Pelagic

So, when does the next payment tranche go out 8) It would seem this is actually Iran's money being given back to them which has been held in trust since an arms deal with the Shah in which we never delivered the weapons in question. The timing of the hostage release to coincide with the payment is hard to see as anything other than a ransom, even if it's with their own money.

A cure worse than the disease. Electing Trump is one thing, suspending the democratic process is a completely different thing entirely. The country will survive a Trump presidency, much like it will survive a HRC presidency. The incumbent president imposing martial law because they don't agree or respect their successor sets a far more dangerous precedent than anything Trump can do. It's amazing how quickly Americans forget civics 101, we have checks and balances in place to limit the power of the executive branch. Both Trump and Hillary will likely face a House and Senate opposed to much of the legislation they wish to pass. And at least according to Donald Trump Jr., Trump will be too busy "making America great again" to do any actual governing. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/magazine/how-donald-trump-picked-his-running-mate.html?_r=0

This. There's also the fringe benefits of insuring a lower priced property and having a lower tax payment. If you care about cap rate the third scenario's lower cost basis will produce a higher cap rate assuming equivalent cash flows across your scenarios. In addition any improvements you're able to achieve in net operating income are magnified by the lower cost basis which could be useful if you're trying to sell the property as turn-key investment. I think Jurgis' initial point of buying cheap with cheap is the real play. RE markets are incredibly inefficient, even within a given metro area. Cheap financing has certainly increased the number of players but to say everything inflated in price equally or that there aren't deals to be found is lazy.

Sorry to hear about that. A few years ago I was in a similar situation, I've had my boat stolen and in two separate additional incidents have had electronics and gear stolen off it. When my boat was recovered, completely stripped of everything leaving just the hull, I asked the officer conducting the investigation if he wanted to dust for prints. His response was basically no, we don't usually do that in these cases. They seem to look at high value property crime against insured individuals as basically a victimless crime, no one cares about insurance companies :'(. I worked with the claims agent who was handling my case over about a 6 month period to settle on a value and restore the vessel and along the way I mentioned a couple things I thought insurers in the area could do to deter boat theft. He said there was really no motivation on the part of local law enforcement officials for cases like mine where the boat was stolen for parts, in instances where the vessel was stolen to smuggle immigrants they had had some success working with federal agencies. I know of a handful of cases where vessels with GPS tracking have been tracked by the owners and monitoring companies, which alerted local police who took hours to respond. In short, I empathize with your father and the problem isn't just in Michigan, in a lot of metro areas throughout the US police have little motivation to pursue crimes against property.

It's interesting how people are following and reacting to the Brexit today while last year's Grexit, which was arguably a more important test of the EU, received little attention. The article you linked makes a great point about Britain being EU-lite, without it's involvement in the monetary union they had the best of both worlds. I still think they'll be able to come to free-trade agreements with countries in the EU, it will just take time and a little negotiating.

Interesting article. I got a chance to tour both the old canal and some of the new canal's construction a few years ago and they are impressive feats of engineering. When put into perspective though the challenges faced by the new canal seem almost trivial compared to what went into building the original canal. The article points out inferior concrete and the complexities for working with tug boats in the confines of the locks but it never connects the two. I think the Canal Authority's decision to forgo locomotives and use tugboats will prove costly in the long run. The added wear that the wash a large tug's propeller will place on the concrete of the locks is immense and will likely decrease the useful life of the locks by decades when compared to using locomotives on tracks along the outside of the locks to secure ships.

I've seen the theory circulated that the attack on the DAO was accompanied by a large short position on Bitfinex on Ethereum. The hack simply exposed the weakness in the Ethereum chain, the short position on the currency was where the money was made, if they get to keep the money they took too, great but the short position pays off either way. Looking at it from a trading perspective though, it seems odd to initiate a large, noticeable, short position moments before you start the attack. Someone smart enough to carry out the hack would likely also be smart enough to build a short position incrementally through multiple accounts so it wasn't as noticeable or traceable.

