Jurgis

Continued "screw you" to EU users from ... pretty much every single US based tech and media company: Or you can choose not to click continue and not get the content. F-ank you very much! This particular one was from Fortune.com, but really variations of these are what you get on pretty much every single website when in EU. It's pretty much "no choice" choice. Either you waive your EU privacy rights, or you get no content. In some cases, there might be third choice to jump through 20 minute hoops that may eventually end up in some mix of who-knows-what. Still pretty much "screw you".

I would push back on this from two sides: 1. You could argue about "better service" as defined by ease of calling Lyft/Uber vs. calling taxi. This is mostly US phenomenon though. In a lot of countries there are taxi apps/etc. that offer the same convenience. Also, I'm not really pro-taxi person, but security/quality of cars/drivers is arguably better in taxis. Of course, I've got recency bias of using Uber/Lyft mostly, but I've had pretty scary and pretty lousy drivers. And I gave them all 5 stars since OTOH you don't want to kill poor person trying to make a living with bad reviews. If taxi service had Japanese/Finnish car quality/driver professionalism and charged the same as Uber/Lyft, I'd take taxi all the time period. 2. Regarding raising prices 30-35% and not losing riders: currently Uber/Lyft is somewhat competitive with driving to destination, parking in paid parking and driving back, so I may take Uber/Lyft instead of driving and parking. With 30-35% raise, this use case economics are killed completely.

Not bad. But I think there's a lot of anchoring to Watsa's 15% return goal.

Anecdotally, Lyft has been offering discounts for quite a while. Possibly in preparation for IPO, possibly to grab market share, possibly to show growth, possibly all of these. I don't have preference, so I've been using Lyft predominantly, except when I see surge pricing on Lyft, but Uber has no surge pricing at the time. Although I somewhat agree with Broeb22 about duopoly pricing, there seems to be an issue that to pay drivers "normal" wage and to be profitable, Uber/Lyft will have to drive up 8) prices a lot. Which will likely drop the number of rides which may drop the number of drivers, which ... - not a positive cycle. Unless the riders are so hooked up that they'll tolerate way higher prices. Or companies will find a way to profit without driving the prices up. But it's not easy to see how they would do it apart the magic "self-driving cars" spiel. "Self-driving cars" is not really an answer. First, the development is taking longer than expected. Second, it's not clear that Uber/Lyft will dominate self-driving car ecosystem. As a customer, I'm afraid of the bearish predictions that either Uber/Lyft will drive up prices to close to old taxi pricing or they'll go out of business and we'll go back to old taxi pricing anyway. I'd like to hope that this won't come true. But Spekulatius was right in his initial post - investors are subsidizing the riders so far.

Broeb22: Just MHO, but you are probably better off looking at NFLX or STNE (or maybe PINS) than Uber. In fact, there are tons of other software companies that are expensive, growing and still probably better than Uber. I can post ticker soup if anyone is interested. (Some of the names have been discussed on CoBF, some maybe not).

Finally, someone else who saw the same thing I did! Sauron was not destroyed he just relocated to a galaxy far, far away...

That's correct. I was also surprised (I didn't know much about it going on), but it actually increased my enjoyment because I think it's important that we get reminders once in a while of just how vile these regimes were. Historical distance and the death of first-hand victims is making it all more fuzzy over time... "The Death of Stalin" was banned in Russia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Stalin ). People in power there don't want any reminders.

Hear, hear!

I think gfp caught value investing virus. ... Get well soon, gfp!

Every f&*(ng thread on CoBF is hijacked by politicos. Good job folks. You win.

Some of these are mind tricks and meaningless (e.g. #1). Some are possibly depressing for people who want to get good returns. Some explain why people active invest even though it mostly does not work. Some show how people doing X may look like geniuses for year/decade and like idiots for another year/decade. Some are possibly food for thought.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/pictionary-playing-computer-connects-humans-deep-thoughts?r3f_986=https://www.google.com/ - Pictionarize this!

- I for one backflip for our robotic overlords http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-mini-cheetah-first-four-legged-robot-to-backflip-0304

Good post. It might be argued that BRK is attractive compared to elevated market/SP500 valuations and future expected returns. I.e. even if you get ~10%ish (or even high single digits) return on BRK, it may outperform the market. Of course, this argument has been made in the past and so far it has not worked. 8)

You guys realize that the article claims that what you propose is what value funds are doing and that's what underperforms? While no funds do the value-metrics approach and that's what presumably outperforms? Or nobody read the article?

