ValueArb

No surprise but ESG outperformance studies were flawed and confused causality. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-11/esg-investing-studies-are-flawed-reports-say?cmpid=BBD031224_MONEYSTUFF&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=240312&utm_campaign=moneystuff

Its ironic that Harald Kujat has been accused of being pro-russian, not just because of his opinions but also because he was under the employ of a Putin kleptocrat, Vladimir Yakunin. One of the problems that the west has with Germany is the significant number of important politicians and high ranking government employees who have or had close financial ties with Russian kleptocrats. Its certainly not proof that they are under Russian control, or even influence, but you have to see how concerning it is. Putin is not a trustworthy person to sign peace treaties with. He's already laid out the justification for total subjection of Ukraine, a peace agreement is just a pause for him to rebuild forces. And it will likely embolden him to not just finish off Ukraine but to invade Georgia, etc, all of which is key to his goal of rebuilding the Russian empire. Every domino that topples makes him stronger, and more of a problem for the west, including Germany. You may think that Ukraine can't win, but I think you are unfairly extrapolating the current stalement. Ukraine might not be able to win, but we don't know that for sure, there are certainly scenarios where they can. For one, Russia can't hold Crimea if Ukraine mounts any significant offensive in the south-east. They are within a few tens of kilometers of being able to cut all the rail lines to Crimea using long range artillery and HIMARS, and if someone gives them long distance missiles with heavy warheads (instead of the cluster munitions on US ATACMs), such as Taurus, they could keep the Kerch bridge out of service for long periods. At that point russian forces in Crimea would be starved of ammunition, supplies, equipment, and even food, and would likely retreat in panic to get on the next ferries out. Once Crimea falls, Ukraine gets to mass far deeper concentrations of troops along a shorter line against the Donbas, which doesn't guarantee a break-through but makes one more likely, and makes any peace deal far more attractive for Ukraine. Russia has lost most of its most advanced weapons and ships already, its only edge is just meat-grinder assaults. Its lost all of its paratroopers and most highly trained forces and is using undertrained conscripts straight from boot. It can't build T-90s in any volume, so its pulling T-74s and T-64s out of long term storage that weren't compettive 40 years ago. Its had to pull back its airforce because of heavy losses of SU-34s, SU-35s, A-50s, etc. Its only path to victory is over a mountain of corpses and through mass artillery barrages. Now I realize I've been the big bad american on this thread dumping on Germany, Hungary and Turkey for not doing enough or undercutting NATO's defensive posture. But thats just because the topic was not America's short-falls. So in interest of balanced and equal criticism here is all the ways we haven't done our best for Ukraine either. 1. We have 3,700 Abrams Tanks in storage, and as many as 3,000 are 40 year old M1A1s that are obsolete for our purposes so most will end up being recycled, but still far superior than Russian T-72s and T-90s in crew protection and most everything else. We've given Ukraine only 31 Abrams, despite them being practically free to us (refurb does cost money but still), and only did that small amount in order to encourage european allies to provide their own modern tanks to Ukraine. 2. We have 2,800 Bradley Fighting vehicles in storage (in addition to 3,700 modern ones in our service), again mostly 40 years old and obsolete for our purposes, but still have a great historical record of killing T-64s and T-74s at high rates while offering excellent crew protection. Again, basically free other than refurb costs, and we've only given them 186. 3. We criticize Germany for not providing Taurus, but we only provide the cluster bomb version of ATACMS because we can no longer use them as the US is cycliing out of their use as a step towards banning them. We could provide the large warhead ATACMS to Ukraine to take out the Kerch bridge, but don't. 4. We are helping train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16, but refusing to provide them to Ukraine, despite having over a thousand 30 year old versions in storage that we will never use (other than for parts canniblization). These are still superior to almost anything Russia flies and ready for almost every NATO weapon we can provide them, unlike Ukraines old MIGs and Sukhois. Instead we have to rely on the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Belgium to supply them. 5. Even the Javelins we provide Ukraine are outdated, almost every weapon we've given them is from storage and no longer good enough for our troops. Yet almost all of them are superior to anything Russia can field, especially now. Biden likes to promote the high dollar figure ($100B) of aid he's sent Ukraine, but the reality is it appears he's way overstating the value of the aid and is using old sticker prices paid decades ago for obsolete equipment that had near zero value to us. He's only giving Ukraine enough help to keep them alive but not enough to help them win. But still, I have to vote for him because the only alternative is a guy who has no appreciation for the dangers of Putin or the value of defending Ukraine. So now I think I've criticized everyone except the UK now so how much fairer can I be?

