ValueArb

The problem is there is no compelling evidence that the "tic tac" ever did any of these things or isn't just a ballon or drone. Filming using a low resolution video from a moving platform miles away can lead to all sorts of mis-measurements. Secondly, traveling at 13,000 MPH would ionize the atmosphere around in spectacular fashion. No missiles can travel remotely near those speeds unless they are outside of the atmosphere. Look at all they had to do to keep the X-15 and SR-71s from incinerating themselves.

Bonds are basically just stocks without voting rights, and even easier to value. The market is darker and spreads are wider, but that's opportunity for a value investor.

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in nano caps is the worst. - Thomas Paine* * he might have said "religion" instead of "nano caps" but I think if he had an interactive brokers account he'd agree with my edit.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2016/10-year-treasury-bond-rate-yield-chart Since 1962 the average 10 year treasury rate has been 5.88%. Given our current national debt is far higher than it's every been during that period, my super simple "two factor" macro model says future 10 year treasury rates must be higher (on average).

If it makes you feel any better there is a money manager named Warren who has never even had a hundred bagger, or the biggest gainer of the year or decade, but somehow still beat the market by around 100x in his first 30 years. Don't let FOMO eat you up, just keep learning and applying what you learn.

I just found this out, and it seems kind of bonkers to me. At end of 2020 Cathie's distributor decided they wanted to exercise an option she had given them to buy control of Ark investments. She flipped out over this and eventually negotiated to buy them out using what had to be a ton of borrowed money. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-28/cathie-wood-buys-back-option-that-had-threatened-control-of-ark The deal was done just a couple months the absolute peak in ARKK, and at the time Ark Investments across all of its funds had $37B in assets so she was likely counting on a big stream of fees to pay that debt. Now her total AUM has declined by 60% to $14B. Is it possible that if they continue to shed assets that she'll be bankrupted? I always thought that she'd be able to milk ARKK and the other funds for fees for another decade based on that one great year, why would she leverage up and risk all of that?

A better patriot than half the tour.

Its because people intuitively understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And we also understand that people selling systems are almost always frauds, in part because if you had a great system you wouldn't flood the market with competitors reducing your returns. None of this is saying that Sykes didn't turn a tiny sum into $2M or whatever. Someone wins a lottery every day. Every year someone wins the WSOP main event for millions of dollars, but almost never the best player and sometimes the winner is a terrible player. I used to play in a high stakes game built around a huge fish that had won 4 WSOP bracelets, won WSOP Player of the year once and would have won it twice if they hadn't changed the rules. And these famous "winners" get to become poker coaches because clients don't know how to play poker well so how would they know how good their coach is? Too my shame I've spent enough time around the casino to know a few gambling "experts" that were so good at it that they made a living selling their sports betting picks. Then I found out that the key to the business isn't handicapping, it's deluding lots of wealthy clients with your reputation and lifestyle. Even though your picks are pure guesswork, half your clients will still win, and they'll stick with you even through long losing streaks because you are a "proven winner". I've often wanted to perform the following experiment, not for my personal financial benefit, but for science;) I'd start sixteen anonymous internet accounts that give out free stock picks. Each pick would be selected for high volatility and momentum to maximize the potential upside, esp. if they have an impending catalyst. After a few picks roughly half my accounts would be losers and the other half would be winners. I'd shutter the losers and start charging for the winners. Again after a while I'd probably only have four accounts that were winners and one or two that have outstanding returns. Again I'd shutter the losers and unveil myself as the master trader behind my highest return account, and market the hell out of my service, start selling books, training videos, more personalized stock picking services, etc. Over time I'm going to trail the market, but many clients will stick with me because I'm a "proven winner" much like Cathie Woods. Again, I am not saying that Sykes is a fraud, I'm saying I don't know and haven't seen any evidence to convince me. I think it's healthy to always be skeptical of huge claims without corresponding strength in the evidence. Sykes may have parleyed a great run as a trader into a coaching business, but that doesn't tell us whether his run was luck or skill, or that he is able to coach clients into achieving similar levels of success. After all if you have thousands of clients statistically at least a few dozen would end up with amazing results just due to pure luck.

