Liberty

Happy new year everyone! :)

I've seen many good interviews. I would be interesting to start a list of the best interviews. A great one is of course the Bruce Berkowitz one. Any others that you guys particularly liked?

Very interesting line of inquiry, Eric. I wonder if it depends on how much permanent capital you have access to. ie. When starting out with almost nothing, it was better for Hamblin-Watsa to get into the insurance business and use float as a form of 'permanent' capital (not exactly, but acts like it) to be able to invest without having fickle investors who tend to pull out their capital every time there's a downturn or if an idea takes more than a year to play out. Maybe that worked better with their style of investing than taking money from investors who have a short-term view and are scared of deep value stuff. Maybe dealing with that would've crimped their returns quite a bit? But now that they have this very valuable business, it's plausible that they might be able to get better returns in the future if they sold the whole thing except the investing group for a few billions and then used these few billions to run a kind of public hedge fund with their own permanent capital. This way, they wouldn't be forced to invest in things that are sub-optimal just to meet insurance obligations (regulator, claims, etc). Of course, that's only if the insurance operations keep forcing sub-optimal decisions and aren't profitable enough to more than compensate. If they become very profitable, that's another story.

Thanks for the highlights, Gio! :)

Best wishes guys & gals! Don't read too many 10Ks while family is visiting :D

It already exists :) http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/what-are-you-selling-today/

Very cool. Glad you had a good time! :)

I'd love to read it. Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts.

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/12/19/northern-gateway-pipeline-approved-by-panel-with-209-conditions/

Reddit is a large online community, and for a few years now they've had a secret santa thing during the holidays. One person received a gift from.. Bill Gates. http://redditgifts.com/gallery/gift/spoiler-alert-bill-gates-did-not-get-you/# Pretty cool of him :)

*sigh* :D

I don't, just an amateur. But I am interested in the space and I've seen enough LEDs to know that quality can vary a lot. Thanks for sharing your insights. It's always very cool to get info from someone on the inside! :)

I'd guess it's a more niche type of bulb and the big players probably haven't really focused on that format yet as cracking the regular bulb format will be a lot more rewarding, so most of what is available is probably terrible cheap crap (ie. ask a random Chinese manufacturer to slap the cheapest LEDs they can find in a bulb of that format and sell it without any heat dissipation or light quality testing). Just a guess though, I've never researched that type of bulb as I don't have any.

Excellent. Philips has already made a warm white LED that gets 200 lumens/watt. Good LEDs currently on the market get around 80 lumens/watt. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/philips-creates-the-worlds-most-energy-efficient-warm-white-led-lamp-202534551.html

There's been research on this that showed that the mercury emissions from coal power plants were much higher from running an incandescent bulb than the small amount of mercury present in a CFL (and if you dispose of it properly, you're fine). But LEDs are even better because they don't have that problem. We always have to look at the whole system. That seems totally wrong on its face. How many cars are on the road now? How long do tires last? What things other than tires do we use oil for? Do we expect to run out of oil within less than 4 years? Not to mention that "replace every car with a fuel efficient one" is not a special action. Non-fuel-efficient cars don't last forever, people replace cars every few years anyway. Might as well replace them with something better, just like when you replace your computer you probably don't buy the exact same thing you bought 5 years ago or whatever. But even in a world where making tires was a problem, the best thing to do would be to go electric so that oil could be used for things other than being burned in an internal combustion engine.

Good read, thanks! :)

Indeed. Second-level thinking makes it look a bit better, though; CPU/GPU development will happen faster thanks to things like this, so the pros might outweigh the cons in the end. Similarly to how many people buy cutting-edge hardware to play video games, not to calculate the long-term orbits of near earth objects. Personally, I have electric heating here, so during the cold time of the year I run Rosetta@home distributed computing on all my computers. It's a computational biology program from the University of Washington. Good way to use idle CPU resources productively (and if I had good GPUs, I'd probably run Folding@home). http://boinc.bakerlab.org/

Interesting, thanks.

$2000/ton dissolving pulp :) But seriously, I've asked people to not buy me anything, but I might buy myself some books from my amazon wishlist. Many were recommended by people on this board, so thanks!

Do you have specialized hardware to mine or are these new cryptocurrencies still easy to mine with just regular cpus/gpus? If you don't mind sharing, what kind of money have you made so far?

