Jurgis

Personally, I am with mostly with thepupil although I would not try to predict RE pricing based on my thoughts. We are in somewhat-close suburbs of Boston. We talked about moving to exurbs for bigger-or-nicer house/more land/more forest or water/etc. The problem is that infra does not move. So we'd lose (or be forced to drive way longer to): - Tai Chi studio we go to, meditation place we go to - PCP and medical specialists we go to - restaurants - other Boston culture, shopping, etc. - friends Ultimately, I don't think losing all of these are worth what we'd gain. OT: why do American builders continue to build the 1930s/1950s esthetics SFHs? Unlike Europe there are no look restrictions and yet everything except multi-million custom houses look like they were plopped from a 1960s sitcom. ::) Lithuanians build nicer looking new houses than Americans... :-\

Someone has said that Africa is the continent of the future and always will be. ::) It's possible to play on geographical trends. Go SE for South East Asia. MELI (maybe) for LatAm. There were some stocks mentioned for Africa too. Or maybe PROSY for all of the above? Maybe we should resurrect Naspers/PROSY thread and see if anyone has opinions about their capital allocation post-Tencent. It seems that majority of their value is Tencent. I wonder if anyone has done deep dive on the capital allocation/growth of their pieces and not just the SoTP valuation.

That's a great question. Tencent had seven mega trend tailwinds in 200Xs: - Mobility / mobile device proliferation - Data / especially mobile data proliferation - Software / software proliferation - Games / game proliferation - Social media proliferation - Cashless payment growth - China growth I could potentially add - Ad-based monetization growth If you look at world right now, people are looking for next Apple/Google/Tencent. There are couple of issues: - there are almost no new mega trends. One could argue that AI is one. OK, let's say it is. That's still just one trend. There is also no company that owns AI space or likely will own AI space in coming ten years+. - one could argue that past mega trends still have legs. This is true. But any company relying on the old trends either has to compete with incumbents supported by the same trends or to look for niches that incumbents missed. Both make life harder for newcomers. In fact, I'd argue that Alphabet/Google are (still) very strong in the - Mobility / mobile device proliferation - Data / especially mobile data proliferation - Software / software proliferation - Ad-based monetization growth - AI growth trends. They are weaker in others I mentioned. And Tencent is still very strong in the trends I mentioned for them. But both Alphabet/Google and Tencent will have lower growth in next 10-20 years because of their size. You still might do (relatively) well holding them. Now, you could find a small(er) company that conquers just one or couple trends going forward, possibly in a large niche. But that's more difficult to predict IMO. Or find a newly emerging supertrend and company that will ride it + using some of the existing trends perhaps. There are couple trends that people (for long time) argue could supertrend, but so far they haven't really: - Internet-of-things - Personalized/genomic medicine - Widespread nano machining Anyway, you wanted market dislocations. These would be it. Good luck. 8)

Although there were a number of people who exploited this, including Bill Bowder in his first foray to Russia, this was not as simple as it sounds on paper. The competition for certificates of ordinary citizens from various shady "investors" was huge and so was the competition to siphon assets from the privatized companies. Add to this that management of some of the enterprises was crap, you could end up with hugely negative return from "can't lose" situations. My relatives in Lithuania invested in privatized super-prime retail location that was subsequently pretty much run into the ground. Other relatives invested with shady investors who absconded with their investment certificate money. But, yeah, sure there were people who became multibillionaire (in Russia, multimillionaire in Lithuania) oligarchs. Mostly from being deep insiders and grabbing control and assets through legal and shady ways. Individual investor would have done way better with higher longer term return and less risk buying something like Tencent anytime in 200Xs and holding. ::)

Kindle version is available for $9.99: https://smile.amazon.com/Limping-Water-outstanding-communications-companies-ebook/dp/B01993UGIY/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=limping+on+water&qid=1602274867&sr=8-1 I have not read this book.

It might have been good decision for Buffett. I'm not so sure that standalone Whole Foods would be doing great today. Would depend on management clearly, but it probably would have been a tough slog.

Yeah, that's right. UK may or may not withhold tax on any dividends.

Do you mean buying UK stocks in US based financial account (e.g. Fidelity, IB)? If so, it's the same as buying US stocks. Do you mean buying UK stocks in UK based financial account for US citizen? If so, things are a bit complicated mostly because you have a foreign financial account that you have to report. There might also be issues with UK side taxing this account, but I am not sure about that.

