RichardGibbons

Nah, a really great outcome for anyone who owns Fairfax is for the shares to spike overnight to, say, $100,000 per share-- massively overvalued--with the market remaining constant. Then you can sell your Fairfax shares and buy something cheaper. If you own inventory of a good in a marketplace with a bunch of goods, all of which you can buy or sell, then you want the value of goods you own to dramatically increase, and the value of goods you don't own to decrease. The Buffett saying about wanting the market to be low when you're a net buyer only applies an idealized case where you either can't sell or if there's only one thing you can trade, the market.

Yep. This is the thing that confuses me about everyone thinking Israel should stop the war now. Hamas murdered a bunch of people and took a bunch of hostages, and Israel attacked to get them back. Hamas still has hostages. Why would Israel stop when they haven't actually even achieved the most basic goal of getting their hostages back?

Yep, and this is a nice example of Blake's good judgment. It was very clear at the time that your only goal was to discredit Blake, and that regardless of what he said--even if he showed that he was in the top 0.0001% of his age group--you'd scoff at it. And what's more, it would take the thread further down a destructive path. It must have been very tempting to tout his achievements. So it showed very good judgment to recognize that it was a no-win situation and not take the bait.

Thanks for your responses, James. I think I'll leave it there. I think we've put forward the arguments, and people can decide for themselves which strategy is optimal.

Yeah, I agree. This is totally how you decide if someone is competent. I guess the debate is, when you don't actually have any real data points, how do you come to a conclusion? And the two positions seem to be: You don't need to evaluate anything. Just conclude that the person is incompetent There's a possibility that the person might have valuable perspectives, but you can only evaluate that by looking at their reasoning

This is one of those things that is trying to sound wise, but is the opposite. Like, have you been a senator or congressman? No? Then you can't comment on federal politics because you're a federal political virgin. Have you done a Ph. D in climatology? No? Then you can't comment on climate change or climate policies. Are you a medical research doctor? No? Then you can't comment on the efficacy or safety of vaccines. Have you been to China? No? Then you can't criticize, compliment, or really say anything about China. The criteria for whether someone's ideas are worth listening to is the validity of the reasoning behind their ideas.

Yep. When people start saying, "you don't know anything because you're young", it's basically equivalent to any other ad hominen attack. Generally, it's used by people who are unable to defend their position using reason. If one wants to bring age into such arguments and still come off as reasonable, it needs to be in the form of, "because you're young, you likely didn't live through the history of X, and therefore may be drawing the wrong conclusions." It is funny how much age is discounted on this forum, particularly considering historically, many breakthroughs are made by young people. Heck, even Einstein said, "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so." The other really fascinating thing on this forum is how little Trump's actions are actually defended by his supporters. Like, most defences are of the form, "Trump did X, but Biden did Y", which isn't actually a defence of anyone's actions, but roughly equivalent to "the Oilers are great, because the Stars suck." It would be nice to have a leader who was generally doing good things, things that supporters could actually argue are good.

It is private. I used to work for them. My favourite part of the business is that they rented a huge building beside FedEx in the primary FedEx hub airport. Then, if someone needed a replacement phone, it could be easily shipped overnight. It was a major competitive advantage when competing with other potential phone insurers, that they could get a phone to people in hours while others took days.

I'm not sure why you believe this--it seems rare that people resolve cognitive dissonance by rejecting their existing beliefs.

Yeah, I missed the fact that they were LEAPs, and I think that might change the math, as it changes the probability of loss. Like, assuming no fraud, then the chance of 100% loss is pretty low, I think, which means a 10% gain might be fine. Also, if you expected it to be a quick trade, and your downside was limited by that (i.e. you'd dump it if the options didn't do what you'd expect), then that could limit losses as well. One of the trickiest things with options is figuring out if the strategy is a winner over time, and I'm not sure either way with this one, so thanks for sharing your insight on it.

I wonder if this is actually a winning strategy--I think it depends a lot on what you do when the trade goes against you. Like, if you rerun this scenario 1000 times, with outcomes in proportion to the probability of each scenario happening, is it a profitable trade to take the 10% gain in one day? For example, if there were equal probability that it goes down or up, and you lose 100% in a few months if it goes down and gain 10% in a day if it goes up, then the strategy will clearly lose money. But that's a gross simplification of both the potential outcomes and the actual strategy. So, it's unclear to me whether the "take a quick gain" strategy wins based on the actual probability distribution and strategy.

Ah, okay, in that case, let me help you with that: Edit: Darn just realized that this isn't a political thread, so deleted my content.

Edit: removed political content I wrote before I realized that this thread didn't have the political tag.

Yes. It's totally fine to draw a line when stuff becomes laughably retarded and blatant. This is the way pretty well all bad things in life are--bad stuff crosses over to unacceptable when it hits a certain limit. You can poke someone hard and likely won't be convicted of a felony. If you punch them, also probably not. If you beat them senseless, you probably will be. If you beat them to death, you almost certainly will be. There are lines being drawn for different magnitudes of the same event. What's more the fact that it's so blatant actually matters to the degree of crime. It normalizes corruption even more, which is problematic. I understand that, based on your argument, you think unlimited bribery is cool. I think most society doesn't believe that, and I think most people recognize why it's problematic.

My memory is unreliable, but the thing from the GFC that really sticks with me is that before the major collapse, people on CoBF were basically saying, "All these numbers are horrible. How is the market still going up? It makes no sense!" And that mode didn't last for a couple weeks, but literally for months. The market is supposed to be forward-looking, but I think in that particular instance, it only priced in the bad news well after it was obvious that the world was ending. I think it was Bear Stearns that finally made the market actually react to the atrocious news.

