RichardGibbons
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Posts posted by RichardGibbons
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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. -
8 hours ago, Parsad said:
No idea how exactly they calculated this, but those jets, yachts and certain companies aren't good for the environment. Kind of like how Leo and Bono fight against global warning but sit on gas guzzling yachts all summer! Cheers!
https://www.yahoo.com/news/worlds-richest-1-emit-much-215000375.html
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.)
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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.
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1 hour ago, rkbabang said:
The funny part is that is kind of what I believe. Nothing in life is guaranteed and all value is subjective. There really is nothing that has “intrinsic value” because all value is subjective. You may think you have a company with intrinsic value, but people could stop loving any product or service and those cash flows would vanish.
Yeah, I feel as if it's a bit like the "brain in a vat" scenario. It's plausible that you are just a brain in a vat, with electrical inputs supplied to brain to make you think that you actually have a body and exist in this world. There's no reason to be completely confident that you aren't just a brain in a vat being fed stimuli.
But, on a practical level, you're likely to have better outcomes (i.e. a happier brain) if you use the heuristic that you aren't just a brain in a vat, but rather act as if you were a brain in a body roaming about on a giant spinning sphere.
Similarly, I think you're likely to have better results investing if you have some concept of "intrinsic value", even if you know that the word "intrinsic" doesn't actually exist with the 100% confidence that seems to be implicit in the word "intrinsic".
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1 hour ago, ValueArb said:
Again commodities are speculations and so is crypto. Its a standard definition. And yes, any commodity with industrial uses is different than crypto because crypto has none. We can use gold or wheat as mediums of exchange just as easily as BTC, it doesn't give them any intrinsic value.
And by induction, anything created by commodities is also a commodity and therefore speculative. And any business that relies on selling something speculative is also speculative because it could disappear in an instant if the speculative value of its output falls to zero.
Therefore everything in the human universe is speculative and nothing in existence has intrinsic value. Including bitcoin. And the USD dollar.
There, ValueArb. To help you out, I've proven exactly what you've been stretching toward. The key, I think, is to start with the premise that commodities that people use and are willing to expend both resources and human effort to acquire don't have intrinsic value.
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5 hours ago, formthirteen said:
(If you ask ErnieBot, a Chinese version of ChatGPT, whether Xi Jinping is pragmatic, it replies, “Try a different question.”)
This is actually quite a pragmatic response. So at least we know ErnieBot is pragmatic, even if Xi isn't....
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That makes me wonder if the best thing for the world would be the Ukrainian war lasting for a decade. Horrible for Ukraine, but if nations began to believe that any war is likely to last many years, consuming many lives and resources, I think there would be fewer wars.
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12 hours ago, Viking said:
I heard this on a podcast a while back (not sure which one). I did a quick search online and found the following article:“For a typical wood-frame condo development in Vancouver, the fees represent 29.25 per cent of the unit’s final purchase price.”
“Government fees imposed on a project can range from those that cover infrastructure-related needs (DCCs and development cost levies), community contributions that will offset density (CACs), a federal goods and service tax (GST), building and development permits, property transfer taxes and the speculation and vacancy tax.
“ In Vancouver, there is also the additional empty homes tax and a public art fee, according to a February 2023 Urban Development Institute, Pacific Region report.
“The total cost of government fees represents 32.72 per cent of rent that the end-user pays in a typical wood-frame, purpose-built rental development in Vancouver.
“Municipal fees account for the majority of this total at 44.27 per cent; federal and provincial fees account for 28.39 and 24.15 per cent, respectively. The remaining 3.18 per cent is attributed to regional fees. For a typical wood-frame condo development in Vancouver, the fees represent 29.25 per cent of the unit’s final purchase price.”
Wow, thanks Viking!
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3 hours ago, Viking said:
Taxes (as a % of selling price) on a new build has gone from 10% eight years ago to 30% today
Do you happen to have a source for this? (Not because I doubt it, but rather because I'm curious about the underlying math.)
