wachtwoord

And once again Greg nails the thread. Estate, inheritance, death taxes are the most unfair taxes out of the lot of them. It's already taxed wealth (usually several times over) and sometimes even originated abroad (in situ assets are covered).

They are (much) worse. Criminals generally don't pretend to be the good guys.

Thanks for the information and the lecture video. Much appreciated!

Sorry I misunderstood. I saw the JPM news before the BRK. Dismissed JPM but saw the BRK and wondered what was going on. @thepupil So indeed despite and not because of.

I wasn't asking about the many great assets that BRK surely has that will retain long term value. I'm asking (in isolation) why holding an asset rapidly losing purchasing power (his speculation) and increasing in supply has a positive expected return. Your argument is that there will be a large demand. My follow-up question is then: why will 3rd parties have a large demand for an asset rapidly losing purchasing power in the future? Are you (and Buffet) preparing for another liquidity crisis, dispite the inflation?

Why would you hold cash if you are expecting high inflation? Sounds like a larger hurdle to argue for holding cash as you'll need to overcome the loss of purchasing power implied by the higher inflation too.

Indeed @rkbabang. Victim blaming may go against your sense of fairness @achangegonnacome and I might even agree. What we think is not relevant though because the world is not fair and denying reality is plain stupid. Or do you drive around town with your entire life savings in a briefcase with Dollar signs drawn al over it?

Interesting thought experiment! Considering it's hard to choose which companies will win. How about going for commodities? Steel and oil in 1903 for cars. (Perhaps add platinum if you would have known about the success and make up of catalysators?). I didn't check, did that even work out? Was it possible to secure stock in these over that timeframe? (unlikely without starting out with a significant amount of political influence I think). For the internet revolution? What are the components (routers, cpus, ram, etc) mainly made off that's rare (enough) and not used much for other purposes? (hard question ... I couldn't find any). How about domain names? But would we know enough off the future to know what domain server design would win and to be certain domain names would be respected as property and not simply exapropriated? Similar questions exist for the hypothesized AI future. What would be the main components of these? Would this market even be allowed to be private? If the world is in a major socialistic wave when this revolution happens (very possible considering the situation today and the loss of jobs predicted by some as a direct consequence of an AI revolution) that would't be likely.

The old one scrolled way easier through the lists of latest posts on my phone (my main way to browse the forums) so I prefer that. The current unread content list takes more space per thread and is a latest post list, not latest threads that had a post, which I prefer. I don't know how many use the forum as I do so take the feedback for what it is.

@Cigarbutt I advise you to read your own posts here again. Pay special attention to both content and tone and then decide whether you are not actually guilty of what you are accusing others of.

Your analogy is incorrect (and I'm very surprised you voluntarily took the vaccin. Young healthy people have negliable chance for any serious complications from covid-19. All affected had pre-existing weaknesses of some kind. The consequences of a rushed and vaccin in the middle of phase 2 testing are not non-negligable however. Of course chances of complications are still small so you'll pribably still fine but in my opinion you did just increase them.

If political talk isn't allowed/meant here this topic really should be moved or closed here. I've not seen any off-topic post here (except yours and my current post I guess but I understand why you posted it).

Greg, they want you to do that. The more people they vaccinate the more kickbacks they get. Hence the entire manipulation angle and threathening (hopefully just threathening) of taking away the right to travel from those who don't want to take an untested, badly working (it needs yearly repetition) and (more importantly) unneccesary (not a dangerous illness) vaccine.

@Greg: This post is inherently political. Just cause it's not a red-blue thing in the US doesn't mean it's not political. It's political because: 1. Politicians are urging people to take the vaccine. Now whether you think that's mainly through lies and manipulation to benefit from it (e.g. through them owning equity in certain pharma companies, in the Netherlands this was proven for the Mexican flu, no-one cared) or through education, it's still an inherently political topic. 2. Same with taking away people's rights (even if temporary) both wrt social distancing and wrt people refusing to be vaccinated, is inherently a political topic. If someone (dwy000) argues there shouldn't be political talk on this forum he should argue all discussion on Covid-19 should be stopped (as would a great many other topics). Just like you it's my impression Parsad does not want that (or he would have locked this topic)

Chances of death are very low but you can still get very sick and incur permanent damage to your lungs or organs. Even if you are healthy. Not just theoretical, I know someone 40ish and healthy and fit that had this happen.  They have lung damage, it's permanent.  They also went through complete hell for 2 weeks. Israel has vaccinated over half their population and haven't reported any issues.  The pharma companies aren't based there so they have no reason to lie about the effectiveness.  I feel at this point it's quite a remote chance the vaccine is more dangerous than covid. The exact same thing is true for the flu. Do you think everyone should get innocolated (yearly flu shot)? I can write a list of bacteria and viruses that can (emphasis can) have terrible terrible repercussions (much worse than a Corona virus). Why are you behaving so differently towards this one? Could it be the global fear mongering? And you are going to use the shit hole called Israel as a good example? What's next, North Korea? Eritrea? I actually think everyone should get vaccinated for flu as well. I do it, I had a flu a couple of times before that and while I apparently survived it, wasn’t much fur for ~7-10 days each time . A flu shot is much easier on me and since ai got them, I never had the flu again. For COVID-19, the risk reward ratio for vaccination is much better because COVID is much more in inconvenient , if you get symptomatic and much more dangerous. Also, why is Israel a shithole country?  I can think of a lot of other states that deserve this classification much more so. Well at least you're consistent then. I think it's much better and healtier to build the resistance naturally. Israel? Look at their green pass system. Have they learned nothing from WW2? Of course this is not the first indication of unethical behaviour by Israel.

