rkbabang

It looks like they are spending 14-15% of sales on R&D. But this is a really tiny company. They have only 46 employees! I wonder how many of those are engineers and/or scientists? Most chip companies have teams larger than that working on a single product. That said their balance sheet is great, their margins are excellent. It looks like they can keep paying this dividend for years if they want to. I just bought a small position this morning.

rb summed up the Intel situation without actually talking about Intel. Somewhere in the Apple thread he said something along these lines. "It's a massive company, with generally solid products and a sticky business that is trading below 10x FCF. So I backed up the truck." Sure, situation isn't apples to apples, and I don't want to speak for rb. But Intel is a massive company that produces competitive products and has solid entrenchment in multiple markets. As Spek said, the latest earnings report was actually pretty good. People love doom and gloom stories. Especially in the tech space. Apple wasn't going out of business and I highly doubt Intel will be out of business anytime soon. Agreed. I just think that we haven't reached the point of peak-pessimism yet, like AAPL in 2013.

Small position in Netapp (NTAP). Still thinking about INTC, but haven't pulled the trigger yet.

Yes. And the personality of the child. I have two children who attended the same schools and obviously had the same parents, yet one never did well in school where the other excelled. My daughter who did not do well in school at any level and never went to college is still doing well however as a young adult. School isn't the only road to success in life. Every child is different, sometimes it really is nature over nurture, and some people take different paths to get to where they want to be.

Good question. I'd like her to be nurtured around nice people, but they need to have common sense. There’s two kind of private schools. The catholic ones. And the none catholic ones. The none catholic ones can be a lot more liberal than the public ones. The catholic ones have their problems too, like half of the kids don’t have immunizations. I noticed some schools are called Catholic and some schools are called Christian. I wonder if they are different? Generally speaking a "Catholic" school is operated by Catholics, and a "Christian" school is operated by Protestants. If you have a religious preference between the two presumably you'd go that way. If you don't, I doubt the differences would be meaningful. I don't know what Catholic schools are like now, but I went to a Catholic school K-2nd grade and it was hell. The nuns were vicious sadistic demons. They couldn't hit you anymore, but they wanted to. And they found alternative ways to torture you. My parents felt bad for me and moved me to public schools, for which I was grateful beyond measure.

What percentage of middle class Americans had $100,000+ primary or high school private educations, compared with the percentage that had public school educations? I don't think not spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on your children's pre-college education will make them dumb and poor, I also don't think spending half a million dollars on your child's education is necessarily going to make them smart and rich, but it will make you poorer.

My kids went to good public schools in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but If I had to do it over again, I think I would have put them in a Montessori type school in the younger grades. Kindergarten for sure. Forcing young kids into desks for hours on end had got to be the most unnatural thing we do to them. Sex education of any type at 5 years old is insane as well. Let kids be kids. By the time high school comes around any good school private or good public will do. My kids used to come home from school and tell me how their teachers or administrators were trying to brainwash them. Simply being raised right by you should be enough of an immunity to that type of nonsense.

Just a note that anarchists do not want you to kiss us. A hug would do.

Is this just a few companies at the fringe or the first signs of an "enormous wall of money"? Former Goldman hedge-fund manager says an ‘enormous wall of money’ is coming https://www.marketwatch.com/discover?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marketwatch.com%2Famp%2Fstory%2Fa-90x-return-in-just-five-years-former-goldman-sachs-hedge-fund-manager-says-an-enormous-wall-of-money-is-coming-11602781826&link=sfmw_tw#https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/a-90x-return-in-just-five-years-former-goldman-sachs-hedge-fund-manager-says-an-enormous-wall-of-money-is-coming-11602781826?mod=dist_amp_social

Just bought the FSLY shares I sold 3 days ago for $127.70 back for $88.50.

Sold 40% of my DDOG position and 20% of my FSLY position to get more than my original investment out in both cases.

Microsoft was flat from 2001 to about 2013

I get free stock trades on Fidelity. I'm not sure if there is a minimum balance or if they are always free. Trading options is not free however.

Get a hardware wallet https://www.ledger.com/ I second the hardware wallet approach, but not certain that it helps in a retirement account unless if there is some way to do it via self-directed accounts. OP - are you able to access foreign markets? GBTC trades here in the US and is probably accessible through a broker like Interactive Brokers. I think the point is to keep your BTC in a hardware or paper wallet and not hold it in a retirement account.

Exactly. The best analogy for democratic government is it is like a cancer that will grow and consume more and more resources right up until it can't because the host is dead.

