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For a brief period of time GoPro held the spotlight with its foldable drone equipped with camera stabilization and 4K video resolution, courtesy of the mounted Hero 5. The drone was unlike anything from the major drone manufacturers; for about a week. Soon after the GoPro announcement, DJI demonstrated their even more compact, foldable, 4K enabled, video stabilized drone, which retails for $749. The GoPro Karma drone, which is bigger, heavier, and less compact, is expected to sell for a similar price, but without the necessary Hero 5 camera. The whole bundle including camera will be around $1099. The surge in GoPro’s share price and the hype that GoPro’s CEO Nick Woodman created surrounding the drone was based off of its revolutionary design features. The revolutionary design features are the foldable quad arms, extremely small frame and great video quality. The DJI Mavic Pro has the same exact features, but in a much smaller package, which was supposed to be the main selling ...

When oil and gas prices began to fall in late 2014 a common view regarding the effects of these low prices began to develop. In short, the idea was that the low prices would cause many high cost producers to shut down, new investment would curtail and global supply would be drastically reduced, leaving the strongest, most profitable (mainly OPEC) to reap the benefits of a recovery in price. That is not what happened. Production in the United States has remained extremely resilient. The resiliency in supply is undoubtedly fueled by technological breakthroughs in extraction technology, but to what extent. How can it be quantified? I recently ran across the data for Oil and Gas Extraction productivity in the U.S. and it tells a stunning story. As a control I also included overall U.S. productivity growth. From 2012 to 2015 the average rate of change for Oil and Gas Extraction in the U.S. is 7.9% YoY. The U.S. economy saw an average increase in productivity of just 0.5% in that ...