Point out where I was impolite and I'll edit my posts to remove the offending statements, that wasn't my intent. But please don't tell me that pointing out how Germany, Hungary and Turkey are unreliable partners is impolite, when it's just a statement of fact. https://www.politico.eu/article/us-ambassador-slams-hungary-pm-viktor-orban-embracing-russia-over-nato/

How can Ukraine promise to stay a neutral country when Putin has already said its always been a part of Russia? How does that work exactly to stop Putin from finishing what he started?

Germany is the beneficiary of at least a trillion in US subsidies the last 70 years to rebuild it and protect it from the USSR and Russia. It leaving NATO would be great for the US, we could reduce NATO spending obligations by pulling our troops out and closing Ramstein, and use Germany as buffer space in the next big european war. While its being overrun would give us more time to align defenses for the rest of free europe.

Blocking EU aid to Ukraine, dragging feet on Russian sanctions, trying to block Finland and Sweden from NATO, trying to block Ukraine EU bid, cozying up to Putin, etc, etc etc. I'm all for reconsidering once Orban is out of power.

First, its extremely unlikely that Buffett made the Nubank purchase. Second of all it's a bank that makes the vast majority of its earnings from being a bank, not from crypto. Anyone who thinks Buffett is ever changing his mind on crypto has no clue about how Buffett thinks about investing, and the very definition of someone without a clue is that grifter Anthony Scaramucci.

Does that officially make me a doddering old man when I confuse Yugoslavia and Hungary?

Congrats to Sweden, to NATO and to us! Now all we have to do is boot out Yugoslavia, Turkey and Germany;)

Let me also say I loved this post. This is how most should live their lives, instead of obsessing over reading 10Ks and relentlessly searching for better stocks, make great long term investments so you can spend your time with on your family, your business and your hobbies while time works its magic on your investments.

Some nits on rational thinking that have nothing to do with crypto or bitcoin. A religion is a belief that can only be taken on faith, and faith is the excuse you give yourself when you don't have good reason to believe something. We should all strive to accept only true beliefs, ie based on sufficient evidence. If your belief in crypto and Bitcoin is based on rational reasons (and I think you would agree it is), that is by definition not your religion. The Optimalism essay also claims the mind is separated into two parts, physical and "metaphysical". There has never been any compelling evidence that the mind isn't wholly physical. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary from traumatic brain injuries dramatically altering peoples personalities establishing how strongly their physical brains correlate to the operation of their "minds". Since the metaphysical and supernatural aren't falsifiable ideas, this can't prove our minds are entirely the product of physical processes but it's compelling evidence they are. Its wierd the essay makes this tangent when the rest of it is laser focused on thinking rationally.

Just catching up my podcasts and in middle of last weeks value after hours with Jim Carroll as the guest where he's talking about how hard it is for the market makers to hedge these new zero day options. Gives me flash crash vibes...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-05/cryptocurrencies-bitcoin-is-up-but-the-future-of-money-lies-elsewhere

#1 - Sanborn Maps #2 - American Exoress because the earliest big wins are what enables the later winners.

We need an upvote mechanism on the site for posts like this.

How can Gold and BTC be near all time highs at the same time? Something is amiss in the matrix.

Ukraine claiming about three SU-34s today. Adding a little clarity to this unprecedented string of claimed kills, a spokesman talked about how Russian pilots are being forced to fly closer to the front line in order to reach targets with glide bombs. Still seems strange, one would think the RUS Air Force would adjust flight paths and targets to minimize losses, so if they are going to why do they keep getting hit.

Thousands marching in Moscow to mourn Navalany, the balls on these people are very impressive. Edit: Looks like they are chanting “down with Putin!” and “bring the soldiers back!”.

