Jurgis

One thing: yes, we should adopt the easy "no cost" methods: 1. Tell your kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Tell them to wear seat belts even in back seat. 2. If you are teacher/professor, it does not hurt to know how you can lock your classroom door (or where the closest fire extinguisher is). Yeah, 1. is still probably 100 times more worthwhile than 2. But 2. does not cost much and so it does not hurt much either. Take care.

Depends on where you live. For most places in USA and developed countries, you are right.

Because life is about choices and about resources. You might not need Tesla engineers, but you may need money, time, political will, campaigning, etc. It would be wonderful if we could resolve all issues facing humanity, but we can't. My point is that we make a lot of bad choices because we ignore statistics. Edit: perhaps I should have asked "would you contribute your money/time/effort to A or B". It seems that voting is easy, sure, you can vote for A and B and C. Not so if you have to spend something. Assume you can contribute to charity/organization that is working to reduce A or B. What then?

Although I disagree with school shooting characterization as: I agree that humans/humanity in general are very bad at making statistics based decisions. There are numerous issues that are not focused on even though working on them would yield huge benefits and vice versa there are numerous issues that consume huge resources even though they are statistically insignificant and the resources are wasted. Edit: Just for illustration to Pauly: Assume that a chance of your child getting killed in school shooting is 0.00001%. Assume that a chance of your child getting killed in auto accident is 0.001%. Assume you can vote only for only one solution: A. Reduce a chance of your child getting killed in school shooting 10 times. B. Reduce a chance of your child getting killed in auto accident 2 times. Would you vote for A or for B? Why? You are welcome to change percentages and numbers yourself.

Hah, we've had this discussion before. You'd think Google and Yahoo would value their finance platforms as premium places for ads. And yet they are treated as red headed stepchildren... Bonkers.

First of all, big +1 for randomep. :) Agree with that. I think we all do. And yet is there anything better? Yes, but not if they decide to go Volkswagen and discard the data that shows issues in replication. We will have to see how this works out. She's definitely not a martyr that bulls try to depict her: she has tons of money, great backers, contracts. So really Theranos should show results. Should not be tough with X$B warchest, no?

Perhaps. Or perhaps there is an inflection point where there is no longer enough work for humans. There are valid arguments why this time is different. But I agree that it might not be. Edit: there is also potential issue of hollowing out that I brought up above. I.e. there might be work only for computer scientists, Ph.D. level bio/pharma and materials engineers, but majority of people won't be able to get to that level of education/proficiency/etc. Only in certain countries and certain occupations. But, yes, I don't disparage our current status of civilization. It is the best we've had so far.

Part time work is one possible solution. I'd love to work 75% part time (funny thing, I might even put in >75% hours). Companies in USA do not like this though. Maybe this will change. I don't think "part time" solves hollowing out of some professions due to automatization. I.e. a segment of people having not enough education to work in remaining sectors (e.g. truck drivers if driverless trucks displace them). We will see if we can come up with good solution for this.

Completely agree.

I am happy that you have this vision of future. I'd like to believe this will be the case too. There's a small wrinkle in the fact that supporting 80-90% unemployed people is not something that a lot people can accept. ;)

This thread is a great example how we as civilization are totally unprepared for coming machine age where 80%+ of people will be unemployed. Something to think about. Or not.

You and a bunch of others keep talking about sacrifice. Of course, you only think about the business owners / management. "Oh my god, instead of firing people, I have to think how to structure my business so that I might not need to fire them. Such a huge sacrifice. It might blow my brain. Oh my god, I might not get my bonus, I might not be in the three comma club." Perhaps you should think about the fact that by firing people you are telling them to sacrifice their livelihood for your profits and bonuses. Nah, they are not sacrificing anything, they should just expect it. Only the business owners can talk about self sacrifice. News flash: "sacrifice" is a red herring word. It is not about sacrifice. It is about spending some time to think about all parties involved. It is actually something that's not about communism or statism. It's actually something that is taught in the best management practices. Ah, but who listens to those. They are for schmucks, not the enlightened economists with flashy MBAs.

There's nothing to get. The board is populated by 0.1% of smartest people who only take the point of view of the business owner or investor and who can easily find other jobs even if they have to find a new job. How many of the posters above experienced being kicked out of the job and having very limited chances to find a new one in foreseeable future while having to feed their family. How many lived hand to mouth? So, yes, there's nothing to get that I have sympathy for the workers and not for business owners or managers who are in the position of power and use it as they see fit. I hope that at least some people will think about what I say and perhaps next time they may try to find other solutions rather than the easy one. And I write only because of that hope. Take care

Ah yes. So you screwed up and you solve this by making others suffer. Great example how the employer-employee relationship is "equal". Lolz. The fact that you don't see other solutions except the easy one does not mean others can't. So you taking out Munger trump card? OK, I'll beat you with Buffett who does not close underperforming businesses and fire people from them. That's one of the reasons I invest in BRK. So there.

