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Yup, good to hear from you CW. The Japanese have no sympathy from me. Hell, it took them 50 years before they ever apologized for the millions of Chinese they murdered, let alone Allied POW's.

Good thing that you worked from home that day, may be work from home 5 days a week? By the way, still no Jardine transcript.

Cubs we don't often agree but I am with you 100% on this. Those in charge of Japan at the time were completely ruthless and life was relatively worthless. Death and torture by the Japanese was commonplace and quite acceptable. To end the war with an invasion would have taken as many as 1,000,000 lives. On the other hand the two A bombs killed approximately 200,000 people and ended the war. Further, and what many tend to forget, the nightly B-29 raids in 1945 were fire bombing Japanese cities and were burning to death as many as 100,000 Japanese people per NIGHT. Personally, I would much rather be vaporized than burned to death. But those critical of dropping the bombs seem to overlook the hard truths of the situation. I knew a guy who was in the Canadian army and posted in Singapore when the Japanese took the city in early 1942. He was captured and spent the balance of the war in prison camps. People today have no concept of the situation in 1940's Japan. And those who who like to apply present day morals to decisions made 80 years ago do a great disservice to those who fought and died for our present day lives and society. Here is a small example for those who don't know. The Sandakan Death Marches (1945) The Sandakan Death Marches directly involved Allied prisoners of war (POWs) who were captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942. The Background: Thousands of Australian and British POWs captured at Singapore were shipped to labor camps in Sandakan, North Borneo (now Malaysia). The Marches: As the war neared its end in 1945, Japanese forces, fearing an Allied rescue, forced emaciated and sick POWs to march hundreds of kilometers through the dense Bornean jungle into the interior. The Outcome: Of the roughly 2,500 Allied prisoners (1,787 Australians and 641 British) forced to march, only six Australians survived by escaping into the jungle. The rest died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, or execution The number of prisoners who died in Japanese POW camps was 7-8 times higher than those who failed to survive German POW camps in WWII.

Small % of my portfolio making sure there is ample excess liquidity. I tend to buy calls on stocks I already like and own that have multiple down days in a row for no good reason (recently CPNG and BRK). The idea being that the stock is already undervalued but also it may be due for a short term bounce regardless. The key is to also be aggressive in selling when it pops but also if it doesn't jump am willing to take a 50-90% loss and roll forward. Definitely don't want to play the buy and hold game. I've had multiple situations where I lose like 50%+ on multiple rolls, but then eventually one hits and am up 100's% and it makes up for all the losses and then some. United health this year and last was a good one. Loss, loss, loss, and then huge gain and overall positive return. You have to be willing to take big realized losses and have the guts to keep reinvesting. Sprinkle in some put selling when the IV is high which it usually is if the stock drops a bunch. Put selling I keep at like 6 months expiry max. Berkshire is a special case because the IV is super low as it generally doesn't move much, but then you have days with big jumps where you can sell. Also, it's the one exception where I don't mind selling LEAP puts. I've shorted a bunch of Dec 2028 puts (the furthest out at this point). It's a big hit to my excess liquidity, but am willing to take that chance because it's Berkshire and there is a countercyclical component to the stock, and it hasn't done anything in 2 years, big cash position, buybacks, etc.

Tragedy in Montreal. Three dead: Dead civilian (a Rabbi) at the hand of an excited police officer, who got jumped during the stand off with the shooter. Another police officer (An Algerian) killed in action in his early 30s. The shooter, a maniac from Alberta, part of the nationwide “Incel” secret society, or whatever the fuxk that is. I worked from home Monday, so didn’t see anything first hand. I drive by there often.

Very curious to see if this coincides with some announcement regarding BIAL / Anchorage IPO!

Thank you for laying this out.

Another opening tick fill on FIH.u

And now Israel will hit Beirut until Hezbollah stops, just like they did with Gaza. At least Hamas is mostly killing their own Palestinians now.

Don't worry change - I would never mess with you!

Yesterday STX today MU

Remind me never to get into a bust up with you in real life @cubsfan

He is becoming Chairman. Probably all set in motion by current chairman David Brandon retiring. I bought some too.

In my experience, when a CEO or CFO leaves voluntarily, it is rarely a good sign, unless the executive leaves due to really bad health issues. Also, have you taken a look at Yum Brands?

Sorry, meant disproportional loss of innocent human life. And of course no one can explain or justify Hezbollah presence in Southern Lebanon as just one example. Lebanon doesn't want them there and neither does Israel yet when Israel responds to their terrorist attacks, it gets blamed and used as a pawn and/or excuse for jeopardizing a peace deal with Iran. Informed people know better.

The whole notion of "proportionality" in war is total bullshit. You end wars with disproportional responses - not 1 for 1, but 10 for 1. Why do you think the USA has not invaded Iran? We could never end it with "proportional" responses. Therefore, we obliterate what we can without any losses to the US. Israel would be stupid to play this game with Hamas or Hezbollah. Both terrorist organizations are getting exactly what they deserve - where Gaza is a pile of ruble and Southern Lebanon may end up. For every Israeli death - Israelis are responding "disproportionately" Proportionality is nonsense when you are in war.

Cubs, the issue is always proportionality and whether it was necessary. Again, hindsight is much more clear than present day. We didn't start or provoke WWII but we ended it. The issue is how we ended it and whether we would do the same thing again. We did learn how destructive a nuclear bomb can be, which hopefully is the reason it will remain a useful deterrent for those who have it and who value human life.

