Jurgis

Screw my previous goals, i’m all in on this one. Screw my previous lengthy rationale for financial independence, I just want to play the triangle in a house of pleasure Hey guys, no cutting in line! >:( http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/berkshire-hathaway/another-charlie-classic-for-all-time!/10/

This has gone to hell in handbasket. Losses - mostly because of iQiyi content acquisition consolidation? Zero'ish revenue growth. Presumably margin pressure on ads. Does this have a future or it's dead Jim?

I hate to disappoint you, but I think you're in the wrong profession. You should take up investment banking instead. Sure. Just crush a man's dreams why don't you. Well, he can also invest in BAM I guess: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/too-teekay-offshore-partners-l-p/260/

Where do I sign up? ::)

I hate to disappoint you, but I think you're in the wrong profession. You should take up investment banking instead.

1. See if I can outperform SP500 long term. 2. Learn what makes good/great companies/managements. 3. Invest in interesting companies that make positive contributions to this world. Printing tons of greenbacks is good enough too - most of the time. 4. In terms of financial target, I'm gonna join "independence" train. 8)

Partially OT. If someone does a snowbird thing or just plans to live in one place more than couple months a year, AirBnB probably is not great. Also if they want to setup their house/place the way they like with their things/books/etc. OTOH, IMO upkeep is a hassle and that's why I would not want to have multiple houses and would go with frommi approach. 8)

Fair enough. You got me. I have to admit that if I wanted a plane, I'd want "The Indefencible". Actually even a bit more range than that...

Screw modesty. "Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen!"

What did you do, grab value line book and start in the 'F' section? It was the 1,245th page in the ten-bagger thread that finally convinced me. You're way behind. It's on the 1249th page now and boy that has improved the arguments.

I was going to look at this. Thanks for saving me the work. ::)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

This sounds like it doesn't need AI, but maybe I don't know. Shouldn't you just write a series of if-then statements to check if someone's account is accessing records they are they don't need? Sounds like they are using fancy words to scare people. It's not as trivial as you suggest. For clear cases, you just have access control, you don't need if-then statements. But there's a lot of situations where access control does not work and if-then statements don't either. Is the nurse accessing patients' records five times a day checking that his temperature is OK or is she checking out a sexy guy's disease info and telephone number? Is a specialist accessing data of a patient that they saw three days ago checking whether they correctly entered the info or are they trying to preempt some error/negligence they made? You can't just access control these, and you can't just flag them all since you gonna get too many false positives. So you run fuzzy, statistical systems on the data. And you can call them AI since it is really what AI has been for ages. It might not be DNN, might not even be ML, but sure it's AI. BTW, when you say "if-then statements" - if it's a rule based system, that's AI too. ;) And this stuff has been used for similar use cases - like fraud detection - since 1990s if not before. (In general, if it's in Russell and Norvig, then it's AI https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00I2XV9IY/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_ntK3CbQ0M8RP3 8) )

Hear, hear! People (and I) may be concerned of buying a Tesla and company going BK on us. But there's as much concern IMO on traditional automakers giving half assed support (or pretty much none in reality) to their electric models that they produce, sell in hundreds (not hundred Ks), and then discontinue. I might not buy Tesla, but I won't buy a poor cousin EV from traditional automaker either.

As a cheapskate customer, I think Uber/Lyft have space to increase prices without forcing me to take cabs. There are definitely trips that I would not take if prices increased ("Uber-vs-drive-myself-and-pay-for-parking", "Uber-vs-complicated-public-transport"), but there are trips that I would still have to take and probably take up to the taxi prices ("Go to airport"). They can also probably have more "partial surge" pricing, which might be tough to avoid. So from customer point of view, I'm afraid Uber/Lyft will start pushing prices up. Whether that's enough to justify investor point of view to invest into the stock, I'm not sure. I'm not sure how it's in US, but in Lithuania wait charges can be annoying. The price of a ride is so low that couple minutes of driver waiting can up the price of the trip 10-20%. I understand that this is a nice way for drivers and Uber to get extra revenue, but the customer does not get a discount if the driver is late... Which brings me to the anecdotal observation that it seems like a large percentage of Lithuanian Uber drivers casually hang out at home with app running. The scenario plays out as follows: I order Uber, it shows 6 minute arrival time, and then... the car on the map does not move at all for 2-4 minutes. Pretty sure the driver was just at home and then went to their car after accepting the trip. I'm not against this on principle, but it adds waiting time for customer. And it's asymmetric with customer being charged for waiting the moment driver hits the pick up spot. Electric scooters for rent seem to be a big thing right now in Lithuania. I did not try it, since you have to get an app and I'm not sure if the app would accept my US credentials. So maybe if they were offered by Uber, I would have tried them. Not sure. Most of the time I'd either choose to walk or to take a car (Uber) rather than taking a scooter. Might change my mind if I lived/worked/etc in more urban area. And in Lithuania there's tons of scooters in city center, but you can't really get one if you're even just outside the center. So it seems the convenience/availability is mostly for trips from center to suburbs, but not really in the other direction.

