Liberty

I thought this was an interesting read. Can anyone confirm the author's claims? http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/why-a-low-delinquency-rate-isnt-the-good-news-real-estate-story-you-think/

Even more stuff on Shannon: https://medium.com/the-mission/10-000-hours-with-claude-shannon-12-lessons-on-life-and-learning-from-a-genius-e8b9297bee8f The authors of the book wrote about their 5 years reseraching him and 12 lessons they learned from him. Also, there's a review by Vin Cerf (co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol on which the internet is built) here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7662/full/547159a.html?foxtrotcallback=true

If he has better opportunities to deploy lots of capital, it would be crazy to tie his hands in advance to buybacks. If BRK falls a lot, other things are probably falling even more.

17 years at 26% is 50.8x Wow.

btw, the book came out yesterday, for those who were waiting to order it.

I'm about 60 pages in and liking it so far. Very interesting to learn about pre-digital computers and how they could do fairly complex calculus simply be internally reproducing analogs to real world phenomenon with spinning discs and ball bearings and such. There's a funny anecdote about how Shannon was almost prevented from taking a flying class as a student at MIT because his professors recognized how special a genius he was and they didn't think it was a good idea to put his life at risk :) I also find it fascinating that Shannon and Turing met during the war, but couldn't really talk about what they were working on because it was so classified. Both of them together basically had all the theoretical pieces for digital computers.

Valuing BRK on book makes less and less sense as time goes on. It used to be mostly insurance cos with a portfolio of publicly traded stocks and a few operating businesses on top, but now it's also bunch of very large operating businesses of various kinds. The two-column valuation method makes most sense, IMO. I certainly wouldn't compare the book value of BRK to GOOG or whatever...

BTC just went to 1800, ETH to 130... Talk about volatility for 'currencies'.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sprint-executives-have-engaged-warren-buffett-about-investment-1500055560

Did you cut & paste what I wrote on the Shannon thread? :D

“Our space probes still tethered to the Earth with thin cords of 0′s and 1′s.” (That’s good writing!)

Congrats Keith, well deserved!

It's better to be lucky than to be good 8)

I was lucky enough to get a copy, I'll be letting everyone here know what I think of it when I've read it:

Great post, Peregrino!

Fascinating discussion. I haven't kept up with this phenomenon in a few years, and it looks like it has gotten a lot easier. I hope this leads to many great books that wouldn't otherwise have been published. Can only be good for the civilization.

This is coming out soon, so I figured it probably should have its own thread to bring attention to it. https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Information-ebook/dp/B01M5IJN1P/ Here's an except: http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/a-man-in-a-hurry-claude-shannons-new-york-years

Thanks for the anecdotes. It certainly sounds like a change from the bidding wars and people throwing $100k cheques with their offers without inspections and such.

Ok, thanks. Your phrasing made it sound like you thought those orders of magnitude bigger numbers were small for today's consumer storage.

Are you talking about current storage or future theoretical storage? Because your examples seem a little stretched to me. 124GB growing 100x is 12.4TB, which is more than what most people have available at home, so I wouldn't say it's "easy for anyone to keep a copy". 124GB growth 1000x is 124TB, which is definitely out of reach of any normal person right now, so I wouldn't say "it wouldn't be much of a problem to keep at home"... Even at the sweet spot of a 4TB HDD, that's 31 hard-drives, or about $4,000 of HDDs, plus the NAS enclosures, plus probably redundancy, which is many other thousands depending on the RAID scheme. So we're probably talking about close to the price of a small car just to store a 1000x larger blockchain. As for a million times bigger than 124GB, that's definitely not that easy to keep a bunch of distributed copies among miners everywhere with anything close to current technology. Maybe I misread, or misunderstood what you said, but I was thinking that the multiples of 124GB you were talking about didn't seem that small to me. Maybe you were thinking about theoretical future storage capabilities...

That's going on the list, thanks! Liberty, If you have not seen this yet, I thought it would be of interest, http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/meet-the-authors-of-a-mind-at-play-how-claude-shannon-invented-the-information-age Thank you, I hadn't seen it!

While looking for something, I found a bookmark folder from 2011 full of Bitcoin stuff I was reading at the time. I've been interested in crypto since the late 90s (PGP), so I was mostly interested in the tech. I also have some friends who are engineers working in an adjacent field, so we discussed it a bit in those days. Never bought or mined (hindsight is 20/20). Among the stuff, I found this, which I remembered from those days:

http://www.greaterfool.ca/2017/07/06/the-perfect-storm-2/ Also: http://www.greaterfool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/DEAL-modified.png

I thought this was a good article about how the big branded food brands are under attack from above and below: https://www.wsj.com/articles/so-long-hamburger-helper-americas-venerable-food-brands-are-struggling-1499363414 h/t Connor Leonard for pointing it out.