boilermaker75

more WFC, BRKB, BAC, and cowbell

After the Great Britain Beer Festival, in London, all the brewery presidents decided to go out for a beer. The guy from Corona sits down and says, "Hey Senor, I would like the world's best beer, a Corona." The bartender dusts off a bottle from the shelf and gives it to him. The guy from Budweiser says, "I'd like the best beer in the world, give me 'The King Of Beers', a Budweiser." The bartender gives him one. The guy from Coors says, "I'd like the only beer made with Rocky Mountain spring water, give me a Coors." He gets it. The guy from Guinness sits down and says, "Give me a Coke." The bartender is a little taken aback, but gives him what he ordered. The other brewery presidents look over at him and ask "Why aren't you drinking a Guinness?" and the Guinness president replies, "Well, I figured if you guys aren't drinking beer, neither would I.

Recently we hired a faculty member who previously was a faculty member at an ivy league school. He came to see me near the middle of his first semester teaching. He said he had two students who had not been turning in assignments and bombed the mid-term exam and it was past the drop date. He asked me what he should do. I said give them Fs. He asked, "I can do that?" He told me at the ivy league school he was at previously he could not give Ds or Fs. If they had to they would get the student dropped from the course no matter when it was during the semester.

A mother is driving her little girl to her friend's house for a play date. ' Mommy,' the little girl asks, 'how old are you?' 'Honey, you are not supposed to ask a lady her age,' the mother replied. 'It's not polite.' 'OK', the little girl says, 'How much do you weigh?' 'Now really,' the mother says, 'those are personal questions and are really none of your business.' Undaunted, the little girl asks, 'Why did you and Daddy get a divorce?' 'That's enough questions, young lady! Honestly!' The exasperated mother walks away as the two friends begin to play. ' My Mom won't tell me anything about her,' the little girl says to her friend. 'Well,' says the friend, 'all you need to do is look at her driver's license. It's like a report card, it has everything on it.' Later that night the little girl says to her mother, 'I know how old you are. You are 32.' The mother is surprised and asks, 'How did you find that out? 'I also know that you weigh 130 pounds.' The mother is past surprised and shocked now. 'How in Heaven's name did you find that out?' 'And,' the little girl says triumphantly, 'I know why you and daddy got a divorce.' 'Oh really?' the mother asks. 'Why?' 'Because you got an F in sex.'

I added to my WFC and BAC positions.

Wrote out-of-the money BRKB puts.

A young priest arrives at the monastery. He is assigned to helping the other priest in copying the old canons and laws of the church by hand. He notices, however, that all of the priests are copying from copies, not from the original manuscript. So, the new priest goes to the Bishop to question this, pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up! In fact, that error would be continued in all of the subsequent copies. The Bishop says, “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.” The Bishop goes down into the dark caves underneath the monastery where the original manuscripts are held as archives in a locked vault that hasn't been opened for hundreds of years. Hours go by and nobody sees the old Bishop. So, the young priest gets worried and goes down to look for him. He sees him banging his head against the wall and wailing, “We missed the R! We missed the R! We missed the R!” His forehead is all bloody and bruised and he is crying uncontrollably. The young priest asks the old Bishop, “What's wrong, father?” With a choking voice, the old Bishop replies, “The word was... “CELEBRATE!!!”

Four United States Presidents get caught up in a tornado ... and off they are whirled to the land of Oz. They finally make it to the Emerald City and went to find the Great Wizard. What brings the 4 of you before the great Wizard of Oz? Jimmy Carter stepped forward timidly and said, “I've come for some courage.” “No Problem!” said the Wizard, ”Who's next?” Richard Nixon stepped forward, “Well, I think I need a heart.” “Done!” says the Wizard. “Who comes next before the Great and Powerful Oz?” Up stepped George Bush and said, “I'm told by the American people that I need a brain.” “No problem!” said the Wizard. “Consider it done.” Then there was a great silence in the hall. Bill Clinton is just standing there, looking around, but he doesn't say a word. Irritated, the Wizard finally asks, “Well, what do you want?” “Is Dorothy here?”

+1

An engineer was crossing a road one day when a frog called out to him and said, "If you kiss me, I'll turn into a beautiful princess." He bent over, picked up the frog and put it in his pocket. The frog spoke up again and said, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a beautiful princess, I will stay with you for one week." The engineer took the frog out of his pocket, smiled at it and returned it to the pocket. The frog then cried out, "If you kiss me and turn me back into a princess, I'll stay with you and do ANYTHING you want." Again the engineer took the frog out, smiled at it and put it back into his pocket. Finally, the frog asked, "What is the matter? I've told you I'm a beautiful princess, I'll stay with you for a week, and do anything you want. Why won't you kiss me?" The engineer said, "Look I'm an engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend, but a talking frog, now that's cool!"

