RichardGibbons

Well, I was going to use a more sophisticated argument, but based on your reasoning thus far, I figured you wouldn't understand it. Economics means that we produce as much energy as is efficient to use. We produce where the supply curve intersect with the demand curve, and if we produce anywhere where these curves don't intersect, we are producing non-economically. However, there are huge negative externalities in oil production, such as the destruction of farmland, acidification of the oceans, extinction of organisms that can't handle the environmental changes, and death of people through wars and famine resulting from global warming. Thus, while the benefits are taken into account in the supply and demand curves, the negative externalities aren't. Thus, the reason people often focus on the bad things (i.e. negative externalities), rather than the good things is that the good things are already in the price of the commodity. If there were more good things that could be done efficiently by burning more oil, they would already be done. This fact means your argument makes no sense. Or, to put it another way to be more comprehensible to you: Eating is good, but overeating adds no extra value--it actually adds negative value. It's really that simple.

You don't see a problem with saying "The more we use, the more net benefit we get"? Horses can pull heavy stuff, and are a huge net benefit over life without horses. So, the more horses we have the more net benefit. It's really that simple. In the winter, having a wood stove is a huge net benefit over having no heating at all. Therefore, we should burn down our houses to maximize our heating. It's really that simple. Eating food has a huge net benefit over not eating food. Therefore, we should eat and eat and eat, and never stop eating. It's really that simple. Using explosions to clear away rock has a huge benefit compared to pickaxes. Therefore, we should use 100 megaton nukes to clear away rocks. It's really that simple.

The thing that I'm wondering about this conversation is how I should allow it to affect my perspective on people's judgement. For instance, it's very clear that neither Clinton nor Obama is a narcissist--anyone who spends any time at all listening to what either one says should realize this. So, when someone says, "Obama is a narcissist", how do you let that affect your evaluation of their judgement? Do you just say that "politics makes people think strange things", and not really judge their capacity for reasoning on it? Or do you basically say, "This person can't do even basic evaluations accurately when it comes to politics, therefore I shouldn't take much of what they say in other domains seriously either?" (And similarly, those people, if they are using the same criteria, shouldn't take anything I say seriously.) I've been thinking about this a bunch since this campaign started, just because usually there's a wide margin of reasonable opinions. But in this case, there isn't--the two candidates aren't even on the same page when it comes to reasonableness to be president. So I'm curious. To what extent to people think that we should discount the ability of others to reason when they clearly aren't doing so in such a major, high-profile instance?

My favorite gun stat that I just found.... The last gun death of a police officer in Greater Vancouver? 1987. Before that? 1974.

No. Your TFSA is considered an affiliated person. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investor-education/your-tax-rrsp-questions-answered/article4083027/

I find the SPY to oil one interesting in how flat it mostly is. Like, in 2000, there was the big bubble popping, so the S&P 500 was responsible for the collapse there. And then more recently you can see oil crashing, responsible for the ratio spiking recently. But other than that, it's pretty flat between 2002 and 2014. I found the one I was interested in, the S&P 500 versus commodity index ratio. http://stocktwits.com/message/21305822 I wonder how you tell the difference between just the effects of bull/bear markets and actual inflation. Or maybe that's a stupid question, I'm not sure....

Why choose gold as the commodity to measure against? Why not choose the price of zinc, mangos, or pork bellies? Or, if you believe that commodities are the only true way to measure inflation, at least use a basket of commodities rather than just one? I suspect that this sort of S&P 500/gold ratio analysis is post-hoc reasoning meant to justify a particular point of view rather than an unbiased attempt to understand the world (not saying this of you, Graham. I'm saying this of whoever makes the charts.) In other words, if the chart had shown the S&P 500 ratio steadily increasing, I don't think anyone would have shown us the chart. For instance, there's this oil and S&P500 chart on the same website: http://www.macrotrends.net/1453/crude-oil-vs-the-s-p-500. But for some reason they don't include the ratio. That said, I suspect the CPI doesn't measure inflation accurately (because of chained CPI and quality adjustments). I'm just not a fan of using a single commodity to argue anything, even if the "gold is money" argument is very popular.

Nice one Nice once, Swimming. You say everything that I was thinking, but couldn't think of a way to write concisely.

