Jurgis

I fully support Prem. bearprowler6's note above did not change my opinion or my vote.

+1 to what innerscorecard said. To comment on Packer16's post: I found that international index funds suck unfortunately. It seems that either international indexes are crappy or international markets are inefficient or both. I think both. So it's easy to run US index funds and possibly US bond index funds. I'm still on the fence about US bond index funds - I think active managers might be better, but the cost differential of active bond funds vs index might affect return more than for stock funds. International stock and bond funds are much tougher, since possibly you want actively managed ones...

There are couple issues with mass-taxi-no-ownership view of the future: - Peak to trough demand/supply both in time and direction. Assuming most people still go to work at 9am and return at 5pm, will FutureUber maintain a huge fleet to satisfy demand at that time and direction? Compare this to midnight when nobody wants to take a car and most of the fleet is idle. Sure, FutureUber can apply surge-pricing, but that's not gonna make a regular-9-to-5 Joe happy, since they will have to pay surge pricing every day... - Out-of-way places and destinations. If you want to get rental car in LA and drop it in Montana, you pay through the nose since the company does not need a car in Montana, they need it in LA. Similar situation will happen with people living or going to locations that are out of way. This also can be dealt with surge pricing perhaps, but I'm not sure that would make people happy either. Also, I think there's a magical line of having car in 5 minutes or less. If you have to preorder a car and/or have waiting time over 10 minutes, the convenience drops quite a bit. Sure, in some cases it does not matter, but in some cases it's very annoying. Guaranteeing 5 minute car in peak demand or vice versa in out-of-way low demand location is going to be hard I think. These might be solvable. :) I'm just thinking aloud.

I fully support Prem.

I'm not interested in GM at all, so take the following with grain of salt: GM is a highly cyclical company with pretty much no moat and heavy competition on a 6th year of economic expansion. You might be paying the low multiple on cycle-top results. But then others argue that it is indeed very cheap. :) Good luck

We are back to the strawman argument. ::) Yes, everybody stopped driving GM cars "for decades" because of a "handful,of ugly incidents" with their ignition systems. ::) And obviously nobody buys cars with cruise control and antilock brakes, because the technology is not "infallible". You prefer to die, that's your choice. Have fun.

I consider myself above average driver (haha, lol), but I'd buy one in a heartbeat too. I don't see a point of me spending time, effort and mental energy driving. I'm always happy when someone offers to drive instead of me driving. And even if I'm above average driver, the self-driving car would still be safer than me driving. :)

Schwab711, I completely disagree with you. We will have ~100% penetration of no-human-in-loop cars in 30 years or less. As an aside we will have some form of human immortality in 40 years or less. Also superhuman level AI in similar time frame. (Unless we have a civilization extinction even in the meantime). The future's so bright we gotta wear shades. 8)

How many did you expect to see at this point after release? Depends on the time. ;D

+1 agreed.

Is the blame on the service provider or the investors not validating their numbers with regulatory filings though? Service providers should provide good data. Investors should validate the data. It is somewhat easy to validate data against SEC filings. It might be tough if company does not SEC file (OTC, foreign - excluding some countries that have easy SEC-equivalent access).

Second link is broken. The correct link is: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-start-and-run-a-mastermind-group.html You already have CoBF - why do you need a mastermind group? ;) If CoBF not good enough? ;) Theoretically, it's a great concept. Whether it works in practice depends on you and your network. IMO, it's not easy to create a great mastermind group, the same way it's not easy to find your personal Charlie Munger. Personally, I think that great friends and masterminds are easier in fiction ( four musketeers, Harry Potter/Ron/Hermione, etc.) than in real life. But then it's me speaking and I'm sure other people have different experience. So try it. :)

I think that evaluating CEO from inside might be as hard as evaluating them from outside. Most people on the inside have no clue about company's position/moat/competitiveness/competition/financials/etc. Even people who know and understand these things, don't necessarily have an ability to tie these metrics to what's happening inside. E.g. is it good if X people are cut in division Y? Is it good if project Z is promoted and project W is closed? To be honest though, I have never been a good evaluator of CEOs. I never worked for great CEOs. The ones I worked for usually looked good when company was doing well, but looked like crap when company was performing poorly. In some cases, the situation changed and the CEO could not change. In some cases, they just continued the trajectory when changes were needed. Also, in large organizations sometimes it's hard to see CEO vs. division politics. CEO might talk about X, but changes below their level are quite different and you just don't know if CEO is spinning or if they don't know what they division VPs are doing or if there's politics/infighting/etc.

