RichardGibbons

Hallucinate, sure. But not arguing. Admiring. I find your unapologetic stance that you aren't rational--and shouldn't even try to be--fascinating. It's like Guernica or something.

Cool quiz. I got 35, and "A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents" essentially describes me. (That said, the quiz might be a bit inaccurate for me, since I'm Canadian, and on average we're richer, we have a less skewed income distribution, we have better social mobility, we have far fewer people per capita in prison, and we're better educated on average. Thus, there's a good chance that the average Canadian will skew toward "living in a bubble" according to this quiz.)

Suggesting that there is only one way to view the world (yours!) would strike most as elitist. I see it as the creepy-clown of arguments. Sorry, I'm confused now. I thought that I was representing your view accurately. Didn't you say that you aren't rational when it comes to politics, and--what's more--there's only one way people view politics--irrationally? Or are you just trying to say that your own views are creepy-clown? That said, one of the great things about your "I'm not rational" position--one of the things I admire the most about it--is that you're totally within your rights to claim, "X is true", and then a day later say, "X is not true" and not feel any sense of contradiction. It reminds me of O'Brian in 1984, a brilliant concept for a character, IMO.

Fair point, Investor. I'm not sure if an increase in the duration for capital gains to be considered short term is a good thing for society or not. For me personally, it would be a slightly bad thing, so I'm mildly opposed, but I'm willing to be convinced. That said, to me, this issue is pretty minor compared to the bigger issues. It's akin to saying, "Last time we hired that babysitter, she forgot to brush the kids' teeth. So we should hire Jeffrey Dahmer this time instead."

I think it's quite a useful point he makes. Basically, onyx doesn't really care to be rational, thoughtful, or reasonable in any sense of the word. For him, it's not at all about qualifications, demeanor, intelligence, or ethics. He finds Trump prettier than Clinton and will therefore unapologetically vote for him, for who says that reason, logic, or facts should play any part in deciding the leader of the free world? It explains nicely so many people don't seem to be acting rationally, and why the core of Trump's base is the racists, the violent, and the misogynists. This election might not be the battle of the sexes, the war of the corrupt, or the maverick vs. the establishment. It might actually be the fight between the reasonable and the unreasonable. (And one of the nice things about onyx's unreasonableness is that he can claim that everyone is like that, including him. It nicely avoids any sort of cognitive dissonance, enabling him to justify anything and feel good about himself, while still believing that people should take him seriously. I think it's pretty neat.)

This is exactly the question Obama and Clinton supporters are pretending not to hear. I don't see it answered anywhere. Hillary made a lot of hay over Trump supposedly being cozy with Putin, but no one is saying anything about the Democrats playing with nuclear war. Yeah, the question is being ignored. I think that's because Obama's pretty bright and nobody thoughtful sincerely believes he's likely to start a nuclear war with Russia. Plus, Americans in general don't seem to care much about foreign policy.

Interesting argument, but I'm afraid that you're at first level thinking on this one, focused on this one premise, "IBM is a job security for IT people (but don't refer to 'people associating job security with IBM' as a brand, because it isn't. Just because.)" Grounded in this first-level thinking, blindered view of IBM's competitive advantages, you'll have problems understanding their long-term risks. The Silicon Valley "fast fail" strategy is risky, but there are a large number of people who are doing this, and 5% who are successful will typically be much more successful than the people using things like IBM. The non-IBM customers will be the long-term winners, which will be very problematic for IBM. Thus, while IT job security is a factor, it is only a minor one, long term. The important thing is whether IBM can play this new game successfully (and it's shown no sign that it can.) It doesn't really matter if you're great at creating buggies that will reliably take you from Philadelphia to New York, and everyone who orders buggies will think of you first. Thirty years after the car is invented you still won't be selling many. You should consider doing some second and third level thinking about what happens to IBM in a world where a bunch of people start doing "fast fail".

That's the conclusion you take from this? That the most likely explanation is that all the polls are rigged? Interesting.

Hey, wait a minute... I said this and you said it was lazy thinking: "they make incompetent management feel good about themselves". This is essentially your 2nd level thinking. Also, your third level thinking is basically paraphrasing "hey people buy it because of its brand and we should think about whether that brand is eroding". Essentially what I said! Go figure, I'm third level thinking, but you're having a really hard time identifying it. I think maybe you're saying the same thing as me, except you're being nice about it, and I'm being blunt about it. You're probably a nicer person. :) I think the real problem IBM has is that IT is a competitive advantage in many cases. So, the companies that don't understand IT and therefore hire IBM will frequently lose to companies that do IT in-house. It's hard to win long-term when your business model self-selects the customers who are more likely to lose long term.