There are a lot of very very smart people working on making satellites cheaper or coming up with a less expensive work around. My personal favorite is Google's Project Loon and think it has the best shot of being a replacement for a lot of the functionality satellites provide. https://www.google.com/loon/ Facebook is also working on its own long duration solar powered drones that serve a similar function as Google's balloons and satellites. I think SpaceX has it's own miniature satellite program that it's working on as well. My point is that existing satellite companies own a lot of expensive equipment, traditional satellites. Do you think they're going to be able to maintain their marketshare when Google is launching balloons for 1/10th (probably a lot less) of the cost? Perhaps though costs coming down benefits the industry as a whole and existing players can leverage their established customer base.

That it was "fixed" narrows things down. If I had to guess he's talking about Chile and the Chicago Boys a group of Chilean Economists who spent time at the University of Chicago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys#Chile That it was a psychological fix rather than economic would seem to preclude Chile though the argument can be made that a shift from democratically elected Marxism to free market economics (and a more authoritarian government to go with it) is as much psychological as economic. Another option could be Uruguay. I'm less familiar with it's history than Chile's but there was also a shift from the base conditions Munger mentions, which were unfortunately endemic to much of Latin America, to democracy and relative economic prosperity. Just guesses, could be somewhere else although they're the two Latin American countries that come to mind that had a marked period of fixing rather than gradual change.

Don't worry, newspaper delivery will get crowdsourced - eventually. Uber is moving into the package delivery sector, no reason those same drivers couldn't pick up a limited paper route in their area too.

I don't think the "break-even price" means what they say it means. Including budgetary costs makes the calculation a bit nebulous as the way the report is written it makes it seem like the only option is for oil to reach the break even price. Countries, even those heavily dependent on oil, have other options open to them to cure budgetary shortfalls. Just look at Venezuela, they've shut off power for half the week and Saudi Arabia is going to sell a stake in Saudi Aramco - point is there are other ways to correct budgetary shortfalls than hoping oil rebounds, some better than others clearly. Speaking of Venezuela, I didn't see a break even price for them. This infographic gives similar data but puts an even higher budgetary break even on most of the OPEC nations. http://graphics.wsj.com/lists/opec-meeting Almost makes you wonder what Kuwait is doing differently since they're close to break even at today's prices.

Meh... people exaggerate the role of "unhealthy" foods. It ultimately comes in to matching calories consumed with calories burned. As a nutritionist I know likes to say, there are no unhealthy foods, just unhealthy quantities. A lot of the foods we call unhealthy simply pack a deceptively large amount of calories, something which I think Buffett recognizes and moderates his healthy or normal intake to reflect that, most people don't. Humans in general are pretty adaptive omnivores and can make a "diet" out of just about anything. Yeah you might suffer some nutrient deficiencies but there are vitamins to correct that.

That was an excellent interview, thank you.

It's funny how "solutions" to climate change receive so little press. Sure we get the renewable energy/electric cars etc. push but there's a whole range of actual scientific options open to us to slow or mitigate global warming. From the extreme like putting solar blankets in orbit to reflect a small percentage of sunlight to simple things like planting trees to slow the expansion of deserts or fertilizing lifeless expanses of ocean with iron to increase phytoplankton photosynthesis and serve as a massive carbon sink, there are options for directly mitigating the effects of CO2 and climate change. My point isn't that we should jump right into any one of these solutions, it's just that options exist that are well within our capabilities to at the very least slow down the rate of climate change. If climate change is going to have as high of a cost as many predict, why not at least make an effort to mitigate its effects. It makes little sense to me how many people who accept climate change and all its implications in its entirety have also resigned themselves to the fact that it is inevitable. If it's really a problem, start working on solutions with a high ROI. Personally, in my free time I enjoy studying coral and coral reef growth. The effects of climate change on coral reefs are IMO vastly overstated with a lot of pollution related issues being attributed to climate change. The net result is likely to be highly location dependent with some locations benefiting from warmer ocean temps and others suffering. It's unfortunate though that climate change gets the blame when education and relatively simple solutions would have a much greater effect on reef health.

