Liberty

Good point. There does seem to be some kind of acceleration of Fads. They are born and die quicker. Not sure why.... What I meant is that even if the internet removes shelf space limitations and you can now have 10,000 cola brands, most people won't keep track of many. They just don't have the attention/mindspace. They want to find a few things they like and trust, and then will probably stick to them. Brands are mental shortcuts; you know what you're going to get. Right now, where I'm seeing most of the change is in niche things (the long tail). If you really like some obscure thing and you're the only one in your town, you used to be on your own. Nobody would open a store just for you. But now, all the people who are into that obscure thing across the country and world can band together, and as a bloc they are worth feeding and can keep the niche thriving. So lots of niches are now commercially viable that weren't. But for the big, mass-market stuff that reaches lots of people everywhere (detergent, cars, cola, diapers, common foods, smartphones, etc), I think there will always be big dominant brands at the top, and no-name/store brand type stuff for more price-sensitive people.

I think you forget another scarce resource in your theory: Mindshare/attention.

No so long ago, the US was losing access to space and had fewer capability than in the 1960s, and costs were ballooning up. The shuttle was out, the replacement might come in years if not decades, and even basic rockets had to have engines made in Russia. Musk comes around, and in a few years, he goes from nothing to potentially having fully reuseable rockets that land vertically on land with costs that are orders of magnitude lower than anything before. That's a necessary, if not sufficient, thing for anything else that follows. He puts the goal of Mars back on a real schedule (not the BS that politicians talk about), and he puts ambition back on the table too (not sending a man there to take a few selfies and come back, but he wants a base there -- which btw isn't all the terraforming stuff you keep talking about). He's likely totally changing the course of space exploration history with his company, and I don't see anyone doing what SpaceX is doing, so if they didn't exist.... It doesn't mean that he'll solve all the problems himself - and nobody but you has been saying that - but he's making a huge difference (likewise in electric cars and solar, btw). DaVinci? That makes no sense to me. In any case, this is enough for me on this topic. I encourage you to read more deeply on SpaceX than mainstream media coverage and see for yourself.

That's somewhat like saying Alexander Graham Bell didn't have a large effect on the internet. True, but someone's gotta lay the foundation or light the spark for further development. Not comparable. Bell invented a entirely new technology. Musk didnt, he just made the current tech better. But current tech is worthless if we want to travel across solar systems. We would need break throughs in physics and not just engineering.. To colonize mars we would need breakthroughs in terraforming, in building very large and sustainable spacecrafts (and the problems with oxygen etc that brings), how to protect from radiation mars and in medical knowledge how to bypass effects of much lower gravity on human body. All things Musk likely wont provide. Again I think Musk is extremely awesome, but people are overhyping this all a lot. Still curious about the things he will do though. He has suprised people before. So basically, your point applies to every single entrepreneur, inventor, and scientist ever. What value does that point have exactly? Who here is overhyping Musk? Nobody here said that he would do everything by himself or claim that he's doing things he isn't. What he did do, what he's doing now, and what he plans to do, is quite enough to be worth the hype -- in fact, he probably deserves more credit than he's getting but most people don't realize how hard the stuff he's doing is on so many levels... across 3 industries at the same time.

He's already had a huge effect on it.

Can you imagine how impossible almost all the technologies we use daily sound if you describe them like that? I dare you to look into how a GPS works, with Einsteinian physics and all, not to even mention all the other technologies on which a functional GPS system depends (CPUs, satellites, radio waves, etc) and all the fields of science you need to master to even contemplate creating those (quantum physics, complex material sciences, advanced mathematics, etc).

Sure. But in practice, it makes very little difference to the people who go through that event, and might make little difference to people who later have to try to read a SSD with rocks and sticks... Most of our technology depends on other technologies. Take the power grid down long enough and you'll see how well the rest of the edifice stands on its own on any scale.

Don't read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199606501/ I haven't read that book, but in my mind the biggest risk of a major "reset" of civilization comes, not from religion this time around, but from war. If we do major environmental damage to the planet with nukes, or kill 5 billion people with biological agents ..... game over for at least another 1000 years. All the more reason to have sustainable cities on other planets before that happens here. That was exactly my point, though they are not mutually exclusive. Nuclear war started by religious zealots (ie. pakistan, india, iran, middle-east, etc) isn't a lot more far fetched than nuclear war started by ideologues of other kinds (ie. cold war).