+1. This is a capex bubble first and foremost.

Of course it was the right thing to do. The Japanese Military killed 8 civilians for every 1 soldier they lost. Japan killed 16 million civilians.. They earned the bomb. Why would the US risk 1 million casualties to invade Japan when we could end the war is 3 days with 2 bombs?

Agreed. I think the important issue is that smart people learn from their mistakes. I would hope that we have. I'd also like to think that the Japanese have forgiven us and remain ashamed of being on the wrong side of morality during WWII even though there remain apologists in this Country who are unable to learn from history.

That is the conventional wisdom - that the Japanese saw the destructive force of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and threw up their hands.....what people forget is the Japanese leadership was already thoroughly desensitized to the annihilation of their cities by then. By August 1945, the US Army Air Forces had firebombed over 60 Japanese cities to ash. While the atomic bomb was a terrifying technological leap, it was fundamentally just a bigger bomb.....historians argue that to the Japanese high command, Hiroshima merely represented city number 6x being destroyed and it did not fundamentally change their military arithmetic. The military arithmetic that most likely DID turn their head was the entry of the Soviet Union into the war two days after Hiroshima but hours before Nagasaki. Before then the feeling was that the US (acting alone) could be repelled from the Japanese homeland - the entry of the USSR into the war changed the math utterly. The answer of course is likely cumulative....the nukes plus the USSR did it but having looked at the evidence my guess is it was more like 80% the USSR and 20% Nukes that pushed the Japanese to throw up their hands. The story (we) tell ourselves as liberal idealists is that the use of nukes ended the war....their use, by us the 'good guys' was an act of cruel kindness to save aggregate lives on both sides...as in most things the stories we tell ourselves and reality diverge meaningfully. Read more here if interested - https://apjjf.org/tsuyoshi-hasegawa/2501/article Timeline below from Gemini - "The August 1945 Timeline March 9-10, 1945: The US firebombs Tokyo (Operation Meetinghouse), killing an estimated 100,000 people and destroying 16 square miles of the city. August 6, 1945: The US drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. August 8, 1945 (Midnight): The Soviet Union officially declares war on Japan, violating the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact. August 9, 1945 (Early Morning): A massive Soviet force of over 1.5 million men invades Japanese-occupied Manchuria. August 9, 1945 (11:02 AM): The US drops a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. August 15, 1945: Emperor Hirohito broadcasts the surrender of Japan. The Timing of the Supreme Council Meeting Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence is the behavior of the Japanese leadership. After the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, the Supreme War Council did not convene an emergency meeting. However, when news of the Soviet declaration of war and invasion reached Tokyo early on August 9, the council rapidly convened to discuss surrender. They were already in this meeting discussing the Soviet crisis when the news of the Nagasaki bombing was delivered to them later that morning."

On your last question, agree 100%

If token prices plummet, lowest cost of compute will win out. Cheap tokens make so many more use cases possible.

More DPZ

I highly suggest trying GLM 5.2 - pretty much on par with Opus, some argue it's better even. Atlas Knowledge's stock has 15x'd YTD. The question is how far that rubber band can stretch... If frontier intelligence can increasingly be developed in the East at a fraction of the cost incurred in the West ( GLM-5.2, was trained entirely on 100,000 Ascend 910B processors with zero Nvidia silicon), then the largest capital allocators are also the ones most exposed to over-investment risk. The breaking point was always likely to be when one of the major spenders concludes that shareholder returns are better served by spending slightly less. The problem is that “slightly less” is not embedded in anyone’s assumptions. The entire AI complex is priced for ever rising capex as inference demand grows. This set up is becoming increasingly precarious. The louder this message gets the more momo bottleneck bros inch toward the exit which creates neg momentum in its own right. Now we might be inclined to say who cares about GLM because it's distilled from Claude & GPT, but distillation is/was/ and always will be only one part of the equation. It's at best a bootstrapping method, the training, harness and weights over that existing distillation is still differentiated and great. If distillation is all that is required to make a model on par with the frontier labs, I don't think GLM would be the only option. But thus far, it's the only one that has come close. Then there's the seemingly endless debate on open-source being good for hyperscalers. First, the premise is inconvertible: Jevons on volume, i.e. free ish weights collapse the price of intelligence + current elasticity = massively expanded token consumption. And in parallel, margins migrate somewhat away from frontier labs as "good-enough" OS eats the middle of the task distribution (albeit pricing will be pareto distributed anyway so wouldn't overstate this margin point). The labs currently act like demand aggregators, and this proliferates outward, ok, no debate thus far. Second, OS weights can be served by anyone: neoclouds, sovereigns, on-prem, and maybe (probably not) the edge. So not just Hyperscalers. OS explodes TAM for everyone not just the Hyperscalers. So, for me, the shape of compute demand changes from prepaid capex commitments (from two behemoths primarily) to fragmented opex amidst a price war. So, from the Hyperscalers perspective what's changed assuming OS demand make wholes (and then some) frontier lab demand? Well, the demand risk now moves onto their balance sheet. Earlier it was the VCs carrying (via financing the frontier labs) that demand risk. Now, that demand risk shifts onto hyperscaler b/sheet. Third, a question that's less clear to me: in an OS/OW inference dominated world, doesn't the cheapest integrated stack (Google) win? Doesn't the margin migrate from frontier labs to the Hyperscalers with lowest servicing cost to compete? So the OS = Hyperscaler bull case is really a cost leadership bet again. Thoughts?