Jurgis
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Posts posted by Jurgis
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One thing that drives me bananas is when posts "quote" (i.e., copy) a chain of 10 other prior posts instead of just quoting a pertinent sentence or two to which they are replying. Maybe this is something that can be improved in the COBF 3.0.
Yes, if I highlight a sentence and click "quote", the text box should only have the highlighted sentence featured as the quote.
Another one is auto-scaling of images (prevents posting an image and having it blow up the viewing screen).
I hope Sanjeev is not spending money to implement a forum engine from scratch. If he is, then it's IMO a waste of time and money. And the upkeep/fixes/maintenance is likely to be money pit too.
OTOH, if CoBF is going to use off-the-shelf engine, then the engine-specific features in the wish list are pretty much DOA.
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Let's take more hypotheticals:
Apple at iPod release: good manager handles iPod sales and ecosystem fine, never creates and releases iPhone. great manager does. 10x?
Amazon from beginning: good manager handles book sales and expands into selling everything online. great manager also adds third-party sales and AWS. 10x?
Microsoft at beginning: good manager works fine with MS DOS ecosystem. great manager also expands into MS Office, etc. 10x?
FB at beginning: good manager handles FB growth just fine; great manager also buys Instagram, WhatsApp. 10x?
OTOH, back to EXPE/BKNG/TRIP: good manager manages growth with tailwinds just fine, great manager - ??? not much more ??? - maybe not even 2x?
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Would not buy company B.
If you want a number, let's say 10x.
In reality though, this is a very difficult question. Is the comparison of Apple vs Nokia? Microsoft vs IBM? Tesla vs GM? Or is it more like BKNG vs EXPE vs TRIP? And what if Dara Khosrowshahi leaves for Uber? What about Uber vs Lyft after Dara Khosrowshahi came to Uber? Is he great manager enough to have Uber kill it? How about JPM vs BAC vs WFC? Is Jamie worth a lot? 10x? (No, he's not).
Edit: is the "great" manager Steve Jobs v1? Or Steve Jobs v2? Cause that matters too.
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Not a fan of SD’s take but I think some way for the community to provide feedback to each other is valuable.
Perhaps simply an upvote button, but no downvote?
And unlike Reddit where comments are re-arranged based on votes, perhaps we can maintain the timeline of posts (ie no rearranging).
But at least this way you can go into a topic and see what the community thinks the “best” posts on that topic are. And you can make it searchable.
Yeah, there's a french-language forum that I frequent that has the ability to upvote things. It doesn't do much, doesn't feed into a huge algorithm and things aren't sorted by votes, but it's a nice positive feedback and encourages good behavior and adding value.
SiliconInvestor allows upvoting. I think it's OK though there's still a possibility of cliquish behavior. Might not be a big issue with politics gone. Although I think there will be some abuse in battleground stocks.
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@thepupil
The GRIF thread is an example of how discussion died as soon as dissenting opinions were posted.
I disagree. dissenting opinions on the true quality of management, on the decision to not sell assets immediately and grow the company, and on the right value of the stock, and on the sustainability of extremely tight cap rates in industrial have been voiced throughout that thread.
And that is somewhat crux of the matter: people see the same discussion differently. And what is a great discussion for some, is not great discussion for others. And things considered to be covered by some are either not sufficiently covered by others or dismissed or attacked too much or whatever.
This becomes a big deal in the battleground stocks, but it also sometimes becomes an issue in "quiet" stock discussions too.
Anyway. I don't have a solution for this. ::)
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The Investment Ideas section is an investment board. Generally people respond to posts on ideas in that thread. I've always found people willing to engage in discussion of ideas that I and others post.
I actually think there's a good diversity of types of ideas. There is the problem that only a few people may be interested in a type of idea, so occasionally a thread might become an echo chamber of thepupil and BG2008 pondering how wide some NAV discount could get on some doomed property company, but generally there is good and additive discussion in the investment ideas section. Or sometimes people want to talk a lot about SHLD or shorting TSLA or whatever (I myself sacrificed 200 bps to Mr. Musk in 2013, admitted defeat and moved on).
