rohitc99
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Posts posted by rohitc99
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4 minutes ago, Vish_ram said:
If I had a penny for everytime someone predicted a downfall for US, I would be a multi-millionaire.
Most people lack imagination on understanding as to why US is great. US has its flaws and chickens haven't come home to roost for fiscal deficit crisis. Even when this crisis erupts, you may have runaway inflation for a decade and then they'll fix stuff and move on.
Still capital and people flow to this country. Now they are the unmatched world superpower. They lead the world in technology, biotech & numerous other fields.
I remember attending the 2006 annual berkie meeting and everyone carried a book "Collapse of the dollar". Well, nothing happened.
One thing is clear, there is a huge cottage industry that makes money selling the gloom/doom prediction. You can bet your last $ that this industry will thrive no matter what (the Granthams/Hussmans et al).
Most of political stuff that media overplays is just noise. The cultural issues are just fluff. The divisions we see are just superficial in economic terms. The MSM knows how to make $ off of it.
+1 The US is bad, but wait till you see other countries
the last time i checked there are very few countries where people are lining up to get in
The reason for my optimism is that any craziness in the US tends to get corrected over time due to its system. In a lot of other countries, somehow that doesnt happen
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3 hours ago, ValueArb said:
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.
thanks for sharing all the technical details !
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if you read the book : The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, it just shows why all these malthusians have been wrong. Its a great book and in the begining chapter itself, david makes a great argument, there is no shortage of any resource as such. its all a matter of knowledge
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On 3/1/2024 at 8:11 AM, tnp20 said:
I hvave been using perplexity for the last 6 months. Its petty good. Specially its ability to provide source material links to verify its not halucinations.
Its also good because you can change the underlying model it uses for your prompt....I have the paid version so I can use GPT-4 turbo..there is auto mode where it picks the model for you.
Also if you can get access Anthropic and notebooklm.google.com are also good for PDF documents as input....
Use cases so far:-
(i) General search but more complex query
(ii) Resume - asked it how good a match resume was to the job description and how to tweak it to get a better match
(iii) Financial chat board and message board summrization - some stocks have 100s of posts per day - I am able to print it to PDF and load it into one of the AI models and summarize it and also ask it more specific questions that may have been discussed
(iv) many others that I can't talk about
have you looked at chatGpt or done comparison with perplexity ? any feedback ?
thanks in advance
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10 hours ago, benchmark said:
I need to go to Bangalore for business, but wants to spend around 10 days after to explore the country. Which area is too hot to visit during that time?
That is in the south and should be fine. The northern parts of the country start getting hot especially around noon
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2 hours ago, benchmark said:
Going to India in late March to April for 10 days for the first time, any recommendation? Thanks.
Where are you going ? It can get pretty hot in some parts of the country even by this time of year. So just prepare of the trip accordingly
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5 hours ago, Hoodlum said:
The report from National Bank yesterday detailed that the 3 largest investments that would show a gain in market value if marked to market, would offset most of the negative book value that MW found.
As long as there is no material variance in overall book value then there is no need to constantly mark to market each individual investments until there is a material change in ownership. The regulatory bodies have agreed with this approach and that is why there have been no issues with how individual investments are reported by Fairfax or any other insurance business that has similar businesses that are not marked to market.
Unfortunately, many investors don’t understand how the insurance company investment reporting works and MW took advantage of this to try and make a quick profit, although it looks like MW had poor timing and just broke even based on MW shorting on 1/16 and getting out on Thursday.
Fairfax invested in thomas cook in dec 2021 and recently liquidated it and more at a profit. and it gets better with quess. they sold 5% stake at 900 levels in sept 2021 and bought it back at 385 in march 23. more or less sold at the absolute peak and bought the stake back at 1/3 price 18 months later
even someone is writing a short report and calling out quess, they would atleast analyze the space in india. Teamlease is a comparable and sells at higher valuations and so do some other companies in this space
quess is not fully valued and acutally got beaten down due to the losses in the products division. if they can turn that around, the stock will do well in the next 2-3 yrs
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I have held thomas cook and Quess for a long time in india and followed both companies. At a minimum, the argument against Quess is weak to begin with. Quess invested in monster.com and has been incurring losses in this segment for more than a year. this has suppressed their operating margin which should improve by the end of the year as the new segment breaks even. Quess is growing its topline and its operating profit is up 15%+ for the year. The value of Quess is increasing, not reducing
Fairfax invested in thomas cook in the depths of 2020 Covid crisis and the risks were far higher. The stock is up 3X since then and the company is firing on all cylinders in India
The whole report appears like a multiple choice exam where the examiner deducts points for mistakes, decides to ignore all the questions the student got right. totals up the negative points and then fails the student.
