ValueArb

The burden of proof first lies on those claiming there are crashes at all. There have been numerous experts that have demonstrated the Navy UAPs can easily be explained as tricks of perception. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/11/i-study-ufos-and-i-dont-believe-the-alien-hype-heres-why https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/2021-05-29/navy-ufo-videos-skeptics The saying has a very pertinent meaning. If you tell me you drank coffee this morning, and I have witnessed that you normally drink coffee every morning, I can accept that it is likely you are telling me the truth without further evidence. If you tell me an alien popped in through your window, drank your coffee, then teleported you back in time to witness the birth of Jesus Christ, I'm going to need a lot more evidence before I should accept it as likely true. First, any true skeptic believes there is a non-zero probability of nearly any phenomena. We can't know everything, and can't rule out anything. So we have to use actual evidence as our guide to what is most likely true. What evidence do we have? 1) Videos that are easily debunked 2) Witnesses that claim crash debris without physical evidence, and that don't even claim to have seen them, just complete hearsay that someone told them. I can't imagine how you even get to 5% with that set of data.

Ukrainians rightly hated Russia gir the genocides of 1920s and 1930s. If I was a Ukrainian I think I would have thrown my lot in with the Germans over the Soviets too. And too bad those poles and Jews weren’t able to gain the protection of the Soviet forces er whoops. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union Why is every defense of Russia always devolve into a Whataboutism? “other people did bad stuff” is never a justification for genocide of entire populations. Who in Ukraine today is complicit in those crimes? Their “Nazi” Jewish President who lost family in the Holocaust?

Russia can easily defeat Ukraine, if we drop our support. And history is full of Russian genocide against the Ukraine, including Holodomor, deportation and massacres of the Tatars, the liquidation of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic in 1921. That’s just in the last century. And skips Russian genocides in nearby countries like Poland.

Ok, 12.5% more GDP and 25% more troops by population. Last year federal spending was $6.1 trillion across a 330M population. It’s still a Russian propaganda talking point even if as I said, it was partially true. And Russia not only scores higher on corruption indexes, it has been probably the largest force working to corrupt Ukrainian politicians. But by all means, let’s punish the Ukrainian citizens for throwing out a president Putin and the FSB foisted on them. Why did he fight two wars to control Chechnya, to the point of having the FSB bomb Moscow apartments and kill hundreds of Russians in order to blame them? Resources and manpower count for more than religion. It’s no longer the USSR, your perspective is to not worry about it until it’s well on its way of being rebuilt. Mine is to stop it from ever being rebuilt. Kyiv was the original capital of the Kieven-Rus. They’ve long had close ties, similar languages, era. So what? Russia also has a history of genocide in Ukraine and Crimea to bend them to its knee. Who cares what patronizing names Russian imperialists have called them?

If this is real it’s going to take years before we know. It’s such an audacious claim it will require really clear replication and much better demonstrations than the original authors have been able to do. But if true it’s the stuff of science fiction. There is so much energy loss in our transmission networks that it would reduce power demand and waste heat generation by incredible amounts. Would be the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions in history. And then there is the advances it would bring in all sorts of areas like integrated circuits, transportation, even space flight.

Abiogenesis is a fascinating topic, and I hope we will have some detailed evidence of how it occurred before I die. One theory is that I’m going to butcher here but I really like is to blame it on the moon. When the earth formed it was very hot for a hundred million years or so. The moon was about ten times closer and earth was rotating much faster, days were as short as three hours. So as the oceans formed you had these immense tides racing across the earths hot surface where they’d create massive tidal pools evaporating from the heat until refreshed a few hours later. The oceans would have been full of amino acids and they would have been combining rapidly given the heat energy in these hot pools and then flung back into the ocean next tidal surge. So the numbers of combinations over many millions of years would have been incredible. At some point some of the combinations create forms that can self replicate. And over many more millions of years some combine in sheets, and then one day a sheet encloses fully enough to create a cell, maybe with different self replicating proteins trapped inside it. And there we go.

