Liberty

Do you think that what they offer has also grown during that time? More channels? More expensive films and TV series? More niches served? More sports? Better image and sound quality (people don't realize that the switch to 1080P and then 4K meant more money had to be spent on physical sets and on CGI, on top of rising expectations for better versions of all those regardless of resolution)? The golden age of TV isn't free, someone has to pay for all those movie actors that are now doing TV, for realistic CGI and on-location shoots and movie quality scripts and all that.. The problem is that they bundle it all, so customers end up being over-served and paying more than they wish they would. But you definitely get a lot more today for the average subscription than you did 20 or 30 years ago.

This was excellent Liberty. Thanks so much for posting. I would also highly recommend these notes (~10 minute read) Liberty, 1. Have you confirmed the sleep notes at all? I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean if I know the notes to be accurate? I've listened to the podcast but haven't read the notes, so I can't say. But if you meant something else, please let me know. I don't subscribe, I'm not sure where I found the site... Maybe just Googling for the podcast to post it here. Seems like a good resource.

Glad you were on a different flight and all right, Tom. Life shouldn't be taken for granted. It's so unlikely that we even exist... There's an unbroken line from us through our ancestors to the very primordial first replicating RNA billions of years ago. Any of our millions of ancestors (including pre-human) dies from some infection or a club to the head or gets eaten by a predator, and we vanish. Any other egg or sperm gets through at that time, and we vanish. Anyway, sorry to get philosophical in a Boeing thread...

I have no opinion either way at this point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This whole thread has been "looking forward" and "disregarding the past" of this company. Why is this time different? No difference. You still have a 50% chance of being right, just as you always have. Whether you act on it or not, makes a market. SD Why 50%?

It would seem like a weird time to overbuild the whole country or nationalize or whatever, just when speeds are going up quickly (1GB becoming available in a lot of places, with near to mid-term path to 10GB at little capex) while telecos are trying to directly compete with cable with 5G, and just as video distribution is heavily fragmenting with lots of new entrants (OTT like Netflix, Disney, Apple, Google, Amazon, Hulu on top of telcos getting deeper into the space). You used to pay about what you pay now (inflation-adjusted) for a 28.8 bauds connection a couple decades ago... Not exactly stagnation. Most of the pricing pressure are coming from video content, but thats' transforming and I don't expect the big bundle to hold on for that much longer... Broadband is still an incredible value for the money. Price of a coffee a day to have access to more content and services than you could imagine at ridiculously fast speeds and low latencies.

Doesn't look like we had a Boeing thread. Today's big story is about China and Indonesia grounding 737 MAX 8s after crashes: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane/china-indonesia-ground-boeing-737-max-8-fleets-after-ethiopia-crash-idUSKBN1QS15F Stock down 10%+

I also like: "Don't just do something, stand there!"

Did you read the part where bullshit is called on that napkin math? Making assumptions like "guessed net worth from arbitrary point is good proxy for equity returns and let's assume there were no large withdrawals or exposure changes over time" don't sound very realistic to me. Not everybody is Buffett, living in the same house he bought in the 50s, driving hail-damaged cars, not giving money to family, and keeping equity exposure at 99.99% of net worth his whole life...

This whole thread has been "looking forward" and "disregarding the past" of this company. Why is this time different?

???