Oh god no, I hope Space X continues to focus on getting to Mars and doesn't decide to become a military contractor focusing on helping the megalomaniac ruling class destroy the Earth. Then again this is unlikely anyway. The only thing reusable rocket delivered bombs does is cut the costs of war. Since when does the government care about how much it spends on war? This isn't even a concern. A reusable rocket lessens the cost of putting things in orbit - you can extrapolate on the military applications from there. Whether it's multiple layers of GPS and communication satellites that make crippling space based infrastructure impossible or something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment there are a lot of military applications for a cheaper path to LEO. Even if SpaceX doesn't go the military contractor route, I'm sure other companies are more than willing to work for the defense department with their own take on reusable rockets. So, does SpaceX have a moat with their reusable rockets or have they just set the bar higher for everyone else? Blue Origin is trying to follow suit, when does NASA, Roscosmos and Orbital have one too? Speaking of Roscosmos, Musk has to be envious of all the open land Kazakhstan, hitting a barge in the middle of the Atlantic was no easy feat, landing on a couple square miles of prepared steppe and hauling it back by rail has to easier.

Isn't the mortgage interest deduction itself full of unintended consequences though? Home buyers are able to afford more house or perhaps afford a house at all, thanks to it, "artificially" increasing demand. Ultimately, it's hard to look at a program like this as "fair" or "unfair" when it was implemented with a goal in mind - increasing home ownership. It exists to provide a pathway to home ownership for more Americans. Whether or not that is a reasonable goal, the effectiveness of the mortgage interest deduction in accomplishing it, or whether the government should use tax policy to promote home ownership are all better topics than trying to dig into the fairness of the mortgage interest deduction, it wasn't written to be fair.

He wasn't speculating on almond prices but rather the land the trees were growing on. Almonds require a lot of water apparently. Farmland prices have gone ballistic since the crash. There's probably a way to play that as a retail investor, but you're too late now. If you try to coattail someone like Burry, you most likely find yourself buying when he's selling. Not just coat tailing Burry. Saudi Arabia and other "water poor" countries are buying US farmland and shipping the crops home. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/saudi-arabia-buying-farmland-us-164056673.html It's an interesting problem to think about because water issues are typically local due the difficulty involved in transporting water. But in this case alfalfa, hay and almonds as mentioned are all taking water out of the region they're grown in. Are farmland values accurately pricing in the value of their water consumption or are they simply trading for the present value of the crops they can grow? I have to imagine there's somewhere else in the world with cheaper land and more water that can grow almonds, alfalfa and hay than California and the Southwest.

There's a decent discussion going on real estate investing in the strategies sub-forum. http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/strategies/real-estate-13638/ I'll recommend BiggerPockets.com here like I did there, it's a great resource full of a lot of very knowledgeable real estate investors and if you spend time there you'll find the community is pretty helpful much like CoBF's. Someone gave me this book to read a couple years ago and I enjoyed it, thought the author had a pretty level headed take on the real estate market and had some good ideas on how to build a stream of cash flow from your investments. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001JK9B6E/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

Call me skeptical, They had a much higher percentage bubbles to seawater than you'd find naturally I'd think since surface action and currents would disperse the escaping gasses quite a bit and it was still difficult to sink their test boat.

Most of these already exist in a lot of public school districts. The issue, as others have pointed out, is involvement at the student and parent level. If kids don't want to be involved they're not going to take advantage of any perks the school system is providing no matter how great you make it. I tend to lean toward libertarian solutions in most things but I also realize that government's involvement in education runs so deep and at so many levels it will probably never be cut out. Even if the federal government was to leave education alone, we'd still have city, county, school district and state level bureaucracies involved. As I said in my previous post, I think there are effective solutions out there and part of the challenge is just allowing them to rise to the top in areas where the public education system has a de facto monopoly on the process. If private, subsidized-private and public schools are all affordable choices for most parents, I think we would see some innovative solutions to local education issues, solutions not constrained by multiple layers of bureaucracy.