The US federal government is spending nearly $20,000 a year per family member, $300 is a drop in the bucket. As for the rest of your rant, it’s a pure Russian propaganda point to say Ukrainian politicians were “pillaging” the country. It was steadily making headway against its corruption issues, or at least it was before Russia started slamming missiles into its civilian centers on a daily basis. If responsibility for Ukraines defense relies solely in its hands, then can’t we say the same about Taiwan? And South Korea? Isn’t it’s South Korea’s responsibility that it didn’t deter the North’s invasion to begin with? And why are we even in NATO? Wasn’t it West Germanys responsibility to deter 400 divisions of the Warsaw Pact so we, the UK and France could keep taxes low? And wasn’t it our responsibility to throw the British out without the assistance of the French navy? After all our politicians kneeled before that king for decades, didn’t they create the problem? Not assisting free nations to protect themselves from the predations of totalitarian regimes ultimately ends in only one way, with the US surrounded by powerful enemies with few friends willing to help us. Conquering Ukraine increases Russian GDP by 25% to start, and clinches the reabsorption of Georgia, Belarussia, and a half dozen or more other former Russian republics making Putin far stronger and more dangerous, bringing back the Cold War in a hurry. But no worry, we’ll have tiny tax breaks in the meantime.

Thats a discussion of expanding security guarantees until Ukraine is a member of NATO. There is zero chance the US is winding down support of Ukraine while the war is ongoing. Trump and Desantis can't score any points by arguing that we should allow Russia to complete their torture, rape and genocide of the Ukraine.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2023/07/20/verizon-and-att-the-toxic-lead-cables/?sh=2cf755d3258e

I love listening to Joe and Tracy too, its a good podcast, but my one criticism is they have a little bit of Brogan disease. They tend to let guests run without any pushback when they say what appear to be very speculative things.

Every time I hear him I think he's very smart, but massively over-estimating his ability to know true things.

They have been doomed to have a love of authoritarian rulers with egomaniacal streaks. The Tsars were no better than Stalin or Putin. They also have a huge chip on their shoulder, they constantly want to proclaim themselves as a great country deserving the worlds respect when in reality they are a backwards third world nation with a per capita GDP well below Khazakstan. They've lost nearly every significant war they've fought in the last 150 years, getting crushed in Crimea, by the Japanese, in WW1, and only "winning" in WW2 due to massive aid from and a complementary invasion by the West. They'd have zero world influence today if not for one thing, nuclear weapons.

So what? There is also a strong stigma against reporting angels and ghosts, does that imply all three are real? There is always congressional grand-standing. No one has offered any credible evidence there is billions in spending on this. All of their evidence was hearsay and hearsay of hearsay. Beyond Gruch's self serving, vague and non-specific testimony you have a naval aviator talking about unidentified objects that are commonly witnessed by pilots, military and commercial. As I've pointed out, human vision and memory are inherently unreliable. An airliner 20 miles away can look like a silver tube, a disc, or to be rapidly changing shape, based on the lighting and weather conditions and your visual acuity and cleanliness and clarity of your windows and sun glasses. And Fravor's testimony is also a mix of hearsay (other pilots saw what I saw) and he could present no physical evidence of it. Again, what he thinks he saw and what he actually saw may be different things. And if the tic-tac was exactly as he described and performed as he claimed, it could not be a physical object due to the lack of sonic boom and atmospheric plasma trail. And many of those videos have been debunked. Thats what the UFO cultists don't tell you. Again UAP is no different than UFO. It's not an acknowledgment of aliens, its just an acknowledgment that we can't identify everything we see. Some UAPs may be advanced drones from other countries, we should always be open minded and investigate them so we don't end up being surprised by balloons overflying our military bases. One turd in your soup means it's no longer soup. Mixing in crackpot with what is claimed to be evidence should make you very skeptical of their other "evidence". And "trying to make it public"? The internet has been around for decades, putting terabytes online has been trivial for most of it. And we don't need even 7 terabytes more grainy footage of flying objects too far away to make out any specific detail on, so that they could easily be balloons, drones, airplanes, etc. The bar for "evidence" is so low in the UAP/UFO community its just tedious. A firing squad? Risking lives? Methinks you are not "the type who will be skeptical of UFOs until I’m personally beamed into a flying saucer and probed by aliens." as your bar for convincing seems incredibly low. Again to quote Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is all the physical evidence from all the crashes and all the bodies? Anyone who presents the first physical evidence of an alien encounter will win eternal fame and lucrative rewards, the risk reward of disclosure is massively weighted to rewards. Grusch hasn't' presented a shred of evidence yet he's going to have a very comfortable retirement doing paid appearances and writing UFO books. Lastly, what every UFO fanatic ignores is there is already a significant scientific effort into finding and contacting aliens. It's called SETI. The only reason SETI scientists aren't invited to hearings is they will tell you that they can almost always find pretty mundane explanations for almost all UFO videos and haven't been able to find any physical evidence, ever, from these claimed encounters.