Good point, maybe I should rephrase that. People who buy IBM believe IT is a competitive advantage, but don't know enough about IT to build something that would provide a competitive advantage or even realize that businesses don't get competitive advantages in IT by outsourcing their IT to someone else. So they go with IBM because of the brand and end up grossly overpaying for mediocre talent. But at least they help incompetent management feel good about themselves.

Their clients don't have to work with IBM. I'm a proprietorship, and I've done stuff with AWS, and I'm sure I could figure out Azure as well. There are a million people like me, and the only reason to choose IBM is because of the brand. (In fact, I'd go a step further--the companies that choose IBM will mostly be the losers, because they are likely choosing the company because of the brand and therefore don't view IT as a competitive advantage, an attitude which I think puts them at a competitive disadvantage.) Microsoft, on the other hand, has a huge chunk of Enterprise software, but a company would have to be really dumb to come to me to build an enterprise software suite from them. They should just go to Microsoft. Thus, IBM mostly has less of a moat that Microsoft. Watson might end up getting a moat, but it's also a sexy area that a bunch of other people are playing in, and they aren't the obvious "winner" yet.

Yeah, Gates should would certainly be in the running for the top of the list.

Well, I think becoming a major party's nominee for POTUS greatly supports the argument that one has been successful. I was thinking about Scott's ranking, and I think he's got it right. But if Trump hadn't won the nomination, I think I'd put Trump and Watsa on par (because Trump's success in business is questionable and he seems deeply unhappy, and I find it hard to consider anyone who's deeply unhappy to be successful.) Another interesting one to add to the list--in addition to HRC--would be Obama. I think it's tough finding someone that ranks higher than Bezos and Musk.

Don't worry. Trump probably won't run Berkshire. Munger will stop it. Though I guess saying stuff like this about Trump means Munger is a Liberal now, so we shouldn't pay any attention to what he says anymore. Heck, it's all Munger and Obama's fault that America is in debt! Bad Charlie!

Oddly enough, about a decade ago, I wrote a piece on who was the better billionaire.... It seems kind of apropos now. http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2005/12/07/buffett-vs-trump.aspx

Interesting point. I kind of feel like within a thousand years, we'll probably figure out how to create arbitrary compounds and possibly arbitrary elements. If that's the case, I would think the main limiting resource would be energy, which I imagine we could get from the sun. On the other hand, I have no evidence for that feeling, so who knows. It would be quite bad if we only have a 200 year runway.

Is this supposed to mean human life? Because life's been around for 4B years, so another 400M years to get off planet doesn't seem like a big deal. If they mean dinosaurs, that's still over 200M years, so another 20M years seems like quite a long time, too. (I agree with your main point. It's a bad idea to trash the earth in an attempt to leave. I'm just curious about the point the original author (not you) was making when they referenced 10% of time left. )

I suspect this isn't true because the average house price in bubbilicious Canada is up 28% during that time, and real estate is frequently leveraged. So, I'd guess the gap has increased. That said, I think now is a really bad time to measure average wealth in Canada because of the housing bubble.

So to summarize the conversation: Richard: Doesn't a gold standard lead to deflation which is a bad thing? Or am I missing something? Petec: Yeah, it could lead to deflation, but deflation isn't necessarily a bad thing. Richard: I see. That's outside the mainstream view, but the mainstream view seems to have major problems so there might be something to what you say. wachtwoord: Bitcoin exists, therefore good! Evil Keynesians! Religious dogma! Stupid fiscal policies! And education is bad! Avoid text books! Richard: Uh, what? You know that I'm actually thinking petec might be correct, right? Your zealous foamings are not actually providing any insight. wachtwoord: I have no patience for people who ask questions when they don't understand! You're attacking me and you haven't made an argument either. Richard: I'm trying to understand what petec's saying. Not make an argument. Your "Bitcoins are better than gold" statement is actually coherent and relevant. Thanks for that.

