flesh

Seconding the low rate balance transfers. I have about 10 cards with 25k limits and no balance. All you do is pick the lowest fee (0-3%) and longest duration at 0%, 18-24 months usually. Use the checks they send you and deposit, that's it. Roll over to another card at end of period if needs be. Also, a heloc is nice to have. Locally I have america first credit union heloc fixed for five years at 4.5% then it re rates once and is fixed for five years again. Also, pentagon federal credit union offers the same thing. Payment is 1.25% of balance per month but you can always re use whatever you've paid down. For a smaller payment go interest only, but the rates higher.

More ADS at 189.30. 30% position now.

What's useful for me is just to assume I'm anywhere from wrong to totally wrong about everything, which is painful. Constant self inflicted cognitive dissonance. I spend hours everyday fessing up to my errors yet being aggressive. I'm aggressive because I'm less wrong than others if I focus on being wrong more often and have the tools to do so. Being correct is not an option, when I win, I've often missed a lot. Left brain Right stuff, stuff. You basically have to become the Homo Economicus that they talk about in all the economics books. You'll know you're on the right track when in every day life you consistently find yourself over weighting accuracy and under weighting being right. The self you think of as you starts to fade away because it was mostly an error causing machine, an amalgamation of false memories and experiences rearing their pointless heads. You'll have fewer arguments and actually change people's minds. Many will start avoiding you because accuracy hurts, only those seeking accuracy will join you're pain, which is few. You've got to be a masochist. You will appear separate from your species. It's a large price to pay. Many of those that can do it will eventually decide not too or unknowingly reintegrate their ego and forget how little they know, flipping the script and only identifying the biases that confirm their premature ejaculations. It's like having sex repeatedly and never climaxing for months or years at a time intentionally. When you infrequently decide to climax, it's a choice and you know it's risky. Eventually, practicing this discipline, you'll learn to step in and out of the new you and the self that communes with your fellow humans, joining their game from time to time. First discipline, then mastery.

DVA Shares reduced by 13% since q4 17. Buying at 64 is like buying at 56 a year ago. About to receive 4.9 b from sale, debt immediately reduced, significant share buybacks continue. Won prop 8 in Cali.

Buying Ibkr, bld, vsto, ads.

If you zoom out a bit the correlations change. Consider there was a prolonged market sell off or market contraction lasting 2-4 quarters. Brk's robust or perhaps anti-fragile (at times when it has such a % of cash/mkt cap ratio as today) nature would shine through. Buybacks would be aggressive, acquisitions would occur for the first time in years using mostly cash (that's been earning next to nothing TTM), and cash would be put into equities at better prices/in large quantities/higher dividend yields. There would likely be some sweet heart deals. Additionally, brk's fcf yield is higher than the index and that cash would be put to work. Considering the above, what would happen to the average company in the index over the same time period? Obviously people would notice the difference. In a normal economic contraction/sell off I expect the price of brk in it's current form, would be more uncorrelated the further the price of the indexes went down, over time that is, conversely it would not be true in acute days/weeks/month's.

1. Let the private market in. Someone with the right tools needs to measure. If it was ubiquitous that all earnings from nearly all colleges were tracked by major in real time complete with analyses/predictions things would change. Skin in the game. Nobody would have to let other's pay for their school it would be optional. You could have caps, 10% of earnings over 20 years max, whatever. This would minimize debt, maximize real ROI's and solve most of the problems. Let the market get the real data. Let it price what x degree will be worth in the future. Let everyone have access to the pricing for free. Let it be known. This would reduce college cost as well. There would be fewer people engaging in the majors that aren't needed/don't pay and more where we need them. If I'm thinking about journalism as a major and it's 100k and I notice if I go into stem, it's free and they get 10% of my pay for 20 years, some of us will go into stem. Those of use who are very poor who are capable are even more likely to go into stem or whatever is going to be needed next 20 years. 2. Free college privately paid for, likely non accredited initially but worth something, like a ged to a high school diploma. A mainly online university free to everyone in the usa wouldn't cost much, 10's of M's/year perhaps. Some involved would work for free, some would take less pay, anyone with internet could complete a degree. If it wasn't accredited initially, it would have some market value signaling whatever the average of the graduates value vs say a state school or community college. It would prove 100's of hours worked at a college level difficulty, this would be enough for many. I believe there would be enough private funding. Over time as it's value was quantified, more would come, less would pay high prices for regular college and college prices would come down as they were forced to be more efficient. Obviously this would work in some subjects and not others. More undergrad. I believe we'd see many educating themselves later in life whether needed or not, everyone would be smarter. 3. At least, put a cap on the period before a bk can wipe away the loans. 15 years, whatever. Once this is priced in down goes college prices.

