Liberty

The grasshopper tests are SUPER impressive. The rate of progress is really quite good. Looks like every month the capabilities improve dramatically. Update: I like this comment that someone else posted on another forum:

Agreed, but it doesn't seem like something Malone wants to do. This book was unauthorized, though Malone did many interviews with the author (not sure if they were specifically for the book or for newspaper pieces that the author did over time), and I feel like all those interviews were mostly about the business because Malone wants to keep his private life out of the spotlight. Not sure if he'll ever pull a Buffett and open up completely to a biographer.

Excuse my ignorance but what does the acronym "POMO" stand for? Thank you in advance I had to look it up too: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/permanent-open-market-operations.asp

Thank you.

I finished it a few days ago. Quite an excellent book, makes me wish there would be a sequel or updated version that covered what Malone did since the book was published.

This is unrelated to the current discussion, but the other day I was wondering if Fairfax/HWIC would have a better track record over the past 25 years if they had just bought Berkshire stock whenever it was selling close to a fair valuation (or better, of course) for the equity portion of their portfolio... They've had all these amazing investments and trades and deals, but in the end, was it better than buying Berkshire juiced with float leverage over 25 years? As Munger was saying, there's no bonus points for difficulty in investing. If you Eric can compound at 70% by specializing in a handful of companies, I don't think that necessarily makes you a worse investor than someone with a much larger circle of competence but lower returns. The question is, how would HWIC do without the constraints of being in an insurance company/investing OPM...

That's such a brilliant way to look at it, thanks for the insight Eric.

Exactly. They're hedged, yet people often talk as if they were net short.

Thank you, much appreciated!

Another video from inside the NUMMI plant http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/07/the-window-tesla/

I take it this means you had it delivered? Was it everything you hoped? Any negatives?

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2298292 Abstract: We propose a global and morally mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action which can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. We link the rule to various philosophical approaches to ethics and moral luck. The mathematical appendix shows risk hiding in the absence of such a heuristic

Something that I learned and that I think is pretty big: until the spin off of Liberty Media in the 1990s, Malone had almost no equity in TCI. 'Less than 1%'. Crazy how much value he created for Magness and other shareholders in something he had so little of. Of course, that changed quickly once he decided he wanted a bigger piece of the pie...

So I'm about one third of the way through and finally Capital Cities and Malone have crossed paths*. I was looking forward to that. :) *Malone came out on top in the skirmish over ESPN fees.

He actually signs "Greenlight Capital" ???

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/07/26/how-a-brazillian-oil-billionaire-lost-99-of-his-fortune/

Figured this one deserved a thread since so many here seem to have read it. :) [amazonsearch]Cable Cowboy[/amazonsearch] I've had this on order for a while but it's back-ordered and apparently not getting closer to shipping, so I decided to cancel that order and instead just get the kindle version (it isn't available in Apple's iBook store...) and read it on my iPad.

Solar will probably eventually go the graphene route. It's basically carbon, and it could lead to conversion efficiencies much greater than silicon (because in graphene, it's possible for one photon to free more than one electron). http://www.technologyreview.com/news/511751/research-hints-at-graphenes-photovoltaic-potential/ Some even thing efficiencies of 60% could be possible with graphene... But even traditional solar technology has been falling in price very rapidly (a kind of Moore's Law) and will be very competitive sooner than most people think. http://media.treehugger.com/assets/images/2013/05/cost-of-solar-power-graph-1980-2012.jpg.0x545_q100_crop-scale.jpg As for any toxic materials in thin film panels, they aren't really much of a problem since they aren't going anywhere for the decades of useful life of the panel and can then be recycled. It's not like toxic materials in fuels that you burn and then release in the air. Offshore wind farms will play a much bigger role because the wind is stronger, more constant, and there's less complaining. The birds thing is ridiculous. People suddenly become big bird defenders when they hear about wind power, yet the biggest killers of birds are power lines, buildings, cars, and house cats. Yet nobody complains despite these being many orders of magnitude bigger problems for birds. Climate change and toxins from coal also certainly kill many more birds and other animals than wind power... The noise thing is also way overblown. It can be a problem with badly sited wind farms, but overall, it's like the bird thing. Not nearly the problem that wind opponents would like people to believe IMO.

I disagree. Unless I'm mistaken (its been a while since I read about this), the energy source in current uranium reactors (ie. non breeders) is only the U235, not the U238. When you look at coal's energy density, you look only at coal, not at coal + the useless rock that surrounded it. Maybe if he was writing in a commercial context of uranium spot prices it would have been misleading, but the comic wasn't intended in that context. It was only about the energy density of various things, and in uranium, the 'fuel' part is the U235.

Good ol' Munger 8)

Indeed. U235 occurs naturally at about 0.7%, if I remember correctly, and even nuclear weapons only need to go to about 90% enrichment. Nobody would ever quote the price of pure U235 on the market (if anyone did, I'm sure Iran would be very interested) :) That's an aside, but what I'd like to see commercialized eventually is the thorium LFTR reactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR It seems like a better, safer, more efficient model than the uranium reactors that we have, and if the military hadn't needed to make so many bombs, thorium would probably have been picked over uranium from the start...

I think it's 100% U235, otherwise it would read just "uranium" and would represent the energy density of a mix of U235 and U238. This comic is drawn by Randall Munroe, a former NASA guy. He tends to get the science right. Wikipedia has the energy density of U235 at 83,140,000 MJ/KJ, so the comic was apparently being conservative.

Liberty, thoughts on the book? I've read about 1/3 of it and then set it aside to focus on a few other books (I tend to always read a few things in parallel). So far, I feel like I've learned a lot about Greenberg and how he got his start in the business and how AIG was formed, but not so much about the current incarnation of the company, so there are very few useful insights so far. Maybe that'll come later in the book.. It does sound a bit like "Hank the super genius who saw what nobody else saw and made it work through sheer hard work and determination" at times, and I'm not sure if it's getting into hagiography territory or if it's just a fair description of how good Greenberg is (was?). It's not written in the most griping style, but it's not terrible either. I'm witholding judgement for now, though...

Congrats! :)

Heh, that works too. Solar shade's a nice bonus if you're going to get panels anyway, though.