UK

I understand there are natural tensions, but what specific risks are you seeing, especially from UMG point of view? SPOT is great and largest service, UMG cooperates with them and I believe even owns some shares, but there are other distributors and some new players are emerging (Tiktok). Labels could still do well with or without one of them, but no major distributor could do well without labels or even one of them, becouse conumers expect all music to be available. So I think the balance of power is obvious, and distributors could also still grow and do well enought under current arangement?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-says-western-allies-shouldnt-fear-russia-falling-apart-11670505120?mod=hp_lead_pos7 Some of these allies worry that such an outcome could profoundly destabilize the nuclear-armed Russian state, potentially leading to its fragmentation and wide-scale unrest, with unpredictable consequences for the rest of the world. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday that Washington’s focus is on supporting Ukraine to take back territory seized by Russia since launching its invasion on Feb. 24. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who expressed confidence in continuing U.S. backing for Kyiv, said fears about preserving Russia reminded him of the so-called “Chicken Kiev” speech of 1991. Then, President George H.W. Bush in a speech to Ukrainian lawmakers warned against “suicidal nationalism,” urging Ukrainians to preserve the Soviet Union and abandon their quest for independence from Moscow. “I’m calling on the world not to be afraid of Russia falling apart. If the wheels of history begin to turn, no human will change it,” Mr. Kuleba said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in Kyiv. “Instead of thinking of how to help Russia survive and become a normal member of the international community, it’s time to accept the fact that this Russia cannot be a normal member of the international community,” he said. “I don’t think the world will fall apart if Russia falls apart. But it will be the people of Russia who will make their country fall apart, as it happened with the Russian Empire” in 1917. “We are first and foremost focused on striking targets in the occupied territories of Ukraine, on liberating our own territory. But of course the notion that Russia can do whatever it can technically afford doing in Ukraine while Ukraine doesn’t have the same right is conceptually, morally and militarily wrong,” Mr. Kuleba said. “Ukraine should not be endlessly victimized. We are a country that is fighting on all fronts for its survival, for its territorial integrity,” he added. “The most important thing is that no one treats Ukraine’s behavior—as long as it complies with international laws of warfare—from the perspective that Russia can do everything it wants while Ukraine has to respect certain red lines in defending itself.” Ukraine has pledged to the U.S. not to use American-supplied weapons to strike Russian soil. That agreement, Mr. Kuleba said, doesn’t apply to Crimea, which is internationally recognized as Ukrainian territory. The U.S. has also refrained from supplying Ukraine with the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, which has a range of some 200 miles, and has modified the Himars artillery systems that it has provided to Ukraine so that they couldn’t fire ATACMS missiles into Russia should Ukraine obtain them from another source. Mr. Kuleba said Russia’s behavior suggests Moscow still seeks a military victory, including the conquest of all of Ukraine. “Putin and his closest entourage are hoping for a miracle that will happen and turn the tables,” he said, reiterating Ukraine’s call on allies to provide it with more weapons, including Western-made tanks, jet fighters and ATACMS missiles. In the past, Mr. Kuleba said, the U.S. and allies lifted longstanding taboos and supplied Ukraine with the weapons that they refused to provide in the past, such as 155 mm howitzers or Himars, when the tide of the fighting turned against Kyiv. Mr. Kuleba said that at a North Atlantic Treaty Organization foreign-ministers meeting in Bucharest late last month he urged his counterparts to “completely change the optics: Instead of waiting for a crisis in order for them to make a decision, they have to make decisions now in order to avoid a crisis.” Asked about the response to the proposal, Mr. Kuleba said the NATO governments need time to reflect.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russians-march-on-foot-to-advance-yards-in-bloody-eastern-ukraine-battle-11670406883?mod=hp_trending_now_article_pos3 “We shoot at them, they send more. It doesn’t end,” said Lt. Matviyenko, 26, a yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flag patched onto his olive-green uniform. “There’s so many of them.” The battle for Bakhmut has become a bloodbath for both sides as Russia steps up its attempts to take what used to be a quaint, tree-lined city. Ukrainian defense officials said Moscow is losing around 50 soldiers a day to maintain a slow, bruising advance to reach the city’s easternmost gates. If the Russians break through to take control of Bakhmut, it would open a path to the political and economic centers of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in the Ukrainian-held portions of the Donbas area, once one of the country’s main industrial regions. Moscow tried to seize the area in a pincer movement in the early days of the war and into the summer. After a lightning offensive, Ukraine regained much of the lost ground. Now, as Russia slowly burns through its artillery stockpiles, defense analysts said, its troops are advancing once again but on tank and foot. This time it is so President Vladimir Putin can tout a rare victory to the Russian people after a succession of withdrawals, most recently in Kherson, giving it outsize importance to the Kremlin, analysts said. “The costs associated with six months of brutal, grinding, and attrition-based combat around Bakhmut far outweigh any operational advantage that the Russians can obtain from taking Bakhmut,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. defense think tank based in Washington, D.C. Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesman for the Ukrainian military’s Eastern Group of Forces, said 50-70 Russians were dying a day in the battle. Russia has already redeployed troops from the southern region around Kherson to the front in Bakhmut, while Ukraine is similarly trying to get more forces to the area, a task that some analysts said could have been complicated by a recent missile strike on the railway network in Kryvyi Rih in the center of the country. Earlier this week new Ukrainian troops were arriving. A staggered column of T-72 tanks with reactive armor drove into the city. Units of the 58th Brigade, which has been in the city for weeks, were rotating out, and fresher units were coming in from the 71st Brigade. As the tanks drove in, some residents waved. Others kept their heads down. Of the several thousand residents still left in the city, many said their nerves had been shot by constant shelling, shooting and missile fire that has pummeled the city’s center. Bakhmut’s central covered market has been reduced to a jumble of aluminum. Streets are littered with broken glass, telephone and electric cable dangle and window frames lie randomly on street corners. Dogs with collars sniffed at piles of trash that lay in piles of small shopping bags.