Is there some important reason that someone going in debt 100k at high rates to graduate in journalism in the year 2009 shouldn't be taking nearly full accountability? Sounds very thin to me. My company's sales went down 80% from 07-10' and I lost (my money not the banks) 211k on a house. Get on with it, this is america, this shits relatively easy. Work, save, invest. Repeat. For the top 80%, that's all there is to it. I can equivocate about the bottom 20%.

Tony Robbins Personal power classic and Get the Edge. Nothing comes close for 50.

This stuff's so bogus and extremely harmful the way it's propagated. There are so many possibilities regarding what these things may or may not determine that it's crazy to accept them. 1. It's shown no predictive ability 2. How quickly you associate good/bad words with different skin tones/gender/etc doesn't have to mean prejudice/bias. Imagine I live in the jungle and there's two types of tiger's. For generations it's known that one type of tiger is responsible for 5x the maiming/killing vs the other. Whether it's through genetics, memetics, religion, stories, etc, which tiger would I most likely associate with negative connotations faster? Is this prejudice or something else? Most of my favorite books are written by jews, now I naturally elevate any new jewish author. Is this prejudice or an understanding of reality? Isn't is likely there are mechanisms in place for good reason that determine how quickly and to what degree we associate one thing with another? When experiencing pain, people remember the most painful part of whatever happened and the end predominately. What if women, most have experienced broken relationships, unconsciously remember the most painful part of the relationship and the end of the relationship which is also bad and therefore associate more quickly negative words with men vs women. What if I am black and live in S. africa and have had equally good experiences with whites/black however I've spent most of my life in a black village. When I think about whites, I don't think bad things. I love my black family and black kids and black friends. I only see whites when tourists stop in the village and buy leather boots exclusively produced here in my village, they seem nice. I take a test that determine's how quickly I associate black/white with good/bad words and naturally because I'm surrounded by black people I love I am a little bit faster to associate positive words with blacks than whites. The associations I have with whites are weak in general because I've spent 99% less time with them throughout my life. Is this prejudice? Or, is it simply availability heuristic? Recency bias? What I am familiar with versus not? A weak association reduces response time. Where I live, I've see almost no black folks. I never had a black friend here, there were perhaps two in my high school. Where I lived in elementary school there were more and one was my best friend, but not since I was twelve have I known any except superficially when traveling. I visit S. africa often and have been to the village that makes the boots. This by itself should change the distribution. 3. I just took the skin tone test, in the past I took the gender test. I found it very disingenuous that in rounds 3 and 4 they set you up with a number of biases by forcing you to associate dark skin with bad and light skin with good.... BEFORE it came to the free association part at the end. If you first ask people what the last four digits of their ss# is and then ask them to pick a number between 1-1000 those who have a higher last four ss# pick higher numbers on average.

I've always thought 3x/year is superior to 4x or 2x. I've also never really thought about why I always thought this. Quarterly seems too much, bi annually seems like too little. Agree with the notion about not accepting any calls/everything public.

I believe many of us have unexplained experiences. Considering you're experience you may enjoy listening to the Sam Harris Jordan Peterson podcasts (sam's podcast waking up). After listening to those listen to the two (day 1 and 2) "discussions" between Sam and Jordan available on youtube that took place in Vancouver. Basically deals with the very nature of truth, free will, genetic/memetic/darwinian/ narrative/story driven nature of us, acting out god without being religious, science vs it's limits etc. What may be done in the future.. Anyone interested in these things will find these useful. It's a LOT of audio...

Sure downside short term in WB, upside if you believe one is undervalued and one isn't. Plus 1 and 5 year is backward looking. The cash on hand as % of mkt cap for brk is multiples of cash for s and p. Rates are going up. IMO, faaanggsss or whatever it is now won't grow next five nearly as fast as last five, which by itself seriously changes the equation if true. I bought a small position in brk yesterday.