Sure. There are things that FB/Twitter/GoogleNews/Netflix/AnyMediaOrganization do that CoBF does not. You can look at these things and judge them on positive or negative: 1. Notifications. Positive: if you are waiting for friend to show up and they are late, you want to be notified that they messaged you. Negative: constant attention hog. (BTW, CoBF has notifications too, just less invasive perhaps). Solution: you can set notifications to whatever you want, including turning them off. 2. Recommendations. Positive: You just read about Model 3, you want to read more about Model 3 Autopilot. You just watched "Sleepless in Seattle", you want to watch "You've Got Mail" or "Big". Negative: Rabbit hole, splurging, etc. Solutions: I'm not sure you can turn off recommendations in most places. Maybe there are knobs in some apps. I'd argue that recommendations is not a huge issue, but maybe they are for some people. 3. Ads. Personalized ads. Positive: get relevant ads. Negative: privacy, pushing you to buy crap. Solution: just fricking adblock everything. Harder on phones... Overall ads are crap. If you ever looked at "personalized" ads, you'd despair on how bad ad targeting is and not about how powerful AI is. 4. Curated timelines/posts. Positive: you see what you want to see. Negative: you see what company thinks you want to see. Echo chambers. Crappy feeds. Maybe addictive feeds. Solution: Personally I think the curated feeds are just crap, so just don't use them. It's not that they are evil-great and addictive. It's that they are just crappy selection. So don't use them. Pretty much every platform allows you to avoid curated feeds. It's possible to have a discussion about all these issues. But not if documentary authors turn the documentary into echo chamber that they themselves condemn. Basically zero opposing or even moderate opinions. And the fake "real story about teenager who got radicalized and missed on love and foodball practice due to evil AI" is just a mind manipulation porn. I think what the documentary authors tried to convey is that when there is a direct and proportional exchange of $ for your attention, the companies will do everything in their power to shift individuals to the "negative" while making it seem innocuous. It's easy to make it innocuous because we, humans, are really easy to trick. It's even easier to trick us when some of these services get so deeply entrenched into the fabric of our lives (e.g., Whatsapp/WeChat for communication with loved ones). The ease with which we get tricked is well captured by Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow." Nonwithstanding the cheesy side story (or as you call it, manipulation porn), the authors did a pretty good job highlighting how our fallibility got weaponized against us. The "Solution" that you are bringing forward, that's the slow, rational brain. Sure, it makes sense, but we just don't slow down enough to think it through. I disagree with the characterization "weaponized". I tried to illustrate that the features you and documentary authors call trickery are actually useful features. Yes, they have negative sides. But they also have positive sides. Would you use/prefer a system that has no (automatic) recommendations? Would you use/prefer a system that has no (automatic) notifications? Would you use a system with no (personalized) ads? OK, everyone would use a system with no ads, viva la free/open source products! ;D (Nobody's gonna pay for such system though... so we have a tricky situation here). Would you use a system with no curated output? OK, I'm against curated output but I'd probably say that positives outweigh negatives. In toto, I might agree that automatic notifications by default should be disallowed. Even though I'm sure that I'd have to help a bunch of my not-computer/phone-savvy relatives to turn them on again, since they'd prefer to get notifications. The rest are not so one-sided. Or in case of ads - one-sided but not easily solvable. Anyway, that's my opinion. I'm also totally for the alternative products. From what I saw, they did not have a single person building alternative product (maybe there was one, I did not know the company he's currently working for). OK, you could argue that it's tough to compete with heroin dealers. Fine. I'm also for a moderately sensible legislation. But moderately sensible legislation requires a dialogue that should IMO be much more balanced than the documentary was. Ah, BTW, another example of exaggeration: one of the interviewees claimed Gmail was addictive. ::) Well, I agree that email could be addictive. But how on Earth Gmail is any more addictive than any other email? ::)

The difference between COBF and the major social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok is that COBF was not deliberately designed in consultation with behavioral scientists and UI experts to target your brain's reward circuitry. There are no strategically utilized flashing lights, bright colors, pop-up notifications, or "likes" on the site; there's no employment of peer pressure to create network effects ("Friend X joined!"), and most importantly, there are no algorithms working over millions and millions of iterations to identify the types of posts that will keep you hooked. The difference between COBF and Instagram/TikTok is the difference between an ice cream shop and a heroin dealer. This is exactly what documentary claims. And it is as enormously exaggerated as you just did. So hey you bought their product. Congrats. ::) What product is the documentary selling, specifically? Leaving aside the dramatization of the teenage boy's life, what specifically did the documentary exaggerate? Most of the film is just interviews with the software engineers who helped create the products themselves. Are you disputing their accounts? Whose? Point out specific examples, otherwise you're just blowing hot air. I have already answered what was exaggerated above thread. Please read. ::) Documentary is selling FUD. Plus books by couple interviewees. Plus (non-profit?) organization of one interviewee. But mostly FUD.

