Liberty

Yes.

Way to miss and prove my point.

That is a real problem. But if you want to discuss double standards, I often see this where people take a relatively small problem and blow it all out of proportion and get outraged at it, and then take a massively bigger problem and minimize it until they can brush it off. Why? Because if they kept things in perspective and stayed coherent in their views, it would be inconvenient to them. Is it a problem that there are false reports of rape? Sure, absolutely. Does that make all the real rapes any less problematic? No. They are two separate problems, with one being much, much more frequent than the other. Abuses mades in the name of feminism or the fight against sexism don't mean that there's not a real problem. If you get outraged at this unfairness, you should be at least as outraged at the much more frequent injustice of women being treated badly or condescended to simply because they are women (regardless of anything else, it's never right when a man doing or saying the exact same thing as a woman in the same situation gets a much better outcome, or avoids negative crap). But most people aren't outraged at things that challenge their views, because they cherry pick evidence to confirm whatever belief they started out with in the first place...

That's the kind of stuff I was talking about in the other thread... oooh the patriarchy. To be honest im getting kind of sick of all that women are equal crap. That myth has been extensively debunked by science. But for some reason your labeled a sexist if you point that out. The reason you see almost no female investors is not because of the evil patriarchy. Hint: it has to do with incentives and how our brains are wired differently. I guess in 50-100 years when we still invent almost everything and build almost everything, and feminists run out of excuses because positive discrimination is out of control for women, then we can finally accept that. I never wrote about any of that. All I was talking about was not being a huge jackass. A lot of people are dumber than you are, regardless of their sex or skin color. Doesn't mean you have to be a gigantic douchebag to them, and I'm sure you wish the people are are smarter than you would do the same. It's also pretty much always a bad idea to see people as groups rather than individuals, because within any group there's enough variation to make it meaningless. You never meet groups as a whole, only individuals.

That's the kind of stuff I was talking about in the other thread...

Sadly, yes. But thankfully for me, not my experience; the experience of others. As a white male I've had it pretty easy in many ways, but lately I've tried to become more sensitive to the experience of others as they live it rather than just as I think it must be for them. I think too many men look at how terrible sexism was in the past and think "things have improved so much, it can't be that bad...". But in 50 years we'll look back to today and cringe massively. I hang in many tech circles and I've seen it there, but never paid a lot of attention to it until recently when I listened to some podcasts from female game developers who talk about their experience and things like that. I started following @everydaysexism on twitter to kind of passively exposed myself a bit to that reality since I don't live it myself, to try to make myself more sensitive to it and be part of the solution rather than the problem (most well-intentioned people are part of the problem either by actively doing bad stuff without realizing it, or by standing by without a word when bad stuff is being done around them, giving it tacit social approval). http://everydaysexism.tumblr.com (right now they're running a campaign to try to improve sexual education in some schools so it includes stuff about consent and healthy relationships, but if you scroll down enough you'll see they just retweet experiences from random people on twitter -- scary to think how it would be if I had to frequently deal with this on an ongoing basis, being treated like a child and/or a juicy steak... I think if most men were transformed into a woman and had to just keep living their lives, they'd get really angry really quickly at how they are treated differently)

Suggestion: You probably should've created a poll where it's possible to anonymously vote. Most online communities treat women badly, or at least differently, so it's often much easier for women to not have feminized screen names and don't mention that they're women.

Ok, cool. I had heard of those tactics. Was wondering if there was something else :)

I'm curious: What counted as HFT back in 1600? Do you mean people using carrier pigeons and faster ships to get to the exchange faster with some bit of information, or something else? Thanks.

Here's a little extra that was left out of the interview that aired: http://wealthtrack.com/webextra/bruce-berkowitz-museum-investment/

Canada is almost a 2D country, though. Most people live in the South, along the US border. Not that many people want to live in the Yukon or Northwest Territories... The US is smaller in total area, but a lot more of it is pleasant to live in. But the whole "running out of space" thing isn't a very convincing argument. China has over a billion people and still has a lot of space to build new cities (which they do, many of them are even empty).. The earth's carrying capacity depends more on our sources of energy and food than on actual living space for people. If we had 100% clean energy and very efficient sources of food that don't require too much arable land, we could probably fit 100 billion people on Earth easily.

Extrapolating population numbers is hard. Iran used to have like 7 kids per women a few decades ago and now I think they're below replacement rate (2.1). Things change fast. Latest numbers I've seen show us plateauing under 10 billion, but that could change too... Not that I would base in any way my thinking on Canada's RE on this...

Got the album. Listening for first time. Can't comment on quality yet, as these types of albums need to grow on me for a while before I'm sure how much I like them.. But it's funny how on some tracks he's starting to sound more like Tom Waits while on others ("My Oh My" for example) he sounds just like he's sounded for a couple decades..

He seems to agree with you:

Thanks, I love Cohen. Had no idea he was working on anything new so quickly after Old Ideas. My fave is probably still The Future from 1992, but I often listen to the Live in London double live album from a few years ago and a many of his other albums. Cheers Gio :)

http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2014/09/stock-buybacks-they-are-big-they-are.html Aswath Damodaran takes a closer look at buybacks.

I wish we had no-fee cards with such a high cash-back % in Canada. Best I've found is one that gives me 2% on groceries, and on with 1% on everything else, and I recently added the Amazon.ca card with 2% on Amazon.ca stuff.

Berkshire and Fairfax currently have very different makeups. Comparing them simply with book value isn't very meaningful, in my opinion. I'd also ask how fast Berkshire was compounding book value when it was a sub-10bn company.

fareast, I cannot read the article I think you need to register or pay ...... But I always wondered if people realize that Larsen has compounded money much faster than say Brk for the last 10-15 yrs . No I don't have the exact numbers, but I can just estimate from Gate's share of MSFT and how he has grown it to 100+ Billion when you take the $82 bil + whatever he gave to the Melinda and Bill Gates foundation. Maybe there should be 20,000 people going to a Larsen event. WEB said Gates is the smartest person he has ever met. I give him kudos for having the insight to interview and find one of the smartest investors around..... Search google for the title of the WSJ piece. If your referer is search, you get the whole article. The piece says:

Looks like you lost money...

have studies been done on how well bookies predict events? Seems interesting, a lot of people putting their money where their mouth is. Prediction markets, like intrade when it was still open, have a pretty good track record I think. I'll take people who make bets with their own money for a living over TV pundits...

Bookies don't seem to think it's very likely: http://qz.com/267913/according-to-bookies-these-are-the-things-as-unlikely-as-scots-voting-for-independence/

This explains it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Wealthy people all think they're middle class and that everybody's like them ;) 50% of American households make less than 51k a year. I bet most people with AMEXes got one because they're COSTCO members, not Netjets members... http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr12-02.pdf