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8 hours ago, Dinar said:
@RichardGibbons, I grew up in the Soviet Union, you do NOT want to live in a place where everyone is equal. The US does have serious problems and this is how I would begin to address them:
a) Stop immigration. Immigration expands labor supply and depresses wages, particularly for unskilled and the poor. Raises cost of housing, again impacting the poor and middle class the most.
b) Fix public school system (just don't spend more money - NYC spends USD 40K per kid, and outcomes are awful, Newark tripled its spending per pupil, nothing improved.) and give vouchers for private schools to kids. Break the monopoly of public schools. Mandate personal finance classes in every grade starting with 5th in every school, and teach personal responsibility. Classes how to choose a spouse, a job.
c) End federal guarantee of student loans which just serve to enrich colleges. Use the money to reduce budget deficit.
d) End personal income tax on the first USD 50K of income of you are single, $100K if you are married, and say $100K if you are single + kids, $200K if you are married with kids. End all personal deductions, including for charity and mortgage interest.
e) Fix healthcare system which is dysfunctional and a cancer on the US. Three quick solutions: 1) Every hospital/medical practice should have publicly listed price list and law of one price - you have to charge everyone, ensured and uninsured same price, no $50K bill but $10K if you have insurance (80% discount negotiated by your insurance company) and $50K if you pay cash. 2) Mandate that for every medicine in the US, pharmaceutical companies cannot charge more than say 30% more than the same medicine costs in Canada. 3) Ban rebates and other abusive practice in the pharmaceutical industry in the US.
f) Reform welfare and other social programs. It should not be that in the US, a single mother with 2 kids gets so much generous support that she needs to earn $150K per annum in NYC before she is better off working than sitting on the dole.
g) Stop the whole switch to solar and wind which is very expensive, particularly for the poor, and build nuclear power plants - cheap, environmentally friendly electricity.
I am sure that there are a number of things that should be done that I have missed.
I agree that equality is awful. Much, much worse than the situation we have now. It's very clear and obvious that you have to maintain incentives or everything breaks.
a) I think reducing immigration is sensible, but stopping immigration completely is not good. I think immigrants are self-selecting to be much more likely to be hard-working, ambitious, and entrepreneurial than the average citizen. So, I think it makes sense to let in the immigrants with needed high-value skills, and block the others. Then you don't have the immigrants competing with the poor for resources and jobs, and but still get people that add more value than the average American. (Though this would likely be mildly inflationary.)
b) Works for me.
c) I agree with your analysis of the current situation, but if you do this, I'm not sure how you ensure that the economic bottom 50% have the ability to get a higher education. Education is highly correlated with income mobility. But I don't have a better solution than yours, either.
d) This is interesting, because I didn't think it was possible to do this without blowing up the national debt, but I think it is. I'd guess that you'd lose only about $200B in federal tax revenue doing that. Neat idea.
e) Very reasonable, though I'm not a fan of your second item because I think it would increase prices in Canada to the same as the USA, rather than the reverse. And I'm a Canadian, so that would suck. LOL.
f) If that's the actual math, then that makes sense. It's critical not to break incentives.
g) Yep.
Thanks for the response. I'm certainly going to adopt some of these as reasonable strategies I'll argue.
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5 hours ago, Dinar said:
@RichardGibbons, what do you think the implications of a 99% inheritance tax will be? I will bet that you will
a) see tax collection decline
b) people move out of the country (like Eduardo Saverin did)
c) massive misallocation of resources and economic destruction. (If I had a net worth of $200MM and could only leave $30MM to my kids, I would move out of the US. If I was prevented from doing so, I would then buy $170MM worth of apartment buildings or a really scarce commodity and burn them down. Most of the kids I know from high school would do same thing by the way.)
My baseline outcome is Bernie and AOC wailing and gnashing their teeth that billionaires have too much money, billionaires wailing and gnashing their teeth and spending resources to try to avoid the tax.
I think it wouldn't negatively impact small entrepreneurship much, because I don't think young people will decide not to get rich because their kids won't have the chance to be billionaires. I'm not sure the extent to which it will effect big entrepreneurs like Musk and Bezos, but it doesn't seem to me that Musk and Bezo's motivation is to make their kids rich.
