Jurgis

As much as I'm against limiting TSLA exposure in index fund, I think I'm even more against switching to equal weighted index because of TSLA or couple other stocks. Now you are not only shifting TSLA exposure, but shifting exposure of 500+ stocks. Do you really want to do that? Personally, I was in "equal weighted" camp in the past. I think "equal weighted" are bad indexes nowadays. A lot of new economy is winner-takes-most and you are pretty much killing the best performing companies with equal weighted.

Instead of hypothetical question, the real question is: is it worth converting from traditional IRA (401(k)/Rollover IRA/etc.) to Roth assuming (close to) top tax rate? https://www.bankrate.com/retirement/calculators/convert-ira-roth-calculator/ I played around and IMO conversion is only marginally better for most scenarios - unless you assume high returns (15%+) and (very) long timeframes. For your hypothetical question if you had to pay more than what you pay for traditional to Roth conversion to get money into Roth, it's very likely not worth it. One observation that applies to both your hypothetical question and my real question: there is non-zero chance that Roth IRA will be taxed at some point in the future. How much "non-zero" is tough to estimate. Also, almost everyone has been expecting higher tax rates since (before) 2000. So far tax rates have not gone up, so most scenarios from 20 years ago were wrong. Whether taxes will go up in the future and how much are IMO quite unknown quantities (that possibly are also political and should not be discussed here).

Add me to list of confused people. I see the following: B shares $77 (10 votes) A shares $44 (1 vote) C shares $36-37 (0 votes) Are votes this valuable? A and C prices fluctuate. There is usually no rhyme or reason why. When As are more expensive, people say "votes". When Cs are more expensive, people say "liquidity". If you are long-term holder, you can make some money swapping back and forth. I did that in the past with various Liberties that have multiple share classes. No longer hold any Liberties, so that's water under bridge.

This. Also if you held Total Market index - which is likely better indexing strategy than SP 500 - Tesla would have been in it for a long time now. With the upside as well as downside. ./shrug Also, if you hedge, at best you are going to get 2% outperformance vs SP500 if Tesla goes to zero. Likely with the cost, you will not even get 1% outperformance. Is that really what you want to spend you effort on?

I always say I'm Can-eh-dian! :-*

In a sense most of these already happen... Chinese state banks already bail out / merge with failing banks. Ant was exactly that type of spinoff to enrich certain persons. Possible that they'd issue shares but that'd spook the market... control doesn't need to happen through share ownership though, just expressed through pressure at the board level. No new shares needed to be issued when the CEO was forced out and the new guy brought to the table in a much more humble manner. Right. That's why I presented these possibilities - because they are pretty much real. You are right that some of them happen in subtle ways. Makes sense. Take care. 8)

Maybe you all don't care about this ::), but non-US brokerage account for US residents leads to some fun tax forms and consequences. 8) Just PSA, it's your life and your taxes.

Yes. If you have friends in China, you'll learn how essential Taobao is to daily life, ANT financial is to payments etc. China needs a cloud champion, and is looking like Alicloud more day by day. Party will just expand ownership / control rather than let it die. Party can screw shareholders without impacting users. There's a number of ways this can happen: - Make BABA invest in failing govt enterprises/banks at high prices paid in BABA shares to state - Make BABA spinoff/sell businesses to state or state-connected owners for low prices - Make BABA to issue shares to state because it is a business of national interest and should be state controlled. Not saying that any of these will happen. Likely they won't happen. But there is some probability and CCP definitely has levers to screw shareholders without affecting customers or business itself.

You should not generalize across Europe. In Lithuania anyone above 70 can get vaccine already and possibly even above 65. To be fair, Lithuania is still way behind US.

Camel might work better.