I absolutely don't mean this as a personal attack deadspace, but I read your post and was thinking "I don't know who deadspace is, I wonder what companies he/she's posted about over these years that haven't got any love, so I clicked on the old "show posts" by deadspace. I found an extremely prescient call on SHOP, a bearish call on AAPL, some love for Guns Germs and Steel, then it got to Fannie Freddie / and 2017 or older and I stopped.
That's a long way of saying, if you want more posts about investing in companies, maybe post about investing in companies. You had some 5 bagger+ insight into SHOP in May 2019. Kudos to you. that's freaking awesome; my posts have offered no such insight.
Next time you have an insight that you feel is 5 bagger potential (hell I'll take a 2 bagger or a 1.5 bagger), post more than 2 sentences about it. This may engender further discussion of the company/idea, and improve the quality of the board.
Be the change you wish to see on COBF (is channeling Dr King Ghandi (oops) too political?)
I'll post mostly mea culpa. 8)
I am (mostly) not interested in deep value ideas, so I don't contribute in deep value idea threads. Though I appreciate the work that people put in. You know who you are. 8)
In terms of GARPy ideas, usually they are known and I don't necessarily have much to contribute that hasn't been said. I also don't see a value to try to persuade other people that my idea is good or their take is wrong or whatever. IMO usually not much benefit comes out of battleground fights.
Some examples: FB was cheap last year. I bought a bunch. I probably wrote something on FB thread, but clearly this was known.
I bought EXPE and DFS in March. I still don't know if these were good purchases. Both are 50%+ up from the bottom, but I have some shares that are still in red too (I started buying EXPE way before March). I think both of these are known too. Actually DFS is "value idea" even. Not much to say though.
I bought a ton of AAPL before Buffett. I sold some recently and I may think that it's overvalued. Again, this is known and I'm not very interested in arguing for or against selling.
On the other hand, I have offered to discuss the GARPy stocks to a-bunch-of-people-you-know-who-you-all-are on the outside channel. Crickets. That's fine with me.
I might post about another probably-not-great idea that I bought recently. Just to see whether that causes any interesting discussion.
Peace. 8)
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TL;DR version: The gist of this thread is how to deal with excessive dietary affluence but a real game-changer happened when people stopped drinking their own feces and i shit you not.
No shit! 8)
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What about salt?
Low sodium is very likely good.
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This line of thinking forgets that pre-agricultural people did not live to 70 or 80 years old. So you don't really know whether pre-agri diet was good or not. You don't know which parts of the omnivorous diet were good ones and which ones were not. You know that pre-agri people mostly did not die from food problems, but that actually hurts your reasoning and does not help it.
Pre-civilized humanity was pretty interesting in terms of life expectancy. It was essentially a tri-modal distribution: lots of deaths around birth/infancy, around 25-30 (usually dying of tooth infections), and the remainder actually living into their late years (50s, 60s, 70s).
Sources? 8)
I'm not gonna dig it up for you, but I know that Sweeden has kept good mortality tables going back a long time. I was really surprised when I first found out.
Big surprise, life expectancy isn't really increasing by much and it isn't increasing more than before.
I did dig a bit, see my edit. And it's not as good as the "ancient humans lived to old age just fine" crowd presents.
Sweden mortality tables clearly do not cover pre-agricultural society either.
Edit: I have to acknowledge that I'm not an expert in this and 5 minutes of Google may be uncovering as much mis-information as information. Unfortunately, I am not sure anyone else on this thread is an expert either. So knowing what's true and what's debunked by scientific community would take much longer. I think I'm gonna cede the podium and not try to reach a definite conclusion. Have fun.
Edit2: Actually, screw it. I pretty much believe these folks: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy And they show it's not just child mortality that affects life expectancy. They don't cover the pre-agri societies though and they only have long data from England (and the data you mentioned from Sweden in another graph). So FWIW. 8)
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This line of thinking forgets that pre-agricultural people did not live to 70 or 80 years old. So you don't really know whether pre-agri diet was good or not. You don't know which parts of the omnivorous diet were good ones and which ones were not. You know that pre-agri people mostly did not die from food problems, but that actually hurts your reasoning and does not help it.
