Jurgis

@Broeb22: my simple solution is to ignore this. 8) Like HP split, I think it's gonna produce two crap companies from one crap company. Though it's possible that one of the pieces will do Nadella and go multibagger. It's hard to predict for me though. Good luck for people who can foresee what will happen. To answer your question, I think one piece will provide cloud + related services and software. Plus probably the legacy hardware business, etc. The other piece will be pretty much consulting arm. It's not a very natural split because the consulting arm will start drifting away from pure IBM solutions and the cloud arm will start growing its own consulting teams. But hey, that's what they decided. Even though I think both pieces are mediocre, both will likely do OKish unless really mismanaged. Not at the level I'd be interested to dig into and invest though. FWIW. I'm not an enterprise cloud and consulting expert.

Some years ago a relative of mine was lured into one of the MLM schemes (might have been Herbalife, I don't remember) and signed some commitment to buy their crap for X months. They realized the f*ckuppery when they got the first delivery. They took the package to one of their "seminars", left it there, and told them they won't pay for anything they send. IIRC they did not get any more deliveries and were not forced to pay for their commitment. Also, since we are talking about car dealership scumbags. Years ago I was buying a car. Agreed price X. I come to sign documents. Oh, no, the price is something like 1.1X. No, we cannot do X. Unless you sign for financing at 19.99% APR. ::) OK, I signed up for financing. Paid off X on the very first day of financing, zero interest costs. Just f*cking stress and paperwork. F*ck these dirtbags. #StoriesOf"Evil"PeopleWhoDon'tHonorContracts ::)

It might have been good decision for Buffett. I'm not so sure that standalone Whole Foods would be doing great today. Would depend on management clearly, but it probably would have been a tough slog.

Yeah, that's right. UK may or may not withhold tax on any dividends.

Do you mean buying UK stocks in US based financial account (e.g. Fidelity, IB)? If so, it's the same as buying US stocks. Do you mean buying UK stocks in UK based financial account for US citizen? If so, things are a bit complicated mostly because you have a foreign financial account that you have to report. There might also be issues with UK side taxing this account, but I am not sure about that.

Yeah. Donald Trump. Sam Zell. Bob Murray. And tons of other greatly moral businessmen who strategically default all the time. Read the RE threads perhaps? There was a thread on CoBF some time ago where a person was asking advice on how to buy a second (investment) property with non-recourse mortgage so that they could possibly strategically default if things did not work out. The response in that thread was not the moral outrage we see here. It was "hey, here are the states that have non-recourse mortgages, here are the states with recourse mortgages, good luck". Double standards much?

I sub to NYT and WaPo. I seem to read way more WaPo than NYT, but then I had just WaPo app on mobile. Installed NYT app now, opened it, but it did not look that great. Maybe I'm accustomed to WaPo. Not sure if I'll continue to sub both long term. Honestly I'm probably fine without either of them. Might have to try to unsub and see if I really miss the access. IMO newspaper subs are way below Netflix in addictiveness. I also sub to paper Barron's and I'd prioritize Barron's way above NYT and WaPo. But that's a vertical, not general news. NYT tried to upsell me, but I'm not really interested in their other content. I think the thesis is interesting. Spreading/growing could work out. E.g. I'd love if they (or someone else reputable) spreading internationally started providing in-depth Lithuania local news coverage. Right now there's only crappy local news portal. Probably too small market though. I'm hesitant about their spread into other content. Not sure they have moat or quality or whatever. E.g. I look at computer games news sometimes. It seems that there's this Forbes journalist who's really good in covering stuff interesting to me. Not sure how the heck Forbes ended up with a good gaming journalist and if they care about it and if they will sustain it. Just an observation that NYT won't necessarily dominate verticals just because of their mainstream newspaper content/app/journalists/etc.

Summary of this thread: businesses that exploit unwary customers are great moral pillars of society. If you were screwed, shut up, and pay the CoBF investors. It's your fault.

LOL, this is CoBF, what do you expect? You should have asked how to structure RE business so you could walk away from non-recourse loans/mortgages. ::) Just invest into the (preferably used) car dealership(s), pawnshops, for-profit education companies, and be on the other side of poor suckers who get screwed. ::) This is the moral way .

