ValueArb

Agreed it is so good, esp at end when Jeff has just enough stubble that she mistakes him for Harvey Weinstein, combining two of their best jokes of the season.

One thing to look for when you are reading new 10Ks is a deferred revenue liability in the balance sheet, esp. a long term deferred revenue liability. Its almost always some form of float.

You can't talk about one of Elon's companies anymore without politics coming up. I wish he would be a lot more like Edison, head down in his labs focused on making new innovations, emerging only briefly to knife a competitor or former business partner in the back, then back to work.

Poor Slorg. Basically the way crypto works is that a guy named Slorg makes up a token named Slerf, which is distinguished from other tokens by having a cartoon sloth logo. You send $10 million of Solana crypto tokens to Slorg, and he makes a note to himself that he owes you some Slerfs. Then he accidentally flushes that note down the toilet and, due to the irreversible nature of the blockchain, you get no Slerfs and your money is permanently gone, though Slorg is very sorry. If this were a company, and Slerf was a stock, this would all be bad: It is bad for a company to lose all of the money it raises in a stock offering. (Also, though, it would probably be reversible. If a company just lost its list of shareholders, it could probably, like, go back through its emails and reconstruct the list.) But Slerf is not a company or a stock: It is a crypto token, so absolutely nothing matters. Except that this is all sort of funny, and attention-grabbing, so of course Slerf went up. Arnold: “This mistake was very good for attention, and attention is the true value of any memecoin. So the obvious thing happened and the new tokens that were released shot up around 5,000%.” You could spend another 10 hours and 55 minutes pondering this but I do not recommend it.

What are dogwifhat’s fundamentals? Well: Its logo is a dog, with a hat. If people kick in enough money, maybe they can put a picture of the dog with the hat on the Las Vegas Sphere, which might encourage more people to kick in more money.

Some interesting/funny crypto observations by Matt Levine in todays column. First: Well. Sure. Look, I myself have spent at least 11 hours online learning about crypto, and I do not want to be too skeptical about crypto education. But these numbers strike me as reasonable. Of course the CFA program should be harder than the crypto program. One model that you could have for crypto is that it is finance without the content.

7) What is their moat? This is good to call out individually since it is an important component of 1, 2, 5 & 6. 8 ) What is the catalyst? Once you've identified value you still need to avoid value traps. So in addition you want to identify some price influencer that will drive price towards value over time. It can be as simple as strong future earnings growth or more specific events like up-ratings, index inclusions, dividends, buybacks, sale or liquidation.

We have no evidence to support this belief. By "no evidence" its short hand for compelling evidence commensurate with the claim, so the more unlikely the claim the stronger the required evidentiary standard. Sure we can find isolated instances where "the pentagon" or at least high ranking US military have lied to the public, but the number of cases of that is dwarfed by the many times members of the pentagon have told the truth. So we clearly can't accept everything they say uncritically, just as we can't dismiss everything they say uncritically, but our balance should be opposite of what you say here, to tentatively accept their claims until we have compelling evidence not to. We have no compelling evidence they have any agenda other than to do their jobs. Again we have no evidence to support this. There are millions of government employees, there are millions of US military members, they all don't think the same and they all don't have the same agenda, they don't all want the public to think the same thing, but they all have jobs to do. To disbelieve the latest pentagon report on UFOs you have to have specific evidence that the specific people involved have mislead the public, have an agenda to mislead the public, etc. Try turning it around. Assume a team of respected academic scientists reviewed a bunch of UFO sightings and produced a report finding that a small number that were so well documented they were very unlikely they were faked, false, or mistaken, and had specific attributes that can only point to being evidence of an alien intelligence. If I said I don't believe it because UFO proponents always lie, would I be responding rationally to it? If you point out that's an irrational statement and I say, yea but "academics lie a lot too because they all have agendas" and produce a few random cases of academics caught laying, wouldn't you say, "what does that have to do with this very respected team of accomplished scientists"? I think we'd agree that I'd be wrong to make blanket assumptions in this manner, that the only way I could find the academics less than trustworthy is if they themselves had specific histories of making misleading or unconfirmed claims. If they genuinely had unblemished records, I would have to tentatively accept their claim may be true until their study can be fully vetted. Only then based on the results of complete vetting either fully accept it as the best explanation or not. And if anyone who has vetted it claims it as untrue, preferably I'd read the study myself and review all the claimed facts, to decide who I agree with rather than using appeal to authority fallacy of choosing the authority I prefer most to match my world view. So in the case of the Pentagon report, instead of dismissing it out of hand why not read it? What work did they actually do? What did they possibly miss or get wrong? Does it make any statements consistent with an agenda to produce a pre-ordained result? Look, I'm an atheist, which just means I haven't seen any compelling evidence any god exists. But if that evidence exists I'd sure like to know about it, and I would no longer be an atheist. Same with UFOs, I haven't seen any compelling evidence they are aliens, so I don't believe that but if compelling evidence surfaces I'd be excited to accept it. Finding evidence that overturns commonly held scientific models/theories is how we move our intellectual understanding of the universe forward, and is how many of our most advanced technologies have been derived. A similar example is dark energy and dark matter. We don't have any consensus scientific models to explain the cause of the effects we see in the universe that we labeled with those names. But one day we will likely understand them and it will likely lead to significant scientific and technological advancements (assuming they are all not just measurement errors) and a greater understanding of our place in the universe. So finding things "out of place" that break existing models is the most exciting possible thing for scientists to accomplish, which is why thousands of actual scientists are looking for aliens using scientific methods, with tools like radio and deep space telescopes and actually measurable data. If someone someday does find compelling evidence that we've been visited by aliens, it would be as earth shattering as dark matter and dark energy. Scientists everywhere would be taking next steps to determine how did they get here and where did they go? What evidence of their propulsion technologies do we have? Did they get here at sub-lightspeed velocities and if so how did they survive such a long journey? If they travel at greater than lightspeed how do they accomplish it, and how does it affect causality? Etc, etc. But I just don't let my excitement at the potential of that claim blind me to the weakness of the evidence given for it.

