ValueArb

It's a fallacy, whether it's identical to the appeal to authority, it's very similar in its argument using the falseness of another's opinion instead of facts. A failed prediction does nothing to disprove any other prediction. The point is that blockchain is older than the aeroplane was in 1919, yet hasn't found any significant economic application despite being in a world awash with the internet and modern technology. What else are we waiting for to put major government and commercial data on the blockchain? I'd argue that we'll be waiting a long time since the slowest database in the world has no practical uses.

Foch said that in 1911, seven years after the Wright brother's first flight. At the start of WW1, only three years later France had 134 pilots. At the end of the war (only 14 years after the first flight) France had 18,000 pilots and had manufactured 50,000 military airplanes. Airplanes had increased in capabilities so much that it was critical to combined operations that won the war. And what Foch said is a type of appeal to authority fallacy. It's fallacious because who cares what Foch thought? Whether planes had military value depended upon how capable they were, not Foch's opinion of them. His opinion may have been correct at the moment he said it, given the limited range, flight duration, safety, high costs, maintenance requirements and lack of weaponry of the 1911 state of the art aeroplane. Whether he foresaw their rapid improvement or not, who knows? Bitcoin is over 15 years old. The blockchain is even older. Instead of trying to post "gotchas" using appeal to authority fallacies, you might instead ponder why the blockchain hasn't found any significant usage outside of cryptocurrencies and NFTs in the last decade. Why is it being held back? Is it like WW1 tanks, which were advocated by a small number of military leaders with extremely forward looking ideas, but nearly useless in actual WW1 battles? They were eventually proven right in the decades after. Or is it like extreme range guns such as Paris Gun and V-3, that always proved to be more trouble than they are worth, and ultimately replaced by missiles that could be much more accurate and reach much farther ranges?

BTC could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn't affect US security one whit. Just another blue sky dreamer trying to find a use for the nearly useless blockchain that's already failed to find significant usage anywhere for the last decade, outside of ponzi coins and ponzi art.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-20/new-york-bills-aim-to-cut-9-interest-rate-on-defaulted-em-debt The lead in the article discusses legislation to reduce the mandatory interest rate on foreign defaulted debt from 9% to current long term rates (5%), which doesn't seem to have much opposition. It's clearly a benefit for the borrowers, but Wall Street doesn't seem too opposed. I'm assuming their position is that it will be factored in to new financings so it probably won't affect countries ability to raise more debt. And that since it only applies in defaults which are relatively rare, and only reduces rates 4%, it probably won't add much to new bond issue rates. More concerning is the part I quoted. Champerty doctrine is an ancient prohibition against having strangers without a bonafide interest in a lawsuit helping fund it in return for proceeds. Using it to prohibit a minority bond holder from suing for payment they are legally owed seems extremely wrong-headed, and ignorant of unintended consequences. If you are worried about "struggling countries" making it easier for them to default on their debts isn't going to help. Its going to increase the rates investors will demand in the future, knowing that if a default occurs that they'll be forced to sell their bonds at significantly larger discounts. Not normally a conspiracy theorists, but this is appears to be huge handout to countries that already have roughly $800B in outstanding debt issued on Wall Street, especially those who've already defaulted. Their savings on being able to throw out lawsuits over existing defaults could easily be billions. So how many of these "non profits" backing the bill have taken in contributions from international debtors? The ROI on throwing a few million at key community groups and key legislators to get this legislation passed would be immense.

Howard Marks is now "buying" football teams! Who said value is boring? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/oaktree-says-it-has-taken-ownership-of-inter-milan-football-club

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-22/the-15-minutes-on-a-citi-trading-desk-that-sparked-a-flash-crash?srnd=homepage-americas As a long time software developer this sounds like the real precipitant of the problem was excess false negatives. Its good to generate warning messages to stop users from making significant mistakes. But if your system regularly generates so many false warning messages that it trains users to ignore or override them in common usage, you might be creating more problems than you solve. I wonder if this trader thought nothing would go wrong by over-riding the warnings because the system had trained them to use over-rides to get trades done, and led them to believe if the system allowed the over-ride it was okay. I suspect somewhere buried in the 711 warnings was likely the critical warning that said something like "do you realize you are placing a $444 BILLION DOLLAR ORDER" and they either never saw it or, or didn't see it until after they had over-ridden numerous warnings to get the first billion in sales made. I just replaced my decade old Cayenne with a new Audi SUV (new for me, it's a 2020). And it has a bunch of electronic alerts and warnings, especially when parking. I can't park anywhere, even my garage, without it lighting up and beeping. But the 2nd month I owned the new car I was backing out of a parking space and hit another car. I was shocked and wondered why the alert chimes hadn't sounded to warn me. Then I realized they had. They were so frequent that I had stopped registering them in my brain unless I knew I was really close to something. I never saw the woman backing out at the same time, so when the chimes sounded I never heard them.

This has to have been one of the greatest investment hypothesises of all time. Doesn't matter whether it's failed, what matters is the insanely long time it's had just enough of a pulse to keep hope alive.