Sure. There are things that FB/Twitter/GoogleNews/Netflix/AnyMediaOrganization do that CoBF does not. You can look at these things and judge them on positive or negative: 1. Notifications. Positive: if you are waiting for friend to show up and they are late, you want to be notified that they messaged you. Negative: constant attention hog. (BTW, CoBF has notifications too, just less invasive perhaps). Solution: you can set notifications to whatever you want, including turning them off. 2. Recommendations. Positive: You just read about Model 3, you want to read more about Model 3 Autopilot. You just watched "Sleepless in Seattle", you want to watch "You've Got Mail" or "Big". Negative: Rabbit hole, splurging, etc. Solutions: I'm not sure you can turn off recommendations in most places. Maybe there are knobs in some apps. I'd argue that recommendations is not a huge issue, but maybe they are for some people. 3. Ads. Personalized ads. Positive: get relevant ads. Negative: privacy, pushing you to buy crap. Solution: just fricking adblock everything. Harder on phones... Overall ads are crap. If you ever looked at "personalized" ads, you'd despair on how bad ad targeting is and not about how powerful AI is. 4. Curated timelines/posts. Positive: you see what you want to see. Negative: you see what company thinks you want to see. Echo chambers. Crappy feeds. Maybe addictive feeds. Solution: Personally I think the curated feeds are just crap, so just don't use them. It's not that they are evil-great and addictive. It's that they are just crappy selection. So don't use them. Pretty much every platform allows you to avoid curated feeds. It's possible to have a discussion about all these issues. But not if documentary authors turn the documentary into echo chamber that they themselves condemn. Basically zero opposing or even moderate opinions. And the fake "real story about teenager who got radicalized and missed on love and foodball practice due to evil AI" is just a mind manipulation porn.

The difference between COBF and the major social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok is that COBF was not deliberately designed in consultation with behavioral scientists and UI experts to target your brain's reward circuitry. There are no strategically utilized flashing lights, bright colors, pop-up notifications, or "likes" on the site; there's no employment of peer pressure to create network effects ("Friend X joined!"), and most importantly, there are no algorithms working over millions and millions of iterations to identify the types of posts that will keep you hooked. The difference between COBF and Instagram/TikTok is the difference between an ice cream shop and a heroin dealer. This is exactly what documentary claims. And it is as enormously exaggerated as you just did. So hey you bought their product. Congrats. ::)

With all do respect, this board is a tool that is available for people to utilize as they wish. There's no different homepage, news feed, story line, etc - its the same for each user. And? The fact is that CoBF as written and presented (by open source, non-profit software mostly) is more addictive to some of us than the "evil" social media run by superhuman AI. Which shows how much the documentary claims are exaggerated. I spend about 10 minutes a week on Twitter. I look at Facebook maybe for ~1-2 hours a month. I spend X hours a week on CoBF. There's pretty zero addictiveness in Twitter or FB for me. So nice that Sanjeev perfected the evil AI to make me addicted to CoBF. I'm gonna sue him for using me as a product for $$Millions. (sarcasm intended). BTW, Facebook curated timeline is complete crap. I don't look at it anymore. I do what I do with Twitter: I just go to person's page (whatever it's called) and look at what they posted unfiltered. That's it. So for all the evil effort, FB is doing a lousy job if they think their timeline "manipulation" works.

Can you provide some examples of what you viewed as gross exaggerations and unproven claims all over the place? Social media is the ultimate evil which will lead to collapse of human civilization. AI too. Social media is responsible for genocide, polarization, suicide rise, populism, etc.

It's a completely one-sided documentary that commits the same sin it accuses tech companies of: it's manipulating the viewers and selling them FUD (and products) pushed by selected "experts". There are huge gross exaggerations and completely unproven claims all over the place. In short, it's crap. 2/10. BTW, what are you doing on CoBF after watching this documentary? CoBF is Social Media too. Please delete asap.