After a drought of offers in 2016-17, I'm now getting a bunch of open-cc-get-$500 offers that I'm too cheap to refuse. ::)

I'm still getting Uber discount offers although they are somewhat restricted and localized. I think there is some stickiness to the app even if there's local competition. As a user you know the interface, you have the account set up, you know what to expect. Why would you install some other app unless it was radically cheaper? There's some segment that might install additional apps for 10% discount. It's unclear how big that segment is. Internationally, Uber has some countries where it's the only choice. Local taxis still provide the rate ceiling though. I used Uber in Lithuania a lot. It's very cheap - but taxis are cheap too, so Uber can't really charge US or Western European prices. Predictable and low wait times would be a benefit. Unfortunately, unlike dense urban areas in suburbs these predictions are rather imprecise. I'd be happy to choose Lyft vs. Uber if I really knew that Lyft will take 6 minutes to pickup vs 12 minutes for Uber. But in reality predictions are not true until you request a ride and may vary quite a lot from estimates. Boston suburb is not boonies, but I've had a situation where there was a single driver (!) within 15 minute radius on a perfectly normal day and time... I'm not sure that coverage without running up prices is a simple problem to solve though. Edit: BTW in Lithuania pretty much all taxis and Uber's are Priuses. Gas prices being 2x US price does that.

Yes. I get Barron's paper version for airline miles. One drawback is that it's probably supposed to include online access, but there's no straightforward way to get it. The information for online signup is not available when you get it for miles. It might be possible to call the sub department, but it's likely a huge hassle and they might not even come through with solution. The other caveat is that Barron's (and WSJ) only allows new customers when ordering using miles. So you kinda have to swap to your significant other if you want to order using miles more than for single year. Finally, order with miles can take up to 2 months to process. Yes, it has taken that long for one order I made. So you either have to reorder 2 months in advance - and then you might be getting 2 copies for quite a while if they come through fast. Or you order upon expiration and you don't get a copy for possibly 2 months. Anyway, it is a possibility... 8)

Okay, so I am a non-practioner and I do tend to be slightly paranoid (okay, maybe exceptionally paranoid). I mostly don't hesitate to install apps from the Google Play store, or from the Apple iTunes App Store, or add-ons or extentions officially sanctioned by Crome or Firefox. But, installing a 3rd party app that happens to be on GitHub? Nope, I'm a bit too paranoid for that. I use my browser to log into my financial accounts, so I have a certain discomfort with installing apps that are not vetted through the major channels. I have no idea what those apps do and what they don't do. Is there spyware on them that will steal my brokerage and online banking passwords? Do you have any reassuring intel? I don't mind Outline because when it's run in Chrome, it's sandboxed. But who has gone through the Bypass-Paywalls app to ensure it's okay? I will admit to being paranoid, but there are a few people on this site who are trying to protect their assets. SJ I don't look a gift horse in the mouth, if you're that paranoid go buy a subscription. Just read what the author says in his doc on requesting new sites: Which seems to indicate that the extension just pretty much automates the above process. And if you don't want to use the extension, then you can just use this process manually. Caveats: - It's possible that the author uses custom approach to some sites and the manual approach won't work. - I have not looked through the code, so no guarantees of what the author does. Edit2: I've now read through some of the code. The author does some custom stuff for big-name sites. So the manual approach he suggests to try before asking to add a site may not work for big-name sites (like wsj.com, barrons, etc.). I did not read/understand all code, so I can't guarantee the author does not do anything nefarious. 8) Edit: I have online library access to Morningstar. I had online library access to Barron's in the past. Online library access to Morningstar is pretty OK although it goes down sometimes. Also recently it seemed to remove access to M* analyst reports - clicking on analyst report throws me out to premium subscription page. Online access to Barron's was iffy when it was available. It went through some commercial service that required searching for individual articles and then the articles were produced as PDFs rather than granting access to Barron's online site. Plus some sections of Barron's were not made available. So it was iffy and not worth the savings. Later on, the library discontinued Barron's access completely. So to summarize: library access may not be a perfect solution and may not be worth skipping subscription. YMMV.

http://www.bostonomaha.com/ - now has Eventbrite registration for June 8th annual meeting. No shareholding required. I've registered, but I still don't know if I'll make it due to my travel later the same day.

Thanks for the shout out, but I guess I'll continue watching this. Citron's deck is pretty weak, but there might be enough questions to not invest.

"Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it." - Will Rogers.

There’s a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw that goes “those who can do, those who can't teach.” It’s a fairly commonly held notion among Americans, and explains well the general lack of respect for teachers in this part of the world. Anyway, I think that is one of the deep reasons why people around here like to make fun of people like Tilson, whom many regard as a stereotypical “teacher” of the investment world. There's a cultural idiosyncrasy involved that may be hard to understand from outside the US. :) I don't agree with that saying. And I did not think negatively about Tilson's previous pursuit of workshops and teaching. However the latest ad was really sleazy selling of questionable advice. Which may not warrant a thread, but probably warrants making fun of. "The prophet of profit!" - nah, this is already © Nef Anyo.

People who expect BRK to be the same after Warren dies and T&T take over are going to be disappointed IMO.

It's interesting that Todd and Ted were not at the meeting. Or at least they did not admit they were there... ::)