rkbabang

That clip was totally unrealistic. I mean it showed shoppers at the Sears. No way that happens in real life. Believe it or not, Sears is still an actual company. They have locations and employees (and presumably) some customers. I just don't know what they are going to do when their customer base (over 70, no internet access, still has a rotary dial land line phone with a 25 ft cord and answering machine with a tape as the only way to get in touch with them, and sometimes uses their phones to order from catalogs) dies off? You've seen these people. They are the women with white hair that are always in the grocery store line in front of you trying to pay with a check then take 25 minutes to back out of their parking space in the parking lot. They own K-Mart too, but I think it has been about 10-12 years since I've seen an actual K-Mart store, so I'm not sure if those still exist.

This belongs here:

Hey, I loved Tolkien and Rand as a teenager. I also think I remember going into a Sears store with my parents once back then when people did that sort of thing.

Tell me exactly what I should invest in and exactly when to buy and sell so that I earn 200%/year.... okay make it 100% per year, I'm not greedy. Let me know when this is available.

Some more info released. I guess they have built a small fusion reactor, fired it up, and are collecting data. Lockheed looks for partners on its proposed fusion reactor Lockheed has built its first Compact Fusion Test Machine and fired 200 Test Shots

That hasn't been my experience. The last few times I purchased a house and the last time I refinanced my mortgage, the appraisers were there for well over an hour taking measurements in every room, tons of notes/drawings and looking at pretty much everything including basement and outbuildings. I'm pretty sure what I've experienced is standard at least in New England. How can you appraise a house from the driveway? I think (hope) drive by appraisals are over with. I think they were common during the housing bubble. For my last refi (maybe 2 years ago now), the guy came in and looked around every room. Nothing too crazy. No measuring. He wrote some notes. And he was out of here within 30 minutes. I live in the SF Bay Area. "Drive by appraisals"? One check box on the form: [] House exists.

That hasn't been my experience. The last few times I purchased a house and the last time I refinanced my mortgage, the appraisers were there for well over an hour taking measurements in every room, tons of notes/drawings and looking at pretty much everything including basement and outbuildings. I'm pretty sure what I've experienced is standard at least in New England. How can you appraise a house from the driveway?

FCKD is available.

Did you hear the one about the Troll with the mustache who shopped at Sears? Just kidding, there's no such joke. No one shops at Sears.

No, no, you don't understand. If food becomes scarce for a short amount of time, they can live off of their body fat. While skinny people have to carry or store their fuel externally, exposing it to possible theft or spoilage, they have fuel tanks built in.

But if you are about to die anyway the cryofreeze is better than the dirt nap. A 1E-10% chance is still better than 0%.

If Brindle is gone, I am gone! ;) Gio But my understanding of the thread is you can't sell the company for 10 years. What happens if Malone, Biglari, Watsa, and Einhorn are all in a plane crash together next year? These are all businesses that rely heavily on their leader. It wouldn't matter much, because they won't be able to buy or sell anything even if they are alive. If you own any fund or company that invests in other companies you better be completely comfortable with their current holdings exactly as they are because these vehicles would no longer be managed. But like Kraven said, owning any paper asset in a world without a functioning market would be insane. Stock up on useful things like what I mentioned in my last post (gold, guns, ammo, food). Some other good investments would be toilet paper, razor blades, hand tools which require no power/batteries (hand powered drills, saws, etc), hand cranking flashlights, matches, good mountain bicycles (don't forget extra rims, tires, tubes, tube patches, chains, and a hand pump), make sure you have woodstoves so you can heat your house, store as much water as you can, have a well drilled on your property with a way to hand pump the water from it ....

One thing that comes immediately to mind is desalination plants for abundant fresh water in any location reasonably close to the ocean (i.e. California, much of the middle east, India, China, Africa, etc). The predicted future "water wars" never occurring will be almost as large a benefit as anything else. This will devastate the oil industry and completely shake up the auto industry as Tesla takes over the world. Space travel and even intra-planetary travel on Earth will be easier with gigantic nuclear powered jets that can fly between any two spots on Earth without refueling. The prices of cloud computing will plummet as electricity becomes cheap. There are probably a million other things that no one has thought of yet.

