Jurgis

$1 at 5% return in 100 years = 131.50 $1 at 3% return in 100 years = 19.22

I think what you suggest is the way to go. Unfortunately, Waymo has been somewhat adamant that Tesla-ish way "human-takes-over-when-self-driving-cannot-handle" is unsafe and that they want to go L5 with no steering wheel/controls/etc. for humans. I don't know if they will be smart enough to change that tune and release what you suggest: L4 package that can handle most situations.

I bought some of this when it was spun off from BAM. I also got few shares in spinoff, but that was very tiny - my BAM position was not big. I think the bull case is company growth now that it's free from parent. I think TRU may be acquired by Fairfax eventually - although I don't know if personalities involved make this more or less possible. The risk is that pursuing growth they write policies too cheap. And that overall insurance business is not great at the time of low bond yields.

The funny thing is: AMZN/GOOGL already have a lot of workers in NYC and will keep adding even without the whole 2nd headquarters hoopla. So, no, NYC is not killing itself like a lot of people claim.

I don't think questions get worse. I've said before though that Q&A format is not productive for in-depth discussion. I think Munger's hearing and tolerance are going down though. So anyone who asks three level question gets nothing back. But even simpler questions pretty much got short answers.

I think both sides will be just fine. 8)

Anecdotally, I have tried Google Cloud recently and it's full of obscure magic incantations. OTOH, I think that's mostly true about any cloud or even data center setup. Although TBH I haven't used AWS recently and Azure at all. 8) Likely once you work for some time you know the magic incantations by heart or at least have them written in some personal doc for copy/click/paste.

What do you think about competition? https://seekingalpha.com/article/4240488-comparing-pagseguro-stoneco-square

@WayWardCloud: I think Waymo currently is encountering something that is intersection of safety and performance and irrational human decision making. E.g. the situations like merging into freeway or a congested lane. Self-driving cars can handle that mostly. But there are situations when this is not easy/dangerous. What humans do in such situations, they just do it (muscle in). But from self-driving car perspective such muscling in would be unsafe, so the code is not tuned to be aggressive. So the self driving car just gives up or at best stops which makes the merging even tougher. And this annoys all the humans behind it and possibly precipitates humans muscling on the self-driving car even more, which it then considers even unsafer situation to deal with. I'm not sure how this is going to be solved. It might be possible to make the car more aggressive in certain situations, but that would likely make it less safe. Humans just don't think that some maneuvers are 100-1000x riskier than others. They just do them anyway. There are other issues to be resolved like weather (rain, snow) and poor road markings. I think these are easier to solve technologically, since they are pretty much science/engineering problems rather than world/humans/safety intersection problems. Just to mention, there are also: - 'unexpected situations' problems, i.e. where something happens that is not adequately recognized and handled by car. - humans trolling the car problems, e.g. someone just walking in front of a car in a street where self driving car cannot go around the human. - quality-of-life problems: I and (most) Uber/Lyft drivers drive risky but save time like merging at last moment into congested exit lane. Would humans accept safer car that takes 40 minutes to get somewhere when risky human does it in 20? For these reasons, I am more in a Tesla'ish-give-self-driving-but-keep-steering-wheel-and-controls-for-human camp rather than Waymo-full-auto-no-steering-wheel-and-controls camp. Although I understand Waymo's argument against the "Tesla'ish" camp. 8)

It's surprising that crappy brands have value. 8) TAP has a bunch of brands that I have not tried, so above is just generic rejoinder. 8)

Signed up. It will be nice to see you again. Might have some stuff to talk about. 8)

I think it's very hard to get the incentives right in such situation. Perhaps the right way is to create a government-funded non-profit with a pot of money that would acquire approved "reserve" drugs. The non-profit could potentially recoup some money if/when the drugs go off-reserve. It might not if drug stays on reserve for 10-20 years... But I'm still not sure this would be attractive to big pharmas or even smaller companies. I.e. wouldn't for-profit corporation work on a possibly multibillion blockbuster rather than on a drug that at best gets them XX million from government?

