Jurgis

I'm not saying your advice is bad, but... Keeping in mind your advice, would you invest in WFC? DVA? TDG? Aren't there people questioning some ethical practices of FFH? Where's the line? Isn't every company doing things that are possibly borderline unethical? I'm pretty sure I could accuse every company I own with unethical behavior in some way in the last five years or so...

I just set the ringtone of my phone to a song that comes from my own MP3 library. ::) OTOH, there are reasons custom ringtones are better even if they are based on the same song. You may not want the beginning of the song as a ringtone, but rather some part of refrain. To do that yourself, you have to cut the song which is more effort than buying a ringtone. Possibly a bit similar with using your own photo as wallpaper. OTOH, I think these markets are rather mature/tired. Not sure there's great future unless the company does some other stuff. I admit, I haven't looked. 8)

This is a good observation in re Youtube ad explosion that happened last couple years.

:o :o ::) ::) :-X :-\ Good luck. Emphasis mine.

Barron's said that there were rumours Sinclair might buy TRCO. That would require a yuge loosening of regulations though.

OT: Yeah, there was serious hurt with Chinese frauds (some of them weren't reverse mergers either). And some of the frauds did "going private" announcements in the day. So I think it's reasonable to do some DD as writser does in these going private deals. I also agree that there might be some anti-Chinese company bias. I think it's mostly justified though, since most (?) Chinese companies are not run for minority shareholders. (Not that a lot of other companies are...). Foreign locale, past frauds, complex structures (even the huge companies are structured through VIEs, contractual rights, etc, since China does not allow for foreign ownership of large swathe of companies), not understanding language, not understanding accounting/laws, grey financing/sales, etc. Of course, writser picked a nice niche to work in. Going private spreads give known return and are time-bound, so you don't have to trust in things that are difficult to research and trust for long time.

OK, now I'm a proud member of Boston Public Library. Thanks folks for suggestion. 8)

I haven't looked at this in depth recently. Does LVNTA have higher discount to underlying CHTR value than LBRDA?

http://www.heforshe.org/en For gender equality

The advantages of Alzheimer's... I meet new friends and discuss new topics every year. ;D

I've done mine. It is easy. If you are on a Mac don't use Safari, it won't work. You have to use Firefox. Not sure what you mean. I haven't found any way to import IB taxe forms into TurboTax online. Are you saying there is a way? We can take it to private messages or other thread, since it's a bit OT here. Edit: This https://ibkb.interactivebrokers.com/article/2030 I believe only works for importing into TurboTax standalone. Not into online. Also this says only standalone: http://ibkb.interactivebrokers.com/article/2042 Sorry, I'm not using online. I have Turbo Tax on my Mac so I download a txf file from IB and import to TurboTax. What I found is the txf file is screwed up when downloaded with Safari but is OK when downloaded with Firefox. This has been the case for at least three years. OK, thanks. I am using online. I'm aware that the standalone can import the txf. Switching to standalone would solve the IB issue, but I probably would lose info that I have in online that makes other things faster/easier. So tough choice. Probably gonna manually input IB into online... :-\

I've done mine. It is easy. If you are on a Mac don't use Safari, it won't work. You have to use Firefox. Not sure what you mean. I haven't found any way to import IB taxe forms into TurboTax online. Are you saying there is a way? We can take it to private messages or other thread, since it's a bit OT here. Edit: This https://ibkb.interactivebrokers.com/article/2030 I believe only works for importing into TurboTax standalone. Not into online. Also this says only standalone: http://ibkb.interactivebrokers.com/article/2042

Good article. I'm too lazy to create a WP account to ask the author the following question, but I'll throw it out here: So in winner-takes-all economy competitors cannot destroy the margins of AAPL/FB/MSFT/GOOGL. But that does not prevent competitors from trying. And when AAPL/FB/MSFT/GOOGL invest into trying to capture the market of FB/MSFT/GOOGL/AAPL, doesn't that drop their margins, since they can't win and they are just throwing money into the wind? I guess the answer could be that they spend only a small percentage of money trying to break into another winner's market. But is that really true? Didn't Google spend a lot on G+? Another answer could be that their winner margins pre-attacks-on-other-winners are so high that even the money wasted does not lower margins to past averages.

OT. But is it really? It won't be Steve Cohen, but possibly some small guy who talked to someone at the company involved. It's not as if SEC is gonna prosecute a case of micro cap insider trading at ~1K shares... OTOH you're right that it's high probability to be generic no-clue retail investor(s) who got tired/spooked/flipped/etc.

Sorry, my mistake. It's for clients' own good. Tell them to take a vacation and come back in 10 years for $$$$$. ;) Edit: I haven't gotten to entering IB transactions into TurboTax yet. I'm gonna be way more snarky when I do.

It's preventing you from trading for your own good. Just go on vacation, you don't need to buy or sell anything. Come back in 10 years and you gonna be $$$$$.

