nsx5200

This showed up in one of my random searches: BLDR - Builders FirstSource They've been buying up their shares since 2022 and seems to be committing to more share buy back. They don't seem to have a long history of share buyback, and they've been making acquisitions using their shares, so all those buyback have essentially reversed the dilution from the recent acquisition(s). Their target market is the professional builders instead of the DIY crowd for home building, which HD is trying to get into by acquiring SRS earlier this year. The basic stat for that SRS acquisition is roughly EV $18b on $10b sale (so roughly 1.8). Equivalent stat for BLDR is about $24b on $17b sale (so roughly 1.4). Their numbers are down, due to a general builder industry down-cycle, as confirmed by looking at some builder ETFs. I currently have no position in it and am trying to do some DD on it. This is a fairly new industry to me, and would appreciate if people with experience in this area can weigh in on their experience or rumors about the company.

All systems have issues, that will be a given, but according to reports I've read, most of the systems in modern countries outside of the U.S. have a better outcome at a cheaper price. There are tons of material left and right, but from I've read in the past decades, they tend to say say what I stated above. Here's a center left-leaning report from the Commonwealth Fund: Their summary highlights: "- Health care spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be far higher in the United States than in other high-income countries. - The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates. - The U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average. - Americans see physicians less often than people in most other countries and have among the lowest rate of practicing physicians and hospital beds per 1,000 population. - Screening rates for breast and colorectal cancer and vaccination for flu in the U.S. are among the highest, but COVID-19 vaccination trails many nations. Health care spending, both per person and as a share of GDP, continues to be far higher in the United States than in other high-income countries" That's the sad truth about cost of healthcare in the U.S. Even if you make a decent income, it still might not be enough if something catastrophic happens to you, like in Breaking Bad. For many, it is choosing to die, or most likely in the case above, choosing to let somebody close die, because you're not in the top X% in net wealth. From a personal retirement standpoint, considering getting a citizenship in another modern system is a serious consideration in order to mitigate this risk. To most in the U.S., this is simply out of reach due the lack of saving and investment.

Everybody will eventually use health care, so why not make everybody pay into the system while they are able? That means make everybody paying for health insurance, sick or not. If you know of a vampire or zombie that's been living forever and does not use health care at all, then we can probably make a special exception him/her/it. I suspect even a vampire can run into a batch of bad blood once in a century due to global pandemics and can use some healthcare as well though. I've never ran into one, so it's speculation. if you have met one, please share. When everybody pays into the system, then you might do a single-payer to gain economy of scale to negotiate the prices down. Without universal health care, in which Obamacare is a step towards, then the incentives are misaligned between health and cost. We're seeing the outcome from that misalignment. As to the effectiveness of a government program, we don't have to look far. We can look at Medicare, or NHS from UK, program in Canada, etc... almost all those programs have better alignment of incentives, and thus have better outcomes, price and health-wise.

Anybody have experience with book summarizer services like Blinkist or sumizeit? Tempted to get the service to help triage books/articles to digest. NotebookLM is my current go to, but if a paid service has better quality, or at least access to more material at the same quality, I might go for it.

So we should see shady companies start paying more for security for their senior management. It'll be interesting to see which company will self-select to be in this group, and avoid investing with them.

Thanks for the link to the video. I think win-win-win model is such a powerful moat because all the incentives are aligned. I'll have to dig up a thread in the General Discussions to see if there were past efforts to identify such business. But back to DG. Looking at DG's comments in their reddit, it does seem like there are quite a bit of losers in their model. In fact, I think their business model relies on some party losing in order for their business to do well, which in the long-run can bring about some regulatory actions to change their business model.