F8ck Palantir. #EdwardSnowdenIsAHero

Sure. There are things that FB/Twitter/GoogleNews/Netflix/AnyMediaOrganization do that CoBF does not. You can look at these things and judge them on positive or negative: 1. Notifications. Positive: if you are waiting for friend to show up and they are late, you want to be notified that they messaged you. Negative: constant attention hog. (BTW, CoBF has notifications too, just less invasive perhaps). Solution: you can set notifications to whatever you want, including turning them off. 2. Recommendations. Positive: You just read about Model 3, you want to read more about Model 3 Autopilot. You just watched "Sleepless in Seattle", you want to watch "You've Got Mail" or "Big". Negative: Rabbit hole, splurging, etc. Solutions: I'm not sure you can turn off recommendations in most places. Maybe there are knobs in some apps. I'd argue that recommendations is not a huge issue, but maybe they are for some people. 3. Ads. Personalized ads. Positive: get relevant ads. Negative: privacy, pushing you to buy crap. Solution: just fricking adblock everything. Harder on phones... Overall ads are crap. If you ever looked at "personalized" ads, you'd despair on how bad ad targeting is and not about how powerful AI is. 4. Curated timelines/posts. Positive: you see what you want to see. Negative: you see what company thinks you want to see. Echo chambers. Crappy feeds. Maybe addictive feeds. Solution: Personally I think the curated feeds are just crap, so just don't use them. It's not that they are evil-great and addictive. It's that they are just crappy selection. So don't use them. Pretty much every platform allows you to avoid curated feeds. It's possible to have a discussion about all these issues. But not if documentary authors turn the documentary into echo chamber that they themselves condemn. Basically zero opposing or even moderate opinions. And the fake "real story about teenager who got radicalized and missed on love and foodball practice due to evil AI" is just a mind manipulation porn. I think what the documentary authors tried to convey is that when there is a direct and proportional exchange of $ for your attention, the companies will do everything in their power to shift individuals to the "negative" while making it seem innocuous. It's easy to make it innocuous because we, humans, are really easy to trick. It's even easier to trick us when some of these services get so deeply entrenched into the fabric of our lives (e.g., Whatsapp/WeChat for communication with loved ones). The ease with which we get tricked is well captured by Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow." Nonwithstanding the cheesy side story (or as you call it, manipulation porn), the authors did a pretty good job highlighting how our fallibility got weaponized against us. The "Solution" that you are bringing forward, that's the slow, rational brain. Sure, it makes sense, but we just don't slow down enough to think it through. I disagree with the characterization "weaponized". I tried to illustrate that the features you and documentary authors call trickery are actually useful features. Yes, they have negative sides. But they also have positive sides. Would you use/prefer a system that has no (automatic) recommendations? Would you use/prefer a system that has no (automatic) notifications? Would you use a system with no (personalized) ads? OK, everyone would use a system with no ads, viva la free/open source products! ;D (Nobody's gonna pay for such system though... so we have a tricky situation here). Would you use a system with no curated output? OK, I'm against curated output but I'd probably say that positives outweigh negatives. In toto, I might agree that automatic notifications by default should be disallowed. Even though I'm sure that I'd have to help a bunch of my not-computer/phone-savvy relatives to turn them on again, since they'd prefer to get notifications. The rest are not so one-sided. Or in case of ads - one-sided but not easily solvable. Anyway, that's my opinion. I'm also totally for the alternative products. From what I saw, they did not have a single person building alternative product (maybe there was one, I did not know the company he's currently working for). OK, you could argue that it's tough to compete with heroin dealers. Fine. I'm also for a moderately sensible legislation. But moderately sensible legislation requires a dialogue that should IMO be much more balanced than the documentary was. Ah, BTW, another example of exaggeration: one of the interviewees claimed Gmail was addictive. ::) Well, I agree that email could be addictive. But how on Earth Gmail is any more addictive than any other email? ::)

The difference between COBF and the major social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok is that COBF was not deliberately designed in consultation with behavioral scientists and UI experts to target your brain's reward circuitry. There are no strategically utilized flashing lights, bright colors, pop-up notifications, or "likes" on the site; there's no employment of peer pressure to create network effects ("Friend X joined!"), and most importantly, there are no algorithms working over millions and millions of iterations to identify the types of posts that will keep you hooked. The difference between COBF and Instagram/TikTok is the difference between an ice cream shop and a heroin dealer. This is exactly what documentary claims. And it is as enormously exaggerated as you just did. So hey you bought their product. Congrats. ::) What product is the documentary selling, specifically? Leaving aside the dramatization of the teenage boy's life, what specifically did the documentary exaggerate? Most of the film is just interviews with the software engineers who helped create the products themselves. Are you disputing their accounts? Whose? Point out specific examples, otherwise you're just blowing hot air. I have already answered what was exaggerated above thread. Please read. ::) Documentary is selling FUD. Plus books by couple interviewees. Plus (non-profit?) organization of one interviewee. But mostly FUD.

Please don't read this post. You've been warned. I just realized that my butt impression on an office chair looks exactly like Tesla logo. Here. If you did not listen to me, now you have to live with this in your mind for the rest of your life. (Unless Sanjeev deletes this post for pubic safety).