Chances of death are very low but you can still get very sick and incur permanent damage to your lungs or organs. Even if you are healthy. Not just theoretical, I know someone 40ish and healthy and fit that had this happen. They have lung damage, it's permanent. They also went through complete hell for 2 weeks. Israel has vaccinated over half their population and haven't reported any issues. The pharma companies aren't based there so they have no reason to lie about the effectiveness. I feel at this point it's quite a remote chance the vaccine is more dangerous than covid. The exact same thing is true for the flu. Do you think everyone should get innocolated (yearly flu shot)? The IFR for covid-19 is about 2.5x that of the flu. The r0 of Covid-19 is about 66% higher than the r0 of the seasonal flu. Yes that is unfair. You comparing the numbers for the average Influenza with a specific strain of Corona. Either compare average Corona with average flu or Covid-19 with worst Influenza strain. No cherry picking!

Chances of death are very low but you can still get very sick and incur permanent damage to your lungs or organs. Even if you are healthy. Not just theoretical, I know someone 40ish and healthy and fit that had this happen. They have lung damage, it's permanent. They also went through complete hell for 2 weeks. Israel has vaccinated over half their population and haven't reported any issues. The pharma companies aren't based there so they have no reason to lie about the effectiveness. I feel at this point it's quite a remote chance the vaccine is more dangerous than covid. The exact same thing is true for the flu. Do you think everyone should get innocolated (yearly flu shot)? I can write a list of bacteria and viruses that can (emphasis can) have terrible terrible repercussions (much worse than a Corona virus). Why are you behaving so differently towards this one? Could it be the global fear mongering? And you are going to use the shit hole called Israel as a good example? What's next, North Korea? Eritrea?

@LC "Can't vaccinate" lol I "can't" take poison either thank you very much. They want poison? They take it.

I think you can equally use this argument against gun control. Guns have been around for even longer than a year. And in 2015, about 13,286 died as a result of being shot, so certainly not more than 13,286 people died of being shot in the head. And there are about 330M people in the USA. Therefore, if you're shot in the head, you have less than a 0.004% chance of dying. There's basically almost no chance of dying if you're shot in the head. Well yes, very few deaths per year are because of gunshots so I would argue against gun control as well. Primarily because also the value of the populace being armed is very very high (mainly protection against a tyrranic government), next to the relatively low "price".

If this topic wasn't political I wouldn't be interested. Just like I'm not reading topics about the flu, common cold or hay fever. The fact that it's politicized is why it effect me (and probably almost everyone) It affects most people because millions have died. Lol no millions is not so many. Most definitely not most (world population is billions). It affects most people due to what has happened to basic rights in just a year. How little respect hss been shown to constitutions. THAT is how it affects most people.

If this topic wasn't political I wouldn't be interested. Just like I'm not reading topics about the flu, common cold or hay fever. The fact that it's politicized is why it effect me (and probably almost everyone)

First Google hit: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ Worst European country is Czech republic with 233 deaths per 100,000 population. That is 0.23%. Want a more average case? How about Germany with 90 per 100,000: 0.09% US lies between those two with 0.16% (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country) That same source has Canada at 61 per 100,000: 0.06% Those are far lower numbers than 0.5% already. On top of that, those percentages are for the entire population! Older people are the vast majority of those deaths. Let's take the US (not to cherry-pick). If we take https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863 for example that shows that 1.7% of the deaths in the US concerns someone under 44. 0.017*0.0016 = 0.0000272, so an average American under 44 has 0.00272% chance of dying from Covid -19 (about 1 in 36,765) And I didn't even filter out the morbidly obese and those with lung disease, those with compromised immune systems etc yet! To be able to calculate further I'll assume filtering that out lowers the factor by another factor 50-100 (same factor as the age filter, no uncorrelated data is available). Leading to a chance to die of Corona for an average healthy American of between 1 in 1.8M and 1 in 3.6M That's comparable to the chance that an average commercial airplane flight results in a fatality (estimation by aviation consulting firm To70 see https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/02/fatalities-on-commercial-passenger-aircraft-rise-in-2018.html): 1 in 3M So who's being facetious? Or are you also scared of flying? The chance of death is remote and the only thing happening is fear mongering. Your assuming that everyone has been infected by using the deaths per 100,000 number. In Canada, it shows 22K people died out of roughly 1M people infected. You cannot divide the 22K by the population of the country and assume that is the mortality rate. That's ridiculous! Even if you assume that 5 times as many people had Covid and recovered, you still have a mortality rate of 440 out of every 100,000 people. And I'm being generous in assuming that 5M people have been infected out of Canada's 32M population. This is just basic math! Cheers! What are you suggesting? Using an inflated denominator (people dying from something else were counted as covid death) and understated divisor (many people had Covid without knowing it)? Further you are assuming everyone WILL be infected. Covid has been spread worldwide for over a year now, using recorded deaths divided by total population is a reasonable way to estimate death rate. Certainly more reasonable than what you are suggesting we use! And indeed the 22000 Canadians that died. Ridiculously low amount of deaths to sacrifice the freedoms and livelihoods of so many wouldn't you say?