Classic Jared Diamond question with his theory in Germs, Guns and Steel: NotebookLM summary, "Europe's political fragmentation, while seemingly a weakness, ultimately proved to be an advantage in fostering innovation. While one ruler might reject a new idea, another might embrace it, leading to competition and progress." An monolithic autocractic style government can go down the wrong path for a long time, whereas competition amongst fragmented governments will weed out the bad ideas and the good ideas copied, rather quickly, or risk elimination. If I remember correctly, ancient Chinese rulers erroneously ended their sea exploration when they found no other civilization comparable to their, and essentially stopped the flow of new ideas and competition until the post industrial era when Europe landed in China. "The Last Emperor" captures that time period when old China and the new European-centric world met again, albeit from a limited point of view. Now, the world's gotten much smaller due to the advanced global communications we have, and competition is now on a global scale, essentially for all to see in real-time. I would claim that all the world leaders now are aware of the competitions, and are no longer so inner-looking. The true risk for U.S. and Chinese leaders is to make sure they're not selecting their advisors with yes-men, or they risk getting stuck in local minimas. It makes looking at Trump's cabinet selections a bit more interesting from that point of view.

Poor leadership since Reagan https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-cant-the-us-build-ships NotebookLM: "Main Themes: Historical decline: The U.S. shipbuilding industry has struggled to compete commercially since the Civil War, marked by a long decline punctuated by brief wartime booms. High input costs: High labor and steel costs in the U.S. make it difficult to compete with countries that leverage lower-cost labor, like China and South Korea. Cultural factors: A lack of national drive to make the U.S. shipbuilding industry internationally competitive, combined with protectionist policies and union resistance to technological advancements, have hampered progress. Innovation without commercialization: Despite pioneering key shipbuilding innovations, the U.S. has failed to translate these innovations into successful industries. National security concerns: The decline of the U.S. shipbuilding industry poses a significant national security risk, particularly in the face of growing Chinese shipbuilding capacity." The article list the miss opportunities for the US ship building industries going as far back as pre-Civil war era. The Reagan action is just one of the them. Some hopeful news along the lines of country/industry specialization shared amongst the value-aligned countries: "Now, the US is looking to Asia's[Korean] shipyards to help close that [ship building] gap as the two superpowers[U.S., China] move closer to a potential conflict." Inverting the problem, here are some reasons why China's shipbuilding got so big: https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-shipbuilding-power-players-making-warships-at-a-rapid-pace-2024-9 "Its most significant shipyards produce both military and commercial vessels, leveraging industry for defense means" I don't have references to it, but from what I read in the past, the Chinese government's been making intentional decades-long investment in this area, similar to what they're currently doing with EV and AI.

I tried to read his 2023 letter to client: - I find it really odd that the 2023 report spent 150 pages, but pretty much didn't explain their second biggest holding (DG) except for that it was (essentially) cheap that can be fit in less than one page. I stopped digesting it around page 50, and just fed it into notebooklm. No real insight came back from notebookLM either. Not sure if informing his client of his investment holdings is the primary goal of the letter.

All those examples you gave reminded me of reading annual reports/sec filings. These days, I dump them into notebooklm and query it for summary and answers. I heard that investment houses were experimenting with AI to try to gain an edge. If they're successful, we may start to see the edge from deep diving on SEC filings shrink, forcing some of us to evolve. Or we all can just buy bitcoin and call it done.

Meditation and exercise has passed the test of time (thousands of years), unlike many modern (within last hundred years) dietary recommendations, which is where you'll see a lot of the junk sciences. We humans evolve very slowly (on the order of tens of thousands of years, if not longer) to make such practices obsolete. I would claim that science is just starting to catch up to the these ancient practices.

Some more China news, for those that care... https://www.wsj.com/world/china-xi-jinping-latin-america-acf6dbc1?mod=hp_lead_pos7 "[...] in a region [South America] where China has replaced the U.S. as the dominant trading partner for most big economies[...]Beijing has signed up most of Latin America and the Caribbean to an infrastructure program that excludes the U.S" "China is a voracious buyer of Argentina’s lithium, crude oil from Venezuela and Brazilian iron ore and soybeans" "The region’s nations are generally sincere in their desire for warm relations with the U.S., but they are often seen as a secondary priority in Washington. Beijing’s diplomats and executives, meanwhile, actively engage with local and national governments almost regardless of their political leanings." "The U.S., Feeley [U.S. ambassador, early 2016] said, “looks at Latin America as a problem not an opportunity.”" "China is crowding in with manufactured exports[...]Already some countries are raising tariffs on Chinese goods" It looks like China's making inroad into accessing South America's natural resources while providing additional export outlet. The in-article video also provided more details on the deep-water port that China's invested in via their BRI, as well as the ramp-down of BRI investments due to China's internal financial troubles. With Trump in office, I suspect Latin America will continue to be seen as a problem.