Little Johnny comes in from playing outside and asks his mom, “What is it called when someone sleeps on top of someone else?” Johnny’s mom, wanting to be honest with her son, tells her son, “Johnny, that is called sexual intercourse.” Johnny runs back out to play. About 15 minutes later he comes back in and says, “Mommy, you were wrong. It is called bunk beds. And Mary’s mom wants to talk to you.”

A blonde and a redhead went to the bar after work for a drink, and sat on stools watching the 6 O'clock news. A man was shown threatening to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge, and the blonde bet the redhead $50 that he wouldn't jump. Sure enough, he jumped, so the blonde gave the redhead $50. The redhead said, "I can't take this, you're my friend." But the blonde insisted saying, "No. A bet's a bet." Then the redhead said "Listen, I have to tell you that I saw this on the 5 O'clock news, so I can't take your money." The blonde replied "Well, so did I, but I didn't think he would jump again!"

An engineer dies and he goes to the gates of heaven. St. Peter can’t find his name on the list and tells him he has to go down to Hell. Satan is thrilled to have an engineer enter Hell. The engineer finds Hell to be unbearable, so he starts to make improvements. He adds air-conditioning, cold running water, and many other amenities. Word of these improvements down in Hell gets back to God, so God gives Satan a call. God is not very happy and tells Satan that the rules clearly state no engineers in Hell and Satan needs to send the engineer back up to Heaven right away. Satan refuses, so God tells Satan he is going to sue. Satan responds, “Where are you going to find a lawyer?”

A pastor, a doctor and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers ahead. The engineer fumed, "What's with these guys? We must have been waiting for 15 minutes!" The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I've never seen such ineptitude!" The pastor said, "Hey, here comes the greenskeeper. Let's have a word with him." [dramatic pause] "Hi George. Say, what's with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?" George, the greenskeeper, replied, "Oh, yes, that's a group of blind firefighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime." The group was silent for a moment. The pastor said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight." The doctor said, "Good idea. And I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist buddy and see if there's anything he can do for them." The engineer said, "Why can't these guys play at night?"

An engineer, a physicist, and an economist find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of beans. How to get at the beans? The engineer proposes breaking the can open on a rock. The physicist suggests heating the can in the sun until it bursts. The economist’s approach: “First, assume we have a can opener…”

If a year ago you offered a bet that Trump would be the Republican nominee and you gave 1000 to 1 odds they would have thought they were stealing from you. So nothing will surprise me with this election.

When does the Michael Lewis book come out?

Yes, that was the one I was thinking everyone was missing. Geaux Saints!

I also got 14 right. I bet we are all missing the same question

+1 - Very well phrased, globalfinancepartners. I concur fully to that. mikazo, The more long term your investment horizon is, the less your entry point is important for your investment outcome. It's math. Racemize has posted a very good paper about it on this board. If I remember correctly, Racemize had MKL in mind writing it. John, I'll +1 your +1. Good advice, as always, from GFP. Mikazo, I am doing something similar. Whenever BRKB dips, and there are decent premiums, I write out-of-the money puts at strike prices at, or below, P/BV of 1.3, which I guesstimate at $137. So today I wrote some puts and had some order in at higher premiums that did not execute.

