RichardGibbons

This doesn't make much sense to me. Sounds to me like you're basically saying, "I'll make up my own morality by thinking hard about it, but pretend that the answers I come up are coming from God." That said, there's nothing wrong with that, unless one actually acts like one's morals come from God. Nope, as I said, it's largely about deciding who counts as "part of society". War rape falls into that. Most types of sexual relations are practiced today, as well. So, not far different. Also, though I'll admit that most Christians seem to view sex as the most important moral aspect of their religion, I think it's a relatively small part of morality Like, if you were to arbitrarily create, say, 10 religious commandments, I bet only one would be related to sex. And really, I think sex is probably less than 1% of morality. (In fact, I think I'd probably just have the simple, "don't do anything during sex that your partner(s) don't want you to do.") On the other hand, "You must ensure that this religion grows" might take up, say, 40% of the commandments. The relative smallness of sexual morality compared to all morality is worth noting, because my argument is that morals are largely the same for all successful societies, with minor tweaks around the edges, and you're saying that sexuality is mostly the same, with tweaks around the edges. And it's worth noting that the sex-related commandment isn't the stuff Christians shout about today, but clearly related to social stability. Hard to have a stable society if everyone's screwing others' spouses. Again, evolutionary morality.

It could be because their revenue growth forecast is lowish. A year back, they were growing the top line well over 100% annually. Last year, they did 70%. The forecast for 2023 is about 45%. There's a massive difference between 100% growth and 45% growth, particularly with an unprofitable company. The whole strategy with buying an unprofitable company with 65%+ gross margins is that the top line growth at high margins rapidly overshadows fixed costs, leading to a fast-growing, profitable business. If the growth falls off, it's much harder to get to profitability (e.g. twice as long at 45% than 100%.)

Oh, ok, then essentially you're saying that there effectively is no morality that can be know. God can't be known by humans, and God doesn't assert morality on humans, so your "God is morality" argument is the same position as your "evolutionary morality isn't true morality". There's no violate or not violate, because in every case (God-based morality, evolutionary morality, any other morality) there's no known morality. Re: Math: I don't think we can violate them ("we" being the society in aggregate, rather than individuals in the actual society.) No, the moral standards today aren't far, far different than ancient Rome. I really meant it when I said that the broad strokes of morality are the same, with the biggest differences being edge-cases about who is part of society.

Tablets from a mountain doesn't solve the morality issue because one can't know God and because even if we could, God asserting something doesn't make it moral. (Heck, if you must base your morality on rules from a higher-power, I think all morality should simply be defined as "whatever RichardGibbons says is moral." That's actually a more solid foundation for morality than a God--after all, it's much easier to believe that I exist, and you can even often get answers from me when you ask questions. And if you don't believe I'm a higher power, one worthy of delivering moral laws, I think that's just because you need to have more faith.) Rather I think the most likely explanation is that morality is derived in the same sort of way that Math is. i.e. once you can count items, everything naturally follows, from addition and subtraction to differential equations. Similarly, once you have groups of people, you need morality or else your society won't be stable. That's why at the core, most of the moral rules are the same between societies (e.g. generally, capriciously murdering other people in your society is discouraged. And basically the edge-cases of morality seem to revolve around defining whether or not certain people are part of your society.)

To me, it sounds like they're filtering to ensure they can hire racists. Essentially, it reads like they want to hire people who will treat people differently based on race, gender, sexuality, etc. The best answer for society to Chemerinsky's question is, "I'm going treat diverse people as I treat everyone--fairly, with respect and kindness." But I think that's not at all the answer he wants, and wouldn't get you the job. The first half of the 20th Century showed how deeply problematic it was treating people differently based on these innate but irrelevant characteristics, while the second half was focused on righting those injustices. The 21st century seems to be focused on the idea that race is the most important thing about a person, and you should definitely think about people differently because of their race, and treat them differently as well. Once again, people just want to justify racism. I wish, as a species, we could get over that. Deliberately encouraging racism isn't a good way to create a diverse and compassionate society where everyone has the best chance to build their best life.

I'm pretty confused by why anyone who isn't a time traveler would equate "things that happened a century ago, and everyone is completely unable to change anything about what happened", and "things that are happening right now and could be changed today in a myriad of ways by taking actions today." IMO, a good basic strategy for success is to focus most of one's energy on the things that one can impact today, not the things that happened a century ago and are completely unchangeable. And I think this rough heuristic works pretty well for both people and countries.