Just more evidence that exercise has all sorts of benefits: https://neurosciencenews.com/fitness-neuroscience-23228/ "Aerobic Exercise and Brain Volume: Regular aerobic exercise like running can increase the size of the hippocampus and preserve vital brain matter, improving spatial memory and cognitive function"

https://news.mit.edu/2024/when-muscles-work-out-they-help-neurons-grow-1112 "Now, MIT engineers have found that exercise can also have benefits at the level of individual neurons. They observed that when muscles contract during exercise, they release a soup of biochemical signals called myokines. In the presence of these muscle-generated signals, neurons grew four times farther compared to neurons that were not exposed to myokines. These cellular-level experiments suggest that exercise can have a significant biochemical effect on nerve growth." I guess this also serve as a reminder to keep up with your exercise routine, or if you don't have one, start one.

There's a trade-off between security and practical usability. Ideally, you have a separate machine that you do important transactions on, and don't do your everyday browsing on, but it's probably not very practical. I've heard about browser attacks where browser cookies have been acquired, and 2FA bypassed that way. Some techniques to mitigate that is to always force 2FA during login (similar to what the US TreasuryDirect does), and uncheck those "remember login/don't ask for extra verification" boxes. That avoids saving those authenticated logins in the cookies. Using a separate browser profile for the important stuff adds more task-level segregation protection as well.

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/luxury-designer-increasing-costs-quality-34263746: "Has Luxury Lost Its Shine?" "For the last two decades, they have increased sales by “democratizing” access to luxury. By pushing into cheaper categories such as cosmetics, sunglasses and small handbags, they have intentionally drawn in millions of new middle-class consumers" "The ultrarich, on the other hand, don’t tend to shout about their wealth as much. [...] One study found that for every $5,000 increase in the price of luxury goods, the brand’s logo shrinks by a centimeter" "But social media is making it harder for luxury brands to maintain exclusivity." Classic trade-off. Short-term gain at the cost of exclusivity. It seems like to do well long-term in this space, you have to be the most exclusive like Ferrari and be okay with growing slowly.

https://news.mit.edu/2024/generative-ai-lacks-coherent-world-understanding-1105 "Despite its impressive output, generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world" https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/30/24283516/waymo-google-gemini-llm-ai-robotaxi "Waymo explores using Google’s Gemini to train its robotaxis" It looks like Google/Waymo is trying to improve FSD by bolting different AI systems together when none of the AI systems seems to understand the underlying models yet. FSD still seems a bit more of a science project than something that's production ready.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3285238/chinas-stimulus-seems-be-trickling-through-it-too-early-tell "Indices of sentiment in China’s manufacturing sector both returned to expansion in October, while non-manufacturing also improved" "The Caixin/S&P Global manufacturing PMI echoed the official survey, beating projections with a rise to 50.3 in October from 49.3 the previous month." Don't know how much to trust these numbers given that it's from SCMP. Will need to keep an eye out for more independent reports to see if it's true. https://www.australianmanufacturing.com.au/jp-morgan-global-manufacturing-decline-persists-as-new-orders-shrink-for-fourth-month/ "The moderation in the PMI score, however, suggested a slight easing in the rate of contraction. Notably, China showed signs of improved operating conditions, while declines in the US and the euro area slowed." "Major manufacturing regions, including China, the US, the euro area, Japan, and the UK, all reported declining export volumes, pointing to faltering global trade dynamics." "Employment levels declined across various regions, including China, the U.S., and the euro area, marking the steepest rate of job losses since August 2020" Note that the PMI that JP Morgan appears the same as the PMI from Caixin/S&P Global manufacturing PMI. So it looks like the decoupling is continuing, and the slow down in China might be moderating. Trump will play the role of Chaos Monkey to stress both the U.S. and Chinese systems.