I already cited Confucius’s golden rule, and gave you a passel of examples. Don’t call me condescending when you actively refuse to respond to what I actually said.

So the Bible isn’t the word of god? Finally we agree!

Interesting missile attacks last night, it appears they targeted the Patriot battery again with six "hypersonic" missiles and that all six were shot down without anyone getting hurt (though there were some ground explosions and Russia is claiming they took out the battery). Update: CNN is reporting US intelligence saying the Patriot battery took some damage.

You seem to struggle with the most basic understanding of basic human morality or what morality actually is. Your understanding would grow significantly if you would just think about consent or put yourself into other peoples shoes. It has nothing to do with "anything can be good". Eliminating "undesirables" isn't good for them, so it doesn't matter how "good" it is for human genetics, its still immoral. Eliminating another tribe is immoral because they don't want to be murdered and won't consent to it. It might be beneficial to the victorious tribe, but it's still immoral. Whether societies changes the rules of a board game is a LEGAL, not MORAL, question. Societal rules are laws, not morals. There have been many societies that explicitly made slavery legal, but it was always immoral because the slaves would not choose it.

Attributing the nasty parts of the bible to the (likely mythical) Moses instead of God brings the obvious question, how do you know? How can you tell which instructions were written at the lords behest, and which were from men that god disagrees with. And why would god allow HIS book to portray HIS instructions incorrectly? If you believe this, then you believe the bible has little to do with gods instructions or wishes and is just a bunch of stories men wrote. Roads are shared resources, it's reasonable to have limited rules on how they are to be used, especially when someone expressing their bodily autonomy by drinking endangers many others bodily autonomy by driving. Slavery has never has never been moral because no slaves would have ever chosen slavery unless their other choices were even more dire. A just god should know this and should have made not owning slaves a commandment in the bible. And no one gets to "accept" being a slave, that's not the definition of slavery. As for who is a moral arbiter, the god of the bible can't be because he is so clearly immoral, committing genocide, murdering women, children and babies, endorsing slavery, and condemning people to eternal torture simply for not believing in him, or even never having the opportunity to believe in him. This is the part from Exodus 21, that Moses wrote under gods advisement. “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything. 3 If he comes alone, he is to go free alone; but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. 4 If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free. .. 20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property." and in Leviticus, he made it even clearer. "44 “‘Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. 46 You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly." And in the new testament, which moses didn't write. Ephesians 6:5 “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” Colossians 3:22 “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.” 1 Peter 2:18 “Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.”

He was 40 years late though.

Berkshire has missed every tech boom of the last 50 years, and I think it’s done fine. The only problem with Berkshire is it’s now so enormous that it isn’t likely to beat the market by much going forward. You can produce superior returns buying it when cheap and selling while dear, but they involves work you don’t seem to want. I’m not sure why index funds aren’t the right solution, few professional portfolio managers are likely to beat them. The one thing academia can tell you is to overweight small caps, less liquid stocks historically provide significantly higher returns. So go total stock market in US and Europe, or small cap in both.

The problem with relying on God as a moral authority is which god and under what basis should we accept their authority? The Christian god advocates for slavery, yet we know it is wrong. So how can we accept that god as a moral arbiter? And the reason we know Slavery is wrong is it violates bodily autonomy. Would you be willing to become a slave under biblical rules? IE that allowed your master to beat you whenever they wanted, as long as you didn’t die within a couple of days? If you don’t want to accept being a slave then you cannot impose it upon others. And winning wars doesn’t make anyone a moral arbiter. Southerners used the Bible to justify slavery before the civil war, clearly they were wrong. As was Hitler.

Without God good people do good things and bad people do bad things, it takes God to convince good people to do bad things. Morality is something we understand without requiring God, we all understand the concept of treating others as they wish to be treated and expecting them to treat us as we wish to be treated. And the slave certainly doesn’t regard slavery as morally neutral, that’s for sure. Owning another person is clearly one of the most immoral acts humans can perform, because it violates bodily autonomy.