I'm using Azure and it is horrible, I'm using it only because of free credits. Maybe I'm too much dum-dum, but I never were able to wrap my head around how to use GCP and I do not know anybody who use it. I've used AWS 10+ years ago, GCP maybe 3-4 years ago, Azure now. I don't see much difference or any issues. There are always magic commands all over the place. You just learn them and you're fine. ./shrug. It depends on what you run too. For someone who just launches couple VMs and then works inside VM, there's not much to know about Azure/AWS/GCP/etc. For someone who needs to run cloud-specific workloads with a lot of cloud-specific tools/scripts/magic, yeah, you need to know the specifics quite a lot. 8)

DigitalOcean is favorite by nerds, but saying that it's in the 2nd place after AWS is quite presumptuous. 8) Azure and GCP want to talk to you. If you have $B$$$ that is. 8)

This is PSA thread. I'm not personally interested. 8) I talked to these guys, so the following is somewhat management-promo. Take with a grain of salt, do your DD! They direct-sale (Tupperware parties FTW!) children's books in US. Not only Tupperware parties, but also social media virtual parties (go FB!). Covid was great for them, but they expect to continue growing post-Covid too based on number of direct salesforce (60K -> 75K, etc.). 90% e-commerce orders, 92% orders sent direct to customers Typical order size: 5 books $60 They have 120 day vendor terms. Seems like FCF cow. They did/are doing 6M capex or so, but capex is not huge. Planning to get to 350M revenue, maybe even 450M. They basically paid off debt, so they gonna divvie. Likely not gonna buyback (boohoo). Management own 30%ish of company. TIKR 2021 annual FCF shows 34M which is foobar, expect more like ~13M FCF or so. All kind of questions if this is gonna melt, etc. Don't address to me, I'm just a poster on the internetz bored. ::)

I was trying to change the scenery on my Peloton app ... ... and then I realized I was walking outside. ::)

You're not concerned about BLUE CMO leaving? https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/bluebird-bio-cmo-quits-amid-a-rollercoaster-year-and-upcoming-split

If China takes over, bitcoin is not going to save you. CCP is gonna nuke bitcoin as soon as yuan is the reserve currency. You cannot position yourself for global (civil) wars. Well, you can move to New Zealand, but even they will be affected ultimately. On the positive side, most likely nothing disastrous will happen in the next 10 years. And anyone who tells you that they can predict what will happen after 10 years is selling you pipe dreams. © Philip Tetlock Actually Tetlock said "5 years", but I'm gonna be generous. This message is likely going to self destruct in ...

I had to list my title recently and decided that "NFT" is the title du jour. 8)

BTW, FinTwit are mostly hugely positive about FB AR/VR future. FWIW. 8) Seedinvest has another AR company now https://www.seedinvest.com/innovega/series.a 54M pre-money. Requires both contact lenses and glasses for AR. I'm skeptical but FYI.

This one is easy. The answer is "Yes". Ultimately, the right way to feed data painlessly into human visual input should be as direct and as hands-off as possible. So ultimately it is glasses, on-eye input (contact lenses???), or jacking directly into eyes or optic nerves or visual cortex. All the external displays that need to be carried somehow are crutches. Of course, the next next platform is just feed everything directly to the brain. And the next next next platform is to replace the brain. Although I am super tech bull long term, I think it is going to take way longer than people expect. That's why I'm negative short/medium term. I agree that the second question is currently not answerable. There's some probability that FB will win. But I won't go above ~35% or so. Perhaps even lower.

So now you are introducing another (human?) actor into each write of weather station data. Did you consider the cost of this? Did you consider delay? I thought you wanted a real-time weather data. Now you are delaying it. Even if you are suggesting automated verification on write, it still delays the write. Also who is going to do the verification? And how is that different from centralized validation/verification that could use a regular DB and does not require blockchain? I understand that this could work in other domains perhaps. IMO your example with weather stations is not a good one though. Weather domain is not risky enough to be concerned about double writes, erroneous writes, etc. Errors are expected and anyone using data usually cleans the data on input. Yeah, that's unneeded overhead, cleaning on write is better if done well. I don't know if there's already clean-on-write for this data. Also, yeah, there is some reflexivity with blockchain solutions. People/companies/institutions may implement things using blockchain just because it's sexy and on the wave and therefore they have enthusiasm and possibly budget while implementing using DBs would be boring/no-enthusiasm/no-budget. In this respect weather station example might be good: NOAA probably has limited budget to provide free, validated, real-time weather data. If some organizations got the sexy/enthusiasm/some-money bug, they might be able to push through blockchain solution while they would not be able to push through regular DB solution. Maybe. So I would not be surprised to see some blockchain "successes" just because of that. ::) Edit: OK, I'm nitpicking here... but then the weather forecaster's DB can be borked... ;D They should be prohibited from reading blockchain data into non-blockchain DB. ;)

I did not have access to the whole article. However, if BABA has to shed media assets, this is a risk to shareholders. Sales/spinoffs could be done at "friendly" prices to "friendly" buyers without shareholders getting much (any) benefit. It could be ANT Financial redux. ::) TBH, I did not look at how much hit this could be. Perhaps not huge enough to worry.

