RichardGibbons

None of these countries has committed genocide in my lifetime. I haven't committed genocide. Nobody I voted for committed genocide. So I'm baffled by how you seem to believe that I'm hypocritical in condemning genocide. My best guess is that you you are viewing all human interactions through identity politics, evaluating people not as individuals, but only on their group identity. And you're implying that people are guilty in perpetuity based on the crimes committed by their countries of origins generations ago. I think it's a huge mistake to view the world this way, because it encourages lots of bad things, including genocide. That said, I think your position that "anyone of European ancestry can't condemn genocide" isn't based on reason. And you think I'm hypocritical for being someone of European ancestry who is willing to speak out against genocide. So I think we've kind of exhausted the discussion.

Who in particular are you referring to here?

Ah yes, the familiar "you committed genocide 100 years ago, so it's cool if I commit genocide now" argument. This is happening today, on our watch, not our grandparents'. I think if you care about people, you probably shouldn't suggest someone's behind in the number of atrocities, and so should therefore get a hall pass on committing genocide.

I mean, even the Luca's "China's raising everyone up rather than just helping rich people" argument doesn't actually align with reality. Pretty well every democratic country on earth has a lower Gini coefficient than China. My guess is what he thinks of as evidence is actually propaganda, and he's ignoring the actual outcomes of the last 150 years of authoritarianism and communism. It's pretty amazing to me that managed economies have been tried since Marx, and not one has even had close to the astounding beneficial results that arise from liberal free-market economies. And even more amazing that many people are so eager to completely ignore that evidence in favor of a story.

That makes sense. Thx, thepupil.

Not disagreeing strenuously with your argument, but is there a reason to believe that the companies in the stock market ought to grow at roughly the same rate as GDP? Like, I imagine a tiny percentage of failing businesses are publicly-traded. And I imagine that higher-growth businesses are more likely to be public (because they can get better valuations), and that businesses that have better competitive advantages are more likely to be public (because they will likely leverage those advantages to grow bigger, and most big companies are public.) I just wonder if you're effectively saying that the average high school student's mark is 70%, so we should expect people who have incomes over $300K/year to have averaged 70% in high school.

Yeah, I think everyone paying attention knows this because of the large percentage of completely nonsensical arguments on this topic.

I think you're misunderstanding what's happening here. Your goal for the performance review was likely to evaluate them in an unbiased way and incentivize their future performance. Their goal was likely to use the performance review to improve their personal outcomes.

Yeah, I've wondered about this too, and don't have a good answer. The best I've come up with is that there's stuff that increases measured inflation when interest rates go up. (e.g. in Canada, if mortgage rates go up, it increases the rate of inflation.) I wonder if there's enough stuff like that in the measurement that people can be quite confident inflation will fall over the next six months if the Fed stands pat or lowers rates.

Yes, it does. There's a reason why chips are still going to countries like the UK, Canada, France, Netherlands, and Sweden. It matters whether a country is a democracy abiding by the rules-based order, human rights, and the rule of law.

Yep. I've been reading Chip War, and the book makes a pretty good case that a contributing factor to USSR falling behind the world and losing the Cold War was simply that they couldn't match the free world in semiconductors in large part because they couldn't get access to cutting-edge manufacturing equipment. It's a pretty good outcome, I think, as long as the CCP keeps doing horrific things, but I feel bad that the Chinese people get screwed as a result.

My interpretation of this whole thread is that it's about entertainment. So, I imagine almost every comment, including this one, is intended to entertain the writer or the potential audience.

Yeah, I mean SongDonkey's argument is among the worse I've seen on this board in the decades I've been reading it. In 1973, Buffett stopped an acquisition of Wesco, only to acquire their own majority stake two years later. The SEC investigated, and fined Blue Chip $115K to compensate Wesco shareholders for damages. This is obviously much worse than the alleged "inaccurate valuations" by Fairfax trumpeted by Muddy Waters. So in that case, clearly, if SongDonkey had been around in 1973, the right thing for him to do then would be to dump all Berkshire Hathaway Class A--and maybe even short those shares considering that they were trading at the lofty price of $71. Such horrific actions by Buffett completely invalidate Berkshire as a potential investment for anyone with an ounce of intelligence, because it's clearly run by a bunch of crooks and cockroaches must be everywhere! Terrible idea to try to profit by buying Berkshire Class A shares for $71 in 1973. --- Overall, this whole Muddy Waters thing makes me feel pretty good about Fairfax because it's such a nothingburger. If the best Muddy can come up with is screaming about what are clearly paper monsters, then that actually validates the investment.

One other potential wrench is the likelihood of the provincial government giving Indigenous people a veto over forestry use. This is under consultation now, and I wouldn't be surprised if it moves ahead this year. A court decision back in 2021 resulted in the same thing for parts of Alberta and northern BC. I know someone who works in forestry up there, and that decision has led to Indigenous people extorting the lumber companies. On top of that, the government is clawing back rights to privately manage forestry land to transferring those rights to First Nations tribes. As a result, the lumber companies up there have stopped harvesting on government-own land for the last couple years. So, to sensibly model BC lumber companies, I think one probably has to dramatically reduce both volume and profitability for at least five or six years. Since it's a competitive global market, I think there's a decent chance it'll kill most of BC's forestry industry. In any case, one would expect margins in BC operations to be much lower in perpetuity than the past and increased risk.