I was debating whether I should continue discussion about engineering. Here I'll try to clarify some of my meaning. And I know I make generalizations using not the greatest choice of words. So don't take all that I have said too literally. I exaggerate a bit and that's mt way of ranting I guess. But regarding examples of making perception the goal. I think the best example is Elizabeth Holmes. She has had a cool college project for 12years now. Suppose she made financial gain including perks of 300k a year. That's about 2.4M in 12yrs after tax. And how did she do it? by getting investors to part with their money by claiming that she can do hundreds of blood tests with a nano vial. She has not shown concrete proof that she can do it and even if - that's a huge if - she does show proof future it is irrelevant. She already made $2.4M in salary. Pretty good for a nobody before she did this. Many engineers will perpetuate some belief as long as possible, and if they are shown to be total BS just move on to another job. Typically engineers are small fish and their new employers will not know of their bad reputations. Ok now back to your particular experience with Intel. Intel is a case in point. In 1976 Intel may have been what? 200 employees? Today there are probably 5000 doing your type of work today (I am not talking about fab stage or even back-end) I am just talking about design and implementation front-end. Say Intel at any given time is doing 50 chips, with 2 completing designs on each. The employees work on average 2 designs. That is still 100 employees per chip design. You can pin the blame on 2 people as in your case, but hardly with 100. Even if you can pick out 2 out of that 100, the other 98 can still hide. And I think about 90% of chip designs never become anything close to product. So the above example is only for 10% of cases. The people working on the other 90% must work hard also right? They don't know their product will get cancelled, or do they? Engineers are rarely idle so high level management will keep projects going months after they've be written off. As you get closer and closer to cancellation, more people can guess or know about it. What is their mentality when they know what they're working on is useless? And possible layoff is in the future? You don't work hard and honestly and you promise the world! Heck if it doesn't work management isn't going to get on your case anyway. You are just thinking about looking good so you don't get cut. Intel recently laid off 12000 folks. I know roughly which department got it. So you and I should ask ourselves, WTF were these 12000 people doing? Intel isn't exactly poor. They weren't doing the type of work you were doing that's for sure! Back in 1999 I heard a lowly engineering from Nortel tell me that Nortel was buying startups just to prop up the stock price, not because those startups did anything useful. I was shocked at the time but now I know he was right. If you were in one of those startups and you felt that, what is your attitude. What is the rational thing to do when becoming a millionaire hinges not on making a product let alone making sales but on perception. Chipmaking these days is not a very creative industry. A lot of it is execution and speed. So there can be entire departments whose jobs is to help designers improve the speed. Yet they actually do nothing useful! And they can make false claims because they aren't really related to the quality of the end product. And if I say they slow us down, they can deny it and say it is my fault or someone else's fault. I haven't given you concrete examples of BS in chip making but you can see how it can happen. I can give you very concrete examples but I don't really want to, its too upsetting, also I have to get back to work! OK, i understand where you are coming from. It is a question of how long before the deception is discovered. In the situation at Intel back in the seventies it would not have been long, a few months maybe. As an aside, even though Intel was only 8 years old when I joined there were already 6000 employees. It is possible that only 200 were over 30 years old! It sure seemed that way. I guess an example is Theranos, which took a long time to discover. This whole company had to be a part of the deception. I wonder how much was intentional and how much was self-deception? I guess the courts will try to decide that.

I get both. Since I am an educator I get the print and digital as a package deal for $99 a year.

ROFL. ;D ::) :D ;D OK, sorry man. You want the truth? Investing is way way way way way more away from truth than engineering is, was or will ever be. Engineering is at least measurable and actually measured in good organizations. Investing? Well, 99% if not more investors don't add any value. Even on this forum, I'd guess more than 50% of already 1%'ers don't add any value. Discussions here? The truth? LOL. It's all agendas and biases and p3n15 size and all that. Even the best investors just push their agenda and run their book. You see this is such a situation. I don't know if are to put it politely: just egging me on or if you truly don't get what I said. Best investors push the agenda? to who do I push my agenda? Personal investing is a solitary job, it is convincing yourself. If you push some BS agenda to yourself then its called denial. Maybe my explanation is just off, tell you what, save me the thought watch Big Short, and go to the part where the austic Michael Burry says in response to "are you being sarcastic", something to the effect "I don't know how to lie I don't know how to BS I don't know how to be sarcastic all I know is numbers....." Or go to the part where the Frontpoint team is introduced and how they in effect think everyone else is a moron and they are right and make money off being right. [edit] ok I fired off that response too soon, what I mean is: in investing your own money: you get paid if your bet is right (truthful whatever adjective you want) in engineering you make money convincing others you are right....... to a certain extent Could you give an example where you can make money in engineering by convincing people you are right? Let me show an example of my own experience why I don't think this could typically be possible in engineering, at least not for long. My first job as an engineer was in 1976 working at Intel. I was designing microcomputers. In those days two engineers designed the whole chip. It would come back from fab and we would test it and not everything worked. If I tried to convince anyone else that it worked, it wouldn't be too long before the truth was known. Once we "claimed" it was working it had to go to reliability testing and my lie would soon be discovered. I would probably then be out of a job and no longer making money from engineering. Instead the two of us had to figure out what didn't work, fix the design and resubmit to fab. We usually had to go through this several times before we got it working, after which it would then go to reliability testing and eventually to production.

After years of no problems with morning delivery of the WSJ, it stopped being delivered. After complaining for weeks, WSJ is now delivered to me via US mail. It comes the same day, just not in the morning. I just recently received an email from WSJ that starting May 31 I would start getting it again by early morning delivery. I'll see how that goes. Like someone else mentioned, my first job was delivering newspapers. Great learning experience, especially trying to collect from customers! Every customer had a ticket, which I had a duplicate of, and I would punch the weeks for which I collected on my ticket, and theirs. Amazing how many people would argue they had paid when their tickets weren't punched. I loved using that coin changer I wore around my waist when I went collecting.

None of the above.