Liberty

Somebody offered you millions for wife and kid? Can I get a contact number? Maybe I'll sell mine. 8)

I wouldn't trade my wife and kid for millions ;)

Meanwhile:

I think the whole point is that nobody's a perfect driver, and even those who are very careful and talented have bad days (tired, bad visibility, etc). In that sea of cars, it only takes one bad driver to cause an accident. Self-driving cars have the potential to have basically instant reflexes and to have unblinking eyes all around (including ultrasound, radar, etc, seeing through fog), as well as eventually ad hoc mesh networking with nearby cars, etc. Can't help but eventually be better than even good human drivers, and even if you're good, do you trust everyone else around you to be as diligent?

I've seen other videos of the autopilot preventing near-certain accidents. here's one where a car drives across the lane and the car auto-brakes instantly from 45 MPH and avoids a crash: Can't wait until all cars on the road have similar features (including to avoid pedestrians and cyclists), at least until most cars are fully autonomous at much higher levels of safety than human drivers.

I enjoyed the piece too. Even someone who thinks cars are a waste and goes almost everywhere on his bike was impressed.

I also think it's commodities + small canadian venture stuff (look at the Canadian venture index..) that killed him (from what I remember of his portfolio a few years ago), not overall market valuation. Maybe if we start seeing lots of American value investors give up, that could be a different kind of signal, but Irwin Michael seemed to be more Canada-specific.

I thought this was an interesting read, and that others here might find it worth their time. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list-this-is-what-it-feels-like-to-be-hunted-by-drones-a6980141.html Found via David Simon (writer/director of The Wire, Treme, Generation Kill, The Corner, Show me a Hero, etc), on Twitter.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/how-to-land-a-rocket-on-a-robotic-barge/ http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/25787998624_d77cd1b381_k-980x653.jpg http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/25728668373_cec4f9ef74_k-980x653.jpg http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/26239020092_d28d741951_k-980x653.jpg

Some excerts here: https://hurricanecapital.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/return-on-invested-capital-roic-with-or-without-goodwill/

A million dollars. Nice neighbourhood. http://www.rew.ca/properties/R2043286/6604-knight-street-vancouver

New CMHC report on foreign ownership. Low single digit percents in both vancouver and GTA. And that includes americans and others. http://www.cmhc.ca/en/corp/nero/nere/2016/2016-04-07-1100.cfm

SpaceX finally successfully landed a rocket on a floating drone ship. Amazing. https://twitter.com/ow/status/718547064955781120 Apparently Elon tweeted this one but then deleted it (some swearing):

So if it rents for $24,000 per year, then at this listing price the yield (as an investment) is 1.3%. That's a little less than what you can get for cash sitting in the bank. Likewise, at the assessment price of 1.1 million, the yield is 2.1%. Also something you can probably get at the bank. I'm even wondering if the property assessment department is drinking something as well! For that money you can get something in the south of France or Spain and still have spending money left over. It's even worse than that. You get $24,000/year, but that's a gross amount, it doesn't include all your costs for maintenance, municipal taxes, etc.

On top of that, US states that have recourse mortgages fared pretty badly in the housing bust. That's not a panacea.

Maybe its not just COBF. ?? I don't get you... are you saying Giverney is a contrarian indicator? Maybe that everyone can expect to have periods of underperformance, and that includes organisations like investment firms and discussion forums.

http://www.greaterfool.ca/2016/03/24/seriously-7/

Got this in the mail yesterday from the author. Looking forward to reading it. Conceptually, it looks like a compilation of interviews with Canadian investors, sub-categorized by their dominant styles (macro, value, growth, etc). I usually enjoy long-form interviews with practitioners, even those who do things that I don't think I can do; there's usually at least one thing to learn from their approach or way of thinking even if you never try to do what they do. https://www.amazon.ca/Market-Masters-Interviews-Investors-Strategies/dp/177041343X/ I'll share my thoughts when I've read it.

Do you have the population figures for the same periods? I'd be interested to compare. For Toronto, it would also be interesting to look at the larger GTA's area, since at some point toronto proper just runs into the suburbs and these are the ones that grow.

For those who follow him, here's Francois Rochon of Giverny Capital, in the 2015 letter: http://www.givernycapital.com/en/doc/206/Giverny_Capital_-_Annual_Letter_2015_web_.pdf For those who don't know Rochon, the letter contains the performance of his fund. Beat his index by 6.1%/year since 1993, 15.2% CAGR over that period.

I'm not saying it's not a factor, I'm saying it's the common excuse for everything. As Buffett said, every bubble is initially based on something real, but every time there are rationalizations that people use to go from that real thing into la-la land (how many comparisons of Vancouver have I seen with New York, Paris and London in the past few years?). Question anything about Vancouver, and it's the Chinese. I happen to think that the realtors and the media echo chamber have really overblown the Chinese situation because it benefits them tremendously. They've taken something real, and turned it into something else. I think the vast, vast majority of houses in Vancouver are probably being bought by people who aren't from wealthy foreign money, but they're still paying princeling prices, and that will end badly.

It's not. It's a very small sample of the high end market. "Routledge compiled the data by extrapolating from a Financial Times survey of 77 high-end buyers and data from the U.S. National Association of Realtors." Wow, 77 high-end buyers turns into media articles about the Chinese taking over all of Vancouver. There's a constant flow of these. Once the idea has taken root, confirmation bias does the rest. Every time someone who looks asian is seen, it only confirms what people think (even if they're Canadian). Reminds me of the fake asian buyers from news stories not that long ago. Realtors rented a yellow helicopter and had Canadians of asian heritage (one who works as a condo promoters, iirc) pose as rich chinese buyers for TV cameras.. http://www.greaterfool.ca/2015/05/12/the-frauds/ http://www.greaterfool.ca/2013/02/14/the-myth-of-ham/

I didn't say it was the same. Still hasn't stopped prices from rising almost 10% YoY despite 1.6% foreign buyers, most of them from US.

I doubt this "back of the envelope" is anything by myth. Victoria's real-estate board tracks these things, unlike vancouver, and in 2013 only 1.64% of buyers were foreign (most from the USA). Now that's not vancouver, but pretty unlikely that Vancouver next door is orders of magnitude different. http://origin.library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1116729122123-37/Buyers+Origins+20130101+to+20131231.pdf

People's ability to carry their massive debt with their negative saving rates is predicated on constantly rising prices. Flat won't do it, IMO. And this isn't taking into account that at some point interest rates will rise in the US and Canada will face a dilemma; either follow and kill housing, or don't follow and further kill the dollar.