dwy000

inequality is a different issue. And that generally gets addressed through taxes and social spending - the exact things that are being reversed. But the comment that wages have trailed inflation (for any income group going back decades) is simply not true.

Wage growth considerably outstrips inflation and has for decades. The Growth in Real Wages, by Income Group - Voronoi

It only works if the tarriffs are for decades not hours. Building new industrial capacity takes $bns and years. Who is doing that when the situation is likely to change the next day based upon someone's tweet.

Canada put the levies on in August 2024, following and in support of the US and Europe who also put the same tariffs on China.

@longterminvestor, what are your thoughts on AJG buying Woodruff Sawyer? Paying $1.2bn plus $150m in acquisition costs and retention bonuses seems crazy expensive for a company with $88m of EBITDAC. Is this indicative of valuations or is Woodruff a one off at this value?

Yes. This is like the Sovereign Wealth Fund idea. You need to fund it and that requires congressional approval. This reeks of putting out a PR to tick the campaign promise box on supporting crypto. And I'm sure there was some slip of the notice to friends and family to make money on the announcement.

Are you serious? How deep in the cult are you? Ukranian leadership just supported him unanimously last week. He doesn't have to sell them on anything. And he's not choosing to continue the war, he's choosing to defend his country from an invader. Yes, Europe will bail him out. And he's already lost the support of the US. When Putin's puppet came in. To watch this made me truly embarrassed to be American for the first time ever.

the more I read about it, the more it looks like they had some kind of suicide pact. I mean the guy was 95 so I'm not surprised about him. It's his wife thats odd. Well, that and the dead dog in the closet.

Well, with the budget just passed the accumulated deficits will be $19T for the next 10 years. And that's if all the cuts that were achieved, the tariffs meet all revenue projections and none of that affects growth.

That's a great philosophy for a software company. Not so much when providing healthcare, retirement income, national defense, world diplomacy, etc.

I don't think anyone is suggesting there isnt massive amounts of waste in government spend (just like most large corporates). The question is more how best to deal with it. Sending 20 year olds in who literally have no idea what the people there do and cutting entire departments will ultimately create more chaos and harm than savings. Working with those departments to figure out how best to lop 10-20% of spend over the next 2 years is much more effective than culling half the group and waiting to see what breaks. Even more head scratching is why, after going thru whatever necessary process to reduce spend to get a soaring debt in hand, you would turn around and give all that away in tax cuts. It seems to defeat the purpose.

According to your beloved Fox News, that poll is overwhelmingly off of every other major polling firm. Like miles. And there's nothing in it about Ukraine. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/politics/surprising-new-poll-numbers-released-trumps-performance-so-far-white-house.amp

It's whining to try and get the father of your child to respond to medical emergencies? Is that really what we've become?

He's getting paid by Tesla shareholders like he's making each car personally. If he's not involved in running day to day operations this should be reflected in the governance.

This is getting awfully close to political so i will leave.it with this post. 57% of immigrants have some college or a college degree. If you are worried about someone with a 3rd grade education, no experience and no language ability taking your job, your job isn't that secure to begin with! The congressional budget office last year estimated that immigration will contribute $8.9 trillion to the US GDP from 2024 to 2034. Your issue with benefit programs disincentivizing work has zero to do with immigration and in fact appears to be more related to US born citizens than immigrants given the employment numbers. See attached. Immigration leads to substantial reduction in deficits as wages and taxes well exceed added system costs. 60165-Immigration_250217_201042.pdf

Consistent immigration leads to increased consumption and demand, just like any type of population growth. That gets supplied by increased production. Higher wages arises from a shortage of workers not an excess (much like we've seen over the past few years). Lower housing costs comes from increased building of housing (ie production) to meet demand. Every single piece of research shows that immigrants have higher employment rates than non immigrants. I'm not sure what your point about Medicaid is but it has nothing to do with immigration. Businesses are begging for more workers - at all levels of experience and education. Even Musk wants to massively increased the H1B program. There is not a problem out there that gets solved by stopping immigration, but there are a lot of benefits of continuing or increasing it. Curious what your issue with immigration is? Why do u want to stop it given its so beneficial?

In the very, very, very short term (like weeks or months) and in a very small area there can be, but over the long term its definitely a positive. Also, the numbers here are both very small each year and very consistent and widespread across the country so there's no shock to the system that would lead to issues from decreased wages or housing shortages. The complaint from businesses these days stem from a shortage of available workers, not high unemployment.

Well the US population has tripled in the past 100 years so you would expect the number of immigrants to increase. But the highest year ever for immigrants was 2.7mn in 2016 and it's been hovering around 2.5m each year since (except 2020 covid of course). That's less than 1% of the population. And considering the birth rate has been steadily declining where it's now below replacement rate, it's really hard to blame immigration for housing problems, unemployment or anything else really. An influx usually leads to growth as the infrastructure and economy expand to provide for increased demand.

There's no questioning Musks achievements. None. The issue I have is with the Tesla board. First, if your CEO is also CEO of 4-5 other companies is that really in the best interest of shareholders? And second, there's really no debating that his antics over the past 18 months have harmed Teslas reputation and sales. At what point do you uphold your fiduciary obligation to shareholders and say that you need to put someone else as the head and let Elon go off and do his political thing?

That was exactly the Madoff strategy. We'll, that and stealing people's money

Bought for $4bn. For sale for $4bn

I'm a huge supporter of long term investing and I think it's one of the only ways that the average retail investor can have an advantage over managed money who get ranked every quarter. The problem I struggle with when implementing it is that, other than indexing, when talking about individual stocks the proof is always in hindsight and the cost is the most valuable asset of all - time. If i buy Costco at 55x forward earnings, yes after 30 years I will probably do okay. But 30 years is a LONG time to judge any investment (heck, 5 years these days is impossible to figure out). So if anything hiccups, not only do i have a poorly performing investment, but I've lost 30 years of investing that money at even a market return. Ive invested in many undervalued names that underperformed for 3-5 years while I railed at the market for being inefficient. Then it doubled over a year or two and I felt so justified in my analysis that I ignored the fact that it was an average return for 5-7 years.

I wonder if the reference to the friend who got rich by never, ever selling is about Dealraker.

To be fair, 1946 was a pretty important year for children in France.

Rogermoribund posted this on the Google thread and it got me wondering, who, other than Nvidia is benefitting from these hundreds of billions of additional global spend? Is it mostly real estate and construction? Who's providing the compute infrastructure and connectivity? Is there any opportunity left or has it been fully priced in?