I don't think I'd take bitcoins at will because that would be theft. Rather, I assume that proof-of-work is also an NP-Hard problem. So I'd just find the hash every 24 hours or so, with a Poisson distribution or something, with each win allocated to a different key. Doing that wouldn't make you rich as fast as stealing a billion dollars overnight, but you'd be approaching revenue of $50M/year. (And you could also branch out to other proof-of-work coins with large enough capitalizations.)

It could also not be able tracing currency transactions, but rather as a canary in the coal mine indicating when encryption is broken. A huge amount of encryption relies on the fact that there is no known way to factor large numbers in polynomial time. But, nobody has proven that it's impossible to factor large numbers in polynomial time. Bitcoin effectively makes it possible to quickly become rich if you come up with a polynomial time factoring algorithm, but using such an algorithm to become wealthy would likely leave clues on the blockchain. So, perhaps the CIA created the blockchain so that they'd be able to scan it for indications that encryption has been cracked. (I doubt that it's actually the case that the CIA created blockchain for this reason, because when bitcoin was first created, it would have been unreasonably optimistic to believe it would become as popular as it has become (and using it as a "canary in the coal mine" requires it to become popular. ) Nevertheless, I like this theory because it's a very elegant solution to the question, "how can we tell when someone's cracked our encryption?")

I asked it to make ASCII art of a golfer (it only does text). It came back with this: ( ) | | __|__ / \ ( O O ) \ || / \ || / \ || / \||/ \/ Its explanation was:

It's also worth noting that "should have served jail time" can mean: "He broke a law and should have been sentenced to jail time", or, "There ought to be a law where he'd serve time for what he did", or "The punishment for what he did should be prison." e.g. For #2, if someone is depressed, and someone else convinces them to kill themselves, it isn't a crime, but one can still reasonably believe that the convincer should go to prison. For #3, if a man rapes a 15-year-old girl in a Sharia Law country, and the girl is stoned as a result and the man gets off with 10 lashes, one can still believe that the punishment for the man should involve prison. You seem to be assuming #1, when others could be talking about #2 or #3.

Does anyone have any opinions on the probability of the Liberals implementing a "windfall" tax on Canadian oil companies. Freeland recently said that they weren't looking at it, but I still wonder about it, because: Trudeau tends to be a follower, requiring external validation, and Europe's already validated that it's OK for him to impose a "windfall" tax on energy The NDP, with its first-order thinking, looks like it would support pretty well any tax on wealthy people or any corporation The energy sector is the most vilified sector in Canada, so an easy target The Liberals have already done something similar with their "large financial institution" tax (which targeted the third most vilified sector, those greedy banks.) So, when thinking about Canadian energy investments, I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts about the odds of such a tax before the next federal election. (I put windfall in quotes because for the energy sector, I don't think it's actually windfall in the sense that people who aren't politicians define the word. Companies drill recognizing that in recessionary times, oil might fall so much that their wells will be unprofitable, but also understanding that in booms, the business can be wildly profitable. If your business model depends on the idea that "profits in the good times make up for the losses in the bad times", then calling those "high profits in the good times" a windfall doesn't make any sense, because those aren't unusual, extraordinary profits. Rather, they're expected and necessary for the business to make economic sense.)

Pain level 3. I'm up about 21% this year, but down about 25% from my 52-week-high, I think (I don't keep track of highs.) This is an anomalous outcome compared to my history--while I wouldn't match the market, I'm typically in the same ballpark. Most of the gains have been in fertilizer, currency exchange, and short-term trades in energy and Chinese tech. Most of the losses have been in other tech.

Actually, twice as good as that--two long runways!

It's also worth noting that if you're curious what the prices will roughly be, you can just put the numbers into a Black-Scholes model. You'd need to estimate the implied volatility, but it will return approximately the right answer if your inputs are at all reasonable.

I'm in Vancouver. When I retired, we didn't own, but we bought a house about 5 years later. Basically, we'd made enough that buying a house would put our liquid assets back to roughly the level we had at the date of retirement. So, it didn't seem to risk retirement, seemed like a reasonable luxury purchase, and under some scenarios could be helpful as diversification or a parachute.

I live in Canada. I don't know much about health insurance in the USA, but I think if I were there, I certainly would've worked until my kids were off my health insurance. And, I probably would've waited until my net worth was twice as high before retiring. (Which seems like a lot, but if you get 10% returns, it's only an extra seven years. It's likely the kids requiring health insurance would've been the gating factor, not the net worth.)

