大白象

"white elephant" came, in English, to mean a thing which is more trouble than it is worth, or has outlived its usefulness to the person who has it.
A list of white elephants
The term was coined after New York Giants manager John McGraw told the press that Philadelphia businessman Benjamin Shibe had "bought himself a white elephant" by acquiring the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team in 1901, A's manager Connie Mack selected the elephant as the team symbol and mascot. The team is occasionally referred to as the White Elephants.

Other examples include:

• Aircraft:


• Concorde, a supersonic transport built by Aérospatiale and BAC, intended to allow high-speed intercontinental travel. Only fourteen examples saw service, though development costs were to be amortized over hundreds of units.


• Bristol Brabazon, an airliner built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company in 1949 to fly a large number of passengers on transatlantic routes from England to the United States.


• The U.S. Space Shuttle is also considered an example of a white elephant, as its continued existence is debated versus other forms of space transportation, which are thought by some to be more reliable and affordable.


• The Hughes H-4 Hercules, or "Spruce Goose," was often called Howard Hughes's white elephant before and during Senate War Investigating Committee


• Railway:


• The fully automated North East Line and Bukit Panjang LRT Line struggle to break even by their operators.


• Structures and engineering projects:


• Kansai International Airport, located on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, south of Osaka, Japan, is considered an example of a white elephant, as it was constructed largely as a matter of pride, and though at a fraction of nominal capacity, is being doubled in size.


• Montréal-Mirabel International Airport, a large airport located in Mirabel, Quebec, near Montréal.


• Superconducting Super Collider (or SSC), a large particle accelerator which was being constructed in Texas. Billions of dollars had been spent on the project by the time of cancellation, and the project termination itself cost hundreds of millions of dollars.


• Three Gorges Dam, a monumental project to bring hydroelectric power to the Yangtze River basin in China, beset with construction and environmental issues.


• World Trade Center México, a building complex located in Mexico City, Mexico, a building and complex that never really performed their intended functions and were known as a white elephant which eventually bankrupted their owners without ever being finished.


• Technology:


• Intel's IA-64 (better known as Itanium) (semiconductor architecture), which cost billions of dollars to develop, now relegated to a niche role in the computer industry. See also Itanic.


• Nautical:


• SS Great Eastern, a ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refuelling.

WHAT is the meaning of Xbox?

WHAT is the meaning of Xbox?

Its name has horribly geeky origins: the bit of Microsoft's Windows software that does fancy graphics is called DirectX, so when the company moved into games consoles in 2001, it wanted a “DirectX box” that was optimised for graphical performance.

泰國也有領匯事件

Fermenting trouble
Nov 24th 2005 BANGKOK
From The Economist
The unsettling effect of shelving two share offerings

DRIVING past the Stock Exchange of Thailand, you never know what you might see. A few months ago, orange-robed Buddhist monks were protesting against the planned listing of Thai Beverages, the country's biggest brewer and distiller. More recently, left-wing activists marched against the partial privatisation, through a public offering, of Egat, the state-owned electricity monopoly. Indeed, these days, demonstrators seem more interested in Thai stocks than investors are.
In 2003 Thai stocks were among the world's top performers. The main market index more than doubled, as the economy grew by 6.9% and finally shook off the torpor that had set in after the crash of 1997. Alas, Thailand has since suffered a string of misfortunes: bird flu, last year's tsunami, a prolonged drought and an intensifying insurgency in some Muslim areas. Meanwhile, dearer oil has pushed inflation up, prompting the central bank to raise interest rates repeatedly. Expensive oil imports have also weighed on the current account, and so on the baht.
In the first quarter of this year, the economy even shrank slightly. Over the whole year, it might grow by some 4%, far less than optimists had expected. In August consumer confidence hit its lowest in three years. All this gloom has affected share prices too. The market looks like ending the year where it began, 15% below the peak it reached early last year.
The protests have not helped. The listing of Thai Beverages, originally scheduled for the middle of the year, would have been the biggest-ever flotation of a private Thai firm, worth roughly 40 billion baht ($980m). But the World Health Organisation ranks Thais as the world's fourth-keenest drinkers, and temperance groups, supported by Buddhist clergy, argued that the listing would foster further boozing. The stock exchange and its regulator have not yet dared approve it.
The government's attempt to sell a stake in Egat has dragged on even longer. It first postponed the offering last year, after protests by the company's staff. As a sweetener, it raised workers' salaries and reserved shares for them, before reviving the sale earlier this year. It had planned to sell 25% of Egat this month, for 33 billion baht or so. But at the last minute, a court put the listing off again, to consider activists' charge that the decree authorising the sale violates the constitution. The government still hopes that the sale, and the rest of its privatisation programme, will go ahead—but the court has not even set a date for a ruling.
On the other hand, Thai stocks now look cheap next to other markets in the region, or at any rate cheaper than they did. The average price/earnings ratio, which topped 14 in 2003, is now around nine, and falling. If, as economists expect, the recent easing of the oil price continues next year, and interest rates also decline, the market should start to recover. And the resuscitation of the shelved listings might give traders cause to celebrate—soberly, of course.

Copper trader missing

Crouching trader, leaping prices

Nov 17th 2005
From The Economist

How a big bad bet is pushing up the price of copper

ALL that remains is to sell the film rights. Liu Qibing, a trader handling China's strategic commodity reserves, allegedly shorted the vast quantity of 100,000-200,000 tonnes of copper, then vanished when prices moved against him. The stuff of latter-day legend, this briefly pushed an already upwardly mobile market into near-vertical ascent.
“Shorting” a commodity involves borrowing the commodity itself and selling it to someone else with the intention of buying more later to return to the lender. A trader only does this when he believes, with some confidence, that prices will fall. Since copper has gained more than 30% this year and more than 200% since 2003, it is reasonable to think it due for a drop. Plenty of other traders and speculators have bet that way too.
But the metal is not obliging them. The three-month contract on the London Metals Exchange (LME) was already trading at record levels on November 11th, closing at $4,105 per tonne. When the tale of Mr Liu broke on November 14th, rousing expectations that China would have to buy a lot of the red stuff to meet commitments, it closed $20 per tonne higher. Copper hit a new record price of $4,174 on November 15th, and moved higher still on November 17th.
Mr Liu's copper is due for delivery to LME-approved warehouses in December. Will it be there? China claimed last week to have 1.3m tonnes of the metal stockpiled, far more than most western analysts reckon it has. This week, it held its first copper auction ever, selling 20,000 tonnes and pledging to unload more on November 23rd. And there is talk that the State Reserve Bureau, for which Mr Liu was acting, has applied to export 200,000 tonnes this year.
But this all sounds more like deliberate market-cooling before a purchase than like a surfeit of supply. Copper is scarce these days. Years of commercial underinvestment, together with work stoppages that grew more bitter as the copper price rose, have kept a lid on worldwide output. Last week Chile, the largest producer by far, lowered its output targets for 2005 and 2006.
Demand, meanwhile, was booming, until this year. And in fast-growing China, now the world's largest copper user, it is still increasing by leaps and bounds. The usual cushions of inventory and spare capacity have vanished: global stocks are depleted, as the chart shows. Mining companies should respond to this by investing in increased production. But the results will come, if at all, some years down the track.
The fall-out from Mr Liu's speculation-gone-wrong is hard to judge. If he assumed his positions last spring, as some suggest, when copper prices were below $3,300 per tonne, it is possible that the losses now amount to $200m.
But more than money may be at stake. China was expected to liberalise its derivatives markets a touch next year. After this bruising brush with those outside, it may be disinclined to do so.

central bank staff cost