Pelagic

The other end of the spectrum is a site like Quora where users are required to use their real name and there are millions of users asking and answering questions with their own name. All you'd have to do is Google the person's name and if they've written answers on Quora you would have a wealth of information about them. Personally I don't mind, I enjoy reading, participating, and occasionally answering questions on Quora more than I care about what someone can find when they Google me.

Having been to a few of the WeWork locations in my area my impression was that they are almost exclusively catering to startup tech companies - most of which have received some funding in an angel or seed round. Unfunded tech companies probably can't afford them or if they can are wise enough to weigh their options and find somewhere cheaper that suits their needs. With that said, whether or not WeWork succeeds is heavily dependent on new funds flowing into tech, especially into early stage companies. If funding dries up, paying $300 a month for a "hot desk" isn't in the budget but if you're looking for a leveraged real estate play leveraged to startup tech companies then WeWork is worth a look. The networking opportunities at a WeWork location and their events can be great for early stage tech companies but I just don't see any of these tenants being particularly sticky in terms of lease duration. A company either quickly outgrows WeWork or it burns through funding and WeWork's expensive monthly lease is one of the first expenses to get trimmed with a more economical office rental being able to suit their needs. I didn't see anything regarding the average lease duration for WeWork's users in the FT article but I would be curious to know what it is.

This is evidence in favor of rb's theory. But much of what you said I have no answer for. If they actually saw what they describe, it sounds like tech that is far beyond what is available to humans currently (never mind a decade ago). Yes, I forgot to mention that ALL of this is predicated on these reports being reported TRUTHFULLY. In this day & age, there is a lot of false information out there...and this certainly could be the case here. It isn't necessarily false information or pilots lying. There is always the possibility that they didn't see what they thought they saw. Light and reflections can play tricks on you and your brain can fill in details in your visual field that aren't really there. Google optical illusions and you can spend hours looking at weird visual mind tricks. That combined with unknown/undiscovered/rare natural phenomena can trick even honest people into thinking they saw something that they didn't actually see. Ball lightning used to be mistaken for UFOs. Fair enough, and IMO this probably explains the vast majority of UFO "sightings". However, this specific incident was captured on IR camera as well as being witnessed by 4 separate individuals (a pilot and RIO in each F-18). It's also worth pointing out that the individuals who witnessed it were all naval officers with extensive pilot training and a degree of familiarity with most existing forms of aircraft developed by humans. I think most would give their claims more weight than the average individual who claims to have seen a UFO. Not that they couldn't have been tricked but the fact there were multiple observers, it was captured on IR, and there was some evidence of disruption on the surface of the water, certainly raises questions in this specific instance.

Guess if you don't have jeans, or an arm, you could buy one of these leather strops. https://www.theartofshaving.com/razors/straight/small-hanging-strop/00670535680109.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjwxtPYBRD6ARIsAKs1XJ5Tj1QbYc3nxs88e-KmfWxAEmpx7bLBlXbFq6qYZ3Mz8IgDdgA1yHUaApgbEALw_wcB&cm_mmc=PPC-IP-GL-_-Non%20Brand%20-%20Shopping%20Categories-_-Categories-_-1918975c-c170-4100-9334-5f10c59c27b9 I'd imagine an old leather belt would work just as effectively though. I don't think any of these methods are actually sharpening the blade, just realigning the edge much like using a honing steel on a knife.

Doesn't ease of participation play a role as well? If someone can participate in BTC when all their friends are already in by just downloading an app on their phone and transferring some money into their account and clicking buy, all done within 10 minutes, the participation as a percentage of the population is significantly higher than even in the late 90s. Think of the various barriers to entry that have existed when it comes to participating in various financial markets, I can imagine in the 1920s a lot of people wanted to get in to the stock market but filling out the requisite paperwork and transferring the money to your broker whittled down the number of people who actually followed through significantly. The 90s internet bubble saw the birth of online trading accounts, making participation easier than it had ever been. And now participation has almost no barriers to entry when done through a phone app, and perhaps more importantly can be done immediately when social pressure is at its highest - not, oh I'll go home and talk to the wife about it and setup an account. So yeah, social "FOMO" plays a role but the fact that there are almost no barriers to entry into participating in the latest bubble, coupled with FOMO, means everyone can easily participate. Add in things like social sharing and gamification and participation becomes not only easy but a competition amongst friends.

What I find interesting is a lot of articles are free when they're first published then become subscription only a few weeks later. So you can at one point as a free user be following the article and the author's response to comments and the discussion on it, then be completely locked out even if you were participating in said discussion. It's also funny how there's no distinction in terms of quality on what articles become pro or not, some of those I've seen that start free and then become pro-only are little more than a rehash of the company's corporate presentation with little to no analysis done. Oh well, their platform, their rules.