Don't read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199606501/

Look at prediction of the future from 50 or 100 years ago. How off base were they? So I think it's hard to say what we can and can't do. Progress can go in reverse (look at the dark ages). We need people who are pushing things forward. It doesn't just all happen by itself. People like Musk are making a real difference. If they thought the way you think, our civilization would be much worse off.

Humanity's practical spaceflight capacity was actually going backwards until SpaceX came around, with prices going up, not down. Better materials and computers from other industries are great, but they don't get you a foot off the ground. What you need are better rockets...

Musk doesn't want to go to Mars for the money. He thinks it's good for the human civilization to eventually become multi-planetary, and Mars is #1 on the list of places where a self-sustaining base could be possible. We're not going to terraform the whole planet any time soon, but you have to start somewhere. He's mentioned it many times in interview. I suggest you have a look. yeah but good for human civilization = economic reasons. And to make it cheap and practical, we need a new technological break through. The size of things we can launch into space is limited by our shitty fuel sources we have now. And it is still somewhat risky. If something goes wrong, you are toast. It is not like the work for this new necesairy technology is not being done, as the world is hugely benefited from it if you exclude space flight. His argument is, if nobody does it, then no progress will be made. But Im not so sure about that. You don't think that SpaceX has been making pretty good progress on making it cheap and practical, and making technological breakthroughs, in the last than 12 years that this private company has existed?

Musk doesn't want to go to Mars for the money. He thinks it's good for the human civilization to eventually become multi-planetary, and Mars is #1 on the list of places where a self-sustaining base could be possible. We're not going to terraform the whole planet any time soon, but you have to start somewhere. He's mentioned it many times in interview. I suggest you have a look.

Thanks. Look at SLM's recent price action. Ouch.

Some thinking about bubbles and the people who try to predict them: http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2014/06/bubble-bubble-toil-and-trouble-costs.html

http://www.bnn.ca/News/2014/6/17/CMHC-to-return-to-lower-risk-roots-.aspx

SolarCity buys a solar manufacturer: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-14LQRE/3257317271x0x762403/aa368a6f-c0ba-4164-8068-be869edd4e98/Sunflower%20Investor%20Presentation%20FINAL.pdf

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all This criticism reminds me a bit of the Halo Effect (excellent book). The piece is long, but it gets really interesting in the middle when he looks at the case studies on which the theory is based. Not saying it means it's 100% flawed (it isn't), but like most theories about business, I think it's wise to take it with a lot of salt and not give it more predictive power than it actually has.

Interesting piece: http://philosophicaleconomics.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/whos-afraid-of-1929/

Tepper's so frugal, LCD screens are a luxury he doesn't need!

I disagree. Everything I have read suggests that high quality .com sale prices are higher than ever. So it could be a bubble but it's not a slump. There is very minimal demand for any of the new TLDs, or anything other than .com. http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/top_level_domain/all Buying the right domain name can easily be the most critical part of a business' marketing spending. It doesn't make sense to go cheap / risky instead of getting the name you really want. You may be right. As I said, I haven't looked into this business, that was just my initial impression. Let us know how it turns out.

Trivia: That naming convention is a very 'Web 2.0' thing. I believe it was started by Flickr in 2004, but maybe someone else came before them. In 2003 there was del.icio.us which deconstructed its domain. That's another trend starter, I think.

Domain names have lost a lot of value over time. It used to be that to go somewhere, you had to type the domain name in your browser's URL bar. So shorter, memorable, typo-proof ruled. You could also typo-squat because when people have to type something, they make mistakes. Nowadays, URL bars autocomplete, people use search, and most people move around more by following links on social media and blogs than by deciding to directly go to a site. This is even more so on mobile devices where people type even less. You could have a domain name that is complex and long and most people on iPhones would never notice it. So I haven't really looked into that business, but on its face, it doesn't sound like something should be very profitable, if at all, especially now that we're being flooded by new generic top domain names: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/

Ok, thanks. I was curious so I checked; It's up 63% since your last post (plus a little in dividends). Seems like an interesting company, but it's probably going in the 'too-hard' pile for me.

Was looking at ONEX and found this old thread. It stops on a cliffhanger... Gio, did you ever look deeper? Did you end up investing in ONEX or did you find something that turned you off?