Yet somehow Russia’s “jamming” caused multiple drones to hit the same building twice in two nights. Even Russias native propagandists have pointed this out.

That’s a computer simulated replication, not a physical replication. There is a Chinese team claiming physical replication tho. If this turns out true, next step is figuring out how to efficiently manufacture and package it. Preliminary indications were that the process can only make tiny quantities.

I have always thought that the most ludicrous misunderstanding of crypto is that it's anonymous when every single transaction is easily traceable. We may not know who owns a wallet, but we know all of it's transactions. This is why its reasonable to think that Satoshi Nakamoto is dead or has lost his private key, given his wallet has not been used in over a decade. And why scammers who steal billions in BTC end up getting arrested years later without having spent more than a tiny fraction of their haul since any transaction will be quickly flagged as from the stolen BTC. But I'm pleased to find out today that I'm wrong, not for its utility in committing crimes which I have no interest in committing, but because its something I've been thinking about a lot for years. I'd like to use this technique not for crypto but for another application I've been wanting to implement for a long time that requires this type of anonymity algorithm. Turns out there is an algorithm called Ring Signatures that can be used to obfuscate the actual account in a transaction. Essentially the transaction can only be attributed to a specific group of accounts, not a single account. So if implemented cleverly by a currency (both in maximizing obfuscation as well as minimizing computational requirements) no one will be able to trace transactions. And of course after finding this algorithm a simple search demonstrates Monero implemented Ring Signatures about 4 years ago. I can't speak to how well they implemented it, but now I know why they make their anonymity claims. https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/ringsignatures.html

What should Graham have said? What should Washington (and NATO) do if Russia uses tactical nukes against Ukraine?

Tactical nukes aren't likely to be very effective in Ukraine. Hitting Kyiv would be genocide and kill hundreds of thousands. But hitting the front lines or even military bases will only kill a few thousand at most given how dispersed they are and prepared already for bomb blasts by being in trenches or hardened buildings. I will be surprised if Putin orders their use, given the immense blowback Russia will receive and cause the likely introduction of the most advanced NATO weapons, if not NATO personnel to operate them.

These aren't civilian office buildings, there are military, FSB and their contractors in that building. They are legit military targets. In the history of war, attempts to lower morale or provoke a civilian uprising through direct bombardment of the enemy population almost always fail, this was true even in WW2 during massive fire bombings in Europe and Japan (I'm listening to podcast of Siege of Paris by the Prussians in 1872, once they started direct artillery bombardment it just pissed the population off). This isn't going to do diddly to bring Putin to the negotiating table because it's not going to lead to any civilian unrest esp. given how tightly controlled they are. The most likely reason for these attacks, besides the military benefit of hitting bureaucrats directing war materials and decisions, is that Putin is going to be forced to bring more Anti-Air defenses back from Ukraine to Moscow and other Russian cities. This is being done to help clear the way for the offensive in Ukraine, not to make political statements. Ukraine is publicizing their involvement to hopefully provoke Putin to panic and over react.

All value investing requires being able to make dispassionate decisions, and a process that minimizes bias. That's why Charlie and Warren recommend reading Cialdini's "Influence" and why Buffett's process includes 1) Never reading analyst reports. Throws them right in the garbage lest their opinions infect his. This also extends to never using other peoples estimates, and always try to go to source material to make your own. 2) Never checking stock price before estimating intrinsic value. If he finds himself falling in love with a business as he's reading their 10K, he doesn't want to have a target price in the back of his mind as he thinks of a reasonable valuation range for it. 3) Trying to filter out news and current events and focus on what will be true in the long term. I admit I'm unclear how they do this given they admit to reading a lot of newspapers and Warren allegedly keeps CNBC on in the background of his office. But they are big proponents of Graham's Mr Market parable. https://fs.blog/mr-market/