Pre-civilized humanity was pretty interesting in terms of life expectancy. It was essentially a tri-modal distribution: lots of deaths around birth/infancy, around 25-30 (usually dying of tooth infections), and the remainder actually living into their late years (50s, 60s, 70s).
Sources? 8)
Edit: I just Googled for 5 minutes and the picture is not really what you present. Even from the people who acknowledge huge number of infant deaths dragging down the averages:
https://jasoncollins.blog/2013/10/21/life-expectancy-and-the-dawn-of-agriculture/
http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/seminarpapers/dg09102006.pdf
Edit2: This is IMO pretty definitive: https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy but does not cover pre-middle-ages. So FWIW.
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I now try to think about a world without agriculture and what would human being eat then? I assume that we are naturally omnivores. We probably ate meat, fish, berries, and some sort of veggies. Despite thousands of years of civilization, I don't think human metabolism has evolved much. This is largely due to the fact that humans are very good at surviving and we haven't needed dramatic mutations in our genes to survive in the last 10,000 years or so.
This line of thinking forgets that pre-agricultural people did not live to 70 or 80 years old. So you don't really know whether pre-agri diet was good or not. You don't know which parts of the omnivorous diet were good ones and which ones were not. You know that pre-agri people mostly did not die from food problems, but that actually hurts your reasoning and does not help it.
Throwing genes into the discussion muddies the waters even more. I'm pretty sure nobody in this thread actually knows how genes interact with diet and again which components of the diet (and genes) are geared to make humans survive to 20-40 years in food-deficient society vs. which parts are good for living to 90-100+ in food-excess society.
BTW, I am not sure where you are going with this too. I'm pretty sure pre-agri people did not eat Keto diet. So are you now arguing that some kind of balanced omnivore (paleo?) diet (whatever that is) - is the best?
I am (not very strict) vegetarian. I acknowledge that it's possibly not the best diet. In fact, as vegetarian you are limited, which makes it harder to avoid "bad foods". But then I am vegetarian based on ethical reasons - not killing animals without necessity - and not because of health reasons. (If anyone is going to pursue this line of discussion, please open a new thread in politics, TYVM).
I don't know what to think of new scientific studies on diets anymore. For years we were told to eat 10+ servings of carbs a day. It didn't even distinguish between refined carbs or whole grain. Eggs were bad, eggs were good, fat was bad, fat is good.
I think this line of non-thinking is not productive. The actual studies are way more nuanced than you try to portray them. I am not sure how many have you read and if you have expertise in the topic. (I don't.)
Sorry, but you sound like a Robinhood investor who would say: "I don't know what to think about investing studies anymore. For years we were told that low P/Book is good. It did not even distinguish between p/book of banks and software companies. Dividends were bad, dividends were good, share repurchases were good, share repurchases were bad. This investing science is all crap". (Last sentence added for emphasis ;)).
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Here is what I might have for a day of groceries for myself:
Breakfast: oatmeal
Lunch: broccoli & spinach,
Dinner: cauliflower with wild rice,beans, and corn with glass of wine.
About $12/day
Damn you leftist, granola eating, hippie!!! :) (Please forgive me Eric in the name of a little humor)
Asking vegetarian about meat prices is a missed steak.
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Everything I know about ethics, I learned from computer games .
Here's the hypothetical situation that was presented in the beginning of Baldur's Gate II:
A sorcerer kidnaps you and your brother and places you both into cells. You cannot communicate. There's a button in each cell. If you press the button, you die, but your brother goes free. If your brother presses the button, he dies, but you go free. If no one presses the button, you both die. If both of you press the button, also both die.
What would you do?
Spoilers: assuming you and your brother are both homo economicus and both know game theory, what would you do?
Spoiler interlude: can you do better than the obvious answer?
