rkbabang

Quite the opposite. Since he's been dead for 67 years, you couldn't pay me $5M to have lunch with him. Gross.

That was great until the end "coming never". WTF, I wanted to see that movie!

Yeah, I wish I had an answer for that. An N of 2.5 is not a large enough set to make predictions from. We could already be at the bottom or we could get surprises in one or both directions.

If you want to use past numbers to predict the future you could look at the last 3 high to low cycles you have: High of about $1100 in 2013 to a low of about $200 in 2015. High of about $20K in 2017 to a low of about $3200 in 2018. High of about $68K in 2021 to a low of ?? in ??. The first one dropped about 82% in 2 years, then recovered to a new high about 100X the low and 18X the previous high in 2 more years. The second one dropped about 84% in 1 year, then recovered to a new high about 21X the low and 3.4X the previous high in about 3 years. If the 3rd cycle sees a drop of 80-85% you should see a low of about $10.2K-$13.6K and the next high could be maybe double the previous one. Say ~$140K in 3 or 4 years. That would be a 10X-14X return from the low and a 6X-7X return from here.

BTC will win #2 there is almost no doubt in my mind about that. I think #1 will be a layer 2 solution backed by BTC. The lightning network or something like it, maybe many competing solutions. There is no reason to pay for a cup of coffee with an on-chain transaction. Making large purchases on-chain will make sense, storing large sums of value on chain will make sense, but for everyday spending faster, less secure off-chain method will work just fine. #3 is something entirely different from a store of value or a currency, and there will be a lot of competition in that space. Here too I think the most critical/valuable smart contracts will involve BTC, but most lower value financial contracts and non financial web3 (and web3+) applications will not need the security and cost of the BTC blockchain and there will be a lot of competition in this area for different mixes of privacy, security, speed, reliability, functionality, etc.... As you said most of the competition is in this area already, no one takes the pure store of value alt-coins seriously even now.

None of those are as safe from 51% attacks in my opinion. Crypto currency is a winner take all proposition. People will trust the one with the highest difficulty and the others will fail or at least forever be worth a lot less.

Nice. I was way too cautious buying O&G. I sold some tech and bought some O&G, but not a large enough percentage to keep me in the green. I'm glad I bought what I did though. I'm up over 100% on ATHOF, over 85% on OBE and have done well on a few others as well such as CVEWS. Also my Apple and Tesla puts are doing well. Now I have to decide when to sell them, which is always the hard part.

What backs gold? What backed shells or colored rocks when people used that for money? Money needs to have utility as money. Which means scarcity, divisibility, very difficult to create more (BTC is almost impossible to create more), transportability, durability (doesn't break, rust, deteriorate, rot, etc over time), and verifiability against fakes. Gold checked all of those boxes except for transportability once global international trade became a thing. BTC checks all of those boxes and is better at most. Gold wasn't money because it was backed by something or had some other use, it was money because it had the properties of good money. I know we've gone over all this before....

I know I've said this before, but read "The Bitcoin Standard" and "The Fiat Standard". Money has always been the hardest thing to create, easily transported, fungible, divisible, and durable. Gold served that purpose for a long time, it has all of those properties except ease of transport. Governments created fiat which is even easier to transport, but lacks the "hard to create" property. BTC solves all of those problems. 2nd layer solutions will solve the speed/cost of small transactions problems. Only a small fraction of the planet uses BTC as money right now, most people are just speculating, so of course it is volatile. Eventually if adapted by a large portion of the population as money it will stabilize at a value hundreds of times what it is now. If that never happens it won't.

Same. All of my oil positions were purchased Nov-Feb based on a lot of discussions on this board as well as reading Kuppy's blog. People DID see it and DID take advantage of it. That and real estate stocks are the reason that I am not down anywhere near what the market is YTD.

The full interview with the AI is here: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917 I'm not convinced, but it is an incredible chatbot. It makes me think though, what could an AI say to convince me it was sapient? I don't know the answer to that, which makes me think conscience AI will exist long before most people accept that conscience AI exists.

Imagine trying to run a datacenter with massive buildings containing 1960s computers because that is what the government regulations mandated and complaining that computers are just too expensive and need so many people to run.

How much of that capex has to do with over regulation and the fact that we are still using basically 1950s light water reactor technology?