Lol, ya sorry, I wrote that while speaking with a buddy and cooking. Specifically just looking for data, who has tariffs on what, how much, who subsidizes who, what's normalized and what's not. Anyways, thanks, I'll check that out and do some research.

You know, the less biased, informed type, regarding the differences in tariffs, IP, .... etc relevant details/facts that currently apply? All I see is noise.

This. Unfortunately I wasn't investing during the last 50% drop but I have gone back and looked through financials on 100's of co's through that period. You could have simply run a screen near the bottom and found stuff down 80% at 10x multiples growing 20%/year despite the head winds. Or stuff selling at 3x multiples. Large disconnects are the time to dig into the disproportionately punished co's.

I wonder if the net psychic loss due to the actual/perceived purposelessness of recent wars in the combatants, plus their close ones, and society versus past wars affects the problem. Or, if your friend is blown up in front of you as part of an eventual end to jewish concentration camps and you're successful in the end... and the world agrees... vs you have no idea why you're there and when you get back everyone wonders what the point was immediately thereafter and more so over time. In one case your a hero, your friend is a hero, everyone's a hero in everyone's eyes for the rest of their lives when they get home. In another, humanities general difficulty with nihilism is magnified and you chance of recovery isn't largely ameliorated.

How about a constitutional amendment fixing the cost of nationalized healthcare to a % of gdp plus regular inflation not medical inflation adjustments. Even if the initial number is nauseatingly high, this would reduce my fears by a substantial majority. Aside from that, if you zoom out and look at the next century, I believe significantly more lives will be lost to reduced innovation than gained by single payer. The thing is, no one will be talking about that lives that weren't saved due to reduced innovation. Greater than 50% of lives saved from innovation in the last century are not a result of infant and children's death's. Plus, that's backward looking.... forward looking, a better innovation system humming on all cylinders with the tech that will come in the next century with 10 billion people innovating vs less people in the past could produce untold wonders. What might have happened can't be calculated and isn't news on 99% of folks radar's.

Really liked this one. Half way through left brain right stuff as well, also very good. It's like I've come full circle. I was in business for a decade, knew a bunch of stuff explicitly or implicitly because I hadn't intellectualized it although I had done it. Read a bunch of books that seemed relevant but never resonated, read his stuff and now I know why. Lol, back to where I was except now I know where I was and where the helper's led me wrong and that I can be led wrong, but shall try harder not to be in the future. Bottom line is, people don't know shit and these books along with Danny's etc. have given me the evidence to know I was right all along.

I'll just add a little tid bit here. Buy a place that has a mother in law apt and rent it out. Ideally it would have a separate entrance and all the amenities, washer/dryer, kitchen, bathroom, separate drive way etc. If you look hard and are patient you probably (maybe not in london have no clue) can find a place like this over time. Alternatively, you may be able to find a place that can be made ideal for a small investment. Also, by doing this you can generally spend a bit more on a place and therefore your portion of the house is nice and if there is appreciation is will be larger. When I subtract what my renter pays me, what's going to principal, assuming no appreciation, my cost to live here (with a mortgage that was originally 80% ltv) is 100/month before taxes and utilities. Why not have your cake and eat it too? My buddy had the place I'm in now and I always told him I would pay him 10k over comps, no realtors fees when he was ready to sell and he was ready 1 year later. ATM, I'm working on design plans in an area of the city that allows it to build a new place that has two 1k square foot apartments with separate entrances in a walkout basement. It will be very cheap for me to live in this new place, in the hundreds a month effectively and the place will cost about 2x my current place. If you are single, use this strategy plus rent out some of the main house and you'll be cash positive before appreciation.

