All Activity

Everybody's thirsty till it's their turn to buy.

This is the way to do it. I guess you are in the top 1% of people in terms of travel experience. The WS guy who lives in Manhattan and does his annual vacation for a week in an overpriced beach house in the Hamptons or Montauk, while answering teams messages from his work while sitting on a beach share is travel poorer in many respects than Europoor peon who travels on a package deal to Spain for 4 weeks with no worries whatsoever.

Yes, you could essentially modify the opensource code and remove any bias, but that may require quite a bit of work. However, if you regard an LLM as an utility to do coding or run some mundane excel task etc , why would you care about the LLM answer about Xi Jinping or why Karthago lost the 2nd Punic war? In a way, these frontier models are massive bloatware and I think the likely way forward is to have specialized and much leaner tasks specific models that do the job.

Is $69 too low? We just went through a geopolitical scenario that was the oil bull doomers’ wet dream and oil peaked at $110? A lot of it because the major powers (USA, China, G7, etc) all coordinated to contain the upside…what that tells you is that the upside in oil is basically capped. Now you have a large amount of DWT moving through the Strait releasing pent up supply back on the markets while you have new pipelines being built to bypass the strait, other global producers who have upped production, majors getting serious about Venezuela, UAE leaving OPEC and maybe Iraq too soo they can pump more oil… $69 ain’t enough to get me interested. And if the Strait normalizes for a while, oil likely heads even lower than before the war…

In September Angela and I will stay three weeks in Conwy then most of the time in Betws-y-Coed - both Wales. I think Betws-y-Coed population is 476. LOL! And 6 weeks ago we spent two weeks in Okehampton UK then one week in Falmouth.

I normally don’t reference SeekingAlpha but I thought this was a great analysis of Altius Minerals. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4917683-altius-minerals-the-royalty-factory-is-starting-to-look-like-a-compounder

Yes, it's a bit more balanced now. Can see Oil price go down more as a) it's what the US wants/needs and b) more obvious pain trade - not all the bulls have been shaken out, I think. But yes, doesn't feel like the conflict is over by any means. And I think hard to predict what would happen if it restarted. So not so hard to see price going up. This is why I've learned my lesson and am sticking with boring Royalties!

Sorry if a dumb question, but if it's Open Source, can't you just do a fork that removes any censorship? I don't know if there are different levels of 'Open Source' e.g. whether you need a licence to amend.

Irony is that the GMO Quality Fund (& ETF) is actually one of the better mutual funds out there - has pretty consistently outperformed S&P500 which few funds do. And is basically a tracker but with some bad stuff taken out.

Thanks, @Spekulatius, As a Northern European citizen I learn something new here on CofB&F almost every dag about USA and American culture.

I agree, the $69 spot price seems too low. With inventories in a drawdown and continued supply disruption, the skew is to the upside.

Trojan horses should be easy to find in open source. I would be more concerned about gotcha’s in closed models. Censoring doesn’t really matter if you do coding etc. Yes, the Chinese models will give you the party approved answer if you ask them anything remotely politics related about China but it does not matter if you do so some coding.

Added a bit CME , MSFT and a tiny bit of ZTS

He is wrong because not everything is overpriced . Lot’s of cheap stocks are around and I would argue now more than ever. it should be his job to find them and benefit from them rather then bemoaning the fact that the fact that SPCX trades at 100x earnings. He could have even benefitted from SPCX by getting an IPO allocation and selling them to a sucker (almost a no brainer trade if you follow the social media landscape). Even some of the Mag 7 aren’t expensive any more and trade at fair prices. He does this because he had branded himself as a “value investor” so he gets his TV appearances and other people’s money despite his return sucking. He can make a nice living off that, better then most of us, I give him that.

No it’s the general description of Europeans on the bird app and other social media. Sometimes from those who have never been to Europe and probably live in Dollar General towns. Europe does not have Dollar General towns but if you have ever driven through rural America, they are everywhere. There are basically three sorts of towns in Americas - Dollar General towns, Walmart towns and Costco towns (likely cities). You do not want to live in Dollar General towns.

V

I recommend the book: "Excellent advice for living. Wisdom I wish I´d known earlier" from Kevin Kelly "The very best thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse." "If someone is trying to convince you it´s not a pyramid scheme, it´s a pyramid scheme." "Investing small amounts of money over a long time works miracles, but no one wants to get rich slow."

- Clickbait by Greg [ @Gregmal ]

if so why do people talk about 40yr investment track record, or about the long multi decade tenure of senior managers, or seek to increase management voting control. Those are all continuity things. I agree that the insurance has evolved, and is significantly larger. I also observe that interest rates are higher and appear likely to remain higher for longer, this after a protracted period of suppressed rates. They've had some recent wins in the investment side, but I remain curious on whether that's a structural change or a phase. And we won't know how their new investments turn out for years. Yet for me the first 2 items are adequate. I hope they can be average atleast in the equity side. The bar frankly isn't terribly high to generate 15% ROE from the structure they have.