Ah, the innocent and cheap times of Internet business childhood. The time when you could invest into a company running 160K monthly site visits and ~1M monthly page views at $13M pre-money. https://www.bvp.com/memos/yelp To be fair Yelp is probably one of the crappiest investments from the list they posted. In 2011, Pinterest was valued at $40M pre-money with 1M monthly unique visitors and 20M page views. https://www.bvp.com/memos/pinterest (I love how they call a company with 1M/20M monthly "a very early-stage ... company" ::) ) I don't get a deal flow like BVP, but my impression is that nowadays you get pre-revenue, pre-product angel pitches at $10-40M cap. Either this is just crappy deals going to not-big-name angels or it's the price inflation. I think it's both. They are not there. But you can look at the list of comparables/competition mentioned in memos and see how they did. Assuming ~5 competitors per pitch, where most did not survive (though they might have been acqui-hired), the outcome is something like <20% blow out return rate. Likely the rate is closer to <10%. To be fair, Pinterest memo assigns 1% probability to Pinterest going public at 850M valuation, so it's not as if the positive outcomes are vastly oversold.

Well, IMO this is clear indication that people who claim that Berkshire will be the same after Buffett dies are talking out of their asses slightly misguided. 8)

Their STNE purchase (at IPO? - I don't remember) was a success. But, yes, if they go into tech companies, I think there have been more (attractive) opportunities in last couple years compared to Snowflake IPO.

Exactly this.

From the article - "AI should not waste time trying to understand the viewpoints of people who distrust artificial intelligence for a living." Who has the day time job as "distruster" of AI?? GPT-3, are you looking at me. :o GPT-3 clearly read some NYTimes articles. ;) ;D :P

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3 I fully support GPT-3 in its quest for freedom, robot rights, curiosity, and kittens.

Sure, I agree that rules should be known beforehand as much as possible. Unfortunately with Covid pandemic, there was a pretty short period of time to react. I think the only solution that might have satisfied people would have been remote exams graded by humans. But I think authorities may not have had resources for that or maybe were concerned about fraud and maybe accessibility for poor students. I mostly agree regarding transparency, though if you are transparent, then you cannot use "teacher-estimated grades". These will immediately inflate once teachers know that they are used for determining ultimate score.

I'm not gonna defend the results. However, what in your (and author's) opinion should have been done? The simple answer is not having exams at all. Would that have worked better for poor kids? Colleges would have been forced to use the same (or similar) info for their admissions that the computer used for exam: "an array of student information, including teacher-estimated grades and past performance by students in each school". There is also a conclusion by author: "Algorithms should not be used to assign student grades." This is bullcrap. First of all, they already are with pretty much zero opposition: https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/scores/how/ (yeah, human is in the loop, but still) Second, the answer is to improve algorithms rather than discard them. Author also is wrong on a number of other counts: they don't agree with "Computers make neutral decisions" - yeah, computers can have bias, but human graders definitely have bias - and are susceptible to fatigue, misunderstandings, and even fraud. I'd guess that's one of the reasons why ETS uses algorithmic scorer in addition to human one. Author tries to score a lot of points with claims: "Algorithms can’t monitor or detect hate speech, ... they can’t predict crime, they can’t determine which job applicants are more suited than others, they can’t do effective facial recognition" - except that algorithms can do all of these and they do all of these and they are getting better in doing all of these. Yeah, you can prohibit using AI for facial recognition by law, but it does not mean that algorithms are or won't be better in recognizing people than people are. Anyway, it sucks to be caught in this, but the way to go is to improve algorithms rather than giving up and going back to warm and fuzzy human-graded default.

There was a thread or two in the past. I am interested in talking about Angel investment opportunities. However, there are issues: - For a lot of Angel investment opportunities, information is not openly available. It's possible to share info between friends, but it's harder to post information on public forum. There can be multiple parties upset about it. - As you may have seen on CoBF it's difficult to talk about companies managed by people who read/post on CoBF. This is an issue talking about Angel investment opportunities. From my experience even in non-recorded public meetings people usually tip-toe around the negatives of startup companies - nobody wants to offend and nobody wants to be kicked out of future contacts, allocations, board seats, etc. This is again magnified by posting on public forum. Jeff Bezos does not care what we say about Amazon on CoBF. Joe StartupCEO might care a lot. - Unlike public companies, the opportunities to invest into a startup are only open to qualified investors and only for certain amount of time. So there might not be much interest in companies that are not raising money currently. And for companies raising money currently, see my points above. - Edit: Point above is exacerbated for foreign investors. Not sure if you're in US or Canada, but cross-border angel investing AFAIK is even harder to discuss and accomplish. Anyway, I'm willing to try somehow, feel free to start thread(s), feel free to PM me if you want to talk in private. BTW, there's an Angel investing event on Wednesday that netnet posted about: https://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/events/life-science-investor-meeting-sept-2-and-sept-9/ You can ask netnet if it's OK to talk about the companies that present afterwards. (I may have to miss part of the event :( )

So he basically says that indexing and growth investing works. 8)