100% agreed. But the effective models are huge and require mass scale in service and storage. I am a developer but not an AI expert so I don’t really understand how to solve the problem. Can you build a proprietary model with your own data, that relies on the huge public model to fill in gaps in your proprietary model? Or can it extend the public model without writing back to it?

I work for decent sized Tech Unicorn and ChatGPT has been banned here. The issue is that to get the most out of it for development you need to feed it your existing codebase and ours is highly proprietary and no one wants to allow our competitors to catch up just because they were able to as ChatGPT for solutions our code solves. They are working on a solution right now, but no idea how long until we can get comfortable with it. I'm also convinced it will have a valuable place in mental health. Psychology is a soft science whose studies have a lot of reproducibility issues. So the best way to provide therapy is unclear (and regularly changing). But there is reasonable support for the idea that just being able to talk to someone privately about your problems and issues improves perspective and mental outlook, so why not provide a bot at a fraction of the cost of a real therapist?

I can only speculate that it was done because it increased tax receipts. Obviously women’s groups would be for it since usually divorced women would benefit from it.

If you don't personally benefit from some earned income or capital gains, why should you be forced to pay taxes on it? I think that should be a constitutionally enforced principle of income taxation. Its not just for charitable donations, but for things like alimony. Some people don't know this but the Trump tax cuts changed alimony so it is no longer tax deductible to the payer, but is now tax free to the recipient. Imagine you make $200,000 a year, and your stay at home wife divorces you. Now you still have to pay taxes at the $200,000 bracket. while paying her $100,000 a year that is tax free to her. How fair is that when you are only living on $100,000 a year now? Or the taxation of exercised options. If you work at a startup for four hard years and get 100,000 shares of stock at an exercise price of $1, and the company goes public at $10 so you exercise your options. Now you have a $1M "imputed" gain, but as yet have received zero actual cash. If you dwaddle about selling enough stock to pay for taxes (because maybe you believe in your company, or didn't realize it was taxable) and the stock crashes to $4 at years end, you have to sell ALL of your stock to pay a massive tax bill for money you did not and now will never receive. This happened in the internet bubble, where unwitting employees momentarily thought they were rich and exercised their options, but didn't realize the tax implications and ended up without enough stock value to even pay their tax bills. I have one friend who was momentarily worth $20M when he did that, by the time the taxes were due his stock was worth only a couple million, far less than his tax bill. So how did we solve this problem? We didn't change the law to make it fair, the IRS just "ignored" the tax obligations of exercised stock options that year. Which turned out great for one of my friends, but terrible for another one of my friends who was aware of his massive tax obligations and forcibly sold every single share he had before year end at the lowest prices the stock would ever see. If only he had know about the unannounced tax holiday that would be given out.

Speaking as a software engineer, I'd love to return to the office because I miss working among my team-mates and the work relationships that developed. But ... only if I have a private office with a door. The open floorplan fad was killing productivity and creativity, and companies can get much better productivity from remote workers if they manage them well. I think the office ship has sailed in software development. Very few of my compatriots will be willing to go back to commuting, if forced they'll just take another remote job and the talent will (continue) to flow to remote work companies.

I sortof agree with the comment that Google is a one trick pony. Clearly they have way more businesses than search, but search is the main reason they got into most of them and the lever they used to build other businesses. The main one is advertising since it was a natural progression and a reuse of the tools that search advertising used. I would also put Android there since the idea of a free operating system they could monetize through advertising and search was so powerful it wiped out every other phone OS except Apples. It's also hilarious that Whitney didn't think that search had any significant moat when it's turned out the be one of the greatest moats in history. Google is a one trick pony but their pony is maybe the best in history and it's allowed them to build a huge ranch filled with other valuable livestock.

How is morality not as simple as treating others in the manner they would like to be treated, and expect them to treat you in the manner you would like to be treated? it’s hard to look to the Bible for morality when it explicitly endorses slavery and god killing babies as punishment for their parents sins. For all of the British abolitionists who were Christian, there were many more southern Christians holding up that Bible as clear justification for whipping their slaves.

I haven't read it in twenty years but that has always been its reputation. Pretty sure my mom still gets it.