Hmm, rukawa, I am confused now. 8) Your last post is very pro-university, your post earlier is very anti-university system. Can you clarify? 8) Let me answer some of your points from previous post: The geniuses from the past who you like so much also had to find funding. OK, they were not exactly today's grants, but they had to find either government/state/government-institution or private rich people funding (or be rich themselves). How is that different? In some cases such funding was easier to obtain, in some cases harder. In some cases the constraints on the funding were less, in some cases way more onerous. You exaggerate there. So you don't believe in multiplier effect from graduate students doing research? You don't believe in graduate students doing worthwhile research? I do. I'll go with Google example again. Also, you seem to forget that graduate studies is studies. People who start at year one of graduate program don't know how to make good research yet (at least majority don't). At the end of graduate studies they do (majority do). So what you call "army" is really a way to teach young people to become researchers. And these young researchers will appear from where? From getting B.Sc.? You really believe that you can fund people to do research without them going to graduate school first? I disagree. Yes, some research results might be better if professors employed professionals instead of grad students. If you think that professors love having graduate students instead of professionals to do the work, then you are quite mistaken. It's headache for them too from that point of view. However, we are going back to the fact that you have to have institutions that train people on how to do research. And the current system is just a solution for that. Maybe you disagree with the whole concept of such institution. I believe it is needed and I believe it mostly works. Yeah, grad students are not necessarily well trained when they start working. Yeah, they don't necessarily know what they are doing. Yeah, when they become proficient, they graduate and leave. Yeah, these are the facts of life. Good professors and groups deal with that well. Bad ones don't. Some professors do hire professionals for some tasks. It is though expensive and thus limited to best professors and best institutions (MIT, Stanford, CMU). I think you contradict yourself when you talk about professors doing their work themselves and then talking about them hiring professionals to do things. Professors doing the work themselves would just mean less progress and less results. You may think that's good. I don't agree. Professors hiring professionals would make things way more expensive for whoever is paying for the research. If money is available, then I'm all for it though. BTW, what you argue for somewhat exists too, though in limited quantity. There are government research labs where researchers work themselves with some professionals on various research projects without student "army". There are private and industrial research labs. You may not like these for other reasons, but they also mostly follow the model that you like: "researchers working themselves with some professionals on various research projects". So we do have alternatives. Finally, you have a lot of emotions against the system. I guess that you had bad experience with it. I'm sorry for that. I've had great experience with it and although I have not worked at the university after doing my degree, I still interact with people from there and have a lot of respect for them. It is not ideal system. It has issues. But I disagree that it's "utterly without logic and reason. Its inefficient, corrupt and stupidly run." Good luck

Yeah, sure. Google for example. Oh wait.

I agree with Liberty. Sample bias and recency bias (you know bad apple examples from now, but you don't know the bad apple examples from Newton's time... oh wait didn't he and his students fight with Leibniz like heck? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy ) There are tons of great researchers nowadays who do it for love of science. There are great researchers who achieve spectacular results possibly comparable to greats in the past. There are great professors that teach and guide students as well if not better than the past ones did. However, yeah, there is increasing specialization - the "easy" knowledge is all discovered and the new achievements require more and more esoteric specialization and understanding of very limited domains to great depth. It is no longer possible to be polymath to great extent. Some people still are somewhat, but not a lot. Sometimes there's also a "new" field in which you can discover somewhat "easy" knowledge like computer science in 1940-1970s or so. But that's somewhat rare.

What KJP said. Edit: and even if you do something like 60/40 or 70/30, you still can argue that 60-or-70 should be in-index or beating-index.

Since some of the posts went towards medicine, I'll post the following article that I found rather interesting: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes/517368/ IMO it's a well written article and possibly useful to some people who commented above. I appreciate comments of tripleoptician and lschmidt from the field. This article is only partially related to the original topic of this thread.

False. Even highly survivor-biased polls on CoBF, which is stacked by the best-of-the-best, does not show that it isn't hard to beat the index.

"Expert" is not just appeal to authority. Unfortunately, like nafregnum said, science is now so complex that somebody outside the field cannot understand all the data, all the studies, the variables, the possible interactions of variables, the statistics used, and the significance of such. What I will give you is that even within the field not everyone understands this and/or can summarize the data, evidence, studies, point out the questionable spots, etc. But for people outside the field it is simply impossible (unless you are a genius and/or spend couple of years studying the field) to do that. So, yeah, you can either rely on the accepted majority opinion based on long term studies and their results. Or you can decide that you will take the opinion of couple minority studies and possible effects of data mismanagement (which don't necessarily even support minority hypothesis). Or you can have a weighted opinion. IMO someone like Liberty has a weighted opinion. Someone like your original article doesn't. If you still believe this is "appeal to authority", so be it. If you still believe that you can have a better weighting about the pro/con/tampered/non-tampered studies without being inside the field and understanding it thoroughly than relying way more on the established long term expert opinion, then I disagree with you. Good luck

I won't. First of all neither you nor I are experts in medical studies. So even if I posted 99 studies, there won't be any productive discussion afterwards. Second, your phrase drastic conclusions immediately shows your existing prejudice against the scientific studies. Your attitude is to question an established long term results based on a couple samples that are questionable. While this might be productive if you were an expert in the field, for non-expert it shows a prejudice against the experts in the field.

Before I posted it, I checked some of the other articles from the homepage. I had the same response that you did. But I thought to myself: If the article itself is thoughtful, has legitimate points, and legitimate sources (I checked most of the sources myself), then it should be posted. The section on vaccines is what first made me question the article's authenticity: Sounds a little funky, right? Well let's check the source: http://morganverkamp.com/statement-of-william-w-thompson-ph-d-regarding-the-2004-article-examining-the-possibility-of-a-relationship-between-mmr-vaccine-and-autism/ So the source appears authentic, if you ask me. The source is likely authentic. The Wakingscience website though amps up the source into single sided "scientists cooked results, vaccines cause autism, etc." diatribe. Even if all sources of the article are authentic, reliable and not exaggerated (and some of them clearly are), there is still a huge anti-science slant by not reporting anything from the other side. Let's put it that way: if there's 98% of studies that did not cook data and reported X, 1% that cooked data and reported X, 1% that reported "not X", what would be your conclusion about X if you read an article that only mentioned the 1% that cooked data and the 1% that reported "not X", but said nothing about 98% of other studies? Would your conclusion be valid, interesting and justified?