Market price signals only work when price information exists. A lot of environmental issues arise because there's no price on clear air, a benign climate, clean water, plant species X, animal species Y, untouched nature spot Z, etc. And these things are very hard to price, with the value of a lot of them only obvious when it's too late and they are gone (how much are bees worth to the agriculture industry?), or hard to put in dollars but still valuable (how much is love worth to the world?). Sometimes incentives are used to encourage favorable behaviors in lieu of these prices, and that's what this is. Thousands of laws create all kinds of financial incentives (dividends vs buybacks? charitable donations? cigarette taxes? VAT that end at borders, favorizing exports, mariage and family benefits, etc), this is just one more approach. Not optimal, but it can help kickstart new desirable things, like more efficient vehicles. In an ideal world, I don't think this would exist. There would be better ways to achieve this goal. But if we're talking ideal world, many things are higher on the list of things I'd like to see gone before insurance rebates for efficient vehicles. There are probably thousands of things I find much more problematic.

You also can't buy a car without a catalytic converter or run a coal plant without lots of emission controls. Horror! http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/what-pittsburgh-looked-when-it-decided-it-had-pollution-problem/2185/ If someone's externalities cause you harm take them to court (individual or corporate). That is the purpose of a rule of law. You don't need to infringe on someone's freedom. Why not hold those companies accountable for the pollution in Pittsburgh? If these light bulbs are such a great idea, why can't the exchange be voluntary? Why is forced coercion required? I hear you. It's elegant. Libertarian 101. But what you're preaching is like Efficient Market Theory. It's a nice model that looks very good on paper and works for many things (but not all), but in practice it doesn't work for a lot of environmental problems. Where it does work, I'm all for it, though. It's not more private litigation that cut air, water, and ground pollution over the past few decades. Why? Probably because the people most affected are poor and the fight is terribly asymmetrical; it's easier for the rich to just move to the nice, less polluted spots than fight big corporations with bottomless pockets -- and nobody likes litigation, especially libertarians who preach what you say, ironically. And also because a lot of that kind of harm is very diffuse and long-term while the benefits of ignoring environmental/social damage are very concentrated and short term. Courts are good at dealing with existing harm, but if you see harm coming over many years and/or across jurisdictions, they usually can't really deal with that -- and if you wait for the harm to have happened, it's then usually too late, species are extinct, people are dead, fetuses deformed, watersheds are poisoned, etc. So quality of life is down (just ask the Chinese), some ecosystems go in irreversible decline, it's hard to prove that certain diseases were actually caused by toxins X or toxins Y or whatever; but some people and companies make millions and so have huge incentives to hire lobbyists, acquire political connections and back people who will protect their special interests, hire lawyers to find loopholes, etc. Tragedy of the commons exists. So it's kind of a prisoner's dilemma. Everybody would like their neighbors not to poison them, but nobody wants to have to change their habits to be less polluting. If you voluntarily do it, you probably won't reach critical mass and freeloaders get an advantage. The best way to get the benefits for everybody is sometimes to have an arbiter who says "Ok, let's all do this". Personally, I don't think the best way is to ban specific things like the incandescent lightbulb. Instead we should set energy efficiency standards to move things forward, as can be seen with how cars progress when standards tighten and stagnate when standards also stagnate (sometimes for over a decade). So I'd be more in favor or a standard that says "You have to produce X number of lumens per watt however you want, and every Y years you have to get Z% more efficient". People always whine during transitions (look back at any energy efficiency transitions with cars, appliances, building codes) but a short while later people get used to it and are glad. I'm not nostalgic for the time when cars got 10 MPG on a good day and fridges and ACs used 4x more electricity to do the same thing (similar to the safety side -- I'm glad we have seatbelts and airbags, esp. because people aren't rational, even about their own safety). Soon enough LED bulbs will cost a few bucks, this controversy will be forgotten, and many terawatt-hours of electricity will be used for more productive things.

You also can't buy a car without a catalytic converter or run a coal plant without lots of emission controls. Horror! http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/06/what-pittsburgh-looked-when-it-decided-it-had-pollution-problem/2185/

So far no problems. Most of mine are Philips, but i also have GEs, Samsungs, and CREEs. I've always found it worse to have heat sources I can't turn off (because I don't want to be in the dark) during the hottest, most humid days of summer than not saving as much electricity during the cold time of the year because I now get less heat from lights... The process of moving heat out via A/C is probably not that efficient anyway, so that's another layer of waste. In places where people heat with natural gas, it's more efficient to burn the natural gas for heat in your home than to burn it in a power plant because of the losses that occur there and during transmission. So heating with incandescent lightbulbs was never that great, especially since electricity is a more "high grade" (you can do more useful things with it, such as run a computer) form of energy than heat from burning fuel, so priority should be put in using it for these higher uses rather than heating with it. But here, we have electric heating from hydro, so it's a wash on that front, but still better during summer.

Good. My place has been 90% LED and 10% CFLs for a few years and I have no complaints. Recently got a CREE LED that has a CRI above 90, So light quality is getting quite good. Incandescents offend my anti-waste engineering sense :)