I suspect it will largely impact the decisions of people who are older than 50 with children, but I think those decisions aren't that important for innovation and can be counter-productive (like monopolies leveraging their position), and it's a toss-up for me whether their reaction will be a net positive or net negative for society.
In broader society, I think there will be an increase in social cohesion which is the key to the good outcomes in societies. I think there will be efforts to get the well-educated kids of rich parents to start their own business while they can lean on parents for help. I think people will become more tolerant of billionaires. I think monopolies will be harder to sustain. I think there will likely be more tax revenue. I think there will likely be more focus on innovation and more entrepreneurialism as youth will have more resources to mess around with.
a) Can't know for sure, but I think maybe not. But it's super hard to predict these things, so I wouldn't bet any amount of money on it. Second- and third-order effects in taxation are hard. Does Elon stop innovating after PayPal because he's worried that his 15 kids won't get an inheritance? I think not, but I could easily be wrong.
b) Yeah, people can totally do this as long as they pay the exit tax at a marginal rate of 99% on amounts over $30M. You have to move when extreme wealth is fairly certain, but you haven't achieved it yet.
c) Well, I think most successful people don't get off on willful destruction because not doing that is a significant part of why they're successful. I'd be pretty surprised if Buffett destroyed Berkshire in a fit of pique. (And if he did, it would be neat to see which companies would rise up in its place, and what the people you paid $170M would build with that capital.)
Just out of curiosity, what's solution do you have to combat growing wealth inequality? I'd be happy to adopt your solution if it seems more sensible than mine. I think it's quite a hard problem to solve without breaking capitalism, so I'd sincerely love to hear of something better than my proposed strategy.
(If your solution is, "do nothing", I think that's an awful solution in a country with human rights and the second amendment. If wealth gets too skewed, I think life for everyone, including the rich, becomes not much fun.)
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7 hours ago, Luca said:
public housing, wealth tax for extreme net worth, higher capital gains and income tax for the very wealthy, 0% tax for average joe
Accidentally all things that China is doing right now and at the exact same point in time when china starts doing these things you start to see the US upping their own spending too because competition gets tougher
The problem is that this stuff doesn't actually do what you want it to because it assumes a static world. The world isn't static, and in a non-static world capitalism wins (for everyone, not just the rich) because incentives matter.
Suppose that a country is getting 4% annual growth from a capitalist society, but the bottom 90% is only getting 40% of the output. If you put in your socialist changes and the bottom 90% now get 60%, but it costs you 2% of your growth, then in the year you do it, the bottom 90% have a 50% higher standard of living.
But in 17 years, they have the same standard of living. And in 30 years, the bottom 90% in the capitalist society have a 50% higher standard of living than those in the socialist system.So you have to be careful not to break capitalist incentives, and studies show that higher capital gains taxes, wealth taxes, and high-income taxes do that.
China is a pretty good example, because you saw the CCP destroy their country for socialism, adopt capitalism in the 1990s to dramatically boost their standard of living, and now you'll see them destroy their country once more by breaking capitalist incentives. The two Koreas are similar. Or, a less extreme example is the difference in Canadian and American economic paths.
I think the actual solution is massive inheritance taxes (like, 99% on amounts over $30M) combined with taxes and jail time on people attempting to subvert those inheritance taxes. Allow the brilliant risk-taking entrepreneurs to allocate capital and do their thing for their lifetime to improve everyone's standard of living. But nobody gets to be a billionaire except through their own efforts.
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2 hours ago, no_free_lunch said:
Apologies. This is certainly a nuanced and balanced approach. It gives me hope. It is important that the west maintain some sort of moral consistency and the events of the last couple years really shook my belief in that. However, I do see more and more questioning the politicians and their motives and as long as that is the approach I hope things will turn out ok in the end.
No big deal, I didn't take it the wrong way.
I think the big problem with North American politics now is that countries prosper when there is high social cohesion--when everyone shares a common broad vision and everyone tries to act in good faith to achieve that vision.
Politicians and media, however, seem to believe that destroying social cohesion is good for their careers. They seem to want wedge issues, polarization, and villainization of their political enemies because it leads to engagement.