"The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms. It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved. Jacobson’s group published their results in a paper in the journal eLife in early July." https://elemental.medium.com/a-supercomputer-analyzed-covid-19-and-an-interesting-new-theory-has-emerged-31cb8eba9d63

Netflix knows when you stop watching a video too. But Netflix isn't a good example to use. In addition to the different content length, Netflix has an issue where their catalog is shrinking as third party content makers pull their libraries to start competing services (https://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-movie-catalog-size-has-gone-down-since-2010-2018-2). Your dissatisfaction with their Recommendations / Personalization may have to do more with how little they have to recommend, versus say Youtube, Instagram, Spotify, which all have millions of content creators. True, but you need to watch a good portion of a movie before you know if you are going to like it or not. And once you are an hour in, you might as well watch the rest and hope for a good ending. You then watched the entire thing and hated it. How does Netflix know? I haven't thumbed up or down anything on Netflix for years. I just never think to do it. So all it has is what I've watched, but it has no idea if I thought the movies I've watched were great, so-so, or horrible.

Someone I know recently recommended a series to me called "Yellowstone". The problem is I can't find it for free in any of my streaming services. The person who recommended it said that it is worth paying for. Anyone seen it? Is it worth it?

The thing I find most offensive about socialism is the term "workers" as if a human being with unique skills, thoughts, abilities, creativity and potential is just some kind of widget that can be grouped together and referred to en masse, because one is just as good as any other.

That is a complete misunderstanding of "value". The value is a subjective value the customer places on the service. A multi-millionaire in Beverly Hills will value a haircut more than a poor subsistence farmer somewhere in southeast Asia will. Value is subjective and different for every human being and different even for the same person at different times. You might place very little value on a bottle of water right at this moment sitting in your office, but when hiking on a hot day and you run out of water you might place a value on a bottle at that time many times higher, and if you are ever dying of thirst in the desert you might be willing to give everything you have for one. This is the reason price arbitrage works, you can make money moving goods from where they are valued less to where they are valued more. But in general a machinist who can make precision parts will always be valued by employers (and indirectly their customers for the parts they make) more than a cashier at McDonald's will be. Kinda feels like you agreed with me there at the end... No because, even though one might usually be more, there is nothing guaranteeing that to be true. Maybe there is a Mcdonalds franchise operating in a culture somewhere that values hamburgers far far more than precision machine parts and they are willing to buy burgers off of the $100-Menu. That franchise could offer to pay its employees an astounding amount of money, where in the US we expect our cheeseburgers to cost $1.50 and our precision machine parts to cost more. Back to haircuts, if I go to a national haircutting chain I would expect the employees to make less to cut my hair than the employees at the same chain in a super wealthy area where they can charge a lot more. It is all relative. Your income doesn't just depend on your skills, but how and where you use them.

That is a complete misunderstanding of "value". The value is a subjective value the customer places on the service. A multi-millionaire in Beverly Hills will value a haircut more than a poor subsistence farmer somewhere in southeast Asia will. Value is subjective and different for every human being and different even for the same person at different times. You might place very little value on a bottle of water right at this moment sitting in your office, but when hiking on a hot day and you run out of water you might place a value on a bottle at that time many times higher, and if you are ever dying of thirst in the desert you might be willing to give everything you have for one. This is the reason price arbitrage works, you can make money moving goods from where they are valued less to where they are valued more. But in general a machinist who can make precision parts will always be valued by employers (and indirectly their customers for the parts they make) more than a cashier at McDonald's will be.

300x the median wage. So in a company with 100,000 employees you could double the wage of 300 of them, or increase 600 of them by 50%, or increase 1200 of them by 25% or increase 2400 of them by 12.5%, or increase 4800 of them by 6.25%, or increase 9600 of them by 3.125% or increase 19,200 of them by 1.0625%, or increase 38,400 of them (still only 39% of the workforce) by 0.53125%. So you propose that CEOs make nothing so that less than 40% of their employees can get a half of a percent wage increase? In order to pay the average employee $75k the average employee of your company has to be producing more than $75k of value.

If this is even possible depends on the company. A company that makes precision parts is very different from say Home Depot or Walmart. The CEO of those companies could give up their entire salaries and it wouldn't even come close to being enough to raise every employees salary to $60-$75k. Many tech companies pay the majority of their employees more than $60k and it works just fine. Most retail or restaurant companies could never dream of doing that.

Corporate leaders have a duty to do what's best for their companies and shareholders. They have no obligation to "save cities".

NIO is pretty interesting. A state backed luxury EV play with a battery as a service model that allows them to sell their cars at a 20ish% discount to Tesla. I picked up 100 "eff it" shares in May of 2019. We'll see what happens. I don't follow this space closely, but from the little I've seen they seem more mature/further along than many EV companies. Looking at the price today I'd say I've gotten pretty lucky so far ;D What about LI, have you looked into it at all? On a first look it seems less overpriced than NIO, but I know very little about the Chinese EV market.