https://fortune.com/2022/12/07/microsoft-cto-kevin-scott-on-how-ai-language-models-can-democratize-education-it-creates-a-bunch-of-opportunity/ Scott emphasized that one important aspect of AI models is its ability to help individuals and businesses create complex code without necessarily having to get a degree in computer science. Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI partnered to build GitHub Copilot, which is a coding assistant. “You don’t need to have a PhD in computer science anymore to build an AI application, which I think is really, really exciting,” he said. “I went back home to rural Central Virginia, where I grew up, and I talked to a bunch of people who had an entrepreneurial mindset, and given these tools, even without computer science degrees, these folks will be able to see the opportunities and they will absolutely be able to incorporate them into their businesses,” he said. “To me, that feels really exciting.” He also emphasized the potential for AI language models applies to an array of professional uses beyond coding. “You will have lots and lots of these [models], helping people with a pretty wide range of tasks, whether you are a video editor or trying to pull together a piece of content or you’re a journalist doing research or writing an article.” While AI language models sound impressively human, Scott emphasized that these models are tools, not replacements, for human workers and educators. Scott explained that AI language models can function using tools like Chat GPT is to help articulate information more clearly, which Scott referred to as prompt engineering. He acknowledged that these chat bots can be wrong, and therefore it is up to the user to give the model accurate information to work with. To Scott, the fact that users must have context and information to correctly prompt engineer is a boon for students using AI to cheat on essays and other homework assignments as the tools become more advanced. He argued that to create an accurate essay using AI, the student still has to learn the material. “So in a sense, like, nothing really is changing here,” he explained of using AI in education. “You have this tool, and now the student themselves has to become the teacher to the model,” he said. “I think it will be a more much more accessible way for people to get real power out of their technology,” he added

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/05/technology/chatgpt-ai-twitter.html The potential societal implications of ChatGPT are too big to fit into one column. Maybe this is, as some commenters have posited, the beginning of the end of all white-collar knowledge work, and a precursor to mass unemployment. Maybe it’s just a nifty tool that will be mostly used by students, Twitter jokesters and customer service departments until it’s usurped by something bigger and better. Personally, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that ChatGPT — a chatbot that some people think could make Google obsolete, and that is already being compared to the iPhone in terms of its potential impact on society — isn’t even OpenAI’s best A.I. model. That would be GPT-4, the next incarnation of the company’s large language model, which is rumored to be coming out sometime next year. We are not ready.

I think if I was told not to touch it for more than 20 years, the best way for me, also psichologically, would be to just buy SNP. It would be hard to have high conviction on many individual names for more than 20 years for me, but it woud be mostly the same holdings I own currently: BRK, FFH, JOE, maybe less than I own currently of big tech (currently GOOGL, META, AMZN, some MSFT) and maybe I would add some consumer good companies (which seems like never are cheap enought to buy). And also my favourite individual company to answer this question would be UMG, which I see as durabale consumer business with tech growth characteristics:). But to own for more than 20 or 50 years I would like company to be able allocate capital like BRK. Now a problem with BRK is that 20+ years is also perhaps too long period to be sure how succesful it will be after WB.

I agree with this and am tired from all these questions about not implementing precision railroading at BRK agm. 3g already has prooven that it could be not necessarily good idea even in unregulated consumer staples business, I think it is dangerous in somewhat regulated oligopolly market, providing essential services. I had so many painfull expierences with regulated business outside US, that sometimes it is almost unbelievable, how good these regulated companies are treated in US. Better it stays this way:)))

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-moves-to-bolster-defenses-after-airfield-strikes-11670415197 Igor Girkin, a former Russian militant commander and an influential voice among Russian hard-liners, also visited troops in Donbas recently, he wrote Tuesday on Telegram. He said that what he found there was a poorly motivated Russian army, especially compared with Ukrainian forces. “The troops are fighting ‘by inertia,’ not having the slightest idea of the ultimate strategic goals of the current military campaign,” he wrote, adding that fighters from Luhansk and Donetsk were better motivated. Efforts to break Ukrainian will, he added, weren’t working. “‘Ukraine’ will NOT freeze in winter, will NOT rebel and will NOT fight worse. Vice versa. Its soldiers, who have already believed in their strength as a result of the autumn victories…will only fight angrier and more stubbornly,” he wrote. “And they will be met only by apathetic performance of duty, behind which many fighters and commanders have long been [asking] the unresolved question: ‘What are we doing here?’”

