snow pea

Demanding absolute consistency in another person is ridiculous. We are all complex human beings that often do and should be allowed to change our minds, act in ways that differ from what we have previously espoused, etc. Please consider that passing judgement on someone for what you perceive as inconsistency might imply that you are expecting them to conform to your simplified model, which may be a byproduct of your mental laziness rather than a failing of theirs.

Always interested in what you dig up, writser, so I took a quick look at DEST. What's your opinion of the prospective post-merger co? Seems like in a stock-for-stock deal it'd be important. From my 15 minute look, it seems like Orchestra has a business that is doing pretty ok on its own, while Destination doesn't look so hot; meanwhile, it looks like stock values have tanked for both companies since the announcement. Certainly I can see where the apparent discount of DEST relative to KAZI looks appealing, unless of course the gap closes by means of KAZI continuing downward. Is this written up on one of the blogs you follow?

For my part, I didn't pick up any partially because of being a bit late to the party, and partially because of some small logistical hurdles combined with some laziness on my part. I regret it, but I know myself well enough to recognize that it won't be the last time I miss out on such an opportunity. I still very much appreciate your bringing it to my attention, writser & Hielko.

I woke up to see LRE in the 560s and figured if it wasn't falling that far today, my greedy limit order at 500 wasn't ever going to trigger. Then I opened up my brokerage and it seems it filled at 467 at the LSE open. Nice.

possible mis-reading of 'immortal' as 'immoral'?

Hanabi is an excellent, elegant card game which scratches a similar itch to this sort of problem.

Or perhaps the INTPs are waiting to see more responses and gather their thoughts before commenting rather than rushing to judge themselves and others and quick-twitch responding...?

This is a pretty good article. A point which is not entirely missed by the article but perhaps not given enough emphasis such that it could be missed, is that just because industrial organic is not all it's cracked up to be does not mean that all fruits/vegetables/foods are equal. There are a wide variety of practices, some of which can provide very high yields, and much more delicious and nutrient dense foods than others, and for the most part neither industrial organic nor industrial conventional use them. One reason for this, in some instances, is that while they may be more productive on a per-acre basis, they may also be more labor intensive, and labor is expensive! Another possible reason is that industrial farming generally produces food for wide distribution, and there are often trade-offs in quality for perishable foods in order to obtain sufficient ship-ability for wide distribution. Visiting farms, seeing and talking to farmers about their practices, and directly comparing/tasting different foods that were produced in different systems may give the best practical understanding of such considerations. In a broad sense, one could posit that there is a difference between value and price in food choices just as there is in investing choices.

My favorite part. From Charlie's letter: Why did Berkshire under Buffett do so well? Only four large factors occur to me: (1) The constructive peculiarities of Buffett, (2) The constructive peculiarities of the Berkshire system, (3) Good luck, and (4) The weirdly intense, contagious devotion of some shareholders and other admirers, including some in the press.

Oregon apparently just put into effect an exemption for small-scale intrastate public offerings open to non-accredited investors. I don't know of how much interest this will be generally on this board, but I just learned of it and think it's great. Anyone know of any other similar rules/exemptions in other states? http://hatchoregon.com/raise-capital-public-offerings/ Admittedly, none of the offerings I see so far look terribly compelling from a value investing perspective.

Very helpful, thank you very much.

This is sort of a general question spurred by your suggestion. Where do you find the documents describing the terms for such debentures as these? I took a look on SEDAR for company filings but I have no idea what the filing would be called (if its even there). Hopefully this isn't too dumb of a question.

I find your dogmatically anti-dogmatic phrasing ironic and amusing (and also am saddened a bit by it).

Given the initial posting of & response to this thread and the recent discussion of the Buffett farm, this may be of interest to some of you (available by link or in attachment): http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/down-on-the-farm I just finished reading it. I found the 'case study' section to be the most interesting, probably because I'm mostly already familiar with the information in the 'future of farming' section, and possibly also because the internal bias is less central to the discussion (though undeniably still visible) than in the later section. I also think there's a bit of a stretch or even disconnect when connecting the two sections, but I'm not going to spend the time going into more detail on that unless there's interest expressed in discussing it further. Also relating back to the initial discussion, there is an investment partnership which owns land and is active in my area: http://www.farmlandlp.com/ which has some discussion of farm economics scattered throughout their webpage and blog postings. Disclosure: I am a relatively new and small-scale farmer. OI_Report_Down_on_the_Farm.pdf

Reminds me of this: http://xkcd.com/1321/

Thank you both very much for your thoughtful responses. Very interesting and helpful points of reference.

O&G are pretty far outside of my circle of competence so I generally leave such companies in the 'too hard' pile, but I am nonetheless curious to what degree those of you who have knowledge, interest, and/or investments in O&G pay attention to / quantify regulation risk, and in particular macro regulation risk due to (for example) climate change activism, such as the possibility of carbon taxes and/or broad carbon emission regulations? To the degree that I have read through O&G related threads here, I can't recall seeing much discussion of this. Maybe it is generally considered a non-factor as politically unlikely? Or perhaps I have just missed it - I would be happy with a link to a thread where it has been discussed if this is not a new topic. I am somewhat spurred to this curiousity by this (not particularly new) article, which in a long winded way describes a tool which has apparently been added to Bloomberg terminals and which apparently allows modelling not only of how various O&G companies' assets and profitability would be affected by changing commodity prices, but also seemingly of at least some effects of potential regulation, such as "loss of earnings because of "prompt decarbonization"; and loss of earnings because of "last-ditch decarbonization"". (I don't know exactly what is being referred to as 'prompt decarbonization' or 'last-ditch decarbonization' - the terms aren't defined in the article.) http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20131203/bloomberg-lp-launches-first-tool-measures-risk-unburnable-carbon-assets

I experienced something similar to Oddball, but with respect to compact pickups. I ended up buying a five year old Ford Ranger with 40k miles at a price that, if I were to buy an equivalently spec'd Toyota Tacoma, would have gotten me at best an 8 year old vehicle with 100k miles. I just don't think the gap in quality is that much (if at all), and I have experienced anecdotal confirmation of my bias insofar as I haven't had a single issue with the truck in the 2 1/2 years since purchasing it.