cameronfen

droughts: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214581818303136 Note I tried to use sources that were as good as possible but also as far removed from global warming as well so you are just getting the raw data. Obviously doughts are very much tied to increase in temperatures. From a couple minutes of searching best i could come up with.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes I'll follow up with droughts.

So this is a problem with the scientific community and the media. Basically only the most dire forecasts were reported on because that drew attention. Then of course scientists responded to those incentives in their research. Thus I think conservatives were expecting global warming to be this day after tomorrow event, which never happened. However there is little question that hurricanes are getting stronger, doughts more frequent and fires harder to fight. Is that mean billions are becoming climate refugees, no. But current costs are calculable and reasonable measures to pick the low hanging fruit that passes cost benefit analysis should be undertaken.

Am I missing something? Relatively costless policy changes???? Aren't the proposals massively costly? In the trillions in terms of the US economy. There is no enforcement mechanism for the paris climate agreement. But the US joining would encourage other more interested parties to cut emissions. Very definition of costless.

Fair point on the really bad effects and unknowns. I agree also, if it doesn't cost anything we should do it. Climate change primary,secondary effects seem very hard to estimate and predict 100 years out. It would likely be gradual - not a sudden tsunami or anything though. There could also be very large benefits that are not talked about much. Warmer temps in much of the colder climates and ability to grow more food there, perhaps less net deaths from warmer weather in the winter, net actually much better for the environment if plants can have more CO2 and grow faster, etc. Sure the effects are gradual, but we also might not know the effect of the marginal ton of carbon we put in the atmosphere today until 20 years out. That's the other side of the risk.

The fact that there is a risk of catastrophic disaster is enough to pay attention. Even scientists dont know exactly how melting of the ice caps could increase tempretures or how tempreture increase will effect the gulf stream. Considering a catastrophic effect which will drastically alter our lives (or future generations) has a small but non-zero chance of happening, taking small relatively costless policy changes seems like a prudent decision to make.

Interesting fact: I think most of Boston Dynamic robots are trained with a model-based system (i.e. this is how the world works and therefore do this) and not deep learning which is interesting. See here: https://www.alexirpan.com/2018/02/14/rl-hard.html

100% I'm concerned with it, but at the same time both Europe and Japan are worse than the U.S. in that regard and nothing bad has happened yet which emboldens policy makers to continue making unsustainable decisions. When will it stop? When it can't continue. Europe are not worse in terms of deficits. Germany actually runs a surplus and even Italy’s deficit is 2.1% if GDP vs US at roughly 4.5%. Sure, in recent history deficits have been better, but historically they were not which is why overall debt levels are higher. The debt level is what I was referencing - I apologize that it wasn't clear. Overall, I think the existing stock of debt, once large enough, is likely more important than incremental growth/reduction in that stock of debt. Also, I was generalizing across the monetary union - obviously you'll always be able to find individual exceptions just like you can find states/counties/cities in the U.S. that are exceptions regarding deficits and debts. The most important thing is the deficit not the debt. If your deficit is lower than growth rate of nominal GDP over the cycle you are generally fine. Total government debt to GDP will never go above some upper bound. The reasoning behind this is akin to a DCF. The deficit is the growth rate of your debt, and the nominal gdp growth rate is you discount rate. As low as your rate of growth is slower than your discount rate overall debt to GDP will stay bounded. If your debt is above that bounded level, as long as you commit to the same deficit amount, your debt to gdp will actually go down even if are running a (low) deficit.

Yeah, I have no idea how the market values Amazon. And I don't see Netflix getting into adjacent verticals. But IMO the rest have that optionality (even if FB is a ticking time bomb regarding other aspects, their whole copy everything that Snapchat does and then bully the first mover out of their own market screams this same ability)

It occurred to me that one reason the FAANG stocks (- Netflix, + Microsoft) seem to outperform, is that people always value them based on the market value of their current businesses. But because these companies encompass so many important verticals in tech, and that they have the best talent, and because there is so much business in tech that is up for grabs, they can much more easily start a new business in some promising vertical. That businesses never has to worry about funding and already has a natural user base of the parent's company. People don't really take into account this option value because it is hard to quantify, I think. It's easiest to see in Google, where people just add back moonshot expenses. But the investment in moonshots has already been paid back just by Deepmind's improvement in Google's search algorithms, not to mention Waymo is also probably a 10-100 bagger in terms of capital put in. You basically have a lot of Knightian uncertainty that is working in your favor. I don't know what to add to that, but those were my thoughts.