Spoilers 2: It's interesting how ethics ties into information theory and game theory. At least for homo economicus. ;)
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$4.99 sale on Amazon today: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07SBX56MC/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_KKq-EbD1BSE2Z
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Anyone have a good place to track COVID-19 hospitalizations state by state in the US? I'm having a hard time getting to track this metric, and would like to do so closely. My thought is total cases are a good measure for the seeds that are fraught with possibility, and deaths are a lagging indicator by too much (by that time everyone already knows). There are enough seeds sown across the country to be concerned about some shoots coming up in more than one state in the months ahead, and the process could keep repeating itself until flu season arrives. Or not.
Hospitalizations are a lagging indicator by 2-3 weeks but (increase in total cases AND increase in daily hospitalizations) is what I'd like to track closely.
Data fatigue seems to be an issue at least for myself, would like to snap out of it and prepare for the next phase. Thanks in advance and apologies for the naive question.
Not sure if you want raw data or something that track hospitalizations in all states in single graph.
I look at https://public.tableau.com/profile/peter.james.walker#!/vizhome/COVID-19SeeYourState/YourStateKeys
which has hospitalizations, but you have to select particular state. Maybe there's a way to get underlying data or different graph(s), I'm not sure.
There's also this:
https://covidtracking.com/data/state/massachusetts#historical
It is also per state and numbers only, so you'd have to scrape/graph yourself.
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Now the Chinese build these infrastructure projects not just as an investment, and a way to recycle their trading surplus, but also to buy influence, but I doubt it buys enough to allow them to use those countries as a staging ground for their military.
You are very likely right about EU ports (especially in NATO countries).
Outside EU is another question. NPR article claims:
For instance, Chinese investments in the ports of Djibouti, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been followed by Chinese naval deployments.I did not search further what exactly "naval deployments" mean.
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It is really dumb for a company to retain 100% of earnings and grow at a lower rate than its discount rate (alternately, the opportunity cost for shareholders). Such a management action destroys shareholder wealth. This is the main reason Buffett said the condition for earnings retention is to be able produce more than $1 of market value for each dollar retained.
OT? Something useful out of this discussion. 8) ./bow
Let me see if I understood this correctly in a broader context. Let's take a company that produces FCF. But it does not pay it out some way. Instead it keeps it and does not invest it (at high/reasonable ROI). Then really we cannot just DCF that FCF at the time it was produced since we are not really getting it. We'd have to assume it's only paid out later (if ever) and add additional time periods (and discounts) to DCF model to estimate when it is paid out.
Of course, we could still assume that if we owned the whole business then we'd be able to use the FCF as we wish. And we can do the basic DCF based on that "wholly owned" assumption. It's just that in reality the business won't be worth as much as our basic DCF indicates.
Pretty interesting, n'est-ce pas? 8)
I agree that Thrifty3000 is confused, but I'm not sure how to explain to them why their calculations are incorrect.
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Do you have the same chart but with deaths or deaths per million?
I'd be surprised if Liberty has it just because it's a chart from a third-party. That said, it's pretty easy to visualize because the EU has about the population of the USA, plus a third.
So, keep the same line from the EU, and move the USA line up a third.
That said, I agree with your underlying point--the chart is a bit deceptive because, compared to the EU, USA has actually done even worse than you'd think just by looking at the chart.
You can edit the chart to select the start-end dates, etc.
It's not a seven day rolling average though AFAIK.
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Sadly, David Webb has been diagnosed with cancer. His loss would be a blow to Hong Kong, given his long-time advocacy for democracy and improved corporate governance.
https://webb-site.com/articles/editor200608.asp
Sad to hear. Good luck to David in his fight with cancer.
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Well the economy is not gonna do a V. There are lots of reasons for that. I'm not gonna go into them cause then I'm gonna write a book.
Get this man an agent, make him write a book, and ... , profit!
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I think mutually assured destruction and nuclear deterrence actually go a long way insofar as a conflict between India and China is concerned, maybe even exceptionally so among former or current pairs of nuclear enemies.
