rkbabang

rkbabang - have you looked at the Hyundai Eqqus? It's not a bad deal new, but used it's very hard to beat. Buyers get a luxury car with Hyundai reliability at a decent price. That would probably be a better idea than a Lexus, but to be honest, unless I make it on the Forbes 400 list someday, I'll never drive such a car. I'd constantly be calculating the cost per year and thinking that I'd have to drive it 40-50 years to get the value I'd get from driving an Elantra for only 10 years.

I never buy American, I don't like working on cars, (been there, done that, no thanks). I always buy cheap and either new or fairly new. My current commuting car is a Hyundai Elantra that I bought new in 2007 for about $15K. I'll probably drive it until about 2018-2020 then buy another sub-$20K foreign car. Before that I had a 1995 Toyota Corolla, which I bought in 1996 with 11K miles on it. I traded it in in 2007 with 256K miles on it. Our family car is currently a 2006 Toyota Sequoia Limited which we bought in 2011 for $22K (they are around $60K new). Before that I had a 1997 Toyota 4-Runner Limited that I bought in 2000 for just over $20K. So my method is to buy a Toyota or Hyundai new or slightly used and drive it problem free for a decade or more. If I ever were to buy a luxury vehicle I'd probably go with Lexus, although I don't think I could ever really enjoy driving the car, knowing that I paid that much for it, which would defeat the purpose of buying it.

<looking around scared> "How the hell did you know? I didn't even list Domino's on my work history & my lawyer said that because I was 17 and a half at the time that all record of the scissor incident would be sealed!" <hands shaking> "Will I have access to scissors at Apple?" <big grin>

"So I could clip articles out of the newspaper about the price of tea in China, because that would be as relevant to my job as the scissors." Or maybe, "If I was delivering pizza in a stupid-assed state like California, carrying a large pair of scissors might be my only viable and still legal means of defending myself in such a high risk job."

This depends on how large a company you are talking about. I'm not an institutional sized investor, yet when I was buying CASA back in 2005 or 2006, there was a week where I was responsible for the entire weekly volume. I was the only one who bought the stock for the entire week. I no longer own it or follow it, but back then it would have a lot of 0 volume days and occasionally even a 0 volume week. It's an odd feeling to buy something knowing that you're the only person on earth willing to do so.

Not a book, but not a bad place to start: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/strategies/bac-leverage/

My biggest problem with bitcoin is that it isn't anonymous. The transactions are public and can be traced to each and every wallet simply by looking at the blockchain. The zerocoin guys recently presented a solution to this at the recent Real World Crypto conference. I'm looking forward to zerocoin going live and might dabble a little bit in it. I'm hoping zerocoin catches on and becomes the iPhone of crypto currencies making bitcoin the palm-pilot.

Bill Gates claims that there will be almost no poor countries left (by today's standard of poor) in just 21 years. Bill Gates Sees Almost No Poor Countries Left by 2035

Do lawyers get to the play the game where they try to bias the jury during the jury selection process? Yes the jury selection process, known as voire dire, is very often used by the lawyers to make their case to the potential jurors before they are even selected. Voire dire is French term for jury tampering. Obviously if jurors are asked anything other than "do you know anyone involved", then you are not really getting a randomly selected jury of your peers, but rather a government selected jury which have been screened to make sure they all agree that what you are being charged with should be illegal and that they are all ready and willing to convict you of it if they think you did it. That's a faux amis. In the English system of justice, the term refers back to the Latin. It's a process where the defense and prosecution and sometimes the judge have the opportunity to question jurors to identify possible biases and exclude those individuals from the jury pool. Typically each side is also allowed the opportunity to peremptorily challenge and exclude a small number of those in the pool for any reason in addition to unlimited exclusions for bias. I know how the system works and its history. I'm just saying that it is flawed. If you are charged with manufacturing and selling drugs, for example, you would need only one person who thought that what you did should not be illegal to hang the jury, but in our current system that person wouldn't have a chance in hell of making it onto the jury, so you are screwed. With truly random juries it would be extremely difficult for the government to prosecute people for breaking any law that wasn't supported by greater than 11/12th of the population. Which is the beauty of how a jury system could work to limit the power of the state.

Do lawyers get to the play the game where they try to bias the jury during the jury selection process? Yes the jury selection process, known as voire dire, is very often used by the lawyers to make their case to the potential jurors before they are even selected. Voire dire is French term for jury tampering. Obviously if jurors are asked anything other than "do you know anyone involved", then you are not really getting a randomly selected jury of your peers, but rather a government selected jury which have been screened to make sure they all agree that what you are being charged with should be illegal and that they are all ready and willing to convict you of it if they think you did it.

I agree with most of what everyone has said here. People, both friends and family, ask me for advice often, but as far as I know no one has ever taken the advice that I've given. Just one recent example: A family member called me from a vacation in Vegas telling me that he was about to buy a timeshare and asked me what I thought. I told him it was a terrible idea, and that since he was in his early 50's without a penny of retirement savings that if he had that extra money every month to pay for the 10 year timeshare loan he was planning on applying for, then he should instead put it into his 401K that he isn't contributing to. Of course that wasn't what he wanted to hear and he bought the timeshare. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.