Interesting discussion. It seems from your reasoning, there is a strong incentive to focus on a niche and build a story around it in order to attract capital. If you're the only small cap Somali value fund, there's probably a subset of investors that would be interested in investing in it whereas a small cap US value fund that invests alongside everyone else has a tough slog ahead in terms of selling themselves. Related question, does the comparative ease of selling a niche fund force managers into a corner where while it may be easier to attract capital, it's also more difficult to produce returns because of the constraints they've placed on their fund's scope - assuming they or their investors care about returns - some investors may just want "exposure" to a certain niche for a small allocation of their portfolio. I.e. they'd produce better returns as a vanilla value fund but wouldn't have a fund if that's what they were.

Currently reading https://www.amazon.com/1493-Uncovering-World-Columbus-Created-ebook/dp/B004G606EY In it they go into the period known as the Little Ice Age which affected mainly Europe between 1550 and 1750 causing extreme cold, poor crops, and generally unpleasant conditions. While the causes are varied, from solar output to volcanoes, one of the theories put forward for its cause is particularly interesting. Native Americans in the centuries preceding Columbus had actively managed the landscape of North America with fire. Yearly burnings of massive tracts of land, essentially the entire Eastern US from Florida to Maine and parts of the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys as well, created a landscape that was ideal for deer, elk, and other game animals allowing Native Americans to easily hunt them and move about. While the idea of pre-Colombian civilizations actively managing the landscape in a way that would be impressive even today is interesting in and of itself, how it ties in to the Little Ice Age is even more interesting. The theory goes that when contact between Europeans and Native Americans occurred and the resulting transmission of diseases caused a loss in population, the forest grew back. And in growing back, creating a dense understory like we see today in much of the Eastern US, it sequestered enough CO2 to have an impact on atmospheric temperatures, creating the period of global cooling we know today as The Little Ice Age. An interesting theory whether it explains the Little Ice Age or not.

This brings up a question. Does narrative matter more in highly technical startups in terms of attracting funding. What percent of investors are capable of doing the DD necessary to determine if what the narrative claims is the goal is actually possible. Someone in the industry like your friend, yes, the average VC - probably not and then they have to hire someone to do their DD and weigh that against the narrative and prior investment rounds where other investors presumably did their DD. In a less technical startup investors want to mainly see traction - not that that will necessarily translate to profitability.

Anyone else follow the bike sharing/rental space? Broadly speaking I feel the various competitors in the bike rental sector are where Uber/Lyft will be if/when autonomous vehicles become common place. Each has to maintain a massive inventory of bicycles and concentrate them in locations that best match demand. It's a race for each company to move into new cities and areas where demand is underserved and be the first in the market establishing what passes for a moat in the sector because people in that area have your app on their phone and are used to using your bikes. I think a lot of parallels exist between the current state of competition in this space and where Uber/Lyft and other ride sharing companies could end up, racing to establish themselves as the sole player in numerous smaller markets while pouring capital into more competitive markets. https://news.crunchbase.com/news/alibaba-bets-866-million-can-win-chinas-bike-race/

The problem as I understand it from other forum's that have dealt with it is that is malware that has infected the ad service provider so it's not something the site administrator can easily fix aside from turning off ads completely or finding a new ad service provider. I've never experienced the issue on my Mac but it was terrible on my iPhone before I installed an ad blocker app, making a couple sites completely unusable.

A lot of forums have been having trouble with this. It's server side and from my understanding is related to the ad service provider many forums use. A popup blocker will work to filter it. I downloaded the content blocker+ app on my iPhone (it was free) and it worked to eliminate it on another forum that had it pretty bad.

So generally I'm looking for an asymmetric risk/return profile which will mean deep out the money low price options. Event-wise it could be a market correction, financial restatements (capital one) or some other event mis-priced with a LEAP date far enough in the future to allow the thesie to play out. Think of Ackman's HLF puts for his short, which I believe he has now closed and given up on. Thanks for the explanation. That's where I've tended to look as well. A thread dedicated to potential opportunities in this space might be useful, something like the "What are you buying today" thread but for LEAPS. Nickenumbers point in regards to economic tailwinds boosting share price independent of events is well taken. Options volatility and its component of their price tends to be heavily weighted toward current sentiment however, what's happening today might be just a footnote 10 months down the road. Fascinating topic - thanks for starting the discussion.

When you're looking at event driven LEAPS, I assume options IV is high due to the range of outcomes surrounding the LEAP. Where in the option chain do you usually look to buy? In/at/out of the money. Just curious as I know some people prefer deep ITM to reduce the vol premium whereas others go for at or out simply because they're cheaper. It's an interesting strategy. I know TD's Think or Swim Platform (its free and awesome if you trade options) has a function to view what the market is projecting as a 1 standard deviation move over the life of the option which can lead to curious predictions for events.

Autonomous cars will kill Uber/Lyft. Why wouldn't I take out a loan, have the car drive itself for the 22 hrs/day when I don't use it myself, and capture that $ myself? And how are people going to find and call your personal car to them if not through the Uber or Lyft app? That's Uber v3.0 after they figure out owning and maintaining a massive fleet of AVs is an expensive, low margin proposition. Uber 3.0 will connect your car with customers where their platform just acts as a middleman. Like the current version but without the drivers demanding better wages. WSJ headline circa 2032 - "MIT Study Reveals Autonomous Vehicles are Working Well Below Minimum Wage"

Makes sense, I was thinking more in terms of the drivers themselves which have little attachment to either and are a sort of revolving door of people that use the apps to make extra money until they tire of it, which I don't see as being their moat. Their platform connecting drivers/riders is the real moat as I see it.

