Liberty

Have they ever mentioned something like that explicitly or is this more of a guess?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/05/19/donald-mackenzie/how-to-make-money-in-microseconds found via: http://io9.com/5800577/the-stock-market-depends-on-how-algorithms-are-interacting-with-each-other

I found this pretty negative piece about Ballmer, thought it would interest some people here: http://brooksreview.net/2011/05/ballmer/ When comparing to AAPL and GOOG they don't take into account dividends, but the qualitative arguments against Ballmer do right pretty true.. MSFT is doing well, but it could probably do better with a better leader.

You're right, that's why I own lots of Berkshire :) But with LUK, I would be a bit concerned that they buy really troubled assets and then are gone and succession isn't clever enough to fix the assets, and so you are left hanging... But that's not a huge problem and the probabilities of that happening and having a significant impact on valuation are relatively low, so not the end of the world.

That's one thing I worry about with LUK. Berkshire has been buying great businesses for a long time and so it bought a lot of good managers, but when you mostly buy troubled business (and something they don't buy them whole), you have a much smaller intake of good managers. I'm no expert on LUK, but I haven't seen anything so far that really eased my mind about succession. But afaik, they're healthy, so it's no an immediate problem.

I would question why you even type the name of your main search engine. You can set it as your browser's 'home', so that pressing the home button brings you there. You can put a bookmark in the bookmark bar that is always visible.. Most modern browsers have a search field or a URL address bar that can be used as a search engine field (you set it in the preferences), or they auto-complete URL (so that you just type G and maybe O and it'll suggest "www.google.com"). Personally, I have my Chrome set up so that I can search from any search engine from the address bar with one prefix letter; so "g something" is google search for "something", "a something" is on Amazon.com, "i something" is on IMDB.com, "b something" is bing, etc.

Thanks Parsad. It wouldn't be a Munger interview without some Costco reference... anybody here own it?

I think he was quoting Mae West. Great quote.

X2

I just hope they won't screw skype up.. I use it everyday (and I pay yearly for SkypeOut).

Well, most people pay rent on the money they borrowed from the bank ;)

I'm posting this for discussion. Not saying I agree with every word.. http://www.businessinsider.com/actually-you-dont-even-make-money-over-the-long-term-with-a-house-2011-5 I think too often, people forget to do the math on the opportunity cost when buying a house.

I wonder what's the cumulative earnings total since inception ;D

I'm not sure if it has been mentioned, but quality of searches probably matters. If a large fraction of Bing's traffic comes from people making typos in IE's address bar or stuff like that, these searches are probably less valuable than searches from people going to the site (google.com or bing.com) and actively looking for something. I feel like Bing probably has more low quality search, proportionally, than Google. Unfortunately, that's just a guess, I don't have hard data on this (and I'm not sure if any exists that is publicly accessible).

It's easy enough to not read things you don't want to read, I don't feel this feature is particularly needed. In fact, I feel like it could make some threads degenerate into high-school fights about who's ignoring who and people constantly saying in public who they're ignoring as a challenge/public diss, etc. It feels like it wouldn't help at all... My 2 cents.

No worries, I should have been a bit clearer. Cheers!

Is that what you're looking for? http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/205992-freddy-hutter-trendlines-research/149187-realty-bubble-monitor-monthly-update That seems to be the source. Thanks!

I just copied the Atlantic's headline. I think they meant a double dip in the housing sector, not the whole economy.

Smazz, do you have a link to the article that this graph is taken from? I can't seem to find it. Thanks!

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/the-double-dips-official-home-prices-fall-to-new-low/238423/ http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/assets_c/2011/05/clear%20capital%20home%20prices%202011-04-thumb-500x348-50007.png Update: The title of this thread is the Atlantic's headline, not mine. I think they mean a double dip in the housing market, not whole economy...

More than evolution by natural selection, you mean? What more do you need?

This drop was pretty predictable, so someone was probably just waiting for it to back up the truck and load up.

Sometimes I wish we would focus more on discussing potential investments and less on how/why we disagree with each other. It's good for each side to state a position, but after a certain point, it just goes in circles and it's more productive to just agree to disagree and get back to more interesting things like 10Ks, PC market pricing levels, and combined ratios ;D Public debates are rarely resolved satisfactorily for simple evolutionary-psychology reasons. Productive discussions with divergent viewpoints are usually achieved in private, when there's no audience. My 2 cents.

As a relatively new investor, I'm constantly trying to learn, and I do appreciate it when you talk about your processes and criterias, Harry. Thanks for that.