The only thing I can say about Elon and Twitter is that he's tweeted a lot of dumb things at times, and I like the community notes feature he added which I think offers the appropriate balance between allowing mostly unrestricted speech on his private property while providing reasoned pushback to misinformation. That said SpaceX made a pretty big step forward this week with Starship. The major accomplishments that I can see are 1) They solved propellent clog problem on SuperHeavy well enough that it was able to do the flip maneuver and hypersonically fly back to his preplanned landing spot. 2) They solved the fuel leak that led to the fire on Starship when it dumped fuel in the previous test, and Starship was able to achieve its entire planned sub-orbital trajectory until re-entry. 3) They tested the "pez dispensor" door they'll need to use Starship to launch Starlink satellites. 4) Essentially this Starship/SuperHeavy test prototype accomplished everything any other finished commercial launch system does. By putting its last stage into orbit, its basically ready to be used as a fully expendable launch system. 5) Tested fuel transfer between tanks (an important requirement for in orbit refueling key to the HLS and other deep space missions), but as yet I haven't seen any confirmation it was successful yet. On a more minor accomplishment: the added Starlink terminals sent a lot of incredible footage back of the beginning of re-entry, something we've never been able to see before given how the plasma blanket cuts off radio communications during hypersonic re-entry. Where it fell short of a "perfect" mission 1) Couldn't relight enough engines to soft-land SuperHeavy in the ocean. Likely means that an actual landing attempt is at least two more tests away. 2) Had issues controlling attitude in orbit leading to an uncontrolled roll. This is probably why it broke up in re-entry because it wasn't able to keep the heat-shield side facing into the hypersonic torch stream. I'm still a bit surprised by the break up since the stainless steel still should have been fairly robust at handling the heat of re-entry. Makes me wonder if the break-up was caused by the flight termination system triggering because it regarded the roll as out of flight path requirements. I'm also wondering if the roll was caused by the fuel transfer test changing the center of gravity, and if so why the thrusters weren't able to control it, so they might need upgrading. 3) Pez dispenser didn't seem to work correctly. Scott Manley noted that the Starship seemed to be air-tight and holding significant atmosphere, which was unplanned and opening the Pez door seemed to release a bunch of gas. If so it might be as simple as drilling some holes in the upper part of Starship's skin. 4) Again we don't know if the fuel transfer test worked yet, if it didn't that needs to be addressed. So most of the things that still aren't working perfectly are only necessary for re-use. Based on payload.coms construction cost estimates, a fully expended Starship/SuperHeavy stack has a construction cost of about $100M including engines so a launch with fuel/pad/launch management barely costs more than that, say $110M, but should be able to put 200 tons into low earth orbit. That's more than double the payload of the SLS at a per launch cost of 1/20th to 1/40th as much. I expect to see SpaceX to launch Starlink satellites on Starship this year as a more detailed test of its capabilities. Once they can land SuperHeavy and Starship, the hardware cost per launch drops from $100M to something like $1M to $5M depending upon how many flights each can be amortized over. Combined with refurbishment/maintenance costs between flights it would probably end up near $10M/flight, which is like a science fiction cost for a 150 ton payload to orbit. And we might get there as soon as the end of the year based on their goal to test prototypes every 2 months this year.