My spoiler'ish comment: (Don't read before doing the puzzle) One thing that the explanation does not mention is that examples can only disprove something, they cannot prove anything. And actually, both "nos" and "yes"es can disprove a theory. In this particular case, both "nos" and "yeses" are useful. Ultimately though there are infinite number of nos and infinite number of yeses, so we can never know the rule by just doing experiments. The right way to approach this problem is to throw a large number of random experiments at it and only then make a theory.

No, they don't. I just checked. 5 year data for free. Clicking on 10-year data lands on the $199 a year subscription page.

Out of curiosity, what data service(s) do you subscribe to, Nate? Bloomberg Terminal, had Morningstar for years prior to Bloomberg. Just to doublecheck: was "$100 tool" metaphorical or did it refer to some specific tool for this specific problem (10 year financials)? If it did refer to specific tool, which tool was it? I'm pretty sure it wasn't Bloomberg Terminal. :)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick-puzzle-to-test-your-problem-solving.html I've got some commentary on the explanation, but it has spoilers, so perhaps I'll post it later. 8)

+1

Right. My question was: he's can write, but can he execute? :) When I look at 10 years of revenues going nowhere, I start to doubt whether eloquence means results...

KLIC is supercyclical and it usually goes really low when cycle goes against it. If you can catch it at a low, you can make multi-X. But it can go much lower than you usually expect. Good luck. I am not playing this field anymore - last time I did it was something like 199X-2002 or so. ;)

The suffering is not symmetrical, so your question is not well constructed. You could argue the same way for Versailles reparations and against Marshall plan. BTW, your question is not well constructed for another reason too: Greece is BK. There is no way the lenders are getting their money and interest back. The only question is whether they face it right now or extend and pretend. And how much pain is inflicted on Greece in the meantime. I am not saying Greeks are innocent. I think it's a clusterf&*k on both sides - somewhat also how it was in US real estate bubble. It's worse with Greece though. In some sense, my ideal plan would be: write off debts, install independent uncorruptible government, that wields both Marshall plan and tough reforms. But I'll call myself naive (so you don't feel insulted ;) ), since this is not realistic. I just think that the current plan is almost the worst possible, since it is almost everything opposite to what I think good plan would be. Take care

Spekulatius, yes, I agree that is a clusterf&*k from both sides and obviously the information is one sided.

Did you read Varoufakis' interview? ( One source: http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/07/exclusive-yanis-varoufakis-opens-about-his-five-month-battle-save-greece ) Apparently he had plan B and was prepared to issue IOUs, haircut the debt and seize Bank of Greece. But he was voted down by Tsipras and co. I agree though: they should have had plan B and they should have enacted it when it was clear that the negotiations are not working.

Well, after the great recession, we pretty clearly know that stimulative measures work and austerity does not. If you do not believe that, look at USA vs Greece, Spain, etc. If you still don't believe it, then there's no point for further discussion. So you are telling us that the PhD economists will be the ones suffering from the austerity Germans inflict on Greece? Really? Don't have any illusions that austerity will mostly hit the "nonproductive / irresponsible" who exploited the system and defrauded it. No. It will hit mostly the people who are in the country because they have no other option (emigrate) and who were not smart enough to exploit the system and then move the money offshore. You say that all Greeks should take responsibility for the actions of their government and fraudsters? This might seem noble to you, but it is terribly naive. I doubt many people in US believe that they have responsibility for the actions (and debts) of their government. In more corrupt countries even fewer people do. Rich can find ways to escape the responsibility and the poor are left under the gun to "take" it. That's how it goes.