Don't know about crazy tariff, but I would expect some increased tariff, and reduced trade. Don't know how much it would impact Europe, but China will have to find new places for those exports. This will challenge the Chinese government's policy of offsetting their reduced consumer demand by increasing export manufacturing capability. It'll probably impact Xi's timeline to take over the world, just not sure if it speeds it up, or if it slows it down. If the House goes to the GOP as well, then IMHO, we'll see a lot more challenge to Chinese-centric companies in the U.S. with a lot more questionable laws passed to restrict that. Maybe if they grease the Trump world, they can get away with it, just like in an autocrat system.

My apologies if I sounded too harsh. I still appreciated reading about new breakthroughs/changes from China, even if it might be at the detriment of Western world's interest. Adding the brain power of 1.5b people to the world does, in the long-run, benefit humanity as a whole, and that's always a plus. A little bit(or a lot) of competition also pushes the incumbents to evolve, and that is also a plus, whether in business or in governing style.

My limited understanding is that to do well in China, you must have buy-in from the people of power (government/party official). This leads to well known secret to have to grease the wheel(bribes). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi matters a lot more in China than in other systems like in the U.S. I was under the impression that non-Asians actually don't need grease the wheel as much since it would discourage FDI. I guess based on your experience, that might not be the case anymore. Thanks for your sharing your experience.

Yes I have. My minor criticism is not with you posting, but rather what you post has been posted in the past, with, IMHO, no real additional new viewpoints or ideas. Every time new ideas/review/criticism is brought into this forum that might be somewhat critical of China, it bring about a boilerplate-storm that denigrate those posts without actually providing any constructive feedback. I don't know about others, but that type of behavior lead me to be more hesitant to post anything that might seem critical of China, even though I'd be interested in gaining more perspective or feedback outside of the "that's all wrong, China is awesome". Again, I value the freely given viewpoints given in the forums, and my minor ask is to reduce the boilerplate storms. If not, that's okay with me too, as on the grand scheme of things, it's a nothing-burger. Would it be more acceptable if I created a different thread outside of this thread that's titled something along the lines of "China Criticisms" to avoid the type of boilerplate posts? Let me know. TIA.

Have you even been in China, Luke? Even travelling to autocractic or places where the rule of law is weak can give you a sense of the forces at play, and lets you better understand the type of decisions common people make. Combine that with economic data, and you would have a fairer presentation of those places. "Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled" - prophet Muhammed

Thanks for the article. Here's the NotebookLM summary of it: The article hits many of the points that Luke's been saying. The biggest criticism that I have with that article is that it's looking at mainly the Chinese advancements that was built on the past period where China was more free market based and ignore the systemic change with Xi, which changes the trend. We do see some rollback of those changes, such as the tact that the Chinese government took recently to try to resolve the Chinese Indian border dispute (https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/asia/india-china-border-agreement-intl-hnk/index.html). Like what the article quote from Munger: "show me the incentives, and I will tell you the outcome.” If the Chinese people feel like they can not benefit from the labor of their hard work, they will simply be less productive, which we see from hard economic numbers, and not from simple news reporting or blog postings. At the end of the day, the hard numbers speaks a lot more than word in articles...

You lost me. What lead you to believe that somebody's arguing that China's turning over a new leaf? If I was not explicit enough regarding my comment, then it's my fault. I was pointing out that even in a heavily top-down system, there are feedback pathways, one of which is the collective power of the personal purse mentioned in the article. A weak pathway, but nevertheless one that can grow to be more influential . Your observation regarding China is applicable to all history. East and West. Dark ages, Russian/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza... most people are just trying to survive. We see it in the U.S. as well, with tons of people barely getting by, leading to the rise of the demagogues.