Yeah, this is generally my approach too, for the same reason. I mostly don't share unless someone asks about a specific stock, or if I want to give back to the board by throwing out something I see as a something that has an extremely good chance of being a big winner.

The Byzantine Generals problem was first described in a paper in 1982, and was certainly discussed in undergrad level computer science classes during the early 1990s. So, it seems pretty odd to say that it's "a pretty obvious idea" when you have hundreds of thousands of computer scientists exposed to the idea and thinking about it over the course of decades, yet nobody implemented a practical solution for over 25 years. As a broad question, would one categorize ValueArb's cognitive error as hindsight bias, retrospective determinism, or something else? I've certainly made that error before (believed something was "obvious" when the evidence conclusively indicates it wasn't). And I've made it surprisingly often. So I'm curious where that cognitive error fits in.

I agree that DEI is not the broad sentiment yet (except institutionally) and Canada's racial problems are small compared to the USA (and almost entirely related to Indigenous people.) But the smallness of the real problems are what makes it particularly egregious that most Canadian governments' are sprinting headlong into promoting race as the primary attribute that distinguishes people. There's really no sensible way to interpret insane policies and luxury beliefs like Gladue, this, this, this, this, this, this.... There are bucket-loads of examples--deeply shameful things that our Canadian governments promote. What's more, the negative second-order effects of deliberately implementing systemic racism and encouraging Canadians to view the world through a racist lens are likely to be severe, particularly as young people's standard of living plummets.

Yeah, and I think that to the extent to which discrimination and bias is deliberately introduced into the system, it should be on such dimensions. For instance, if economically, you and your family are worse off, then you should get systemic advantages (though not to the extent that achievement is discouraged, as that would have the effect of pushing people down, rather than helping raise them up.) That's the whole point behind things like bursaries and progressive taxation. The way I see it, if there's inequalities between racial groups, then that gets resolved by a larger proportion of a particular racial group able to avail themselves of those systemic advantages. And, governmental messaging on race should basically be, "At our core, people are essentially the same, and it's abhorrent discriminating based on race." (As opposed to now, where the government messaging in Canada is essentially, "Race is super-important thing that should divide us. Certain races are less competent, dangerously fragile, and kind of pathetic. And some are also evil. So, it's only sensible to be a racist.")

There's some particular irony there too. The racism inherent in British colonialism likely had many negative impacts on your ancestors. But now, because ethic Indians have among the best outcomes in North American society, DEI is implementing systemic discrimination targeting your niece and nephew as well.

It's quite clear at this point that DEI is the antithesis of fairness and equal opportunities. Among other things, it's racism re-branded, yet again. It amazes me that after so many injustices, humanity just can't seem to tear itself away from the horrific idea that skin colour should dictate outcomes.

I think the reason for this is the impact of incentives on growth. If you have, say, 3% growth, then over the course of 25 years, then your economy will growth by 109%, and your poor are likely to be better off by 55% if they get even half the growth of the economy. If you punish the more intelligent, hard-working, and creative members of your society, then you disincentivize them, which impacts growth. So, suppose you disincentivize the successful, hurting your growth by 2 percentage points, but in return are able to boost the incomes of the poorest by 20%. Then your economy grows by only 28%, and even if the wages of the poorest grow at the same rate, they still only make it to 48%. Therefore, you basically screw over everyone, including the poor, when you create onerous regulations and taxes that impact your country's growth. But that doesn't stop governments from doing it, I think largely because people aren't very thoughtful or proficient at math, and envy is a powerful emotion.

Yeah, I think that's largely because China is the country that today seems most likely to become an Orwellian dystopia, when you account for the social credit stuff. "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever."

This year, I bought C March calls on October 25, rolled the profit up in the second half of November. I think it's about a 700% gain today. On UAN, I made about a 14-bagger on reasonably large initial position of shares and calls (with a lot of rolling of options). That took almost two years, but was my biggest dollar gain. A portion of my FFH calls back in the day went to 30 or 40x--I can't remember which. To my (weak) recollection, that was over the course of about 8 months, and I imagine those calls were probably my highest percentage gain on a single position.

The headline on this one is nicely deceiving. The implication is "yachts and jets", but they're actually referring to you, Sanjeev. Their cutoff is U$140K in income (and I imagine that's likely household income.) Though, to be fair, I guess you did take a jet to Europe.... So, while, based on your headline, you're supposed to think yachts, you should really be thinking about the upper middle class family in Canada, America, or Europe driving to work and heating their home. I suspect the headline is deceiving because the math doesn't work if you just include the yacht club. There aren't enough billionaires to make the carbon numbers impressive, so it's necessary to talk about the global 1% instead, so you can scoop up the top 10-15% of North American emitters. Spek is also bang-on with his analysis. To me, it feels like Oxfam/SEI started out by wanting to blame wealthy elites for climate change. But then they did the math, and realized their thesis wasn't convincing, so they had to start playing tricky with the numbers and massaging definitions. (I think it's actually a terrible tactic by progressives, trying to tie climate change to unequal outcomes. I think climate change is a big problem, but by trying to tie it to world inequalities, they lose credibility. It suggests to me that they don't actually see climate change as a real problem, but rather just another tool for advancing Marxist views.)

I used to play quite a bit, and got into the 1900 range, but don't play anymore. My top chess highlight was beating a master in a tournament. My second highlight was when I largely crushed everyone at work for months, but then lost badly seven times in a row against a random co-worker. Then he revealed that he was the third best player in Canada.