First Google hit: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ Worst European country is Czech republic with 233 deaths per 100,000 population. That is 0.23%. Want a more average case? How about Germany with 90 per 100,000: 0.09% US lies between those two with 0.16% (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country) That same source has Canada at 61 per 100,000: 0.06% Those are far lower numbers than 0.5% already. On top of that, those percentages are for the entire population! Older people are the vast majority of those deaths. Let's take the US (not to cherry-pick). If we take https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863 for example that shows that 1.7% of the deaths in the US concerns someone under 44. 0.017*0.0016 = 0.0000272, so an average American under 44 has 0.00272% chance of dying from Covid -19 (about 1 in 36,765) And I didn't even filter out the morbidly obese and those with lung disease, those with compromised immune systems etc yet! To be able to calculate further I'll assume filtering that out lowers the factor by another factor 50-100 (same factor as the age filter, no uncorrelated data is available). Leading to a chance to die of Corona for an average healthy American of between 1 in 1.8M and 1 in 3.6M That's comparable to the chance that an average commercial airplane flight results in a fatality (estimation by aviation consulting firm To70 see https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/02/fatalities-on-commercial-passenger-aircraft-rise-in-2018.html): 1 in 3M So who's being facetious? Or are you also scared of flying? The chance of death is remote and the only thing happening is fear mongering.

Cool, now try doing the same with "the earth is flat" and "5g kills".

Yes the healthcare system is overwhelmed. But not due to Covid-19 but due to human choices. Here in Europe at least last year they postponed all they classified as "non-essential" for many months. They included many cancer treatments and cancer checkups/studies among other things! I (and also doctors I have spoken too) would qualify that as criminal. Clearly the wrong choice was made and Covid-patients should just been send home to recover (or, unfortunately in some cases, die). Putting so many on ventilators was a bad call (and most of the permanent damage was done by these ventilators!) The choice was political: no politician can be criminally prosecuted for people dying of cancer but if people judges you mishandled a pandemic? .... Also no-one wants to be the harbinger of bad news (people will die, nothing we can do). They prefer to take action to try and stop it, even if that action is worse than inaction ("at least he did something") Your comment regarding only your aunt being allowed to see him. I agree that's completely heartbreaking. I heard of many old people dying alone who just wanted to be with their family members when they died. Again: I would classify it as criminal this was denied. But that is an argument against the Corona measures (the reason this happened) NOT Corona. Without the measures visits would only be restricted by the visitation hours of the hospital or senior citizen home. With all due respect: do you think you have ANY clue regarding side effects at this point? Regarding the individual we know there don't appear to be a great many immediate side effects. That is all we know. I'm not saying there will be terrible side effects: I don't know. But I think you are making a logical error here in assuming chances for that are so incredibly low. You are also using wrong numbers: I do not have 0.5/100 death chance. I would argue significantly lower than 1 in 1 million. (1 in 10 million seems the right order of magnitude for myself given the data). Regarding the effect to the population you are blindly assuming it to be positive. 1. As far as I've seen there is (as of yet) no evidence those inoculated no longer carry and spread the virus (please point me to a source if this has changed?) 2. As I wrote earlier that apparently it's immunology 101 to NOT vaccinate during an active outbreak as this will risk making the virus more dangerous. You wait until the outbreak dies down and start the vaccination scheme afterwards. Why isn't that game plan followed today? Why take the risk to make the virus actually dangerous? (with actually I mean more than influenza, which society has learned to accept as a part of life). I'm afraid the answer can be again found in political reasons (inaction is punished in society while action is rewarded, even if inaction is superior) Perhaps the reason for your opinion is that you fell for mental shortcuts? In most of your life those refusing to vaccinate do so for illogical reasons (claiming it gives them autism or something equally unlikely) and now you think that is the case again. Taking the mental shortcut that those refusing to vaccinate are simply dumb/uneducated. I would argue circumstances are very different here and therefore require a different response. I am not against vaccines. I'm against these specific vaccines at this specific point in time (and for myself likely at any point and time, as long as the virus is relatively harmless to me) based on the information I have available today.