Again, 1) we have numerous cases of UFO sightings being mis-reported visual effects, planes, balloons, etc and strong evidence of UFO promoters willfully providing false information or even manufacturing outright frauds (Alien Autopsy, Mexican "alien" corpses, Bob Lazar, etc). 2) We have only allegations of government UFO coverups, nothing factual, despite such conspiracies requiring the silence of many thousands of current and former government employees. In the example of David Grusch's allegations, everything he's presented is hearsay, someone told him someone else saw something. The only reason to believe in a government conspiracy is if you want to believe UFOs are actual alien technology or entities visiting earth, because the actual evidence for aliens visiting earth is so undeniably weak. But if you only want to believe in things that are likely to be true, you would require a far higher evidentiary bar before you could accept such an elaborate conspiracy theory.

Sure the government might be lying about UFOs, but we don't have any evidence they are. But we have tons of evidence that leading UFO proponents have lied repeatedly.

I fully believe alien life exists in the universe and most likely in our galaxy. But all available physics and evidence strongly infers that UAPs and UFOs have nothing to do with aliens. First, traveling any faster than a small fraction of the speed of light is incredibly difficult and requires massive amounts of energy. Traveling anywhere near the speed of light is basically impossible, it would require so much energy you'd need an entire star to power a tiny space-craft. And even if you could do that, travel still takes thousands of years to reach earth from 90% of our own galaxy, let alone from even farther away in the rest of the universe. Lastly, if you are patient enough to do all of that, the enormous energy output required to slow your alien craft would be easily detectable from earth. Lastly, going faster than the speed of light would break casuality in the universe and we've never ever seen anything that indicates that can happen. And if somehow aliens can beat all of that and get here undetected, they went to all this effort to play hide and seek with a species that is no more powerful than an ant to them? Whenever I talk about actual physics with a UFO nut, they always pivot to "well the aliens have advanced technologies based on advanced physics that allows them to do things we haven't yet discovered". Well if we are making up magic technologies and physics then in that case UFOs are just as likely to be angels sent by a god. Why assume aliens when your assumption is supernatural magic exists? There are thousands of legitimate scientists scanning the skies every day for light and radio transmissions that would indicate whether alien civilizations exist anywhere. We have so far come up empty, doesn't mean they don't exist somewhere (unless the Great Filter is real) but it makes it even harder to believe they are flying around on Earth.

My favorite documentary on how the "dead hand" works.

Russian military hardware is out of date because it was built by the Soviets, and wasn't so junky 40 years ago. I'm not arguing that europe or Poland is in imminent danger, just that Russia + Ukraine + Georgia + etc gives Putin a lot more resources and GDP to build better weapons with and a lot more cannon fodder for the next conflict. Putin has prepared his forces for invasion of Ukraine first, what comes next will be opportunistic. His long (historically inaccurate) screeds on how Ukraine has always been part of Russia lays the ground work for the first part and is absolutely the act of an imperialist. The fact that Putin miscalculated so far doesn't mean he's miscalculated entirely. He vastly over-estimated the capabilities of his klepto-weakened military at the start of the war, and he vastly under-estimated world response and support for Ukraine (or he assumed the war would be over in days, well before anyone could do anything). But he has pivoted to meat-grinder tactics and lower tech weaponry (such as glide bombs) that can still bring him victory in Ukraine over time if Western support for Ukraine lags. What NATO response? Germany won't even send Ukraine useful weapons. Putin would happily take a few years as a breather to rebuild, tamp down on domestic dissent, and then when Ukraine is left alone again try another lightning raid with all the lessons learned to break Ukrainian lines and overwhelm Kyiv and dash to the sea. He's if anything a patient man. Ironically the german army was mostly shite early in the war. Their tanks sucked, most of their planes were mediocre, etc. But they were able to pick on one smaller opponent after another, and when they finally had to take on equal weight opponents in France and the UK they had battle hardened troops ready to exploit a single strategic mis-step against a france that really wasn't ready to fight. Once blooded, the Brits kicked Germany's behind in the battle of britain, and exposed most of the German airforce as inadequate. But by that point almost all of europe had been lost. I'd agree with all of this if it was likely that the peace would last for a long time. I'm just arguing that it won't last long, and there is little reason to believe it will given Putin's track record of lies. And then you've got far more Ukrainian refugees, casualties, torture and rape victims as Ukraine collapses quickly in the next assault. If we want to sign a peace treaty that leaves the border where it is now, it has to include Ukraine membership in NATO and the EU. That's the only possible way to be confident of Ukraine's survival and doesn't just defer even more death, torture and rape a few years. It wouldn't be just, or right, but it would give us confidence the death will stop for a long while.