LOL, It's like watching C-SPAN. Thanks for that, I'm going to have to read the whole thing when I have time. The science fiction writer L. Neil Smith has a theory that the effective intelligence of any group of people (Ieff) is equal to the intelligence of the smartest person in the group (Imax) divided by the number of people in the group (n). Ieff = Imax / n EDIT: I found the article I was talking about, it was from a speech given in 1989 "The Tyranny of Democracy - Majoritarianism Versus Unanimous Consent" By L. Neil Smith. Here's the relevant quote, but the entire speech is excellent and worth the read. "Majoritarianism, as I argued in Tom Paine Maru, rests on two false assumptions and a cynical threat. It first assumes that two people are smarter than one person. Strength is additive, two people are stronger than one person, and this has been the primary source of tragedy throughout human history. Even stupidity seems additive somehow, possibly it's a phenomenon of interference which would explain a lot of that history. People, in fact, do possess certain attributes which are additive, and many which are not at all. Decency, kindness, integrity are all individual characteristics. Time is additive only in a limited sense: two women can't have a baby in four and a half months. If you've ever observed a committee, you know that the highest intelligence in a room isn't the sum of its occupants' IQs, but simply that of the brightest individual -- divided by the number of other people in the room. Just as gravity arises from the nature of space and mass, rights arise from our inherent nature as individual human beings. Rights aren't additive. Systems which assume that they are labor under the false and dangerous assumption that two people have more rights than one. Some claim that majoritarianism, despite its faults, is an alternative preferable to physical conflict. They're wrong: majoritarianism is physical conflict. Elections are a process of counting fists, rather than noses, and saying, "We outnumber you -- we could beat you up and kill you -- you might as well give in and save everyone a lot of trouble." Majoritarianism, to put it straightforwardly, possesses the full measure of nobility manifested by any other form of extortion. "

Physical gold, guns, ammo, & dried/canned food.

In a free market farming would be done where it can be done profitably and water would be put to its best use by those willing to pay its market rate. When government penalizes the water use of one group to subsidize its use by another, this is what you get. But why are you complaining? Doesn't government always know best? After all these great sages which take our money and control our lives and businesses were selected by a popularity contest. They look the best in suits, have excellent speaking voices and great hair. And you must remember back in high school how the popular kids were always the wises, smartest, most moral, and turned out the most successful in business later in life. It is the same with democracy (i.e. rule by popularity contest). How could anything go wrong?

It seems that they have some theory, but no real world data. There are other fusion projects that are much further along, like "polywell fusion" by EMC2 (http://www.physics.umd.edu/jaeyoung_park_slides.pdf) which has build 8 working prototypes (scaled down and non-breakeven so far). There is General Fusion which has also built prototypes and has significant funding. There are others as well which all appear to be further along than Lockheed Martin. I think we will have fusion power in most of our lifetimes, but it won't come from the multi-government, many-$Billion boondoggle that is ITIR. If even half of what they wasted on that was spend on these more promising designs we'd have fusion plants already.

Yes India is like the worse case scenario. Huge population with poor healthcare facilities. That is scary as hell. Coincidentally I just checked my email and saw a spam message which said "Read this or your family might die!", nothing like spreading fear to sell a $7 book. Hopefully no one here orders this and supports this guy, otherwise I'd feel terrible about posting it, but the pitch is a funny read. https://3percenterreport.com/landing/reports/ebola-guide/index.php

70% death rate in Africa where the healthcare is inadequate. No one knows what the death rate will be in the US if a large number of cases appear. Hopefully we don't need to find out, but I suspect it would be less than 70%.

What thing? The NSA director? Probably quite a few.

"still possible to find bargains" doesn't mean anything below the high water mark is a bargain. It means only what it says, that it is possible to find bargains. It is certainly possible to overpay for a house as well. Just like the stock market it is easier to find bargains when the prices are lower in general than when the market is at its peak. I think that is all that is being said here.

I think it means the previous high water mark. The fair value is what someone is willing to pay. In New England we are not yet back up to pre-housing crash levels.

DirecTV & Dish Network Satellite radio used to be a duopoly between Sirius and XM. And of course no one has mentioned iOS and Android.

I look for easy no-brainers that I can understand. None of those fit the bill. The only one I do understand is SHLD and what I understand about it is that it is a failed retailer on an excruciatingly painful and slow slide downhill towards eventual bankruptcy. Not exactly something I want to put money into.

If there was only a way to make money off that. ;) Running for election is one way. How about a moral way for someone who doesn't feel comfortable making a living through theft, extortion, and violence? And since someone already brought up politics I'll add to the duopoly list: Jesus vs. Mohammad. Well Islam considers Jesus to be a prophet as well, actually in Islam he is supposed to return to defeat the Al-Masih ad-Dajjal (essentially the equivalent to the anti-Christ) near the day of judgement. Yes, I should have worded that Jesus worshipers Vs. Mohammad followers.