This is exactly right. America has decided having tens of thousands of innocents die every year is worth it in order to continue to own guns. It's a reasonable decision--even in America the odds of you or someone else killing your kids with a gun is pretty low. So, if you really like guns, there's far less than a 1% chance of your kid being the one that gets sacrificed so you can keep your toys. I wouldn't make that trade-off because I like to reduce even the small chance of my kids suffering a bloody death, but I can see why others would decide it's worth the risk. LOL, do you actually believe this? That if the government went all tyrannical (heck, rkbabang might think they already are) guns will provide the means to stop them? Has there been a single time in the last 50 years where a bunch of Americans with guns decided to fight the US government and won? (Or is this more of a "this is a cool quote, so I don't really care if it actually would work in real life" thing.)

The funny thing here is that RB is coming down really hard on anyone using anecdotal data. Why? Because their data doesn't line up with his gut feel, which seems to be largely based on anecdotal data. His righteousness in the face of people sincerely trying to discuss his question is pretty amusing, considering....

Teranet numbers are calculated using linear extrapolation of "same house" price changes. In other words, it looks at a house that sold 2 years ago for $100K and is selling today for $140K, and assumes that the price went up 20K last year. CREA numbers are a true average, just dividing the sum of the sale prices of the houses by the number of sales. Thus, they are affected significantly by product mix. If one year, people only bought condos for an average price of $250K, and the next year they only bought houses for $1M, then--even if prices didn't actually change at all--CREA would say average prices went up 400%. This is a theoretical case, but in practice, it's also been true historically in Vancouver that product mix matters. (i.e. you can see the effects of several big sales in pulling up the average.) I think it's also worth noting that other real estate indices in BC created by the BCREA should be viewed with skepticism, since they aren't disclosing their methodology in any way that would allow an outside party to make sense of their numbers. So their indices should largely be viewed as a marketing number, not representing anything about the actual state of the real estate market.

I get it. If you are a feminist, and your spouse cheats, you must immediately and irrevocably divorce your spouse because feminism is all about who sleeps with whom. Judgement and rational thought are absolutely forbidden to feminists. Feminists should never decide for themselves what sort of life they want to lead. Rather, they have to always follow feminist ideals (as interpreted and dictated by a man) because doing otherwise would be hypocritical. What's more, if you're a feminist, the ideals of feminism must be the most important issue to you, to the exclusion of everything else you might care about. Feminism is everything--compromise and thought are off the table! Got it.

Thanks APG. I think I get where you're coming from, and your beliefs seem consistent. Basically as I said--you got yours and screw everyone else, because they deserve what they get, good or bad. That baby growing up with an absent dad and a drug-addicted mother, who can't find work as an adult because nobody cared enough to buy her an education, deserves to die at 20 from a heroin overdose. If that baby wanted to survive, she would have sold apples or herself in the streets when she was four to pay for healthy food and her own education. Stupid, irresponsible baby. Die, baby, die! Justice, yeah! It's not how I'd want to live, but I understand the appeal. If you believe that in life, people mostly get what they deserve, then Libertarianism totally make sense. This might be the key difference between Libertarians and me, and I never realized it before. It's pretty interesting to me that possibly the only difference between your political beliefs and mine may be in our differing interpretations of the causes of variance in life. (Basically, I think life is more random than you do.... I'd guess something like 80% of major life outcomes are attributable to luck.) So, thanks for that insight. What's more, if you're serious that sort of unconstrained, me-first, tax-free lifestyle, you should totally check out Mogadishu. Though it might be slipping away a bit from your Libertarian paradise, it may still be the closest thing we have right now. Could be a nice place to raise a family....

I'm trying to understand the way you're resolving your cognitive dissonance. Are you basically saying: 1. Requiring healthcare for people increases demand. 2. Increased demand increases prices. 3. Therefore you need more government intervention to keep prices low (or a reversal of the policy) 4. Therefore you should ignore the evidence that most developed countries with a single payer system have better healthcare outcomes with much lower costs. My logic says such a thing cannot exist. Or are you just saying, "I don't give a damn about the costs of the system, or how well it works, and about people who die through no fault of their own, because my freedom to do whatever the heck I want is more important than anything. I don't care who gets screwed in the process because if they were screwed it was probably their fault anyway." To me, this second argument makes sense. It's perfectly rational and consistent to say nobody else matters. (That said, I'd much prefer to live in a society where people don't believe this. I think kindness generally makes for happier people, and I think there's value in minimizing the variance arising from the genetic lottery.) To add something actually interesting to this discussion, I suspect that the explanation for why single payer system is better for healthcare (and not, say, food), is because consumers cannot reasonably evaluate quality in the healthcare system (and, in emergency situations, often would never have the opportunity.) Plus they don't have the expertise or motivation (if the HMO is picking up the tab) to evaluate price. Since effective markets rely on the price discovery and feedback on quality by consumers, it means that the market is broken, and the government actually does a better job. (I guess another key factor is that USA is litigious, which I imagine boosts costs dramatically.) The interesting thing is that I imagine if there were a way to better communicate pricing and quality information to consumers, it might be possible to create a private market that is vastly superior to a single payer system. It just doesn't exist now.