OK, so humans can ultimately live on Mars, but they can't live on an earth that is 5-10 deg C warmer? Me thinks you're underestimating humans. But you're right, the robots would likely help us survive...if they chose to keep us around. Grok: An Earth that is 10∘C (18∘F) hotter than pre-industrial levels represents an extreme climate shift, akin to the Early Eocene period 50 million years ago. At this temperature, the equatorial and tropical zones would experience frequent, lethal "wet-bulb" temperatures (where heat and humidity make it physically impossible for the human body to cool itself through sweat), rendering the mid-latitudes largely uninhabitable for unprotected mammals. Furthermore, the complete melting of global ice sheets would raise sea levels by over 200 feet, entirely reshaping the continents. For humans to survive in significant numbers, civilization would have to structurally adapt. Here are three realistic scientific scenarios for how humanity could live on such an Earth: Scenario 1: The Polar Exodus (The Circumpolar Civilization) In this scenario, humanity undergoes a massive geographical migration, abandoning the tropics, subtropics, and traditional mid-latitudes (like the US, Southern Europe, and Central China) to aggregate entirely around the Arctic and Antarctic circles. The Environment: The poles, once icy wastes, transform into the planet's new temperate zones, with average annual temperatures resembling modern-day France or New England (10∘C to 15∘C). The Arctic Ocean becomes a ice-free, bustling Mediterranean-like sea. Human Life: Humanity builds high-density, highly urbanized megacities across northern Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland, and the newly exposed bedrock of Antarctica. Agriculture & Economy: Because standard topsoil takes millennia to form, agriculture relies heavily on indoor vertical farming and massive hydroponic facilities. Outdoor farming is limited to specialized, fast-growing crops that can survive the intense, 24-hour sunlight of polar summers. The global economy centers around maritime trade across the open Arctic and the extraction of resources long buried under ice sheets. Scenario 2: The Subterranean & Nocturnal Shift (The Sub-Surface Niches) In regions closer to the equator where geopolitical or structural reasons prevent migration, humans adapt by moving underground, shifting the entire rhythm of human life away from the blisteringly hot surface. The Environment: Surface temperatures regularly exceed 50∘C (122∘F), with hyper-humid coastal zones triggering fatal wet-bulb events during the day. The surface becomes a hostile desert or an ultra-dense, chaotic jungle populated only by specialized, heat-tolerant reptiles, insects, and flora. Human Life: Civilizations carve out massive, interconnected underground subterranean cities, leveraging the earth's natural thermal insulation to maintain manageable baseload temperatures. Surface travel, heavy industry, and automated maintenance are conducted almost exclusively at night, when temperatures drop to survivable—though still oppressive—levels. Infrastructure: Humans become an indoor, technologically insulated species. Power is generated heavily via surface solar arrays (which thrive in cloudless desert belts) and routed downward to drive massive cooling, water-desalination, and air-filtration networks. Scenario 3: The Automated "Ecomodernist" Enclaves (The Controlled Biospheres) Rather than moving underground or migrating to the poles, humanity uses hyper-advanced engineering to isolate itself from the environment, constructing closed-loop, climate-controlled hyper-cities. The Environment: The planet's climate is unstable, characterized by hyper-canes (extreme category-5+ hurricanes fueled by ultra-warm oceans), massive dust storms, and unpredictable weather systems that destroy traditional infrastructure. Human Life: Humans live inside heavily fortified, dome-covered megastructures or sealed architectural enclaves. These cities operate like permanent space colonies on Earth, dynamically regulating internal temperature, humidity, and atmospheric composition. The Technological Lifecycle: Human survival depends entirely on automated AI systems, advanced robotics, and nuclear or fusion power to maintain the colossal energy grids required for life support. Raw materials are gathered from the harsh outside world via automated drone fleets, and food production is entirely synthesized in industrial lab facilities (cellular agriculture, bioreactors, and synthetic protein generation), severing humanity's reliance on the outdoor biosphere.

I was so excited to see who would be the subject of this thread title, I was not disappointed!

Yeah we did what we needed to, strange we still win the group with only 5 points but I'll take it! Now let's see how we fair against better teams...

My view is investors need to be rational when they invest. There are times when it makes sense to own shares. And there are times when it doesn’t make sense to own shares. This is not specific to Fairfax - it is true of most investments. I never really viewed Fairfax as buy and hold in the past (pre-2020). Given how the company is structured today with both insurance and investments (and how they are executing) that is changing for me. I don’t think the version of Fairfax that exists today has ever existed in the past. That makes comparing the Fairfax of today to past versions difficult - I am not sure what it really teaches.

At Pride? Definitely stuff being jammed down throats! And most are probably closeted Christian/Catholic right wingers! Cheers!

They showed up! Cheers!