rkbabang

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.

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.

The inventor of the first LED isn't very happy. Blue light Nobel Prize has LED inventor seeing red

Shouldn't really affect the credibility of the once for the sciences, since it's not awarded by the same organization, or even in the same country. I wonder why Obama would be the last drop though, when it has been awarded to Mother Teresa, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat (also in expectation of something which never materialized) and Henry Kissinger long before that. Also, note that the Nobel Prize for economics is not a "proper" Nobel Prize even if it is a heck of a lot more credible than the peace prize. Yeah the peace prize doesn't have a very good history, not only for who they've given it to, but also who they haven't (Mahatma Gandhi comes to mind). Maybe they will atone for past sins by awarding it to Snowden this year, but I doubt it. It will probably go to the Pope for being against homosexuals and covering up for child rapists.

Nobel Prizes are normally awarded for work that was done many years ago. Only the peace prize tends to be more focused on recent work. Or expected future work (which never materialized) in Obama's case. Imagine if they awarded the physics prize to a promising young physicist who said he was going to come up with something really profound next year?

We've been doing that for audio and video. On the audio side you have Pandora, Grooveshark, Spotify, etc. On the video side you have Netflix. But the thing about streaming audio and video is that there are limits to how much bandwidth we need. For audio we don't need quality that is better than 192kbps mp3s. For video we don't need better than 4K. Once we get close to the limits of human perception, the demand growth for bandwidth stops. I don't think he is talking about streaming Video and Audio. What I think might happen (and its probably what merkhet is talking about) is all our devices are like Chromebooks but more than just Data is in the cloud. We have an interface and the CPU/GPU/RAM/HDD/VideoCard/OS/Software(Office/Databases/Games) is all in the cloud. No need to maintain hardware or upgrade it. Interface separates data storage from Hardware layer. Rent it by the month switch to a different configuration/OS at anytime. Yup, that's what I meant -- so it's not so much that we haven't already created dumb terminals (out of our TVs, for sure) -- rather the number of dumb terminals that we have will increase. Imagine if devices could move data into/out of the cloud as quickly as computers today can move data in or out of DDR4 memory, equivalent to moving 64bits at a time at a rate of 3.2GHz. That is over 200 Gbps, more than 200 times Google Fiber's 1Gbps. Now imagine 15-30 devices in every house (hundreds to thousands in every office building) all trying to do that at the same time.

Like anything else, there is a difference between what you "need" and what you'd like. I'd love it if I could back up all of my computers and devices to the cloud in about 2 seconds (maybe 6TB of data) and restore any one of them in a second. But I certainly don't "need" that kind of bandwidth. As far as storage and CPU/GPU speed. I'd love to be able to have that 6TB of data on redundant SSDs. rather than HDDs. I'd love to be able to render 2 hours of 4K video in under a minute. None of these things are possible right now. I'm converting my old home movies from tapes to only standard-def video and for a 1.5 hour tape it takes over 2 hours to do that on my 8-core 3.2GHz machine with 16GB of RAM. I have to play the tape (about 1.5 Hours) to get it into the software (Adobe Premiere) then it takes about 30-45 min to render it and save it to the format of my choice. I have probably 60 of these tapes to do and I'm on tape 12 right now. It is a long process. If this was 4K video it would be frustrating as hell. Asking how much bandwidth, or CPU speed, or storage do you need is like asking how much horsepower do cars need. Certainly we had enough 50 years ago, but you can buy 400-800HP cars now, hell there are 300+ HP 6 cylinders now.

When will the discrimination against my kind end? Geek Power!

Well, the integration is beneficial for eBay -- but is it beneficial for PayPal? I don't think so. It might be better to think of this as PayPal spinning off eBay.

Those are actually very IN right now. Go to any hipster spot and you'll see people wearing them. Urban Outfitters wouldn't sell them if they weren't cool right ? http://www.urbanoutfitters.com/urban/catalog/productdetail.jsp?id=31612567&parentid=M_ACC_WATCHES#/ In all seriousness, I wonder if Prem will flaunt that thing around at the Fairfax AGM next year. I do have to admit to thinking that watch is pretty cool, it is not only retro and brings back memories, but appeals to the geek in me. I'd certainly be more likely to buy that watch than a new Blackberry.