The problem is, I suspect if you destroy social cohesion, you also destroy democracy.
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2 hours ago, Luca said:
Exactly, you have corruption and abuse on both sides
Yeah. But, the corruption and abuse on the Chinese side is at least an order of magnitude (and maybe two) worse that the that in the "free" world. You might want to "both sides" it, but the CCP is obviously much more evil, just like the Nazis, Khymer Rouge, and Soviets were evil.
The kid who shoplifted the chocolate bar from the store was a criminal, and so was Jeffrey Dahmer. Really, both of those two were criminal. Just like poverty in the US and running people over with tanks are basically the same thing.
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2 hours ago, no_free_lunch said:
Richard, I recall a police state or martial law being imposed, in Canada, within the past couple years. All to silence some blue collar workers. Not so democratic, not so liberal. You probably scoff at this but then Luca thinks lightly of our opinion on China human rights abuses too. From my perspective, it's similar, just different degrees of authoritarianism. China might kill you, in Canada the most they will do is take your job if you oppose them. For the average joe either option is catastrophic.
I don't scoff at it at all. I think it's atrocious. The government has effectively said, "Because you publicly disagree with our policies, we're going to take away your ability to feed your family." This is a huge overreach by the government. So, I think my opinion matches yours on that issue (or maybe I'm actually more extreme than you on the Emergency Act invocation. I'm against it to an extreme degree.)
On the vaccine mandates, I'm on the fence. I think there shouldn't be mandates outside healthcare, but I'm on the fence whether a healthcare worker should have the option of not using proven prophylactic measures. (Like, should they have the option of not washing their hands or not wearing masks during a surgery?) I think I probably settle on exactly how proven the "proven" measures are.
I believe in liberal values, but there's no doubt that the Trudeau government is authoritarian and very far away from liberal values. I think there's a reasonable chance that because of this government, I'll never again vote for the Liberal Party of Canada.
(I really didn't like Harper because of his anti-science stance. But now I wish I could vote for him today.)
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2 minutes ago, Luca said:
Because they can harm societal development, food companies in Mexico as an example, huge obesity problems etc.
Do you view the CCP committing genocide against the Uyghurs and grinding peaceful protesters to a pulp beneath the treads of tanks as harmful to societal development?I suspect not, because the CCP said this was a good idea, right?
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14 hours ago, Sweet said:
Yes so there are some things in human history which we used to do which are good and others which we now frown upon. So let’s not herald prior human practices as proof it’s the right thing to do.I agree 100% that we should both team up to pound that straw man into the ground.
For instance, I haven't enslaved or genocided anyone this year, though human historical practices indicate it's a good idea. And I think that's the right decision (for me, at least. Don't want to judge....)
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19 hours ago, Sweet said:
Human parents have co-slept throughout history, and that’s good? Human parents spanked throughout history, and that’s bad?
Yes and yes. -
3 hours ago, zzzyx said:
LOL....the appeal to "SCIENCE"....and then the extrapolation to child abuse. Too funny!
LOL, yeah, science--correlation is not causation, and it's interesting to speculate about underlying causes when you have a strong correlation. Spanking kids was pretty standard in my lifetime, though it's abuse now.
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I just had another discussion with my wife about this, and she actually remembered more than she did when we chatted earlier. To ease the transition, what we did was put our mattress on the floor, and the kid's mattress immediately adjacent (after the kid had graduated from the crib.)
Then, when the kid fussed at night, the parent could easily move into the bed until the kid chilled, then return their own bed. Initially, it was harder for the parent (because you have to roll off your bed onto their mattress, which is more annoying than just falling asleep right away.) But she remembers that it didn't take long before the kid realized which bed was theirs to sleep in and that having their own bed didn't mean that their parent was abandoning them for the night. And then there was just a transition to another room.
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15 hours ago, beerbaron said:
Anybody that tells you letting a kid cry out is bad for their mental health needs to take a step back trough evolution, birds throw their babies out of the nest and, for thousands of years, human kids were neglected based on today's standard.