No, I'm looking at household income before transfer payments. If you have two people in a household living entirely off welfare and foodstamps (and charity, and other less legal endeavors), under that measure your household income is zero. If both took full time jobs at $10/hour, their household income is now $41,600 raising average income for the quartile (but not affecting overall median household income). More to your point. If transitioning a bunch of people from government dole to actual work lowers wages, the effect on average unskilled wage is likely to be slight, but the effects for them, their families, their quartile's average income, the country, government spending, taxes, and borrowing is likely to be significantly beneficial.

Can't argue with this point. In fact it may be a significant influence in keeping lower quartile incomes stagnant.

You are correct about the moral case, but unfortunately it carries little weight with most people. A better example might be to reductio ad absurdum. What would happen if China submit its entire billion inhabitants and all its capital to our needs? Anything we wanted to build they would build for us, for free. The CCP would command their smartphone makers to invest more heavily to build iPhone level phones and give them to americans, for free. Same with their PC makers. Their farmers would send us all their annual crop production, for free. BYD would build all the EVs we wanted, for free. Would this be terrible? Would our farmers, car makers, computer companies and Apple go out of business and we'd be all unemployed, with nothing to do but eat our free food, play video games on our free PCs, call our friends on our free phones and drive over to their house in our free cars? Or would we take all the free stuff from China and keep working to make even better stuff and different foods so we can live even better? There is is only one major difference between this example and the real world where China provides us more and cheaper goods than we can make. The difference is with free trade the dollars we send to china to buy cheaper goods have to get sent back to buy either american goods, american services or fund the american budget deficit and debt. Since Clinton left office we've decided that our benefits of free trade should mostly accrue in the form of funding our deficit spending, not selling more goods and services.

Its really hard to push up post 2018 incomes when the country took an entire year off, and ran up another $10 trillion in debt to pay for it. Expect more stagnation until we get our fiscal house in order.

There is no flaw, other than self interested actors incented to profit seek at the expense of everyone else by inducing politicians to return to mercantilism.

How is that a flaw? China reinvesting capital to produce up the value chain lowers the costs of many useful goods, and makes them wealthier and able to buy more of our goods and services. The traditional free market example is the Lawyer who bills $200/hour for legal work, but has to spend a lot of time typing up the product of their legal expertise, so she gets really fast at typing and can type 200 wpm. Still she only spends 4 hours a day doing actual billable legal work, and 4 hours a day typing it up. So she hire a secretary who can only type their notes at 100 wpm for $20/hour, and it takes him far longer, 8 hours a day. But now she can bill 8 hours a day, her gross income doubles, and even after paying her secretary her net income increases 80% (though she actually has to hire two secretaries to handle the greater billable output in this example, so net income "only" increases 60% in reality). This demonstrates why even if we can do something better and more productively than another country, it makes sense to let them do it if the net result lowers the cost of that input and allows us to focus our capital, time and energy on higher return activities. So by your example, now her secretary passes her paralegal exam and he can start charging $40/hour to help clients with simple legal forms and activities. First this isn't bad for the clients, its good. And its probably not bad for the lawyer. She can probably connect clients to her paralegal for simpler tasks and charge them $50/hour, increasing client retention and their budgets, which may even allow them to hire her for legal projects they previously couldn't afford to fund. Apple is a great example of this. Cheap smartphones and commodity PCs have been around forever, if Chinese companies make them cheaper and better that's great for americans who choose that option, giving them more money to spend elsewhere or enabling their companies to equip more employees with better PCs to be more productive. But Apple has invested immense amounts of capital into building proprietary operating systems and software, CPUs, hardware, services and stores to provide value and experience that a huge number of customers consider superior. Its not going anywhere, and neither are its customers as long as they consider it even slightly better than Android, Windows and Linux devices. Companies like Dell would rightly go away if cheap Chinese PC makers can build generic PCs to undercut it's offerings. But even Dell has long understood this, and provides most of its value to the enterprise in easily managable and servicable equipment. As China moves up the value chain, we get to make the value chain even longer and better.

Providing sources is a very nice feature, and looking at mine its relying on web pages that are way outdated. I don't think its Perplexity's fault because the pages appear to be undated, So I tried modifying the verbiage to "that are currently net-nets" but get the same list back. Thanks! will try this next.