There is high margin software: for any vertical domain companies would have to (re)implement their domain software for the glasses/AR/VR platform. There has to be the base software: OS - likely stock: Android or QNX (hey BB bulls), UI stack: audio/touch input + the glasses/helmet format video output. Networking is likely stock though there might be some low-power innovations needed. In the future there may be a single platform providing base+UI+standard components similar to Android for phones. Whoever controlled that could ultimately charge for app store/etc. Right now, I think companies already provide some version of base+UI+stdcomp but it's different for each company, so the monetization might be meager'ish. Right now companies are more likely to (over)charge for HW+devkitSW. Companies may provide services for verticals to implement or consult to implement vertical SW on their platform. That's a source of revenue, but possibly not very high margin. More or less think about it like mobile phones pre iPhone/Android. We probably should move this discussion from FB thread... I'd say that side-glasses (what RealWear has), AR solutions and VR solutions each have quite different opportunities and issues: - Side-glasses cannot really achieve combination of real and virtual world. For that you need a display that overlays full or most of your FoV. OTOH side-glasses clearly (pun intended 8)) can be useful in vertical domains without providing AR. - AR is possibly closer to reality (pun intended 8)) as long as virtual can be projected on real glasses in front of your eyes without causing focusing issues and eyestrain. Maybe closest to your 3D TV comparison in various ways: i.e. needs glasses, issues with focusing and eyestrain. May not need helmet (already). Edit: the easiest (? ) AR IMO is car windshields. It's a huge display-like surface. It covers user's FoV already. There are way less issues with focusing and eyestrain since it's some distance in front of user. There are almost no issues with power, computation, etc., since it the car is big and heavy and has power/computation already. Did anyone ask Elon why he's not doing windshield based AR displays? Serious question. ::) - Full VR has further issues with vertigo and overall dissonance between virtual and real world. E.g. do you have to turn around physically to see what's behind you in VR? https://www.seedinvest.com/virtuix/series.a.2 is trying to solve some parts of VR issues, but does not solve other parts. - All of them may still have issues with miniaturization, display resolution, near-eye displays, computational power, UI.

I get what you're saying for the rest of it, but I'm not quite sure how this applies. Wouldn't it have a much slower processing time than almost any other database structure in existence? Like, if you can't really consider a record committed until 51% agree on the record, doesn't that in effect make it a very slow database? Or am I missing something? But you really need that 51% agreement, since those weather station guys might decide to double commit or double spend their weather station data! That would be a weather prediction disaster! ::) Never mind that anyone doing weather predictions already gets all the data in pretty much real-time without borkchain.

AFAIK, COST is losing money on hotdogs. May not be losing money on sodas. Do you know how much food court is a profit center vs being a loss center?

A potential win/not-lose aspect is that: "One pill every two weeks fights diabetes, cancers, heart failure, and 18 other diseases". :) Covid-19 was recently added to this list. Isn't there an analytical risk here? Disclosure 1: over the years, i've had to periodically participate in committees which had to decide if the single payer should pay for certain propositions (there was typically a few participants whose main line of argument was: what is there to lose? a similar line of argument is used now to justify the 2T fiscal shot in the arm). Apologies: i tend to focus (too much?) on second and other higher order effects (the 'unseen' ones). Disclosure 2: i'm in the process of being enrolled in a study (based on strong foundations) which will follow people at relatively high risk to be exposed and to contract covid over the next few months. One arm of the study will receive vitamin D supplementation and the other arm will get a placebo. (i may receive a placebo but will watch for the side effects; you must be aware that the placebo group will also report side effects?) Should I tell you that high vitamin D can cause (? ) (is linked to?) kidney stone problems? Now that I told you this, watch out for kidney stones in placebo group... ::)