saying that, as Mary Barra did, she had something, I don't know, after 2037 or something, GM will not make an internal combustion engine. Well, if you're on my end of the deal, that's a frightening thought because the other ones don't run, you see. So you can see how I fell into the trap and think well hell, if she's not going to build any, but then my friends at Ford didn't make quite as broad a statement, but practically speaking, they were running their investment as if they were no longer willing to make it. [U-Haul Holding Company]