People misidentify objects all the time, whether do to distance, lighting, motion, lack of time or a combination. Your brain fills in gaps in distant images based on previous images or even your own expectations. Remember, human eyes suck, contrary to the claims of creationists their design is terrible. Blood vessels are actually layered in front of the retina and the light sensing cells, absorbing a significant amount of light before it can even reach the light sensing cells. Also the light sensing cells are massed only for direct vision not peripheral and the eye has large blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina. A significant portion of us require glasses to see reasonably at all. And being a skilled naval aviator doesn't enable you to escape these very human limitations. And there are far more plausible explanations of the navy videos. The videos were all infrared, and experts have pointed out the "objects" are consistent with lens flare, glare, and heat emissions. The "maneuvers" are consistent with the source camera moving, not the "object". https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/2021-05-29/navy-ufo-videos-skeptics So the evidence isn't just not conclusive, it's not evidence of aliens or even secret military craft in any shape or form. More videos like these prove nothing other than our video recording systems have flaws, our eyes have flaws, and they can combine to make us see things that aren't even there. Even if you could find similar videos that had compelling evidence it wasn't a lens flare, or infrared heat emission, and shows similar incredible acceleration and velocities now you have to explain why there is no sonic boom and no ionized atmosphere? How can it be a physical object at all given its passing through trillions of Nitrogen/Oxygen atoms without affecting them? So then we arrive back at the supernatural and the question goes back to, why not gods or ghosts or holograms? What evidence is there that aliens is any better an explanation?

I 100% agree with this. There is no evidence or compelling reason to believe we are the only intelligent life in the universe. The conditions our particular form of life needed for it's instantiation are extremely unique, a long lived yellow dwarf star, a planet in the habitable zone and likely a very large moon to provide tidal forces that helped create the building block nucleic acids of our cells. But there are trillions of trillions of solar systems throughout the universe and odds are there many billions of earth like planets orbiting in the habitable zones around stable long lived stars. The problem is this does nothing to support the idea that UAPs are created by intelligent life forms from other solar systems. Because 1) Every observation we have of the universe demonstrates speed of light as a hard limit to travel and communications. 2) We also know that any method to travel faster than it would violate causality, which we've never seen violated in the entire history of the universe. So if the nearest intelligent life is thousands of light years away, its almost impossible for it to even know we exist, and even if it somehow anticipated our advances in technology to a world encompassing civilization it would likely take many tens of thousands of years to travel here. And the physics of any type of ship able to travel even 1% of the speed of light require a massive, massive vehicle using enormous amounts of energy to be able to slow to visit our planet. And that would be easily detectable, likely by the naked eye before it could even reach the solar system. So every argument for "aliens" behind the UAPs requires a level of physics that's akin to magic, that we have not the slightest theoretical groundwork to explain. That can never be a falsifiable claim so fine, but then why aren't these aliens actually angels sent from God, ghosts of our ancestors trying to communicate with us or playful immortal pixies? Why pick one supernatural phenomena as an explanation over literally thousands of others?

Yep, KO peaked around 45 times earnings in 1998. How did that work out for him? Edit: Obviously it worked out very poorly. Returns since then for KO have been poor and it lost over half its value in the next 6 years. Buffett also owned over 8% of KO at the time, so this may also be an example of heavy handcuffs leading to poor decision making. He couldn't get out quickly, and its possible he thought as soon as his 13F filing showed he was selling the stock would get crushed before he could get most of the way out. This is a perfect example of why you don't hold stocks "forever" if you are a value investor who understands how to calculate intrinsic value.

Science relies on preponderance of evidence to start believing a hypothesis could be true, and for extraordinary claims we require extraordinary evidence. The problem is the preponderance of evidence isn’t on the side of aliens existing, and we don’t have any extraordinary evidence. We just finished a congressional hearing that was held not to present extraordinary evidence, but so congress members could preen in front of cameras. The “star” witness admitted he hasn’t seen any of the evidence, just repeated hearsay, sometimes even hearsay of hearsay. Every time he was asked for specifics his reply was “let me tell you that in private”. And then after the hearing the chief scientist of the new military office on UAP research issued a release claiming Grusch mislead the panel by misrepresenting his interactions with the office. This is no different than any UFO claim of the last 70 years, lots of claims of smoke but no one can demonstrate the existence of a fire.

We don’t have the massive handcuffs Buffett has now. If Buffett’s portfolio was the same size it was in the 90s, he would have sold Apple long ago. We all have immensely more opportunities than Buffett of today has and should invest accordingly.