LOL, look at American healthcare costs compared to countries with single payer systems--America has the same outcomes but is way more expensive. On the other hand, I can see your point.... Why bother examining evidence if it doesn't support your ideology?

Thanks for the detailed answer. This is what I do too, except that I pretty well only do bullish bets these days, because it seems very hard to win large amounts with puts.

If you believe this, does this mean that you're constantly short LEAPS straddles on a bunch of indices? (I believe excluding friction, a widely diversified application of LEAPS--long or short--will be break-even on average.)

Aren't you a libertarian? If so, this is a pretty interesting perspective, that an increase in taxes is desirable to make things more fair.

Other noteworthy points are: A thread often becomes long because an idea is controversial Well-known companies (often large caps) tend to have longer threads than obscure companies (often small caps), because everyone knows the company and can have an opinion We are more likely to notice an underperformer with a big thread than an underperformer with a small thread

So true! If Magnus Carlsen is so good at chess, then why does he bother reading about new variations in chess openings? If LeBron thinks he's so good, why does he waste his time going to practices? If Buffett's such a good leader, why did he spend years at Toastmasters? If Sergey Brin has such a great search engine, why's he wasting Google's resources optimizing it? Fools, all of them!

For me, living in Vancouver, I'd buy a detached home when the cost to buy that detached home is negligible relative to my net worth. So, I'd treat it like buying a luxury car--a depreciating asset I'd buy for fun, but expect to lose significant amounts of money on. (Alternatively, I'd buy it when the math made sense, but that looks unlikely from here.)

Exactly. How can you not understand, LC? It's very simple. In rkbabang's Libertarian nirvana, might makes right. Really, it's not much different than college students who believe that Marxism is the solution to everything. The thing that amuses me about these discussions is that the people espousing these ideas don't recognize that they'd likely be among the first victims of such a system. It reminds me of this guy, who says that rape should be legal on private property. Does he think that if that happened, he wouldn't be one of the first ones targeted?

I don't actually see why this is scummy (and I tend to have very strong opinions about real estate). As long as the agent wasn't representing the original seller, I don't see the problem. Like, once the deal is signed, the original seller has got what they want, and the buyer has all the risk. Would it still be scummy if the market dropped, and the agent sold the assignment for a $200,000 loss rather than a $200,000 gain? Is it scummy if a market maker in the stock market buys shares for you for $10, and then sells them 30 seconds later for $10.10? I don't see any real difference. I think that this issue is simply media-created outrage over something that's actually ethical (and kind of stupid for the agent to do.) The people want to blame someone for the ridiculous Vancouver housing prices, so would prefer to blame agents rather than the stupid people buying houses that they can't actually afford, the Bank of Canada trying to keep the bubble economy alive by pumping debt into the system through low interest rates, and CMHC lubricating the system by pushing a healthy dose of moral hazard onto the banks.

Fair point, and really what matters the most for this investment.

So to summarize, your argument is basically: 1. They made suboptimal decisions in the past as a result of deferred tax liability, such as not selling Coke when it was grossly overvalued. But I'll ignore that and assume that it'll never cause them to make sub-optimal decisions. Umm, again. 2. Though they've sold long-held positions in the past, such as Fannie Mae, I'll assume that they'll never sell these long-held positions and realize the tax liability, but just keep getting dividends. 3. Therefore it's rational for me not to discount the value of Berkshire based on DTL. I don't think Berkshire should be discounted by the full DTL, but as far as I'm concerned, saying that a Berkshire with billions in DTL, and Berkshire with no DTL that is otherwise identical should be worth the same amount is really irrational.