CapriciousCptl

I think the point he’s making is some groups (currently too many?) outweigh certain costs compared to uncertain benefits— limiting innovation. It’s along the lines of “nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM.” I don’t think it generalizes beyond the single organization level well considering all the money going into venture capital as of late. And I don’t see it at Apple/Alphabet/Microsoft/Amazon where some of the world’s largest companies continue to innovate and pivot. But, you do see it in terms of Berkshire Hathaway’s investment strategy (which interestingly includes investments in Apple), which is exceedingly conservative by some measures. But part of that is because Buffet is risk-averse (which is different than uncertainty-averse).

I think the article stops short of saying how we would know enough resources are being put into innovation. And for that, I have no idea either.

That's a nice way of saying "the title is clickbait."

I had no idea why my lightly used NAS RAID array with 2 NAS-rated WD drives was failing every few months. Now I know why. Last year, I was researching a small hedge fund and found they had a heavy WD position, they cited metrics like $/gb and called WD a cost-leader. Now I know why.

What doesn't make sense to you? They're "buying" Yen and paying extraordinarily low long-term rates. Berkshire can't get USD that cheaply. If they had a cash crunch, they could exchange the Yen for USD. If things are well, they can buy Yen-denominated companies with an enormously low cost of capital and without factoring in the exchange rate.

I think non-GAAP adjustments were mostly used in the article as a rough marker of "crookedness" that you can measure. Because by far, worldwide, the primary means of fraud involves revenue recognition and other accounting shenanigans (very much recommend the book by the same name) that both IFRS and GAAP are vulnerable to. It's just that's much harder to find that stuff out. But, when the SEC notices a problem with your revenue recognition policies affecting your revenue by a few percent, the SEC comes down on you hard. KHC was an example of that last year or maybe 2 years ago with the new rules in ASC606.

It was news to me that IFRS cracked down on non-GAAP adjustments, particularly because I follow some foreign filers in the US and haven't noticed much of a difference. But then again, I don't follow a lot of companies with the type of management that harps on EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA anyway. According to Charlie Munger, "I think you would understand any presentation using the word EBITDA, if every time you saw that word you just substituted the phrase, “bullshit earnings.”

You're coming at this from a "hedging" perspective-- Instead, think in terms of what the bond gives him-- a lot of Yen. That's opportunities to invest. The increased "risk" in this sense is miniscule-- since the cost of the oppurtunity is less than 1% Yen a year, even a 200% rise in Yen/USD only actually costs Berkshire 2%.

And, my bet is Buffett knows of some companies he could deploy that Yen in right now to cover the interest anyway. He's just lying in wait for better oppurtunities.

Now, there could be some other thing going on-- but taxes-wise in general U.S. companies issue US-denominated bonds to repatriate funds so I'm sure where you're going with that. My bet would be if it's not just for the opportunity, it may for their re-insurance reserves.

Don't know about the FF thing but here's the CloudFlare thing straight from their CEO--

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702

It's Yen-denominated debt-- mostly useful to Berkshire so they can make Yen-denominated investments without currency risk. It's at less than 1% a year, which costs virtually nothing given the options it opens up for Berkshire. And you'll note that that debt makes up less than 1% of its total cash position, it's really just there so Berkshire can buy something quickly in Yen if an opportunity shows up.

I used Postgrest with React for a few projects awhile back. It was... okay. The problem is without having much of an ecosystem around it means there’s no established best practices and you have to kind of guess how to organize things. I ended up with a jumbled mess of SQL functions that never really jived. Maybe I didn’t give it the shot it deserved but Rails feels incredibly simpler.

I see this and then I think of all the success of strongly opinionated things like Rails. Having one way to do things forces you to focus on what’s most important, make choices and get things done. It keeps you away from premature optimization and analysis paralysis. Yes, you could split things into 100 different pure pluggable microservices but should that really be where you put your resources at the beginning? To me, engineering and for that matter everything you do isn’t any doing things the perfect way— it’s about doing them the best way you can and moving on to the next problem.

Some things work well together in a functional pipeline— Linux commands that do one thing for instance. EMRs are famously malleable too, for better or worse.

But could you imagine being IT managing 1000 PCs all with slightly different versions of word processors or something like that?

Physicians are human and subject to their own biases and mistakes. I could go on about how helpful patient/nursing/midlevel input is and has been to me personally in my career. But the point I'm trying to make here is that the shallow vs deep thinking shows up in medicine at obvious points and causes problems.

I see this incredibly often in medicine-- particularly from nurses, midlevels and patients when they don't have great relationship with the physician. Myself included (although I try to have a good relationship and communication I don't bat 100). People tend to latch on to what they know or think they know, and it's very hard to get them focusing on the more important issue that may be at odds with that. As an example-- I trained at a place where a patient disagreed with his doctor's assessment (something about lung fluid analysis). The patient cited a well-respected journal article that guided standard of care. But, the patient didn't realize something. The doc treating him authored that article.

We see stuff like that routinely-- evidence gets misinterpreted and people get angry because their sources (but not their interpretation) may be excellent.

He made 20% one time on less than $15,000. He sold when it happened to go up and got lucky. Dodgy stock picker newsletters in biotech make recommendations every day, he’s just as likely to have followed one of their trades than anything else. Unless you produce actual evidence that he has some connection to that company and acted on non public information it’s just speculation. And even worse, it’s damaging to the guy. Frankly it’s ridiculous that people have formed such stirring opinions here based on such limited data and experience.

Plenty of traders speculate in stocks. These sorts of trades should be reviewed but aren’t really that suspicious. I wouldn’t call this “suspected insider trading” without actual evidence.