There is no path to truth if we only accept claims that support what we believe and always disbelieve claims that don't support what we believe.

You are the king of whataboutisms, the Soviets put nuclear missiles in Cuba. We didn't have a single base let alone nukes in Ukraine when Putin invaded. No one believes Scholz, just excuses because he doesn't want to do it. And why is germany even in NATO if it can't ever fight to defend anyone, anywhere?

If Kujat is highly respected then you have a very low bar for respect. No credible source thinks Ukraine has lost more men than Russia. Of course Ukraine needs to keep recruiting, they are about one fifth the size of Russia and Russia is using meat-grinder tactics to trade mass amounts of their own troops to make minor advances, even a 4-1 kill ratio is to Russia's advantage. "Successful"? Negotiations that would have ended up surrendering most of Ukraine and rendering it easily conquered were successful? The only reason those "negotiations" occurred was that Zelensky didn't know if the west would give them enough support to hold on, which is why those terms were so terrible. You are directly repeating Putin misinformation just like Kujat does. If a free democracy in Ukraine is a "significant danger" to Putins security what does that tell you about Putin? You give up when you say there is no response to a country with nuclear weapons. When Germany falls it will be without a shot, a simple Putin threat will do it. Stop it. A surprise attack by a techologically superior Russian military against a Ukrainian military that was mostly unmobilized and still operating almost entirely inherited and obsolete Soviet equipment a generation older than what the Russian military used. Compare the Airforces, Ukraine started the war with obsolete SU-27s/Mig-29s and a smattering of SU-24Ms/Su-25s. Russia has been flying MIG-31s, MIG-35s, SU-34s and SU-35s. Not to mention the SU-57;) Ukrainian tank corp at the start of the war was almost entirely (1,300) T-64s, even though some were upgraded the T-64 was introduced in early 1960s. Their T72s were all in storage, ad they only had 100 T-80s. Russia started with thousands of T-72s, T-80s and T-90s and even has the Armata (the worlds greatest tank ;). He's constantly spoken about how Ukraine is a false creation by the Poles, German Empire, Austrio-Hungary, Bolsheviks, etc. That Ukraine and Russia are "one people" that need to be "brought closer together". Its all clearly coded to justify conquering all of Ukraine. Then we'll start hearing about how the Poles or Georgians are naturally descended from the Rus, etc, etc rinse and repeat. https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/ukraine-history-fact-checking-putin-513812/ http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181

Taurus missiles have GPS control systems that allow Germany to lock them from striking anywhere they regard as off-limits. Germany can literally send them locked with these limitations. And Ukrainian engineers have mastered every piece of Western technology given them in record time, the "highly qualified personnel" excuse is just another excuse.

You claimed that his palace would only be endangered if Crimea fell, I showed you thats not true, so you reply with a whataboutism. Another whataboutism. The US (or NATO) has never had military bases in Crimea, or Ukraine. AFAIK its never even been seriously proposed. So it's not a justification for invading Ukraine.

We aren't disagreeing at all, I'm just pointing out that the way to end these endless rounds of atrocities is for the victors to be gracious in victory. I will say I doubt that if the Nazi armies had committed zero atrocities in the Soviet Union whether it would have changed much in how the Soviet Armies behaved in victory. These armies were led by the same men who ordered the unprovoked Katyn massacres, ordered the brutal meat-grinder tactics that won the war at huge casualties, they weren't going to hold back their surviving peasant infantry from doing as they pleased.

Its amusing to me that you think the US can't strike Putin's palace any time it wants whether Ukraine controls Crimea or not. We could hit it with 100 tomahawks today if Biden gave the order. Seriously, you are justfying a genocidal war because the genocider in chief "deserves to feel more comfortable" in his klepto palace built from the sweat of Russian serfs.