AFAIK Google as FB tracks individuals across web pages using cookies for gathering info and advertising. So the system between the two is pretty similar. Google is probably using Gmail/google account as an anchor while FB uses FB account.

It's not genetic component. It's good drugs. Where's ScottHall when we need him.

Thanks. My edit was correct then. 8)

I don't see how you link explains the change in brokers not allowing to trade Fairfax India anymore. It doesn't. It does however explain why Fairfax is not the right organization to contact regarding this matter. The ADR's are unsponsored. Yes, and? Not all unsponsored ADRs are prohibited from trading by brokers. I'm pretty sure the line drawn is based on what the company issuing shares does (in this case Fairfax India) rather than what the unsponsored ADR issuer does. BTW, from the posts in thread it appears that brokers prohibit buying Canadian listed shares of Fairfax India too. These are not ADRs. And again the responsibility for lifting the prohibition lies with the issuer: Fairfax India. Edit: actually I reread the thread and it's not clear whether buying FIH.U (rather than FFXDF) is blocked or not. So I'm scratching my last paragraph.

I don't see how you link explains the change in brokers not allowing to trade Fairfax India anymore.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/germany-gets-wrong-facebook-120602470.html ...why go after Facebook and not Google, the biggest fish of all? Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., collects more data. If this stands on appeal, they will go after Google too. Maybe even before that.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. 9/10 might as well mention In Bruges 9/10.

A professor at the University was giving a lecture on Paranormal Studies. To get a feel for his audience, he asks, 'How many people here believe in ghosts?' About 90 students raise their hands. Well, that's a good start. Out of those who believe in ghosts, do any of you think you have seen a ghost?' About 40 students raise their hands. That's really good. I'm really glad you take this seriously. Has anyone here ever talked to a ghost?' About 15 students raise their hand. Has anyone here ever touched a ghost?' Three students raise their hands. That's fantastic. Now let me ask you one question further...Have any of you ever made love to a ghost?' Way in the back, a student raises his hand. The professor takes off his glasses and says 'Son, all the years I've been giving this lecture, no one has ever claimed to have made love to a ghost. You've got to come up here and tell us about your experience.' The student shuffles up to the podium. When he reached the front of the room, the professor asks, 'So, dear, tell us what it's like to have sex with a ghost?' The student replied, "Oh no, from back there I thought you said "Goats."

I guess $1M questions are: - How big is the podcast market going forward? Ek said going to 20%+ of Spotify listening. Is that reasonable and achievable? - What is the probability of Spotify capturing that ??% of total podcasting that would map to 20%+ of Spotify listening? - Assuming they get to 20%+ of Spotify listening. Is that enough to drive monetization/profits assuming no improvement on music side? - Assuming they get to 20%+ of Spotify listening, will that improve Spotify's position vs music labels/artists and music side of business overall? Let me throw out a simple silly model: assume current annual revenue $7B, podcasting adding 20% revenue ($1.4B), all that flowing to income/CF at 100% margin, you have $1.4B income/CF at $25B market cap - looks cheapish. Especially since regular revenue may grow double digits itself. The optimistic parts of this model are 20% rev addition and 100% margin though. Assuming 50% margin, the valuation becomes less attractive. With 207M MAUs, it's possibly somewhat realistic to add 20-40M MAUs if they can grab a large podcast slice?

