nodnub

aren't these all quotes from "The Death of a Salesman"?

https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-speaking-style-interviews/ He used to sound (speak) a lot smarter (read attached article for proof). It's either: an intentional change (appeal to lowest common denominator with plain speech) or he has dementia or he has a brain-eating parasite. Or perhaps a combo of all three.

If a million people die (regardless of age) the economy would be trash anyways. Probably worse than it is right now (if that’s possible). Can you expand on this? If a million people die... would the economy necessarily be trashed? I'm interested in thoughts on this. -- I suppose if we got to point of 1million dead, we would have completely overwhelmed the health care system, and a lot more doctors and nurses would sicken and die from COVID. And many people would die from untreated heart attacks (et al) due to lack of medical care.

Thanks Nell-e for this post and bringing e-ink display back to my attention. I think they must have improved a lot because the old kindles took like 2 seconds to load each page (which I think was a limitation of the display refresh rate)

You suspect 100k+ to be infected. Let's say around 1000 died (10x the official amount to be really skeptical) which would mean that the death rate is still only about 1%. How do you calculate mortality rate when you don't know how many of the currently infected will eventually die (after say 2 weeks)? Isn't the only way to do that accurately to have a controlled population of confirmed, infected patients and then measure how many are dead after 2-3 weeks? I think the only way to get accuracy on that during the outbreak is to have a large group of infected individuals that you monitor. And right now it looks like pandemonium in any city that has a large group of infected cases (so it's hard to measure). That's what the Lancet study did for 41 patients in Wuhan and found that 6 out of 41 died (see under Discussion). Also virus continues to mutate over time and can become easier (or harder) to spread. Early version of "1918 spanish flu" were less fatal in Scandinavia in 1917. More fatal version of the same virus evolved in following year.

https://streamable.com/drpdz

A lot of my fellow employees are from Prague. One of the guys I work with bought a 70k Volvo x60 here in the states. He said that in two years when he returns he can resell the car in Prague and get 100% if not more back. Apparently he calculated the shipping and duty costs. I have not verified it myself, but seems like an interesting angle to take. Have to say I’m quite skeptical about it. In some countries you can import a used personal vehicle without paying much import duty. The import duty in some countries (e.g China) is very high on "luxury" foreign cars. This can make it profitable to import used cars after owning them overseas for a few years.

Hi Gregmal, is your comment from a US perspective. Key factor is that OP is in Canada. Many Canadian mutual funds have expenses of 2.5% and higher. High fees like that on a diversified portfolio of funds WILL have an outsized, negative impact on returns over long periods of time.

Those figures for health care costs in Czech republic sound way off base. Have you had a chance to verify that somehow. Keep in mind anecdotal evidence from taxpayers is not always true. For example, I cant count how many people I have met that dont understand fundamental personal finance stuff like marginal tax rates.

I set that sub-forum to ignore a long time ago. There are some good discussions there but they are needles in the haystack. From the outside it looks like a competition to see who can demonstrate the most cognitive biases and logical fallacies in a single post ;D

Hypothetically, what would you be willing to pay as a monthly fee for something like this? And how much do you think other people would be willing to pay?

I agree with you completely regarding the stupidity of taking on excessive debt that will not earn a ROI. Perhaps loans for college education should be rationalized and focus on degrees with a chance of employment. However, one problem is that many parents are too naive or even dumb to educate their children in these areas. Some of those children will educate themselves about personal finance (if they have the capacity and the interest), but we can't rely on that. We aren't doing enough with financial education in K-12 schools and that is time of life when you need to learn this stuff. Even children with low capacity and aptitude can improve through basic education. I have met a number of successful functional adults that can't understand their own credit card statements, let alone understand the fine print on personal loan terms. Debt is everywhere and it is designed to be easy for most people to get in too deep. If we want a society made of intelligent people making good decisions then we need to educate them well as children. If we want sheep to support the economy and only think about buying 60" TVs and new cars that they can't afford, then we should keep attacking and cutting K-12 education system.