You're honestly telling me that you are criticizing someone about Bitcoin without realizing that, in terms of growth, its properties are similar to gold with respect to supply? Worse, actually, since there is a finite supply. Or are you just ignorant about how Bitcoin actually works? Umm, I was asking a question because I was curious about the pro-deflation reasoning and how people account for the fall in demand. Petec's response was very useful in explaining it to me, much more so than "Wrong! Stupid! blah blah religious dogma! blah blah not science! blah Keynesian!" His response has persuaded me that there's something to be said for not discarding the idea just because it leads to deflation. Yours has persuaded me that many people are religious zealots when it comes to this topic, and, even if the idea might be right, they harm the credibility of the idea by being unable to communicate anything beyond their fervour. Thanks for trying. (And thanks for succeeding, petec--you've enlightened me and I'm coming around to that point of view.)

Interesting argument--very different than what I've seen from mainstream economists, who mostly seem to vilify deflation as destroying the economy by reducing demand. On the other hand, building demand through constantly growing debt doesn't seem particularly sustainable either, but they seem enthusiastic about doing that recently. Thanks petec.

I'm curious about your reasoning here. Why is this the scariest part? You don't think a president should act on non-public information? Or you think that it's important that a president release confidential information to the public to justify their actions? Or do you think that because no public information exists, it also means no confidential information exists? Am I missing something obvious about why this should be really scary? Or am I misunderstanding, and you just don't like the escalation of an online conflict into the physical world? (That one scares me a bit--I'm not totally sure how I feel about it.)

What's the alternative to fiat money? Physical commodities don't seem to work, because the growth of the supplies of the physical commodity might not match the growth of the actual economy. (Like, if gold supplies grow by 1.6% a year, and the economy grows by 3% a year, it seems like you have a problem--constant deflation. Or, if you're getting too much of the physical commodity relative to the economy, you get inflation.) So is there a better alternative I'm missing, or is something wrong with my reasoning here?

There's actually a relatively active subreddit dedicated to these sorts of paths: https://www.reddit.com/r/DesirePath/ I find it strangely compelling. It makes me think that, when building anything new, they shouldn't bother paving for a year. Then, they should just pave anywhere there's a path. (And, to add a political element to the post, you don't actually see that many paths like this in the real world. I guess that means that rkbabang thinks centrally planning mostly works.... :) )

I think slashing the tax rate is hard for a couple reasons: 1. Everything related to the tax code is a political football. Recently, even really minor, but necessary funding changes are hard to pass (e.g. see Zika). Even with a Republican Congress, Senate, and President, I think it would be hard to make big changes to the tax code, and that's a huge change. 2. Figuring out what to cut is hard. I have no idea how much tax revenue would be lost by doing this, but let's assume that it's 35% (assuming similar cuts to payroll taxes). So where do we cut the budget? Defence is 16% now, but Trump says he wants to boost defence. So let's say he's increasing that to 20%. Then we need to find 39 percentage points of cuts. Interest payments are 6%. Defaulting on the debt is a really stupid idea. Maybe Trump would do it, but it seems unlikely, and it only saves 6%, so let's assume he wouldn't. Discretionary is 16%. Let's cut that. No more EPA, no more Department of Education, no more FDA, no more SEC, no more budget office, no more Federal Parks or Federal Courts or Prisons or Veteran Affairs, no more help in the next earthquake or hurricane, all that sort of stuff. I think people might object to some of this, and we'd have criminals running around everywhere, no way to enforce laws or contracts, so that wouldn't be easy, but screw it. So now we need another 23 percentage points of our budget cut. We have another 49 percentages points in healthcare and social security and 13 percentage points in other mandatory spending like unemployment compensation and child tax credits. So, to get these 23 percentage points, he'd have to cut 37% of social security and healthcare benefits. So we're taking a program that people supposedly paid into, and are relying on for their retirement, and screwing them over. A big chunk of these benefits largely accrue to Trump's "old white men" base, and Medicare is hugely popular with both this base and the electorate generally. Plus, watching dear old grandma starve to death on the street on national TV would upset people. So, I think he'd have a hard time doing that too. To me, this implies that it's really hard to make big tax cuts, not really easy. Not to say it couldn't be done. Rather, if it were done, I think it would probably lead to civil war. I think ObamaCare could be cut. It hasn't been out long enough and has had enough problems that people probably wouldn't fight for it strongly. Really, the right strategy is to cut ObamaCare and replace it by single payer--same outcomes as privatized healthcare at two-thirds the price. This might be a way to achieve your tax cut, if you are able to take all the money put into privatized medicine and toss it into the federal budget while shifting to a single payer system. But the healthcare lobby is too strong for that to realistically happen, either. Besides, it's nice that Americans are willing to grossly overpay for healthcare, since it results the development of technology that wouldn't get created otherwise, benefiting everyone.