I'm thinking any spike in copper prices will help initiate the inevitable switch to wireless power transmission;)

Ruh roh. Is this a signal we've hit the top? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-20/morgan-stanley-s-wilson-capitulates-on-bearish-view-of-us-stocks?fromMostRead=true

I didn't watch the whole video, so I jumped to the wrong conclusion that you thought it was outrageous because he was blowing up a Mosque. No, filming operations isn't acceptable from several perspectives. First, it damages operational security and can be used by the enemy to plan counter-tactics and strategies. I would hope that the IDF at least approved release of the video, that soldiers aren't randomly posting videos. That said, while releasing video of a demolition might serve some purpose, like the IDF wants to send a message? But its not a positive message, and especially not blowing up a mosque. The core reasons for the conflict is religious, no reason to intentionally stir up emotions more. I'm not in the "Israel can do no wrong" camp, I'm in the "Israel is better than their enemies" and fully expect them to live up to it. I think Israel itself is a borderline Theocracy, and thats part of the problem. I look forward to the end of the war hoping that Israel can come to grips with the religious fundamentalists and settlers in their own country that helped fuel the conflicts with Palestinians. And I look forward to Bibi's arrest and imprisonment, not for war crimes, but for corruption.

The main war crime that Putin committed was the invasion of Ukraine, so in an imaginary world where Ukraine started the war that wouldn't have been a crime. How much of the other Russian war crimes we can show that Putin directly ordered or is responsible for I have no idea. Every military force commits crimes at some level. No idea. Not sure why blowing up a Mosque that was being used as a base for military operations against the IDF would be a crime, or wrong in any way.

Depends upon if he wins the war and stays in power or not. Lemay himself said if the Allies had lost he'd have been executed for war crimes. The allies deliberately targeted civilian areas to reduce the Axis economic production capacity and morale. Dresden and Tokyo are the most obvious examples. In the case of Israel I see them attempting to be very selective in the targets they attack, even though Hamas puts its military assets directly in civilian areas including hospitals to try to shield them. Any military position should be fair game, regardless of how many civilians are nearby, and that would still be vastly superior morally to the carpet bombing the Allies inflicted in WW2. At the beginning of the conflict IDF intelligence was making phone calls to Palestinian civilians to warn them that an attack was inbound for military positions in their apartment buildings, and giving them time to warn neighbors and evacuate. Not sure if they are still doing that, as it had to have lost them targets and cost Israeli lives, but it is just one in a long list of examples that shows the IDF is attempting to reduce civilian casualties as much as possible. While they should always try to reduce civilian casualties they should never attempt to "minimize" them. That just keeps Hamas operating longer and the war going longer. The only one would can end the civilian deaths is Hamas, by surrendering and signing a peace agreement that recognizes Israels right to exist. Any peace short of that just restarts the rocket attacks within a few months turning Palestinians into human shields again.

Is it still April 1st? This is so hilarious it doesn't seem real to me. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-20/seafood-chain-red-lobster-files-for-bankruptcy-protection-lweh7tpj?srnd=homepage-americas

I don't know what Hwang's results were but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the comparison was done against Buffett's most recent results, not his 35% annualized first 30 years. And the comparison was certainly not done on a risk adjusted basis.

If Bibi is a war criminal, then so were Bomber Harris, Curtis Lemay, Churchill, FDR and Truman.

Yea, the conclusion isn't true (for investors). The problem is that Medallion could never scale, it was always limited to $5B to $10B in capital. An investor couldn't annualize 66% on an investment in Rentech because of its liquidity cap. You could earn 66% (minus 5% annual fee, and 44% performance fee) on your principle every year, but your interest could only be reinvested elsewhere, making maybe 10% annualized. This is why only employees were allowed to invest for most of its life. We should call Jim Simons an arbitrageur and a market maker before calling him an investor. It seems like Renaissance has a very effective set of trading/arbing strategies that makes money almost every year, with the only limitation in trade and market sizes. It reminds me of Buffett during the partnership days, as it seemed like his results were very disconnected from the market and every year he was profitable, presumably because he was focusing on special situations instead of long term investments.

This can't be real. It must be AI. I'm not talking just about the video, but also the resume.

CNBC said 65%. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a SurveyMonkey online survey doesn't cut it. This is a press release masquerading as science.

Whoops, missed this. Carlyle capitulated, TJ raises the flag on another victory but still need to see how the business responds to loosening the leash. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/complete-solaria-signs-term-sheet-120000656.html

I've added Complete Solaria to my watch list, I'm curious to see how their cost cuts play out. If TJ can stabilize them so that BK is off the table and future dilution predictable I might bite. I would never bet against TJ, and always root for him.

I just skimmed Complete Solaria's 10K, and wow, TJ has his work cut out for him. I understand they've reduced costs significantly this year, but it's a mess.

I would never advocate turning our backs on Israel until this war is won, but we have ZERO interest in the middle east. Our national wealth has been drained and our military has been used as an unpaid security force by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc. Time for them to start working out things among themselves and enforcing freedom of navigation on their own. After the war Israel can decide whether it's a theocracy or a free democracy and proceed accordingly. We should pull out of every base in the middle east unless we start getting paid for our services, and reduce our flood of aid to arab states and israel to a trickle.

TJ Rodgers is a national treasure.

One hope is that the end result empowers moderates in both Palestine and Israel. I'm hoping Hamas and Hezbollah will never be given the reins to political power again, and Bibi is retired to face his corruption charges.

looks like the other shoe dropped. Either this is just to placate public opinion, or we might see one of these guys mount his own desperate insurrection to save his neck. https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-fires-russia-defense-intelligence-chiefs-sergei-shoigu-nikolai-patrushev/w