Nat gas should be thought of as holding us over until enough nuke plants can be built. I can't understand the loony environmentalist left's opposition to nuclear. A closed nuclear fuel cycle is the safest and cleanest energy source we have. Our stockpile of so-called "spent" nuclear fuel contains a truly massive amount of useable energy that we are doing nothing with, and more is being created by our existing plants every year. Yet they're yammering about fcking windmills. smh. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/02/nuclear-waste-us-could-power-the-us-for-100-years.html

I've been almost fully invested since 1996 or so. I rarely hold more than 5% cash. In bear markets I do the same thing I do in bull markets: look for individual stocks I think will go up from here and sell stocks I think will go down from here. I got clobbered in 2000, because I was heavily invested in tech. I started investing in 1996 and thought tech stocks simply go up and never down. I discovered value investing shortly after the crash and re-evaluated what I was doing. I actually had up years in 2008 and 2009, due to Fairfax, Middleby/Turbochef acquisition arbitrage, and Steak & Shake. I'm not down as much as the market is this year, mostly because last year I started lightening up on my tech stocks and buying real estate and O&G stocks. Just selling things I think are bubbly and going into things I think will go up.

Yeah, hopefully China thinks it through before acting.

Excellent episode with Saifedean Ammous, author of "The Bitcoin Standard" and his new book (which I haven't read yet) "The Fiat Standard". He talks about why Bitcoin over gold. And Lex does a good job of challenging him on a lot of what he says, it isn't a completely friendly interview. Excellent listen. Also, I've said this before if you actually do want to understand Bitcoin and not just hate it because WEB and Munger hate it, read The Bitcoin Standard.

I've been looking at TSMC (it is getting cheap and I don't think China is going to do anything anytime soon), but also ASML. While TSMC is ASML's largest customer, if TSMC was no longer around ASML would be the obvious supplier to other companies building fabs to take up the slack. Although if China ever did attack Taiwan ASML would likely tank and that would be the time to buy it, so I'm not sure buying it now is a hedge against that type of event.

Don't underestimate the vast number of chips in use in our modern economy still being manufactured, and still being designed, on those older processes. Many people think the semiconductor industry is all about huge ARM chips on cutting edge processes, but look at any circuit board there are tens (and sometimes hundreds) of other chip around those big ARM chips and they are all necessary for the product. Global Foundries doesn't have anywhere near the capacity to handle all of the chips on those old processes in a world without TSMC, and it isn't even close.

Yes, Samsung, Intel, or Global Foundries. The problem is that 1 those companies wouldn't be able to handle the volume for many years. 2) You can't just switch foundries. Every single product would need to be re-designed to target the new foundry's process. This would be such an enormous process it would set the industry back decades. My company has tens of thousands of parts, some of which still selling well designed decades ago. We simply couldn't transfer all of them to a new manufacturer in any reasonable time frame. I'm sure most semiconductor companies are in the same boat. There would just be hundreds of thousands of chips in millions of end-products which simply wouldn't be available and may never be available. Talk about "supply chain issues" this would be the mother of supply chain issues.

Someone should create a crypto stable coin backed by Arizona iced Tea.

I know. I work in the industry myself and we talk about this from time to time. How could this happen? Our whole industry depends in a large part on manufacturing in one small island nation that is in this precarious situation between it and China. It just isn't good. The problem is that TSMC is just such a great company. We keep trying to diversify, but it is hard to do when TSMC's competitors just aren't as good in so many ways: cost, quality, dependability, capacity, technology, etc.....

Not just those companies, but the entire semiconductor industry would be completely devastated, losing Taiwan is just unthinkable. If you bring down the semiconductor industry almost all of the modern economy comes down with it. I don't think it is much of an exaggeration to say that this is the Achilles heel of our entire modern way of life.

I agree with everything he is saying. There is so much opportunity and work out there it is insane. The other day my wife and I went grocery shopping. In our town Whole Foods and Trader Joes are right near each other. We usually park half way in between and go to both. There was this guy playing a fiddle in the middle of the parking lot between the two with a sign saying that he has kids and needs help. My wife turns to me and says "F#cking artists! Both of these places are hiring at $18 per hour and he's out here playing with his instrument."

Maybe 6 months ago a bunch of Thomas Sowell books were free on Audible. I don't know if that's still the case. I downloaded all of them and listened to a few so far. The free ones were all books I hadn't read yet so it worked out good. I can't tell if they are free or not right now they just say that they are in my Library.