Interesting story about Bahamas: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-07/ftx-s-bahamas-headquarters-was-the-first-clue

800 or 900 pound gorilla? which expression is right?

I understand and also generally suffer from some reverse Midas touch with timing:)

Hmm...a second stock you are selling recently which is almost still if not a a buy then a hold for me:)

This has nothing to do with US, but I think it is very interesting real time experiment with rates and inflation:) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-05/erdogan-s-fastest-inflation-is-set-for-first-fall-in-over-a-year?srnd=premium-europe

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-03/stock-strategist-is-bracing-for-5-inflation-for-the-next-decade?srnd=premium-europe Q: So they’ll get rid of that 2% target for now? A: Yes. And that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. And that’s my point. If you look back at the history of the 2% target, it’s a made-up number. It came from a press conference in New Zealand in the late eighties. There’s no scientific backing behind the 2%. If you look at the distribution of inflation and growth in the US, you’ll actually notice that growth has been actually faster -- real economic growth -- when inflation has been in the 4%-5% range. You can very well make the case that what really hurts is when you have inflation above 10%, or really unpredictable inflation, because this is when agents can’t plan for the future, investments don’t get made, people hoard stuff. But as long as you have stable, somewhat moderate inflation, whether it’s 2% or 4% or 5% doesn’t really change things. And I think that’s the way most Americans also feel -- most Americans don’t even know what the Fed does, they don’t know about the 2% inflation. They just think of inflation as whatever happened in the past. So that’s where the inflation expectation channel comes in. So the three factors that made it so easy for us to achieve that 2% inflation are gone -- cheap labor, cheap goods, cheap capital. So it would be a lot harder to get down to 2%. I mean, I’m sure we could, like, if Powell wanted to be Volcker and he gets the fed funds right to 10%, we get to 2%. But what’s the point? Why would you want to destroy the labor market?

I think, even on general level US housing does not look very overpriced or as scary as some other places. In the longer term, there is still healthy demand, favourable demographics, stronger economy. In the short term, some other also good and previously hot places, like Canada, Australia or Scandinavia and other EU cuntries looks much more overpriced and dangerous, especially markete with large part of variable rate mortgages. Then I think there is quite a big differences in US itself, with some places perhaps much more overpriced and maybe in biger risk to suffer from all this easy money bubble burst, residual WFH movement, unfavourable tax policies etc.

Thanks for the answer!

May I ask why are you selling Fairfax?

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-30/federal-reserve-s-chief-jawboner-powell-slows-down-to-let-data-do-the-talking?srnd=premium-europe&leadSource=uverify wall Speaking at a Brookings Institution event on Wednesday, Powell checked the shock and awe at the door and instead offered one of his most candid assessments yet of how little he knew about the path forward. Responding to a question about why the Fed hadn’t chosen a more aggressive path, he said: We’re in a position where the right thing to do is to move really quickly, as we have, and now slow down and get to that place where we think we need to be. And by the way, there’s high uncertainty around that. You know we have a broad set of thoughts about where that destination might be, but we could be wrong. It could be higher than that, it could even be lower than that. We’ll have to see. Seems like suggestion from Powell himself not to be so sure about either scenario anymore:)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-28/us-housing-enters-deep-freeze-with-sellers-and-buyers-sidelined?srnd=premium-europe

https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-us-have-ways-manage-nuclear-risks-ria-cites-us-diplomat-2022-11-28/ "The United States has channels for managing risk with the Russian Federation, particularly nuclear risks and that was the purpose of CIA director Burns' meeting with his Russian counterpart," Rood said in a video on RIA's Telegram channel.

I am repeating myself, but I think at this point it is better not to stick to one of the scenarios (transitory or not) too strongly. There are valid arguments on both sides: labor costs is still increasing perhaps to much and it is a negative for inflation (however covid savings also are running out, so maybe bigger wages will only compensate for that?), while costs of goods/commodities and especially shelter are turning into obvious positives. But who knows for sure? And even if someone think he does I am afraid the world is too uncertain to deliver surely predicted outcomes. I turned over like 2/3 of my portfolio in the last 3 month, from very defensive and almost mostly shorter duration (value) to neutral on the defensiveness (+- fully invested) and ~50/50 on short (value) / long (growth), with no positions with large leverage in either bucket, and I think it is the best way to go for me at this point. Market as the whole is still really not cheap enough to become more aggressive, but it is also not to dangerously expensive I think and there are really good opportunities if you look at individual companies.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/carrying-these-in-your-wallet-is-a-big-mistake-warns-fraud-expert-ex-con-artist-frank-abagnale.html