Think "The Hunger Games" and go from there ;) I think you addressed the crux of the problem, coming up with a metric for "effectiveness" is hard. Attempts at standardized grade level testing have met with a lot of resistance from teachers, students and parents despite being a relatively straightforward quantitative assessment of a student's progress and in a roundabout way, a teacher's capabilities. While I probably would have supported them had I had to deal with them as a student, end of grade assessments clearly aren't the right standard to judge all students or all teachers and fall short of measuring many of the other factors that compose an effective education system. I think in this case cloning is the right strategy. There are thousands of education systems out there, cherry pick what works best and hope the end result melds together. Unfortunately, education systems tie into the broader economy more than one might expect so isolating an effective education system is harder than it looks because most that appear "effective" are showered with money from wealthy tax bases and traditionally more involved parents. I don't know enough real world examples where I could point to an education system and say look their ROI is great they're able to put together a quality education system with relatively scarce funds and little waste although I suspect there are some examples of this and it's where I would start looking to clone. If we try to come up with a metric like dollars spent per graduating student we also have to determine if "graduating" is actually worth something, so you have a high school diploma, now what? Perhaps identifying something that correlates with student success like teacher:student ratio and then optimizing the system for that and hoping you can come up with a metric to asses the teachers is best. I say this coming from public high school where classes were often 30-40 people and teachers were obviously overwhelmed and then transitioning to a private university with small class sizes and plenty of TAs to help out, the difference was like night and day. One thing my hypothetical system would include is a hard check on a students grade level progression. Pushing students to the next grade without them demonstrating proficiency in subjects just widens the gap and discourages them. If they're reading at a 5th grade level but are a 10th grader don't force them into the class their age says they should be in. It doesn't have to be an end of grade assessment, perhaps every 2 or 3 years is better but having students demonstrate a level of proficiency in subjects before advancing them has always seemed like the right idea to me. Still let them graduate but have something like a college transcript that allows employers or continuing education institutions the ability to determine where they got in high school. This removes some of the aura of a diploma and allows for a more nuanced assessment of each student.

Even Democrats wouldn't be caught dead voting for that in an election year. It's being sold as a tax on evil oil companies but who really pays the cost? American consumers. It's a regressive tax on working families who would be hit the hardest, taxing a commodity they need every day to commute or heat their homes isn't how you win votes. People might claim to support green initiatives but at the end of the day they usually vote with their pocket book. Clean energy and transportation will have its day, tossing taxpayer money at uneconomical "green" ventures that don't scale or have a prayer of competing with established foreign producers isn't the way forward.

Thanks for starting this, interesting topic. Do you have a relationship with other hard money lenders whom you can refer business to and vice versa when you can't make a loan yourself? How much time/effort on your part is the paperwork end of the business? What's the most interesting thing someone has asked to loan money for?

I think more of you guys should check out Venmo. For transactions in the $100s of dollars range that you'd normally use cash for it's great - direct bank transfer between parties with no fees, quick and efficient. Venmo cautions against using it for paying merchants but between friends and friends of friends its perfect for transactions. Frankly I have no idea how they make any money and was kinda concerned they're not going to be around much longer but PayPal bought them so we're good - hopefully. With a lot of banks offering check deposit through their mobile apps now checks might see a come back in lieu of cash or cards, makes it actually pretty easy for both parties involved, assuming the checks are good and the parties trust each other.

Or perhaps people are better at statistics than they realize. Expected value of a ticket for a 40 million jackpot is quite low since the odds of winning remain the same, as the jackpot increases the value of the ticket increases as well to the point where it's close to the $2 of the ticket or even above it whereas lower jackpots offer a worse proposition.