If you are going to call out what is carried in excess of market value, then the same needs to be done for all investments where the carrying value is less than market value
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19 hours ago, Gregmal said:
One of my best friends families was from England. Dad worked for Paribas. Mother a nurse. They came here after living in Chile for a bit. Took them 9 years, and over $150,000 to legally get citizenship. This doesn’t include the hours spent having to take US history exams and such. Imagine the rage if we asked folks to endure 1/10 of this? They whine about even having to get a valid ID. And it’s all allowed by certain parts of the establishment.
+1 same here. and after spending 10s of thousands i cannot even get my 80 year old mother to visit me. The immigration system had me recertify my birth certificates and a bunch of documents. WTF !! will an 80+ year work illegally when she can barely walk? and i have given signed under oath that i will bear all her medical and other costs and still they keep dragging on
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9 minutes ago, ValueArb said:
Why hire an American CS major for $100K when you can hire an Indian, Russian, or Chinese developer for $50k and have them work remote? Why not let them immigrate here so they pay US taxes?
Immigrants aren't taking jobs, they are creating jobs. Paying people to clean my house and do my landscaping frees time for me to make 5-10x as much with those hours. American high school dropouts work at McDonalds, not doing landscaping for half the pay.
When I ran product development for a PC software company many moons ago I got a resume and sample application demonstrating graphic algorithms from a foreign developer. It was so impressive that we paid to fly him to interview, hired him on the spot, and spent over $20,000 (in 1990s dollars) to get him a green card in order to stay and work for us. The product we built became so important it was about a third of our revenues, which meant it created roughly 40 high paying jobs. If we hadn't hired this genius, he would have almost certainly been hired by a foreign competitor and most of those jobs would have gone to them.
The reason the US is so wealthy is because we saved and attracted immense amounts of capital, and that capital creates new higher paying jobs and makes us more productive at existing jobs. But we have a problem in that our declining birth-rate makes it hard to fill all the jobs, and having immigrants come in to take the worst lowest paying work on pushes americans up to better jobs. And over time those immigrants work hard and advance and save and help create even better jobs. We should target the smartest, hardest working foreigners and get them to immigrate here instead of throwing up roadblocks. A simple system of work visas would eliminate almost every problem we have with illegal immigraiton.
+1 elon musk is a prime example. Not every immigrant is a genius, but a few more than make up for the downsides. sergie brin and more.
Almost like an index fund approach to human capital. 95% are average and then we have 1% outliers
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50 minutes ago, thepupil said:
he had a 55% drawdown 73/74. might be bigger peak to trough. I wouldn't consider it a "blow up", particularly in the context of the returns in the years leading up to it/overallrecord..
note: as an illustration of sequence of returns risk, if you put those two bad years in the earlier part of his TR, a high withdrawal rate (say 8%) bankrupts the strategy despite it making 20%/yr. I think this is an unfair hypothetical and do not at all mean to discredit the record. but just a good illustration (ie you can be a spectacular investor and make 20%/yr and far exceed the market but if you start at a bad time and have a big drawdown, a too high WR kill you).
+1 great point. also from his biography, i recall that he was quite upset with the drawdown. Not for his own capital as he had the confidence that the fund would recover, but for his partners. it seems that once the fund recovered, he basically closed it
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34 minutes ago, Gregmal said:
Thanks Mike!
+1 @Gregmal 99% of the population is not like you
btw, what made you go down this path so early in life ?
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6 minutes ago, Sweet said:
Then not why not say that to begin with? Why lead with the platitude that it was the British that was responsible? History is complicated.With regard to partition in India, would the Muslims in the North East accept being dominated politically by the Hindus? What should the British have done when the two communities didn’t agree to co-exist in the same state?
Why should british be in the mix ? because they came and colonized the place and now its their job to sort it out after taking advantage of the fault lines, using it to their benefit and now suddenly they are the neutral party to sort it out
The problem of minorty/majority exists everywhere and each country finds their own solution
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3 minutes ago, Sweet said:
There was no conflict in these areas before the British came? I think we are viewing history with rose tinted glasses.ofcourse there was conflict, but atleast in India, it was limited and never at the scale of what happened as the british withdrew. around 1-5 Million people died in the partition. That never occured in the entire history of the country over its recorded history, from one single event.
ofcourse the blame is not entirely on the British, the leaders of the time were equally responsible
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9 minutes ago, james22 said:
It says something about comparative (primarily) cultural advantages.
The White Man's Burden - Wikipedia
you mean this ?
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7 minutes ago, Parsad said:
Notice how millions and millions are killed every where the British drew the lines...Ireland, India, Israel/Gaza, etc. Cheers!
absolutely. i dont recall where, but it seems a lot of conflicts across the globe are linked to these 'partitions' they did before withdrawing from the area. Same thing in africa too if i recall correctly.