I disagree that green (and not only green - people in general too) are against nuclear because they don't understand it. Mostly they are against it because of possible radiation leaks/accidents. Chernobyl and Fukushima did not help. And, yeah, maybe you can argue that modern systems make the risk of accident negligible. But the counterargument to that would be that Japanese claimed Fukushima was safe. So people don't trust safety claims of nuclear industry. And unlike other industries people don't trust, nuclear does not have strong enough lobbyists and backroom dealers who would push through deals even without public support. And BTW the huge cost overruns of recent/attempted projects did not help. BTW, I am pro-nuclear. But I see pretty much zero chance for nuclear development in US and mostly in EU. China/Asia will probably build nuclear. For other countries, the discussion turns to non-proliferation. (And yeah, again, potential solutions exist, but persuading people that they are good/viable is not going to be easy). Also BTW, based on Wikipedia there is currently no commercial Thorium reactor and most plans are for pilot projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power So the situation is not really that <insert country X> could just buy cheap (prebuilt?) thorium reactor and have it running quickly. It's not even that they could build it quickly and reliably. So assuming <insert country X or state/municipality Y> came to you and asked you for input, you could not really advise them to build thorium-based power plant, since there's no successful precedents.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/31/this-clever-ai-hid-data-from-its-creators-to-cheat-at-its-appointed-task/ - Fun stuff

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/nyregion/airbnb-nyc-law.html

Looking for funding/participation. My friends&family in Lithuania have implemented web based market for business designs (logos, webpages, business cards, etc.) They have launched it in Russian market: https://www.brandelements.ru/ (Google auto translates the page to English pretty well.) It’s two sided market where the designers can sell their designs and/or make custom projects for customers. The designer side is pretty well populated. The customer side is so so. They get minimal revenue. The company is based in Lithuania, which means EU market/rules/etc. They are looking for investor and/or business development person. The top priority would be to find someone who would both invest for worldwide launch and lead worldwide business development. Other options are possible: lead business development in Russia/worldwide for equity slice; acquire the startup as is; etc. They’ve built this on sweat equity taking zero salaries so far. It has no outside investment at this time. This is likely a small size opportunity although there is a chance to grow if platform successfully attracts customers. If there's interest, please PM me. I'm happy to take questions/feedback on CoBF, but any in depth discussions should go into private channels. Thanks.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/want-to-invest-in-a-true-value-fund-good-luck-finding-one-11549249860?mod=nwsrl_journal_reports_health_care&cx_refModule=nwsrl Disclaimers: I don't invest in true value . This is posted for fun and discussion only. Maybe this explains (not-true)value fund underperformance. Maybe it doesn't. Have fun. 8)

Probably a better idea to call IB to get it fixed. There will be a discrepancy between what you file and what the IRS will get from IB. Yeah. So IB has "Tax form correction" option in their support section. Except that it does not work. They implemented new interface, but part of the code refers to old form and you can't submit the correction - it requires you to fill in no longer existing checkbox(es). Great programming! This company rocks! NOT. Well, I submitted generic ticket instead. We'll see where that gets us. BTW, they had exactly the same issue with ISTB/FLOT dividends reported as qualified in 2017 tax form. 1099-DIV got fixed/amended in March. This company rocks! NOT. Was this a special dividend? I would have though reporting dividends would be pretty straightforward. No. ISTB and FLOT are bond etfs that pay regular dividends every month. I have no clue why IB cannot get it right second year in a row.

Warren might be interested, but Bloomberg won't get to a point where he has to sell.

Probably a better idea to call IB to get it fixed. There will be a discrepancy between what you file and what the IRS will get from IB. Yeah. So IB has "Tax form correction" option in their support section. Except that it does not work. They implemented new interface, but part of the code refers to old form and you can't submit the correction - it requires you to fill in no longer existing checkbox(es). Great programming! This company rocks! NOT. Well, I submitted generic ticket instead. We'll see where that gets us. BTW, they had exactly the same issue with ISTB/FLOT dividends reported as qualified in 2017 tax form. 1099-DIV got fixed/amended in March. This company rocks! NOT.

IB is reporting dividends from ISTB and FLOT as qualified dividends. Fido is reporting them as not qualified dividends. This also shows they are not qualified dividends: https://www.ishares.com/us/literature/tax-information/2018-ishares-distribution-summary-icrmh0219u-716296.pdf Crap, so now I have to try to manually persuade Turbo Tax that IB's reporting is screwed up... FML.

Well, I guess the positive is that we now know that the BRK prices are due to market and not Buffett put. 8)