"Surely you're joking..." is a great book. There are some other talks he has given on youtube which demonstrate how he thought and how he taught others..

I'm a long time Fairfax shareholder and supporter. I was also disappointed in the multi voting share changes. There has been discussion of the appropriateness of Ben amd Christine on the board... What about Karen Jurjevich? High school principal from Prem's daughter's high school. She could be a wonderful person and maybe a good friend of the Watsa family but how is that relevant as a board member at a company like Fairfax? Doesn't appear to have relevant experience and I can't imagine her relationship to the family would make her very independant while taking action as a board member? Karen L. Jurjevich Ms. Jurjevich is Principal of Branksome Hall, a leading private International Baccalaureate (IB) World School for girls located in Toronto, and is also the CEO and Principal of Branksome Hall Global. Prior to joining Branksome Hall in 1998, Ms. Jurjevich was a Principal in the Toronto District School Board and, from 1988 to 1992, taught at Havergal College in Toronto, Ontario. Prior thereto, Ms. Jurjevich held a number of teaching positions and was previously a member of the Board of the Canadian Accredited Independent Schools, the Board of the Conference of Independent Schools of Ontario, the International Baccalaureate, North American Independent Schools Task Force. Ms. Jurjevich recently graduated from the Stanford Executive Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Just because you or I have a certain experience, doesn't mean that anyone else in the world has the same experience (with avoiding addiction). I think they found genetic components to addiction. It's easy for me to avoid getting addicted to Alcohol... but some people do become addicted. Purdue also lied about the time length effectiveness of the time release version of oxycontin, which led to patients being in pain before their next dose. In those situations, Purdue sales and marketing pushed Doctors to bump up the dose from 20mg to 40mg, and from 40mg to 80mg... leading to drug tolerance and addiction.. but what patients really needed was to take the small dose every 8 hours instead of 12 hours. The sales team was adamant that they maintain the 12 hours dosing regimen and raise the dose amount. The whole reason for this lie about the 12 hour effectiveness was so Purdue could get another patent and extend revenue stream before facing generic competition. I'm sure I got some of the details above wrong, but there was a long and well-written expose on this topic. It made Purdue and rivals look really dirty. TLDR: The opiod addiction triggered by OxyContin is probably not as simple as you think, and your personal experience is not universal.

I disagree. Let's define underperforming as being in 33 percentile (aka bottom 1/3, a good sized margin under the average) I would say that for most professions, their results aren't even being accurately measured. Imagine you are crippled in an accident and you hire a personal injury lawyer. How do you measure his effectiveness? How do you know if they did a good job for you? That you got as much as your injuries were worth? What about doctors? Hospitals probably collect statistics on surgical mistakes and complications, but what about seeing your family doctor? Do you think someone is tracking their misdiagnoses and mistakes? I don't. What about underperforming as a grocery clerk? A bit slower at their work and not as friendly. Remember that one 1/3 of your employees are underperforming! Are you going to fire them all every year? Remember that your top performing grocery clerks probably move on to find other, better paid work. You don't want staff turnover and retraining of 50% per year.. So in summary I think that Fund Management is one of the few professions where your results are accurately measured! There is underperformance in all professions - but it isn't as obvious as in fund management.

Does anyone remember when this forum was a place of mutual respect, despite different viewpoints? It's disappointing to see that so many discussions on this forum are devolving into personal attacks. If someone says something you disagree with, attacking the idea instead of the person... adds a lot more to the discussion.

BG, I agree that is a big hassle... to avoid that I wear a money belt under my shirt containing my passport, DL, bigger cash amounts, and backup credit card. If I am travelling alone I wear this pretty much everywhere and never separate from it. In my pocket I keep a small wallet with daily cash needs, and the primary credit card or ATM card that I will be using. If I get mugged or pickpocketed then then I still have my money belt with passport, DL, and my second credit card. I absolutely never leave my passport and other critical stuff in a backpack. Bags can easily be stolen when you are distracted for 3 seconds in a bus station or subway etc. I have never been mugged or pickpocketed, but there have been a few attempts of the latter! :)