I actually posted about the one post-retirement success here on the "What are you buying today?" thread. It was call options on UAN that, when the unit price was low, I kept rolling up and out. It's hard to figure out exactly how much I made because I've also bought a few shares, and, when it went over $80, I started converting some of the options to shares. Plus, it pays pretty massive dividends (e.g. my initial options were purchased a year and a half ago when the stock was at $22. The Q2 dividend we just got was just over $10, and that's only one of four dividends, albeit for the best quarter.) However, I think the initial options of $10K probably has grown into something close to seven digits, though this month is a bad expiry for me.

Well, the Black Swan idea is that they're small positions that can go to zero without affecting your portfolio in a big negative way, but have potentially big upside. So, basically every position size was small when put on, and either ended up as a zero (or close to it), or ended up being a lot of money relative to the typical salary. Think of them as lottery tickets, but with a bit higher upfront investment and a bigger chance of winning. So, it was never close to the majority of my portfolio--actually never more than about 2%--except when the Black Swan paid off and became a large amount of the portfolio. Examples of things that offer this skewed risk/reward include exchange-traded options, options and restricted shares from work compensation, and entrepreneurial ventures with a low upfront cost. Often, it's expending sweat-equity (but not much cash) in a venture until there's evidence whether it will pay off or not. Also, it's noteworthy to say that I've lost on probably 75% of the times I've tried stuff like this. That's just intrinsic to the strategy.

I retired about seven years ago when I was 43. I did it by having a job that would pay for my living expenses, while repeatedly doing Taleb's black swan strategy (though I was doing it about a decade before The Black Swan explained what I was doing.) The strategy is to look for asymmetric bets, moonshot investments that you can buy for small amounts, and could amount to nothing or to a very large amount. I kept doing this until I had three winners, and that was enough to retire with a 2.5% annual withdrawal rate. I have a wide variety of investments, both high and low risk, but have some fairly conservative preferreds and dividend-producing stocks to stabilize things and provide a bit of income, though only a fraction of our expenses. We have a friend as a tenant who pays rent. We also have the ability to cut back expenses should that be required, and a house that could be liquidated if necessary. The combination of these things gives me some confidence that we can recover from most disasters. I do continue to try for low-cost positive black swans, and I've identified one since retirement. For withdrawals, I tend to convert large chunks of the portfolio to cash, like enough for a year or two of expenses. I do this when it's convenient in the market, convenient for my portfolio, or convenient from a USD/CAD exchange rate perspective. I agree that the sequence of returns for your portfolio matters a great deal--if you get nuked in the first decade or so, you can run into trouble.

It's worth noting that the VIX options are European exercise, not American exercise. That makes it much harder to bet on a 3-sigma event and get the value you hope for. e.g. if you own the $60 strike calls and the VIX is trading at $80 two weeks before expiration, those options will be bid at much less than $20.

Correct. In Canada, as far as I know, the cost basis is always the average purchase price of all shares owned.

UAN is pretty easy to understand--it converts natural gas and petroleum coke into fertilizer. Follow corn, wheat, natural gas, and fertilizer prices, and you'll know where the business is going. It's pretty easy to build a simple model for how the company will perform based on the inputs, particularly since the vast majority of sales are executed six months or more before they appear on an income statement. And then you collect distributable cash. The company-specific risks are also easy to understand: explosions, weather-related shutdowns, transportation problems, and unexpected downtime. The broader risks are a bit more complicated--basically anything that affects the price of corn, wheat, natural gas, or fertilizers. Plus, the unit price doesn't tend to be forward looking, at least on the way up. e.g. shares are at $155, but my model suggests that Q2 will result in distributable cash in the $18 range, and $50 for the next 12 months. But the market only seems to recognized what's happened a month or so after the results come out.

Interesting--there's few people today who will say that they sincerely believe that Hitler did nothing wrong. It's neat to hear from such a person, and gain an understanding of how they've come to adopt such a worldview.

I'm curious what you mean by "better business". In 2004, I feel like there were far fewer cheap Chinese brands, and so competition is harder today. On the other hand, they're bigger now and have Craftsman. (I'm not skeptical of your "better business" statement. I'm just trying to figure out in my head how their positioning and competitive has evolved with the changing market, so was hoping you'd have some insight that would give me a shortcut to understanding what's going on.)

Or as Munger would say, "Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because it cabbages up one's mind."