I get that you think Einhorn is an idiot, a point that has been repeated ad infinitum on this board in recent years. Do you have any actual thoughts on the point he's trying to make here? I thought the Pets.com-Chewy parallel was an interesting one. Of course Einhorn leaves out alot, like that Pets.com was nearly pre-revenue when it IPO'd. Chewy is an actual business. Pets.com was never much more than an idea. More broadly, I think the profitability of selling dog food on the internet is still an open question. Zooplus in Europe looks like it operates around break even. Even more broadly, I agree with Einhorn that many US companies seem priced for something close to perfection. For what it's worth, when I was at UPS I remember whenever the Chewy's contract came up for bid UPS pursued it hard. Dog food deliveries were (for UPS) high margin. Dense heavy product packed in a box as small as possible that was pretty much a recurring monthly shipment. Pet food deliveries were always increasing yoy. Again, from Chewy's perspective can it be profitable? I don't know. All I can say is, the demand seems to be there for the product and delivery service. Customers had nothing but good things to say about it. Women loved not having to pick up 50lb bags at the grocery store. Cat litter is also another big one. That's really interesting, thanks. From Chewy's website FAQ: "Orders over $49 ship free! All other orders ship for a flat rate of $4.95." I wonder how much their average cost to ship a 50lb bag of dog food is? IDK but Amazon will ship a bag costing $26.74 for free. https://www.amazon.com/Purina-Chow-Complete-Food-Bonus/dp/B00PFXFH6O Well if you do a quick shipping quote on UPS website for a 40lb bag (retail $27) 26x16x6 Standard Ground service in state = $28 shipping cost. I used a local Amazon warehouse to my houses address. Things this doesn't address: - Manufacturer -> Amazon cost - 2 Day shipping - Labor fee for packaging, handling in warehouse I don't see how Amazon or any company can pay for the shipping costs on this. Dog food (according to the internet :P) is a low margin product from the manufacturer. - The original manufacturer certainly isn't taking a loss on this - UPS certainly isn't taking a loss (although they are only making pennies) - Amazon almost certainly IS taking a loss and subsidizing the costs. So Zooplus talks about this in their presentations. Basically its cheaper to pay shipping costs on pets products and store them in wharehouses located in the middle of nowhere, than pay for a store in some urban area and pay for employees to sell the product. IIRC, Amazon is losing money maybe even gross margin per sale, but, at scale, both Chewy and Amazon have a structural advantage over pet food stores as they are cheaper and more convinient. The million dollar question is how much money will they make when they are at scale and no longer undercutting competitors.

Is there any plan to use more debt with the company? It looks cheap on an EV basis, but if they don't use any more debt, I don't see how that changes.

I met the PI of the Carnagie Mellon team at a conference while he was discussing Libratus.

I think people hoping for regime change have a unrealistic view of the Chinese populace. Many Han Chinese made a lot of money during the hyper growth years and basically few spend lots of time worried about living in a dictatorship. The main point is if everyone is making money, its not a huge deal that we dont get political expression. They do have a point. I mean think about it as a US citizen how much time is the average person spending in the political sphere. The question is if corruption and propaganda causes economic pain to the middle class. Tarrifs could play a role in that, but I'm skeptical how much damage it does to both US and China.

This sounds like it doesn't need AI, but maybe I don't know. Shouldn't you just write a series of if-then statements to check if someone's account is accessing records they are they don't need? Sounds like they are using fancy words to scare people.

would you elaborate on MEGACPO? going through CHTR and Liberty complex has me interested in cable cos esperially in emerging markets.

it still works occasionally but less often then I hope. I dont know why but on some sites like seeking alpha it works for some posts but not others. Havent found a pattern on those though.

Boston, MA but in Ann Arbor, Michigan for school.

I use slack occasionally, I just don't get what the runway is for monitization. Are the chatbots and whatever else is in the ecosystem or whatever you get for paying all that useful? I think Microsoft teams has the large enterprise sown up as they are growing faster than slack in terms of users (I don't know about revenue but users is what matters) as its integrated with Office 365 and every enterprise has that. Also Microsoft cloud is just more secure so effective TAM is much smaller than actual TAM when you take out the slice Microsoft has. Its made even smaller by the fact that Slack's free offering. I think net profit margins would be around 30-50% so somewhere around 10-20x revenue would be fair value. But I have no precise estimate so I wouldn't even consider it if it was above 8x (mostly because I'm not confident about net margins number).

+1 This post redeems you for everything in the politics thread...almost ;)

Simon focuses on currency markets I think. Most of his stuff is trend following I think and is definitely uses at least some AI since I know he hires top ML Phds from MIT and the like.

OT: Happen to know any good South-African tracker? I've just come back from SA and must say I was not impressed much by what has been going on over there. Electricity outages (so called 'load shedding') were a daily occurence and water shortages are becoming more extreme. Not to mention the social issues. Things don't seem anywhere near to turning around imo. Fido has trading in SA. I use that and dont know of trackers. Also you have to keep in mind SA GDP is like a fifth of developed countries, so turning around is different than your expectations. The recession is only -1% growth so it's actually a quite mild recession.

also if you can't find value I would suggest looking in foreign (English speaking I mainly stick to for maintaining a baseline "edge") markets. South Africa is in a recession and I've seen small caps trade for 2 or 3 times earnings. Most small caps trade for 6-8 and most are still profitable (or should be in a non recession enviroment). Some things in Australia and New Zealand are interesting too.

Yes, I think I saw this article too. I'm not saying SaaS companies are fairly valued, I'm just saying that part of the increase in P/S is due to increase in net margins which have been trending upward for the S&P500 for the last 10 or 20 years. That being said on the monopoly matter, there is evidence that companies are becoming more monopolistic over time. The increasing margins is one piece of evidence. The other is the rise of tech companies which have some upfront cost but most of there moat comes from intangibles like network effects, switching costs, high initial marketing spend, which didn't use to be the case (back in the manufacturing days, actual physical capital was the moat which meant companies were started a lot slower and also that most only earned their cost of capital). That being said I agree that companies are choosing ways to fleece investors like using stock compensation, or the Amazon argument ("we are in a land grab so pay no attention to our bottom line"). However, IMO there are good companies (at good valuations) that are mixed in with the bad in the tech bubble, its just not going to be as simple as P/E < 10.

Surprisingly I agree, there is a lot of hope trading at ridiculous multiples. That being said, one reason P/S are higher now than ever before is because tech firms figured out the business model. SaaS companies have much higher margins (gross and net) then the traditional perpetual license model. Thus for the same growth rates you should expect higher P/S multiples.