rkbabang

What exactly does management telling shareholder to sell the stock (for any reason) actually mean? My translation: "You are no longer welcome to own the company which you've hired me to run for you."

The Meyer fuel cell? The 200mpg carburetor? Really? I know a a guy who used to be a sewing machine repair man in Boston in the 1960-70's. He told me that he repaired a machine at this guy's house who had a working perpetual motion machine in the basement (why couldn't he fix his own sewing machine? I don't know). But he was threatened by the government and couldn't produce it or market it or they would kill him. 100% true!

I don't think you get it. Don't you see the potential "revenue" that the parasitic class can suck out of the productive people of the world with a carbon tax? "If you drive a car, I'll tax the street If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet"

We should only discuss that in a thread about Religion. I am glad my mom didn't have an abortion 49 years ago...... Undoubtedly you think that, but is she glad? (It's the woman's choice after all, not the baby's). Also, while you think that you are happy that she did not have an abortion, I guarantee you that if she had you would not care either way today. Nor would you care either way today if someone had murdered you yesterday. :) Absolutely true. We don't punish murder because it matters to the person who was murdered, we punish it because of the victims loved ones who are still living and do care. They are the ones who deserve restitution*, the murder victim himself doesn't care either way any more and can't be compensated. *Of course in our current system we don't require the murderer to pay restitution of any kind to the people left behind, (nor do we require thieves to pay restitution or any other criminal for that matter) so there is not even an attempt at justice, just retribution.

We should only discuss that in a thread about Religion. I am glad my mom didn't have an abortion 49 years ago...... Undoubtedly you think that, but is she glad? (It's the woman's choice after all, not the baby's). Also, while you think that you are happy that she did not have an abortion, I guarantee you that if she had you would not care either way today.

Kill'em all and feed them to the poor. Solve overpopulation (read The Population Bomb, pretty scary stuff) and world hunger in one fell swoop. Interesting stuff. I like these topics. So what religion do people think is the best? Listen, as a true conservative I never fully agreed with us deciding as a people to move on from Zeus. Seriously. What was up with that? Zeus was pretty cool, always throwing around those lightning bolts and whatnot, but I've always liked Eris. If I really was to go religious maybe Morlock and his obsession with throwing children into pits of fire is a little extreme (I'll leave burning people to death to the Christians), my next choice would be Discordianism.

Kill'em all and feed them to the poor. Solve overpopulation (read The Population Bomb, pretty scary stuff) and world hunger in one fell swoop. Interesting stuff. I like these topics. So what religion do people think is the best? I'm an atheist myself, but if I were to pick a god to worship it would probably be Moloch. I don't think he cares all that much about what I do, or what I think or what I eat, and he certainly supports abortion.

Kill'em all and feed them to the poor. Solve overpopulation (read The Population Bomb, pretty scary stuff) and world hunger in one fell swoop.

If you raise your prices and not see a decrease in sales, that only means that you were irresponsibly charging too little for your product or service. You have a fiduciary duty (to either your shareholders, family, employees, your employees' families, and/or yourself) to charge what the market will bear. My question to the CEO that "jacks up"* his prices and sees no loss of business is "How long ago could you have done this? And why didn't you?". *(you seem to suggest a negative connotation to raising prices just by your language "jack up prices", rather than "increases prices to market levels").

Love it! This just became a much more dangerous intersection. You'll see me on Berkshire and Fairfax, but as far as Sears Holdings, I intend to stay far away from that part of town.

Exactly. This is why WD-40 is an excellent example. Why would I ever bother doing any research or trying something new when it is in-expensive enough and it works? When my can goes empty I just buy another one the next time I'm at a home improvement store. I've had WDFC on my watch list for a while but haven't bought it. They also own 3-in-One Oil, which doesn't have the moat that WD-40 has, but is another well known brand and something cheap enough that you wouldn't bother buying the competitor.

Outstanding! No need to throw away money on a flashy website. At least their website looks better than this one for a multinational corporation: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ I agree, Mays has that spiffy background image.

Yes, I put this in the same category as having an "original" idea. There are a certain number of publicly traded companies who all have a certain number of outstanding shares, all of which are already owned by somebody. No idea to invest in a public company is original nor contrarian. You can't even say whether an idea is good or bad without knowing a person's cost basis and how much they eventually sold it for. When a stock drops from $120 to $80 it wasn't necessarily a bad idea for the person who bought at $12 and plans to hold for another 10 years.

Hi seclive, Just wondering, is it part of your business plan to get thousands of investors to use the site regularly and then data-mine the info for investment ideas? It seems you could tell which stocks people are interested in, what they are highlighting as positive and negative, how they rate the stocks. After a number of years for each regular user you could correlate that users stocks and ratings with how the stock performed in the next 3 month, 6 months, 1 year, etc, and generate an automated best stocks to buy now recommendation for yourself with a confidence value based on which users have recently recommend it and which users have recently started watching it and the accuracy value for those users. Or maybe generate the recommendations and sell them. I'm just wondering how you are going to make money without ads and thinking out loud.

Also even though they ask for your real name they don't make any effort to enforce it. I put in 'rkbabang' as my name and it accepted it even though I assume most real names are at least two words separated by a space. It is a nice site, hope it sticks around.

Let's say you made that statement two years ago. Since then, mortgage rates on the 30 yr have climbed significantly (30%?) as did housing prices (20%?). So from this point, for the statement to continue to hold true... housing needs to drop 30% from here if mortgage rate climbs another 54%. A 30% drop is almost as big as what happened in the Great Depression. Like anything in economics you can make a statement like: "all else being equal if mortgage rates rise, housing prices will fall". But of course in the real world all else is never equal.

This only matters with ARM type mortgages. If all you know is that your P&I is $1200/month fixed for 30 years that is indeed enough information. If the interest rates rise it won't effect you. I've always used fixed rate mortgages to buy my homes. Interestingly, since I've never been in a home longer than 8 years, I'd have been better off with a 10/1 ARM or even a 7/1 ARM every time.

I just voted for the Broncos.

Oh yeah, there's some kind of sport-ball event happening today, isn't there? I ran into the grocery store today and had to stand in line behind a bunch of people buying chips and beer.

I don't see this happening. A corporation would want control over it. They would never create something they couldn't control then release it. If there was an AmExCoin, AmEx would be in essence the Federal Reserve of AmExCoin where they could and would inflate it at will. Take a look at Amazon Coins, that is about all you can expect from these players in this area, IMHO. EDIT: The only large company that I can think of where doing something like this would even be a remote possibility would be Google.

I agree. Some people love cars and enjoy them, so it may be worth paying more for a car if you are one of these people. I've always hated cars and thought of them as an insanely expensive necessity. I could never enjoy owning an expensive car. I have some requirements, it needs to have heat, A/C, a working radio, and be able to do at least 85mph on the highway. My family car needs to do those things, plus tow a camper and have ample cargo space. Other than that, I am not willing to pay for any extras or luxuries. To me, I just want to get where I'm going, without needing to squash in near a bunch of gross people on a train/bus or need to pedal 15 miles to work in the snow.

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."