+1 8)

I really don't want to get into a long discussion of "is it misunderstood or not", but let me cover couple BG2008 and Schwab711 examples briefly. Just to emphasize, I don't know if I'm right and I won't defend my position much. You can make up your own mind. 8) Airlines - I don't care what Buffett did before/now/after. I believe airlines still have issues in terms of competition, pricing, labor, etc. So IMO even though airline stocks seem cheap, I don't think that market/analysts misunderstand them. I'd argue that they do. NFLX - Yes, there is an argument that NFLX is not just lighting cash on fire on the road to hell. But NFLX valuation is huge even if the arguments about their growth-before-cash-flow approach is good and works out. Does market/analysts misunderstand NFLX? IMO no. It could be argued that market misunderstands NFLX by being too optimistic rather than being too pessimistic (bear argument). It could be argued that there is some balance of NFLX being understood/valued based on great growth vs negative cash flow. Hope this helps. Have fun. 8) Nobody's gonna take my ORCL challenge? 8)

Jurgis, I waited a few hours before responding and still can't figure out your argument. You have a way of framing your points that is frankly a bit above my pay grade. Variant perception, what is that? In fear of getting too caught up in semantics like "what is value investing." I'll try to boil it down to simple examples that a fifth grader can understand 1) Before Buffet bought Burlington Northern Santa Fe, everyone thought that railroads were bad capital intensive businesses. After he bought them, everyone realized that there is a ton of pricing power. 2) A few years ago, people thought all the cable companies will die and shareholders will get wiped out. A few people realized that you will still need the connection to the home. 3) A few years ago, there was a 400 post discussion on VIC about whether Amazon will forever be a 1% net margin crappy retailer. I think we all know that the reality is very different from that. Amazon was a large cap even then and there were thousands of people looking at the name. 4) I neglected to mentioned that WWE's stock crashed because Vince tried to get a TV deal that would pay WWE live sport kind of money. The TV people balked at them and told Vince that wrestling is scripted. So Vince said "to hell with these guys, I'm going over the top." The strategy was risky and no one knows if they will ever go above breakeven which I believe is about 1 mm subscribers. So there was a time when you could have followed WWE closely and see how close they were getting to break even. The subscription at $10 or $12 was a great value for its fans. If you bought 2 pay per views a year, that was your annual subscription. From a content perspective, it also means that your stars can focus on the product and not try to promote the buying of pay per views which can get very tiring. 5) Buffet denounces airlines for a long time. Then he invested in them after they have been consolidated to four big players. Maybe we can call whatever I am trying to find something different and exotic, but the key here is to identify situations where people think 1) An industry is terminal, yet it has tremendous growth and pricing power, i.e. Cable companies 2) Business is capital intensive and will forever earn a bad return, in reality the industry has consolidated and has much better economics 3) Low ROIC is intentional and the company is being greedy for the long run, i.e. Amazon and a lot of the tech companies 4) Not sure how I can frame WWE into this framework, but there is some misperception in that the capital allocators don't understand the lifestyle of the poor and trashy population. I think what Jurgis is implying in addition to what he actually wrote is that not only are good novel ideas (variant perception) rare, but that accurately recognizing them is also quite rare. People are posting 'novel' ideas relatively frequently on cobf and elsewhere. Folks like ajc here (or @emilio_gold on twitter) are arguing for Long SPOT, which I don't understand at all. @emilio_gold has some novel arguements with regards to NFLX, which I also don't get. Picasso pushed certain coal companies/ideas when the industry was all but dead. But it didn't actually die. I suppose that's close to what you are looking for. I didn't understand the idea until it worked and neither did many others. I remember at YYX that year, a few coal companies were pitched with little interest. The ideas you are looking for have probably already been written up here, on twitter, on VIC, or elsewhere. They are being written by the people that sound crazy or possibly sound like they don't understand the basics of the industry or finance analysis. Most are as crazy they sound. Some, though, are exactly what you are looking for. Great elaboration and examples Schwab711! 8) I like your examples more than BG2008's. 8) At least partially because for some of them we don't know the outcome yet. 8) Although I might argue that some of your examples are also not misunderstood. 8) Anyway +1 on your post. 8)

Fair enough. I disagree with your examples and your reasoning that they were (are) misunderstood, but I guess that's what makes the market forum. 8) Good luck.