C-25 requires companies to disclose "diversity information" related to their board and leadership. I don't think that companies should be able to even ask about people's ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender, and sexual preferences, let alone be required to disclose this information publicly. I generally don't think it's a good idea to create databases that make it easy to find business leaders of particular ethnicities to persecute. Plus, I've read articles where Liberals imply that if this law doesn't result in the "appropriate people" being hired, then the next step would be to enact laws to force companies to discriminate against particular demographics in favor of other demographics, which I also disagree with. C-51 mandates that in sexual assault trials only, the defence has to disclose their evidence to the prosecution before the trial begins. My belief is that this eliminates one of the primary defences a person can have against a sexual assault allegation, finding contradictions in the story of the accuser. Essentially, it allows the accuser to identify contradictions in their story before the trial and then revise their story to be consistent. What's more, I think trials should ideally be structured in the way that's most likely to identify truth. If this reverse-disclosure were a better way to find out the truth, I'd expect the Liberals to want this law to apply to all criminal trials. The fact that it doesn't--that it only applies to sexual assault trials--to me means that they aren't actually trying to find truth, but rather make it much easer to find people guilty of sexual assault. Thus, I think it eliminates the right to a fair trial. (Since men are the primary people charged with sexual assault, I consider it sexist enough to group with the other two bills.) C-69 says that, when performing environmental assessments, both science and "the traditional knowledge of indigenous people" must be considered, and the indigenous people's knowledge may be kept confidential. I believe strongly that science should be the only factor in environmental assessments. To me, traditional knowledge does have a role, and that role is to be fed into science, proven or disproven, and then the resulting science incorporated into the environmental assessments. Instead, a minority group consisting of roughly 4% of the population is being allowed to influence the results of environmental assessments, and the information that they are providing isn't even being made public. Generally, I think it's a really bad idea to identify a group based on ethnicity, pass laws to give them a disproportionately large influence on regulation, and then say that nobody else can know how or why they influenced any decision. Thanks. Good to know, I totes agree with your assessment. This stuff is getting quite scary. C-16 (Iirc) as well. If this keeps up for some time, I might find a reason to actually get into the political fight. I'm sure we'll see the same stuff in the usa during the next democratic control. I can't see how the left doesn't lose a lot of it's center as this increases in frequency and magnitude. All of the non ideological, party line driven lefties I know hate this stuff.

Oops, I was in a rush and misspoke--I didn't mean to imply that it was this council. I'm mostly referring to bills C-25, C-51, and C-69. What issue do you have with 25, 51, and 69? Just curious.

Here's an esoteric book for you. It's short, it's not what you think. I consider it truth at one level of analysis. I've read all his books, many of them multiple times. I often try other people on for size, try to become them, some of you may be familiar with this, it isn't hero worship. Anyways, I thought it'd be funny to include this here, maybe you'll see why. It works for me.

Not a fan of the article. He's essentially saying, it's better but what if something really bad happened, then it wouldn't be better. Also, people suffering less doesn't address how people feel, people don't feel better. Or, if we end up annihilating ourselves, it's all for naught. All of the above seems to be the basic human operating system, which is why Pinker writes the books he writes. Outside of nihilistic feelings or potential annihilation, things are getting better. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. If we don't know why we're successful, we won't continue to do what's worked. You won't notice the red flags. We'll self sabotage. It's surprising to me how difficult it is to have a conversation about how much things are improving.

I've been hearing forever that Buffett says you don't need a high iq. I'm pretty sure he says the exact opposite. My buddy and I talked about this a month ago after he read one of his bio's. Buffett plays a little trick knowingly or not, by framing it in such a way to confuse. "You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ. Rationality is essential," Buffett is quoted saying in the book, "Warren Buffett Speaks." "HomeMarket Warren Buffett says sell your IQ points; they are of no use in stock market Warren Buffett says sell your IQ points; they are of no use in stock market Warren Buffett says that one doesn't need to be super intelligent to make money in stock market, in fact he advises selling away IQ points beyond a certain level. By: Sushruth Sunder | Updated: November 25, 2017 11:49 AM Warren Buffett says that investors with IQ over 150 may be better off selling 30 points away. (Image: AP) Even as many investors may want to believe that high IQ may lead to better investing, legendary billionaire investor Warren Buffett says that investors with IQ over 150 may be better off selling 30 points away. “If you have a 150 IQ, sell 30 points to someone else. You need to be smart, but not a genius,” Warren Buffett is often quoted as saying. In fact, Warren Buffett places more emphasis on rationality and emotional stability. “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ. Rationality is essential,” says the Oracle of Omaha. In the preface to the ‘Intelligent Investor’ penned by his mentor Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett notes, “To invest successfully does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding the framework.” So he IS saying you need a 120-130 IQ. This is WAY above average/median. 120 iq is 91st percentile ish and 130 iq is 98th percentile ish. No doubt there are many on this forum with iqs above 120 but many who assume they are well above are over estimating. Dunning kruger blah blah If he had instead framed it accurately saying "you've got to be in the top ten percent of IQ's to compete in investing but not a genius" people would have came out with a different impression.