You guys have really weird definitions of win-win situations. I hope I never have to do a deal with youse. ;) :P And, no, I disagree. If you hired 1000 employees, you should have looked into the future and planned for it. So the fact that you suddenly don't need 900, speaks poorly of you. Even though you conveniently exercise your power and fire them.

I prefer companies that figure out how to use their workforce for growth and improvement of the company instead of taking an axe and acting as if that's some kind of smart move. Great leadership and management is not about firing a bunch of employees because a part of business is "inefficient". Great leadership is finding a way to transform that part of the business while engaging and retraining employees for the benefit of employees, customers and shareholders.

No, it's not. There are places (some European countries) where through government regulation it is close to that. There are industries where employees can make huge demands on employers due to shortage of qualified work (high tech). But in most places and industries the business holds the upper hand. No, there seems to be a misunderstanding here. The options aren't, hurt yourself for others or hurt others for yourself. Where does a person who trades fit in? A win-win DOES help others and doesn't come at the expense of either party. That is the proper way to engage in human relationships- neither party sacrificing for the other. Again, having a bunch of people sacrificing themselves for you isn't a path to happiness. Do you think criminals sit down and say, 'I'm going to live 80 years, what's the best way to live a full, happy life? I know, I'll lie cheat and steal.'? No, the correct way is to trade with others to the benefit of both parties. I agree that win-win is the way to go. I suspect that your win-win is very different from my win-win as evidenced by your examples of employer laying off employees being a win-win.

Ah, it's just like the personal relationship. In feudal times. Now I get it. You are the rich husband, your wife has no rights. You think she's not getting any younger, so you kick her out of the house without a cent. It's fine for her to be upset, but it's not fine to claim a right to your love and chain you to her. Obviously once you kick her out of your house without a cent, she will do just fine. ::) Let's stop pretending that business-employee relationship is a relationship of equals. It's not. Unless you are Bill Gross. And even then you have to sue for your $300M bonus. :P even if that happiness is predicated on the suffering of others? :o The end goal of morality for an individual is to achieve flourishing and happiness by bettering this planet and helping others to achieve that.

Oh the certainty of the greater good. How wonderful. Perhaps you should talk to these individual workers directly and explain to them how their job loss is for greater good. I am sure they will appreciate your concern and explanation. Right. Money is the most important thing in the world.

It doesn't have to be. General opinion is that it's harder to outperform in non-concentrated portfolio, so you might as well give up and index. Also running non-concentrated portfolio takes more time, so that's another thing to consider vs. just indexing. But yeah, there are people here and elsewhere with non concentrated portfolios. I will claim again that by now BRK (including op cos) is not concentrated. MKL is not concentrated. Tweedy Browne. Harder to find hugely outperforming known small investors who are not concentrated.

Why is BRK an exception? Now and then, I keep finding nugets in Charlie's Almanack and one of them was a quote from Buffett talking about how everyone else is taking his words as facts where Charlie wouldn't. I think it's hard to concentrate into one idea because no one knows all the risks including BRK. Who knows maybe one day, after Buffett left, they did an Exxon or something. Like others said, BRK is an exception right now because it is "a diversified collection of businesses" plus it has somewhat diversified portfolio as its investment holdings. Theoretically Jain and maybe GenRe could blow up the company by really bad underwriting on supercats. So I would not put 100% into BRK either. But if I was forced to concentrate, BRK would be natural choice for up to 20-50% of portfolio.

You think so? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090685/?ref_=nv_sr_1 8)

There are a lot of people for whom "enough experience" leads to being less certain about investing choices rather than more. The more you know, the more you know that you really don't know anything. In the opposite edge case you have young smart guys with no experience, small portfolios and long career/job runways putting everything into 2-4 ideas and succeeding for a while (sometimes quite spectacularly). And they wonder why would anyone hold a diversified portfolio... Of course there is always also Munger (66% of DJCO portfolio in WFC - that's balls of steel, though perhaps DJCO shareholders don't care?). BTW, Buffett is not concentrated for a long time now, especially considering the op businesses. Though even with that, IBM is just balls of steel IMO. Even more than Munger's WFC in some ways. Ultimately concentration vs. diversification one of the perennial topics that pops up periodically and never gets resolved, since there is no resolution. Same as small caps vs. large caps.

BTW, for lolz Fido equity summary score for BRK is 1 (Very Bearish), which is I think close to the lowest it can get. There are 2 sell ratings and zero buy ratings. ;)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-01/old-money-s-7-essential-ways-to-stay-rich