I don't see the driver network as a defensible moat for them, drivers can and do switch between Uber/Lyft and other smaller ridesharing apps where they exist - most drivers will use both at the same time and pick up rides interchangeably between them. Furthermore, save for a small minority of drivers, most drivers don't see driving for Uber/Lyft as a long term gig, they work when they want, when they feel it makes economic sense to do so. Should they be priced out by higher costs (fuel costs for instance) or cheaper AV rides they'll stop driving. Where I see Uber and Lyft currently having a moat relative to taxi companies is in the platform used to hail drivers. People like being able to summon a ride through their phone and whether it's a human driver or an AV I don't see this disappearing anytime soon - not that taxi companies can't replicate it easily enough if they choose to. It all comes down to price though, if they're not providing the cheapest, or close to it, ride - riders can easily open another app. I usually price shop between Uber and Lyft before summoning a ride and there's no reason to think if a company running a fleet of AV pops up in my area and offers an app to summon them with transparent pricing, I wouldn't also check their rates. The "let's use our drivers as guinea pigs to prove the platform can work then undercut them with our own fleet of AVs" model has always struck me as funny. Technology is great, don't get me wrong I love tech and can't wait for self driving personal cars. But I feel Uber/Lyft are pushing for AVs because the technology exists rather than because of an economic case for it. If you have people willing to work for essentially minimum wage as drivers, is switching to a capital intensive model where you own and have to maintain massive fleets of self driving vehicles really the path you want to take? Perhaps they're making the case that driver's earnings are higher than estimated to justify their push toward AV to their investors.

Perhaps I'm in the minority but I tend to view pipelines and their associated risk as an engineering issue. Spending money on political debate seems wasted when it could be put toward better design, monitoring, and containment in the event of a spill. If oil companies and subsequently provinces are losing millions a day in revenue due to low differentials, there's a lot of incentive to design a pipeline that isn't going to leak and to replace old ones that might. The above goes for oil pipeline opposition, which does present a real risk in the event of a failure. NG pipelines are different and relatively benign in terms of their potential impact on the environment should they leak.

What's most impressive IMO is just how cheap sending a payload to LEO using a Falcon Heavy is compared to the alternatives. Falcon Heavy can launch 70 tons for roughly 100 million putting the price around $700 per pound. For comparison the next cheapest option, Falcon 9, runs around $1600/lb with costs going up from there. Something to be said for economies of scale, although there's a lot more incentive to make sure everything works right when you have that large, and expensive, a payload aboard.

Do these ATMs function as a regular ATM as well or are they exclusively BTC? I have to imagine adding the ability to withdraw from a cryptocurrency account to cash (minus a healthy a transaction fee) wouldn't be that hard to program into new ATMs. Still, you have to ask yourself what percent of people have BTC and need to convert it to cash while paying the ATM's fees, and moreover, how many are going to be coming through that gas station and need it immediately - it can't be a large number of people.

I had a similar situation occur recently in an unoccupied apartment with a plumbing leak in the shower and the water company was happy to give me a major discount on the bill. Clearly the water was used but they still offered to refund about 80% of the bill when I asked if there was anything they could do, and did it quite promptly. I know we have large volume pricing here where if you want to fill a swimming pool or something they'll cut you a break as well. Sorry to hear about your friend's case, might be worth calling to see if they'll give him a break. If the first person says no call back and hope you get someone else, the utility probably has a provision for plumbing issues. Out of curiosity what did your friend's bill say the total amount used was? A constantly running toilet might do about 2 gallons per minute so 86,000 gallons a month.

A little more in depth look at China's citizen score. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion Cultivating a country full of Baghdad Bobs

This was interesting, the 21st century version of a musical Christmas card except you get to hear how bad a job the CEO is doing instead.

I don't know if you're familiar with Breakthrough Starshot or not but their plan to send craft to Alpha Centauri is quite similar to this. Using Earth based lasers and light sails to accelerate the craft to 20% of the speed of light, they estimate the trip will take 20 years. Basically like firing a shotgun blast of many small craft hoping some make it to their destination and can send back a signal of what they're seeing to us. https://www.space.com/32546-interstellar-spaceflight-stephen-hawking-project-starshot.html

I was always under the impression FOREX traders report gains/loss on FX trades as ordinary income. If a crypto currency is bought directly buying "money" it should be no different than buying say euros with dollars and taxed the same way every other FX trader pays taxes. The distinction between buying through an investment fund and buying directly is a good one since in theory gains/loss in the fund should be taxed at the capital gains rate vs. the ordinary income rate. Lots to figure out but if I can be certain of one thing it's that the IRS will figure out a way to get as much as they possibly can.