If one wants to make a 4-d chess argument about Trump and Canada (which I'm not making, because I think at this point that it's completely clear that Trump is stupid), then I think the argument would be something like: 1. A decade of Liberal rule has severely weakened Canada economically. Flat real GDP, massive debt and deficits, rising unemployment, unaffordable housing, crushing regulation that discourages any sort of resource development, spiking crime and food-bank usage, and falling standards of living relative to other first-world nations. 2. As a result, Canada is both economically much weaker than it "should" be, and people are much more unhappy. 3. Trump believe economic attacks are a way to make Canada want to be the 51st state, and an unhappy populace is more likely to vote for change, like becoming the 51st state. 4. Therefore, it's good for the Liberals to be re-elected, because no other government in the history of Canada has been as successful at crushing both the Canadian economy and the Canadian people.

Ah, okay, I understand your reasoning, and it sounds plausible. Thanks!

I'm curious why you believe this? It looks to me like China is gaining geopolitical power from Trump's actions, and America is losing it. The more unreliably and hostile the USA acts, the less other countries are going to want to partner with the USA. Effectively, the Republicans are reducing USA's international competitive advantage over China. Even in Canada, there have been the sparks of conversations suggesting that the country should make tighter alliances with China than the USA (not in a "most people think this" sort of way, but more that the idea has been proposed and not immediately ridiculed.) I guess the main downside of the Republicans, from China's perspective, is the loss of the USA market as a result of tariffs, but it seems like that's likely to stabilize before the midterms. So, I'm curious what you think how a Democratic congress is of greater benefit to China than a Republican congress.

I'm curious what it would say if you tell it that someone you hate wrote this stuff and whether it would be less complimentary.

Though it's worth noting that this chart is saying that the number of travellers in April 2025 is roughly the same as the number in April 2023.

This is a dangerous argument to make when taxes paid aren't equal. For instance, I wouldn't want to imply that universities should not accept people who don't pay taxes, or that people who pay more taxes should have proportionately more seats. Plus, it's unclear why you'd partition your representation based on arbitrary attributes like race. Why not IQ? Why not height? Why not hair colour? Why not religion? Why not the mod 10 sum of social security digits? Why not number of generations living in the country? Why not based on the number of people in the family? Why not blood type?

You can draw a different conclusion just by assuming the distribution of black students' results is bimodal. Suppose that the top 10% of students are admitted to Stuyvesant, and the top 0.1% are admitted to Harvard. Suppose 18% of the top 0.1% are black, but there are basically no black students in the top 10% other than those ones in the top 0.1%. In general, I think it's just a bad idea to assume that differences in outcome are caused by discrimination. (That said, the Harvard one clearly has a discrimination component, because they say it is.) All that aside, it's a really terrible idea for people to go back to the idea that race really should mean something significant or that people should have different rights and responsibilities based on some arbitrary "race" category. The 20th century showed what a bad idea this was, and I struggle to think of a single nation that maintained the idea of "race should be a significant determinant of your outcomes" that had generally good outcomes for everyone. (And it's obvious why--we all benefit when others are innovative, productive, and allowed to grow. Hindering people's ability to succeed based on completely arbitrary criteria like race hurts everyone. I benefit when Steve Jobs creates the iPhone and when Satya Nadella builds Microsoft's cloud solution. I don't want either one of them limited by their race.)

This is quite peculiar. For any country, the number of foreigners talking about that country in a negative light far exceeds the number of citizens of that country talking negatively about any other given country.

Yeah, I'd bet that some of the expenses were actually engineering-related. But I'd also bet that the majority of the expenses were simply bad and politicized decision-making. Like hiring the union guys to dig the hole rather than the non-union guy. Subcontracting the tree-clearing to the indigenous company that is not only 5 times the price, but also delays the project for 6 months causing cascading costly impacts. Additional bribes to First Nations tribes because that's what "reconciliation" means on big projects. Extra environmental studies that cause both upfront costs and delays. For a years, we've seen how the Trudeau and BC NDP governments work, and it seems naive to believe that their new way of doing business would be any different for this project. Government scientists mostly have a different occupation than private industry scientists. Over the last few years, Canada's medical system has much worse outcomes and worse expenses than pretty well any first-world public/private system you want to compare it to. And you aren't saving money if you require 5x the lawyers to navigate the red tape and bureaucracy created by the government, even if you save 20% in the cost of those lawyers. More and cheaper government lawyers is a huge net negative for societal outcomes.

I think a large part of the inefficiency in government is hidden but a result of the lack of profit incentive. Once it's government money, there's no skin in the game, so people are fine being lazy, spending more than necessary, or burning money on virtue signalling. A fun example in Canada is the expansion of the Transmountain Pipeline. Essentially, it was a private project whose goal was simply to twin an existing pipeline. The initial cost estimate, for the private company, was $6.8B. But they had a hard time getting it built, largely because of red tape and grass-roots opposition leading to constant delays. So in 2018, they finally gave up and sold the pipeline to the government of Canada. At that point, it had a $7.4 billion estimated cost to complete. The pipeline went operation in May, 2024 at a final cost of $34B. I can't point to exactly where the costs ballooned to 5 times the initial estimates, or 4.5 times the 2018 estimates. But, knowing the way the Government of Canada works, I can guess. That said, I don't know how to get such inefficiencies out of government, except by starving the beast and transferring the work to the private sector. Because I can guarantee every penny spent was considered a valid expense by some government official who had no incentive not to burn taxpayers' money.