Odd decision, citing bird parenting as the model to follow rather than human parenting. Human parents have co-slept throughout history.
But if one is too frustrated, it's fine to ignore science. Lots of people ignore evidence and correlation is not causation. It could be that the co-slept kids are better adjusted and happier not because of the co-sleeping, but because their parents are more loving and kind. Maybe their parents are less authoritarian, when the non-co-sleepers care much more about control. Maybe co-sleepers simply care more for their kids or pay more attention to their kids than non-co-sleepers, and that's what causes the difference in outcomes.Heck, once one starts saying, "it's ok if I mess up my kid by not co-sleeping. No big deal", one could imagine similarly saying, "No big deal if I yell at my kid." Then "No big deal if I hurt my kid because I'm angry", or whatever. Maybe not co-sleeping is an indicator of which parents are willing to justify trading their kids' health for their own short-term happiness.
Because correlation isn't causation, and all the co-sleeping studies seem to be correlational. (My poorly-educated bet would be it comes down to attachment parenting vs authoritarian parenting styles.)
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6 hours ago, stahleyp said:
Did you cosleep with your kids, Richard? If so, how long did that last?
Yep. We basically removed one side of the crib and attached it to our bed so that essentially the crib became an extension of the bed.
Neither my wife nor I remember how long it lasted, but I'm thinking until about the age of three. The fact that neither of us really remembers the transition very well is indicative to me that at that point, our kids were easily sleeping through the night, weren't large enough to be annoying in bed, and that the transition period wasn't painful at all.
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To not lose your mind with a baby who wants to co-sleep, I think the strategy is to remember the goal. In my opinion, the goal isn't to figure out a way to make the baby sleep. It's to raise a well-adjusted, robust kid.
One thing that makes kids cry is anxiety. Essentially, the kid is telling you that they are worried, and are unable to regulate their emotions on their own. If you go with "cry it out" strategies, I think you're effectively communicating to your kid that you aren't a reliable caregiver. You're communicating that you can't be depended on for protection and support when they need it. And they're learning that at a deep level.
On the other hand, if you do provide support when they tell you they need it, you are teaching them how to regulate their emotions and that you can be trusted to be there when they need you. They will be more comfortable exploring the world independently, because they know in their soul that if they run into something scary, you'll be there to help them.The outcomes of this strategy tend to be kids and adults with higher self esteem, resilience, affection, and life satisfaction.
So, I'd suggest focusing on the outcome. Kids need attachment to parents, and, though it's quite annoying, by giving your child the attachment they need, you're increasing the odds they'll be happier in life. You'd likely take a bullet for your kid, so you should take solace that, to help them get better outcomes, you just need to suffer for a few more months.
(Yeah, I know--taking a bullet is easier because it's over quickly, while lack of sleep is an ongoing grind that seems never ending. But I think it's worth it. And it will end.)
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1 hour ago, Luca said:
Third, we should focus on practical cooperation and expedite economic recovery.
The really goofy thing about this speech is that Xi doesn't recognize that he's basically breaking "practical cooperation".
The magic of capitalism and free markets is that it is the most efficient form of cooperation ever discovered. To create and manufacture, say, a computer, millions of people are cooperating, from the chip designers in Silicon Valley to the copper miners in Chile to the Nigerian oil producers.It doesn't matter at all that these people have never met each other--they are still working together as efficiently as possible to create a computer. And you know that that cooperation is ultimately practical, creating what's desired by people, because price signals show that's what people want.
And if those resources are better spent producing a car--because people now want cars, more than computers--those resources will efficiently get rerouted to producing vehicles instead of computers..
And so when Xi says, "practical cooperation", to me, it basically seems the same as saying, "we're going to build crap that people don't want or need and destroy our efficiency because I'm the Man and I say so."
That said, I understand why people buy into the idea, despite the strong, practical historic evidence of what works. Most people don't understand the magic of free markets and trade and delightful consequences like consumer surpluses. And, if one believes one can improve one's life by 20% at the small cost of hurting a million strangers by 1%, many people will take that deal.
China
in General Discussion
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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."