No, it's clearly not the real cost.... it's a simplified comparison based purely on electricity cost. Firstly, it's doubtful that they used the volume rate electricity cost, which can be more expensive than the cost for small consumer accts in some countries. Secondly, Venezuela with power cost of $530 is obviously an outlier because they have heavily subsidized electricity cost. It is difficult and dangerous to mine bitcoin in Venezuela and you can expect the police and govt to try to seize your equipment to run it themselves. There was a recent news article about this. You have to smuggle the equipment into VZ and then you have to defend the equipment and mine in secrecy. You also can't concentrate all your equipment in one location due to risk of seizure. Thirdly, this fake "mining cost" does not include the capital cost of the mining hardware, which is significant. As the bitcoin algorithm difficulty keeps growing, the hardware may be uneconomic to use for mining within a year or two. Fourth, there are real costs in labour in setting up, managing the mining equipment, securing it, possibly upgrading power service from the power company, rent, etc.

Emily, if you run bitcoin core, it downloads the whole blockchain.. "Bitcoin Core initial synchronization will take time and download a lot of data. You should make sure that you have enough bandwidth and storage for the full block chain size (over 145GB)" If you do run bitcoin-core, I think you only need to back up your wallet address and private key to preserve your account. That takes almost no storage space at all. But if you lose that you lose all your bitcoins.

Hi Cardboard, these platforms I mention do not use a website at all.. They are a standalone program on your computer.... Like launching Microsoft Excel. The program still communicates with the Banks computers, but doesn't go through their Banks website or their webservers, which get bogged down by excessive visitors. The theory I'm working with here is that these standalone trading platforms may have been able to connect to the backend server and execute trades at the same time that the lowly website users and IPad app users couldn't even logon to their system. (I've heard that many of the iPad and Android phone apps for banking are just badly designed web applications so they would also have problems connecting). Was anyone using these platforms during these time periods? --edit-- I think I might be wrong about this.. it looks like the BMO Market Pro application is a Java Applet that you have to log in to the website to launch. The other banks Pro platforms might follow the same model. So if you can't login to the website you are sunk either way. Maybe it's worth having the tablet version on a iPad to see if that works any better in times of high traffic and high volatility.

It might seem crazy but it could be rational. Especially if people in the drug trade are using BTC. Or... it might help to think of these ATMs as automated lottery ticket vending machines with very high fees paid to the owner. Poor people love to buy lottery tickets for a chance to dream of winning big.

These have been around for a long time in some cities. Some users discover them as walk by traffic but I think most users discover them is from online directories that list different locations of ATMs, associated fees, etc. https://coinatmradar.com/ These machines do not function as a regular ATM. They only allow transactions to or from crypto currency. Many of them only work for cash --> crypto. If they do allow you to sell BTC for cash... round-trip fees can be very high (10-15%). I don't imagine that these are stocked with much cash... too much theft risk for the ATM owner. The machines are usually very small and could be carried away easily by 1 or 2 people.

IBKR seems to have an approach of continual automation+improvement and elimination of issues that waste their staff resources. I've read in the past that IBKR is extremely focused on automating any process that required human interaction. In comparison, the big 5 banks seem to block automation -- they have required me to make phone calls to execute trades in slightly less common securities, or to handle things like USD denominated TSX listed stocks showing up correctly. If they can't get pretty simple things right without a phone call... that adds a lot of delays and overhead. It looks like some of the Big 5 brokers offer trading access through a standalone application that runs under Windows (similar to IB's TWS - Trader Workstation) BMO IL has "Market Pro" software. Looks like you need to be Gold Star account to access it. Scotia iTrade has "FlightDesk" software TD InvestDirect has "Advanced Dashboard" software All these platforms looks like the same Windows Java-based program, probably white-labelled software solution. Did anyone use these kind of platforms during the time periods in question? Was there problem with Trade execution from these platforms?

Life is not fair and the "rightful owners" often get screwed. The sooner we learn that, the less of our life we waste waiting for court judgments or politicians to provide our own subjective version of "justice". Good luck :)