I won't short RIM even though I think it has a greater chance of bankruptcy than it does of being a successful investment at this point, mainly because I've never shorted a stock and I'm not going to start now. It was a much better and more obvious short at $40/share than it is now. I have reduced my FFH holdings to <4% though.

Maybe CoB&F needs an iOS and an Android app to attract the less tech savvy investors.

This is an argument for investing in the picks and shovels rather than the weed itself. Growlife (PHOT) maybe? The stocks seems quite a bit overvalued to me at the moment though.

I hadn’t answered till now, because I think most of you already know what I do and what my background is. :) Though, I really envy your day job (besides investing, of course!)... ;D ;D ;D I don't envy that day job at all. It sounds insanely stressful. Maybe I just don't have the personality for it. I always hate giving people advice on anything of importance. If I do something and I'm wrong I can live with that. But if I give someone else advice that turns out bad, I'd have a really hard time with that. It takes a certain confidence in oneself to do that type of thing that I certainly don't have. I'll stick to designing circuits.

I'm not sure simply being an Internet forum explains the over abundance of engineers. It might have 10 years ago, and certainly would have 21 years ago (when I first had Internet access). But Now? Hell everyone I know from age 8 to 80 has internet access, this is everyone from any background and any profession. Look at Facebook, most people are not engineers. If non-engineers wanted to be here, they would be. I think it could be that the type of person who is interested in investing would also be interested in a technical field (and vise versa). In other words if you gather a group of self selected people together who like numbers, a lot of them will be engineers of one type or another.

I also disagree with this assertion. While I’ve only smoked once since Sophomore Year if High School (more than 30 years ago), I know of a few folks who do. The profile of these folks is not focused…older, younger, professional, manual laborers, artsy or more concrete thinkers…it runs the gamut. As with alcohol, there are those who do it to excess and others who do not and any mind-altering chemical put into one’s body carries with it a unique set of problems/issues. While I do not partake in the smoking of pot, I’ve found it difficult to maintain my position that it should not be legalized. The parenting aspect of this is interesting. I candidly do not want my kids (15 and 13) smoking pot OR drinking and, to the best of my knowledge, neither do. It was always easy to say “Don’t smoke pot, it’s illegal” but that parenting tool is being lost. Now it’s a matter of trying to dissuade them based on thinks like random drug testing, the cost, etc. Parenting is hard. I would agree with everything you said here. I know of professionals who do it often (not on the job of course). As far as parenting goes, I obviously don't want my children doing pot or alcohol either, but of the two, I think alcohol is much worse. I think the largest danger of pot being illegal is that it increases drinking. Yes parenting is hard. Always has been, always will be, but I have no desire for "the village" to do it for me.

Oh good. I was afraid that Jesse Pinkman was really dead.

This carnage has to end! How many more have to die! Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization "One of the those victims was 29-year-old Jesse Bruce Pinkman, a former methamphetamine dealer from Albuquerque who had recently moved to Boulder to establish a legal marijuana dispensary. Pinkman was partying with friends when he suffered several seizures and a massive heart attack which ultimately proved to be fatal. Toxicology reports revealed that marijuana was the only drug present in his system. "This is just a terrible tragedy," says his friend Peter. "Jesse was trying to go legit and now this happens? I guess drugs really are as dangerous as they say."

Digital ASIC designer (18 years).

I've got a Samsung 32" tube TV in one of my living rooms which is about 12 year old and still 4:3 aspect ratio. And in my other living room I just replaced my other tube TV last year (which was about 25 years old, I used to have it in my bedroom when I was in high school living with my parents) with a Vizio 32" 3D HDTV. This model I think, it doesn't look like its available anymore. I got a cheap 3D Bluray player for it and the 3D is pretty good. I still don't watch much TV though.

Great. I haven't flown in years, I don't spend much on clothes, and my family eats a fairly low-carb paleo diet, so we don't buy potatoes, but we do buy a ton of fresh vegetables every week. I guess I can enjoy my low electric rates, even though I haven't noticed any difference in my bills.

That’s a very good way to put “original ideas” into the right perspective! ;) I simply believe in frugality and in the importance of shrewd capital allocation. My whole business experience tells me that those two things can take you far, very far. Therefore, I try to save as much as I can, and I try to keep company with shrewd capital allocators. I don’t think this is enough to qualify even as a good investor, let alone an “excellent investor”… Anyway, thank you very much! :) You are welcome Gio, in fact one obvious thing that I forgot to point out is that by my definition the only way to claim to have had an original idea is to start your own company, making you the first investor of both time and capital. This is something you have done that I and many others have not.

"ethical government" You are talking about an organization that claims the right to make pronouncements that everybody in a certain geographical area must obey on penalty of being caged or killed and funds itself through theft. There is no such thing as an ethical government. If you mean to say that some are better than others to a certain degree, yeah some criminal gangs are worse than others, but none are ethical. He's accepted the shelter of one criminal gang, because another one wants him caged or killed. I don't see that he had much of a choice. If you tell the world what the violent gang calling themselves the federal government of the united states of america is doing, you are risking your life, and you better run for it.

If someone from China leaked a bunch of documents on Chinese government spying programs and took refuge in another country to protect himself from certain life in prison (or worse) we'd be calling him a hero. Snowden is no less a hero and his life is in every bit as much danger from the US government as that hypothetical Chinese spy would be in my scenario above. Look at Bradley Manning, (s)he is likely going to die in jail.