nafregnum

Watched this one last night, based on a reddit.com/r/Documentaries recommendation thread. A lot of real good philosophy on teaching/training in here that doesn't just apply to horses.

https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/is-us-oil-production-surging This article is suggesting shale production in the US is going to be peaking this year, that 50% has already been extracted from all major shale basins, and that the reason for recent growth has been prioritization of best performing areas, a process known in the mining industry as "high-grading", and that the actual figures are hidden behind some funny accounting using an "EIA Crude Adjustment Factor" (graph shown on the page) ... Opinions on the usefulness/accuracy of this information? Is this the kind of information people will be pointing to if Warren Buffett's big OXY bet plays out fantastically, or am I reading a conspiracy theory website?

Ooh, thanks, I didn't know anything about Pocket Cast before - I'm going to check it out.

https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/methane-detection-just-got-a-lot-smarter/ Detecting methane leaks via a new satellite that the Environmental Defense Fund will be launching in a month or two, with support from Google and some funding from Bezos Earth Fund. https://www.bezosearthfund.org/ideas/satellites-for-climate-and-nature https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/how-satellites-algorithms-and-ai-can-help-map-and-trace-methane-sources/ It will have the ability to detect methane concentrations down to the resolution of 400m square pixels, and can watch 200 sites that are 200km square, so it'll be able to keep an eye on all the major O&G basins to identify where the worst leaks are so they can be remediated. The old quote comes to mind: "Only when the tide goes out do you learn who has been swimming naked." I have read that Obsidian Energy prides itself on its monitoring and leak prevention/remediation program. I'm interested to see what this kind of transparency does. I've heard that North American O&G extraction is much cleaner than in other countries, but we will all soon find out.

Overcast. It has "Smart Speed" (cuts out silences) and you can also pay $9.99/yr for some premium features, like ability to upload your own mp3 files to your own private 10gb of file space. I take epub books that aren't available on Audible, and convert them to mp3 file using some scripts I wrote and Amazon's Polly service, then upload the mp3s so I can listen to them. The app is great, even if you don't need to premium features.

https://pracap.com/just-smash-the-buybacks/ Kuppy's rationale seems well reasoned for profitable-but-unpopular companies like O&G and coal. Obsidian (OBE) is doing buybacks. Who else is in this unpopular sector and doing buybacks at cheap valuations instead of dividends and mergers?

From a book I just read, here's some supportive evidence of this kind of thing happening: “Aducanumab is the first new drug to be approved for Alzheimer’s treatment in nearly twenty years. The FDA’s approval of aducanumab proved to be one of the most controversial in recent memory. Not only has the drug been considered to be clinically ineffective, a third of patients getting aducanumab suffered swelling or bleeding in the brain. Not a single member of the FDA expert advisory panel voted in favor of its approval, and three of the committee members resigned in protest, one calling it “probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history.” The response from the scientific community may best be summed up by a commentary written by the head of the American Geriatrics Society titled, “My Head Just Exploded.…” Check out the whole fascinating saga in https://see.nf/aducanumab. A congressional investigation concluded the approval of aducanumab was “rife with irregularities,” raising “serious concerns about FDA’s lapses in protocol and [the drug company] Biogen’s disregard of efficacy. That didn’t stop the FDA from its 2023 accelerated approval of a similar antibody, lecanemab (Leqembi), of similar questionable efficacy and safety.” Excerpt From How Not to Age Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

By the way, two side thoughts: (1) It'd be nice for TheCOBF to have an Amazon affiliate code, so that links to the books could generate a little extra $$ for the forum. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/resource-center/how-to-build-amazon-affiliate-links?ac-ms-src=rc-home-card (2) Maybe we could have members submit favorite books for 2023 and vote/rank them?

I'm really liking this book. All about things that just don't change about human nature, and lots of anecdotes that investors will enjoy (about stocks, markets, economies, etc) Each chapter is about 11 minutes long (he says "You're welcome" for that, and I do appreciate it) I'm just 2/5 through it so far. It starts off with a new anecdote about Warren Buffett, and there are some good Charlie Munger quotes in here too. The opening story about Buffett: And, a quote I really enjoyed, by another investor Jim Grant: Morgan Housel wrote another book here in the forum, "The Psychology of Money", which I haven't read yet. Anybody else reading this one?

The Audible Plus catalog has Charlie's biography, "Damn Right!" so anyone can listen to it for free if you've got an Audible account at the Premium Plus level. I think I'm going to re-read my copy of Poor Charlie's too, this time with my almost-grown-up kids. They've been asking me about getting started with investing, and Charlie's generosity at mentoring others is making me feel ashamed that I haven't shared more about the topic, especially with them.

Buffett told CNBC’s Becky Quick in 2018. “Charlie has given me the ultimate gift that a person can give to somebody else. He’s made me a better person than I would have otherwise been. ... He’s given me a lot of good advice over time. ... I’ve lived a better life because of Charlie.” I've been trying to come up with some way to say how I feel about Charlie. Warren expressed it right there.

Page 56 in Poor Charlie's Almanack: "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.» -John Kenneth Galbraith Charlie has developed an unusual additional attribute a willingness, even an eagerness, to identify and acknowledge his own mistakes and learn from them. As he once said, "If Berkshire has made a modest progress, a good deal of it is because Warren and I are very good at destroying our own best-loved ideas. Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year." Charlie likes the analogy of looking at one's ideas and approaches as "tools." "When a better tool (idea or approach) comes along, what could be better than to swap it for your old, less useful tool? Warren and I routinely do this, but most people, as Galbraith says, forever cling to their old, less useful tools."

“This has been attributed co-Samuel Johnson. He said, in substance, that if an academic maintains in place an ignorance that can be easily removed with a little work, the conduct of the academic amounts to treachery. 'that was his word, "treachery." You can see why I love this stuff. He saves you have a duty if you're an academic to be as little of a klutz as you can possibly be, and, therefore, you have gotta keep grinding out of your system as much removable ignorance as you can remove.” ― Peter D. Kaufman, Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition

https://beatyourgenes.org/2023/08/10/313-dr-lisle-nate-why-are-people-snobby-why-doesnt-my-spouse-want-to-improve-their-health-can-you-sleep-train-an-infant-single-by-choice-but-lonely/ Beat Your Genes podcast is about Evolutionary Psychology. I remember listening to this earlier this month, where Dr. Lisle answered a question about sleep training. Might have to skip past the first question if you're not interested in that one. In a nutshell: You won't screw up a kid by sleep training.

[ funny thought ] AI-driven customer service solutions? The first generations of these will likely make for some very funny customer stories. Imagine an AI chat bot giving customers incorrect answers, or arguing with customers like Sydney, and tell someone they are a bad customer and it was a good chat bot. I'm sure they'd have worked all those types of bugs out, but I can imagine some comedy gold will remain to be discovered. [ investing thought ] To my mind, it seems like the smart companies in these sectors could just as easily adapt to the new GTP landscape and pivot to the future where an LLM is baked into all kinds of software/services/apps.