Could use some sort of verification since Wiki can be gamed.

1. Look at past wiki edits combined with article popularity or other signals to arrive at something like a confidence level.

2. Offer some sort of confirmation check to the user.

A problem with complete transparency like this in our new era of yellow journalism is bad actors can cherry pick basically anything and get pageviews and mindshare by manufacturing outrage. Moreover, the kinds of things that are legitimately controversial get moved to other mediums.

I see opinions like this and then see corporations like Costco that you’d have to try hard to find a reason to hate. Ultimately you’re not going to align the interests of different groups perfectly, but profits and competion align value with consumer value we’ll most of the time. And I think it’s fair taking Apple at its word for now— you can bet a lot of tear down people want to test this.

One of Warren Buffett's primary fears is weapons of mass destruction, I think since the 70s (as stated in his semi-autobiography, Snowball). During the cold-war, he put things like this (paraphrasing from memory): if there's a 4% chance of nuclear war per annum, there's a 70% chance of it happening over the next 30 years. If we reduce the annual chance to 2%, we reduce the 30-year chance to 45%.

I don't understand the point you're making. Stagnant corporate profits can happen for a lot of good reasons, particularly when there's GDP growth over the same period. Increased labor pay, increased competition, cheaper and higher quality products for consumers, long-term minded growth at the expense of short-term profit taking, etc.

Profit also involves some major accounting nuances. In SAAS, for instance, advertising costs resulting in customer acquisitions are generally accounted for upfront, reducing accounting profits in the period of acquisition. This is opposed to other industries, where investments are more easily capitalized and then charged over their useful life.

I think they're referring to the radiation emitted because of nuclear plants, like nuclear accidents at Marcoule, Fukishima, Paks, etc, transport and waste disposal and so on.

For a more balanced view, you can turn to JP Morgan's Guide to the Markets. It's a reliable summary of actual data so you can draw your own conclusions.

https://am.jpmorgan.com/blob-gim/1383407651970/83456/MI-GTM_...

From the excerpt: > We worked hard to ensure that this text is accurate, but there is no guarantee that this text is the most up to date and error free.

I'm sorry to say this, particularly because you did a lot of work here. And it's probably unfair, even, since you're just one person taking on this sort of thing. But it seems to me that you won't stand behind your work, which means I can't trust it. NOLO, for instance, might have similar language in its books. But NOLO already has a reputation for quality.

Apparently the man and his wife ingested aquarium grade chloroquine.

http://bannerhealth.mediaroom.com/chloroquinephosphate

We're talking about the telecom industry-- if any group of competitors can stomach high fixed costs to reap future margins it's them. Launch new satellites, build new towers, lay new lines, whatever-- it's all the same Internet. Really, the story of Global Crossing's failure is instructive-- similar strategy of "low marginal cost, high fixed cost."

The whole satellites-for-Internet space is like Global Crossing 2.0. I mean, business 101 is that high fixed costs + commodity business + high likelihood that technology that will decrease future fixed costs + no ability to repurpose fixed assets = no profit.

Good for society. Bad for investors.

After Googling, 8e:c3:91:a4:f6:c0:b3:66:01:e9:85:a9:da:a6:24:f9

appears to be the default public key for a juniper firewall. I could be wrong but I don’t see anything nefarious.

Obviously you should change your default key and you probably shouldn’t whitelist huge IP ranges.

Absolutely glowing review. Personally, I'm not as enthusiastic about its design. My 2016 Dell XPS 13 (Ubuntu) with a 4k screen is lighter at 2.6lbs and smaller without a bezel around the screen.

> Are they updating the order minute to minute?

Yes. That was 2 days ago. It's a fluid, uncertain situation.

Doctor here. You didn't have a false positive-- of course you feel better off. But, you're not physically better off because nothing came back as positive or treatable. Some will start in your shoes, but be unlucky and have a false positive. They would be mentally and physically worse off as potentially inconclusive tests followed by potentially unnecessary procedures resulted in, say, removing one of your kidneys. Yes, that will only happen very rarely and yes I've seen it happen.

There can be kind of a two prong "test" to determine if screening is harmful. Physically, is it a good idea? Answer is probably no. We're not in a scarcity situation really where the "prestige" demographic isn't getting recommended to get appropriate tests based on their risk factors (on the other hand, some of our poorest aren't getting them but that's not an issue solved here). The other side is mentally. Again, I'd argue that people with a clean unnecessary screening got out lucky. They'd be mentally much worse off had something come back positive.

Bizarrely, there's new data suggesting that even fixing known problems, like coronary artery blockages doesn't improve mortality in a lot of situations you'd think it would. That suggests that we're doing too much screening in that case (I mean, if the treatment is worse than the disease... why screen?), not too little. As another example there is a well-known vascular surgery group going to churches under the pretense of "screening" for leg atherosclerosis, then performing high-margin, high-turnover, and unnecessary procedures on the very high "induced" false-positives.

I also find it utterly bizarre that screening would include lung capacity testing. In an otherwise healthy adult who can say, climb a flight of stairs or something of the sort without getting shortness-of-breath, that test is completely meaningless and expensive from a "disease" perspective. On the other hand, it does give you a number to compare to your peer group, kind of like resting heart rate. On the other hand, resting heart rate is free, can be done yourself, and literally takes 15 seconds to measure.

In the end, I'm not really against having these sort of "prestige" medical services available. Particularly because more choice is generally good-- and it's your body, you should do what you want with it (within reasonable bounds). But, everyone should educate themselves because on balance, I doubt people end up up feeling or being better off considering the ones who will have false positives.

Search engines aren't selling peanuts clearly marked as store-brand; they're showing information most users presume is in descending order of relevance.