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2 minutes ago, Munger_Disciple said:
If you read history, almost everyone on earth was invaded and taken advantage of if you go back far enough (Romans invaded Briton, Vikings raped and pillaged everyone & everything in sight, Genghis Khan's expeditions etc.). At some point, we just need to move on & get on with life. Our views are colored by our own experiences. The worst thing about Nehru/I Gandhi regimes was that even when they were presented with irrefutable evidence of their mis-guided policies, they refused to change their views. They were ideologues and didn't worry about the misery brought on by their policies. And the Indian people paid dearly. LKY pushed Indira Gandhi strongly to adopt market oriented policies several times to no avail.agree with you. Indians and in general the country, as no ill will against Britain or any western nation. I have never heard anyone complain. They have just moved on. No one talks of righting the past or anything of that sort.
Ofcourse there is push back when they are preached to
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15 minutes ago, Sweet said:
The same was said of Ireland, but in India like Ireland it was the people and political leaders that partitioned the country, the British just drew the line.Not really, far more complex than that. The British at one point saw threat from the INC - indian national congress and pursued the divide and conquer policy. They used religion for that.
They knew the fault lines existed and exploited that. On top of that they drew the lines arbitrarily and accelerated the withdrawal - almost like, after 200+ yrs of rule, here is the country, good luck. That created a lot of chaos, civil war and millions died
Its not like the rulers in the past were some holy saints, but the narrative that the British were there to 'save' India or did anything for the country is false.
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3 minutes ago, Munger_Disciple said:
Friedman hit the mail on its head. You can just plot the economic trajectory of the Asian tigers like Singapore, HK, Thailand etc vs India during the timeframe 1947-1990. Nehru was a known socialist since his Oxford days. Thanks to Nehru and Indira Gandhi, India screwed itself by adopting socialism.
100% agree with you. Like you, I am a naturalized US citizen of Indian descent too. Came here in early 2000
no doubt the socialist policies screwed up the country for 40+ years.
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1 hour ago, Sweet said:
Bonded Labour sounds like indentured servitude, the practice was widespread in Europe too, most famously to pay for the trip from Europe to North America. Not a nice viewed from today.+1 agree. all forms of oppression is bad whether done by your own race, country or by some other country and although we cannot turn the clock back, there can never be any valid justification for it.
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3 minutes ago, james22 said:
You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours. Napier
absolutely. two wrongs make a right.
this is what i wanted to avoid bringing up. How do you justify colonization and murder (Jallianwala Bagh massacre - Wikipedia) ? highlight all the negatives of the society you conquered. The British came and civilized a bunch of Africans and Indians who were savages before that.
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23 minutes ago, Sweet said:
India wasn’t colonised in the same way as North America, there were no settlers establishing a Jamestown, it’s not on par with what happened in Australia and North America.What do you mean by enslavement here?
Yes, not the same but then i dont know if you can really put a ranking on human misery.
The east (bengal) and other parts of india had indigo farmers who were close to bonded labor. It was done very cleverly. Control the local zamindar (like a local landlord) who in turn would have these bonded labor. Whatever was collected as revenue (extremely high rate) would flow upwards.
I dont have the reference here, but the railways and other infra for which supposedly indians should be grateful for, was funded through debt/bonds on the local economy. Some of the arguments is that some practises such as the caste system was not introduced by the british and it was actually Indians doing to themselves. But they used it very cleverly to their advantage (sit on top of the social pyramid) and used it justify their actions
I won't add any further as it can get contentious on a public forum.
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3 hours ago, Spekulatius said:
@Parsad Do you think the Parsads would be better off, if the Brit’s never had set foot on the Indian continent? Impossible to know, but I would put the chance no better than 50/50. The Brits for all their faults put some rules and systems into place and overall their colonies were better run than the French, Spanish or Portuguese ones.
The only country that was never colonized in that Area is Thailand and they are somewhat better off than their immediate neighbors. Then there is Japan, but it’s an entirely different situation and geography.
Apaolgies for getting truly off the rails here. I am still interested to see if Nery keeps here PhD or not. Seems like copy and pasting several pages is more than an oversight issue. Or perhaps she just had a lazy ghost writer which is quite commoner amongst the entitled.
Thats a loaded comment and for that you need to have a deep understanding of the history of India to arrive at a number. I would put the chance as 99/1 that indians would be better off. They 'were' better off before the British. India was colonized due to its own political short coming, but does not mean that it was good by any means.
Leaving aside the human misery and enslavement, even the economically the country was plundered.
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1 hour ago, ValueArb said:
His returns don't matter. What I take exception to is the idea that what he's teaching is useful for investing. DCFs are great fun to play with, but tweaking inputs in a minor amount can give you massively different valuations. They aren't useful for investing, they are useful for investment banking where you need a complex model you can tweak to generate a valuation that gets clients to give you money.
I agree with Munger and Buffett that if you have to build a complex model to value something, that is telling you it should be a pass.
sure, but then he is putting it out there for people to decide. And DCF especially scenario analysis can help look at assumption built into the price. one may not use it to make investment decision, but its not a bad tool for thinking especially if you are new to all this and just starting off
anyway to each his own
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other book by the same author which is in my list is fabric of reality