Sure. There are things that FB/Twitter/GoogleNews/Netflix/AnyMediaOrganization do that CoBF does not. You can look at these things and judge them on positive or negative: 1. Notifications. Positive: if you are waiting for friend to show up and they are late, you want to be notified that they messaged you. Negative: constant attention hog. (BTW, CoBF has notifications too, just less invasive perhaps). Solution: you can set notifications to whatever you want, including turning them off. 2. Recommendations. Positive: You just read about Model 3, you want to read more about Model 3 Autopilot. You just watched "Sleepless in Seattle", you want to watch "You've Got Mail" or "Big". Negative: Rabbit hole, splurging, etc. Solutions: I'm not sure you can turn off recommendations in most places. Maybe there are knobs in some apps. I'd argue that recommendations is not a huge issue, but maybe they are for some people. 3. Ads. Personalized ads. Positive: get relevant ads. Negative: privacy, pushing you to buy crap. Solution: just fricking adblock everything. Harder on phones... Overall ads are crap. If you ever looked at "personalized" ads, you'd despair on how bad ad targeting is and not about how powerful AI is. 4. Curated timelines/posts. Positive: you see what you want to see. Negative: you see what company thinks you want to see. Echo chambers. Crappy feeds. Maybe addictive feeds. Solution: Personally I think the curated feeds are just crap, so just don't use them. It's not that they are evil-great and addictive. It's that they are just crappy selection. So don't use them. Pretty much every platform allows you to avoid curated feeds. It's possible to have a discussion about all these issues. But not if documentary authors turn the documentary into echo chamber that they themselves condemn. Basically zero opposing or even moderate opinions. And the fake "real story about teenager who got radicalized and missed on love and foodball practice due to evil AI" is just a mind manipulation porn.

The difference between COBF and the major social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok is that COBF was not deliberately designed in consultation with behavioral scientists and UI experts to target your brain's reward circuitry. There are no strategically utilized flashing lights, bright colors, pop-up notifications, or "likes" on the site; there's no employment of peer pressure to create network effects ("Friend X joined!"), and most importantly, there are no algorithms working over millions and millions of iterations to identify the types of posts that will keep you hooked. The difference between COBF and Instagram/TikTok is the difference between an ice cream shop and a heroin dealer. This is exactly what documentary claims. And it is as enormously exaggerated as you just did. So hey you bought their product. Congrats. ::)

With all do respect, this board is a tool that is available for people to utilize as they wish. There's no different homepage, news feed, story line, etc - its the same for each user. And? The fact is that CoBF as written and presented (by open source, non-profit software mostly) is more addictive to some of us than the "evil" social media run by superhuman AI. Which shows how much the documentary claims are exaggerated. I spend about 10 minutes a week on Twitter. I look at Facebook maybe for ~1-2 hours a month. I spend X hours a week on CoBF. There's pretty zero addictiveness in Twitter or FB for me. So nice that Sanjeev perfected the evil AI to make me addicted to CoBF. I'm gonna sue him for using me as a product for $$Millions. (sarcasm intended). BTW, Facebook curated timeline is complete crap. I don't look at it anymore. I do what I do with Twitter: I just go to person's page (whatever it's called) and look at what they posted unfiltered. That's it. So for all the evil effort, FB is doing a lousy job if they think their timeline "manipulation" works.

Can you provide some examples of what you viewed as gross exaggerations and unproven claims all over the place? Social media is the ultimate evil which will lead to collapse of human civilization. AI too. Social media is responsible for genocide, polarization, suicide rise, populism, etc.

It's a completely one-sided documentary that commits the same sin it accuses tech companies of: it's manipulating the viewers and selling them FUD (and products) pushed by selected "experts". There are huge gross exaggerations and completely unproven claims all over the place. In short, it's crap. 2/10. BTW, what are you doing on CoBF after watching this documentary? CoBF is Social Media too. Please delete asap.

Tesla moat is presumably autopilot and (not yet existing) full self-driving. These are the only features that would make me choose Tesla instead of other E or not-E car.

Unless I'm mistaken SlowAppreciation is @MineSafety.

The book is boring, repetitive, facts-lite, disorganized, not really in depth, and not insightful. Pretty much avoid. Just read GE Wikipedia page instead.

What's the big difference? They already know what you buy. Now they'll also know what you steal? ::) 8) (Oh wait, they already have cameras for that in regular shops... if they care)

Yeah, Facebook is a poor small business that needs help and should not pay 30% fees unlike the huge rich tech behemoths. ::) So nice to see Apple stand up for a little guy.

Correct predictions may or may not help you to be a good investor (produce alpha). Correct or incorrect predictions do not necessarily make you a good/bad investor. They also do not necessarily make you a good/bad entrepreneur.

VW ID.4 - US sales in 2022 - I guess they believe that EU is more attractive market. https://www.autocarpro.in/news-international/new-id-4-suv-is-volkswagen-first-global-ev-67257 Not planning to buy car next year anyway, so might see what are the best choices in 2022. 8) Tesla recently sent me another email about inventory availability. It seems there are more and cheaper (IIRC) Model 3s available in our area (or even shipped).