He was on the board of an organization funded by an inner member of Putin's kleptocracy. Clearly he was well compensated for it, whether he was influenced by that relationship is a legitimate question. Do you think its absurd to question whether the Clintons were influenced by the Saudi giving hundreds of millions to their charitable foundation, or Trump by Saudi giving billions to fund his son in laws investment fund? This is a question I always have for Germans. How many of your political leaders do you think have been compromised by the FSB or the old Stasi? How many have long hidden ties to the USSR/Russia, both financial and philosophical, that lead them to be favorable to Putins agenda? Its a legitimate question in the US for right wing Republicans that parrot Putin's talking points, are they are getting funded or supported by FSB agents? Maria Butina is just one example of an infiltrator who targeted key republican operatives and influencers, and who only got caught because she was so obvious. Its reasonable to ask how many more are out there. So how is it a "disgrace" to ponder how deep FSB links penetrate German leadership and how many more Gerhard Schroeders are still in power? You will have to summarize it for me, I don't weigh the opinions of military organizations that haven't fought a war in 80 years (and lost every one over the last 150 years) very highly. And given the tiny amount of military funding in Germany and Austria, their militaries are closer to amateurs than professionals at this stage. How nuts is it that Russia fires hundreds of large warhead stand-off weapons into Ukraine at both civilian and military targets from Russia proper every single day, and you don't think that deserves any response? You just expect Ukraine to endure this endless genocidal assault, that's nuts. Russia is a threat whether you fight them or not. Appeasement never works. World war 2 started in a large part because Neville Chamberlin signed a "peace" agreement instead of meeting uncontained aggression with steel. His mistake in not being willing to accept some losses early led to the deaths of nearly 100M people. This is a logical fallacy called an attacking the motive. I don't trade european stocks and it wouldn't matter if I did. What matters is whether a cowardly course of appeasement and abandonment of Ukraine is going to lead to better outcomes than ensuring it survives and wins, and sends a message to dictators everywhere that free countries will put aside their differences to defeat them if they invade any of them. Appeasement sends a message that they can can flip countries like dominos, one after the other, without any significant response until they are too powerful to stop. Japan repeatedly said they'd negotiate in 1945, but only if they were allowed to keep raping China, keep the Emperor as their supreme leader, their military and the right wing political dictatorship intact. How would that have worked out had the Allies agreed? Putin has made his terms clear. He gets to keep all the territory he's stolen, rebuild his forces now far closer to Kyiv and Ukraines remaining cities, and we just have to pray he doesn't break his promise to not attack again in five years when his military is fully rebuilt. How could anyone agree to any peace that involves any of those components, its essentially surrendering the rest of Ukraine at some time in the future? Why don't you outline a peace agreement that has any chance of Putins agreement that isn't simply setting up Ukraine to be fully subsumed within Russia within the decade?

The problem is that Soviet soldiers weren't raping the German soldiers guilty of war crimes, avenging atrocities with more atrocities doesn't solve any problem. The Japanese military committed unspeakable atrocities against civilians and soldiers, chinese and allied, but the smartest thing MacArthur ever did was to keep his troops under strict discipline, treat the conquered japanese with dignity, and limit the response to war crimes a few show trials. That helped break the cycle of vengeance. Even if there were thousands of Japanese officers and leaders who got off scot free for their war crimes it helped bind the US and Japan as allies and friends despite the horrific actions both sides committed against each other during the war (fire bombings, nuclear bombs). The next time we see a Russian leader behave with such intelligence, foresight, and compassion will be the first time a Russian leader has ever done so. Here's hoping that when the Ukrainian military recaptures their lost territories they channel MacArthur, not Stalin, in how they treat their defeated foes and maybe it leads to a much longer period of peace in the future.

Uh, turns out they aren't here. https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1237100622/pentagon-ufo-report-no-evidence-alien-technology

SpaceX is planning to launch another Starship prototype thursday morning. If anyone doesn't know what it is, its largest rocket ever built and designed to be first fully reusable rocket ever. Or at least first economically fully reusable rocket, the Shuttle had to spend 4 months in between flights fixing tiles and doing total engine rebuilds, and could only reuse parts from its SRBs. If Starship achieves its design goals, it will be able to turn around and fly again in days, if not hours, and its launch cost will be a fraction of the Falcon 9, a much smaller rocket that is already the least expensive in history. https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-third-launch-how-to-watch-online