Granted I can never really get the game theory to work in my head, but I think it has a maybe irrationally pacific effect on both parties.
I think that (large scale) war between India and China is not going to happen.
But I also think that nuclear deterrence between India and China is much less guaranteed than it was between West and Soviet block. IMO both India and China could think that the war would not go nuclear because it would be regional and not "large scale".
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Wow! that is some of the DUMBEST stuff I have heard in my life. And I've heard some whoppers.
I know I'm gonna be sorry for it, but I must still ask, if he's so busy causing covid? Why is he planting bricks?
Yup, I know it is absolutely crazy but something like 44% of republicans have been found to believe Bill Gates is planning to implant microchips in everyone via vaccines. Don't know whether to laugh or cry at that one. See https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648 and https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-vaccine-conspiracy-theories-are-stupid-2020-6 for some of the craziness.
The bricks come in within all these theories because Bill Gates apparently hates and is scared of Trump (who might expose and counter him as the story goes) and wants to damage him by making the protests violent. That is about as far as I can figure out since they don't make much sense overall (some claim that Bill Gates wants to kill 15% of all people via vaccinations but some don't so there is quite a bit of variation to this nonsense).
This sh!t is so f&cked up that...
I don't have anything to add
for now
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I have a question: what percentage of today's best talent are currently impoverished and underutilized, not making it into engineering programs?
When I was at Microsoft, I kept bumping into Indian engineers and it seemed as though not one of them grew up dirt poor, even though so much of the country is dirt poor.
I think by definition very few of the impoverished manage to break through to get into engineering programs, etc.
For example, even in Soviet Union if you lived in a village, the school was pretty crappy. So if you were a genius, you probably could have broken out to get into university, etc. But if you were just above average (let's say good enough to work at Microsoft with right education), then you had slim chances because the school was not good enough to prepare you for university entry exams/etc. On the other hand, if you lived in a large city, the schools were better and you had way more opportunity to be prepared to get into university.
I think similar or worse situation is common in developing countries. Very few if any of children in a poor village or city slum would have opportunities to make it into universities or similar engineering programs.
Maybe you can take population of school age children under poverty line and/or living in villages, multiply it by some factor to adjust for overcounting, then multiply by let's say 10% to get the "really good" ones. And that would be a potential of impoverished/underutilized talent.
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Likewise, we expect recent high school graduates who join the Army to obey the laws of war despite extreme conditions. We expect police in their early 20's to exercise restraint and good judgment at all times, even under duress, under penalty of jail if they don't meet that standard.
OT? I am afraid that our expectations in both of these cases are too high. In fact, I am afraid that our expectations of human behavior in general are too high. Whether applied to young people in their 20s, or people in general, or "highly rational" investment professionals frequenting certain investment forums, or even people at the highest levels of business or politics.
Yeah, that makes me a misanthrope. :-\
Also see my signature.
Choose Your Own Research Adventure (Vote for a research you want to see)
in General Discussion
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I have looked into DBX and I have owned EB. I am somewhat interested in both.
Regarding EB, I kinda liked that people were using them for meetings (pre-Covid). Not sure how much that is monetized/etc. Not sure if there is really moat. IMO the platform is buildable and other companies could sideline this. E.g. Meetup or even FB/GOOGL/Groupon (are they still alive)/LYV. OTOH, it's possible that they could build critical mass and have some moat. I'm neutral right now.
I have looked at DBX and BOX some time ago. Here I have bigger issues with competition. If you are business and you go to cloud, you get disk storage and backup storage together with cloud. I.e. just get AWS/GCP/Azure/whatever cloud storage. Why would anyone use/pay for DBX/BOX? If you are not business, then there's still Google/Amazon/Microsoft drives in the cloud that are competitively priced and likely more integrated with your other stuff (e.g. Gmail/Amazon photos/etc.). So I really don't see a defendable niche. There were people defending BOX here on CoBF couple years ago. And presumably there were businesses paying for storage there. So maybe I am totally wrong.
Anyway, I'd be interested in what you write on either/both.
Not interested in the other two. 8)