That's totally not something that is happening in this topic. :P Never seen this essay. Its really nice. I have had a few instances which were big oops type ones where I completely changed what I was doing. One question I have though is what you do if: 1) You are sure what you are doing is failing 2) You have no idea of a better alternative. Here I'm not talking about investing because the obvious alternative is to index invest. I more thinking about big problems like a failing career or a lack of passion in life. I am thinking of rut like patterns in life that people don't know how to break. I can think of a few answers: 1) Try anything new and different...experiment with a lot with different things 2) Meet different people 3) Look for the person who is succeeding while you are failing. Especially if that person fall into the psychological category of someone you dismiss because they had some unfair reason for succeeding or because you don't believe in what they are doing. 4) Take LSD or some psychedelic. I don't really think I have a good answer since I am having problems like this and I don't really have a good solution. 1 in combination with 2 is a huge problem. I'm reminded of the saying "When you find yourself in a hole ... stop digging". The first thing to do is stop doing whatever it is that is failing. Even if it means doing nothing at all until you figure out how you want to try to proceed. The bias towards action certainly is the cause of a lot of life's problems. It's the old: "All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone." -Blaise Pascal I think the first thing to do is to look inside before you look outside. Everything you do, think, feel, contribute to others, ultimately goes through or comes out of your mind. Often if you end up somewhere, it's not just because life took you there, but because you took decisions - consciously or unthinkingly - that steered you that way. Sometimes when it's a bad place, it's because you had a misunderstanding about what you actually want/need, or just followed paths established by others. I'd suggest some real introspection and exploration to figure that out (I know it's a vague recommendation, but it's something that everybody has to do for themselves, there's not a specific prescription)... I remember that years ago I found the book Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert helpful to create a framework for life choices.

Finally? Down almost 50% since your cup of coffee comment last November... Why would it rerate? What does reverse-stock-splits have anything to do with it, they don't change the underlying value one bit..? Why is an equity raise a good thing if you're saying that it's incredibly undervalued? Wouldn't that just heavily dilute existing shareholders? How can you have confidence they'd get good returns on that incremental capital since they've destroyed most of the existing capital? It's a 200m market cap, wouldn't a 100m equity raise basically wipe you out? It's still leveraged at 2.6x EBITDA on falling EBITDA as a cyclical company, isn't that worrying? 400m of debt on a 200m market cap seems a bit lopsided... You can always get lucky with an equity stub because volatility will be high, but so far they've proven really adept at incinerating capital (-15% ROE, -64% EBIT margin last year, equity has been shrinking at a -24% CAGR for the past 5 years) so time isn't on your side. And that's before factoring that you can't know what the oil price will do in the next year.

https://a16z.com/2019/02/22/humanity-ai-better-together/

https://stratechery.com/2019/facebooks-privacy-cake/

https://www.gurufocus.com/news/828155/why-i-bought-booking-holdings

Yeah, as I've said often, these were mistakes. I make plenty of mistakes still. Doesn't mean I can't look at the facts and reasoning and point out when I think others are making mistakes too. One doesn't have anything to do with the other. What's the point of a forum otherwise? Everybody patting each other on the back and never questioning each other's assumptions?

In a world of King Worlds News goldbugs and preppers, guys like him and Fleckenstein sound really rational and sane. I think that's his biggest selling point.

Rule’s geothermal theme did NOT work out. For the sake of accuracy (because Liberty is so often wrong when it gets to the detail level): Ram Power is now Polaris Infrastructure. It still trades. Alterra was acquired by a utility for $1.1 billion a few years ago. I won’t go into the counterexamples of when Rule’s picks have made extraordinary gains because it is too boring to play that game. Yeah, he rode the 2000s commodity bubble that lifted all boats, and playing in the junior micro-cap game, he can easily cherry pick examples that went up 50x or whatever because of the incredible volatility in the space. That's salesmanship. What I'd like to see is his actual returns taking everything into account, and not just for a cherry-picked period, but I haven't been able to find that. As for RAM, maybe someone should've bothered to update their website: http://www.ram-power.com/news-media.html In any case, it looks like PIF.to is down about 99.8% since around 2010 when I heard Rick Rule pound the table on them (and that wasn't even the peak, which was double that level), if the chart I'm looking at is accurate... Did they do a reverse 100-for-1 split at some point? Can't easily find a release about it because it's not clear what the company was called at the time.. I guess his geothermal theme didn't work in kind of the same way that Eric Sprott pounding the table on silver (saying it would go 10x or 100x, I don't remember) right at the peak of the bubble did...

Rick Rule is the best and slickest salesman in the industry. I know because about 10 years ago, I found all his interviews and loved listening to him. He sounds so smart and thoughtful and knowledgeable. Doesn't sound at all like he's selling you something. I remember back in the day he was really pounding the table on some of the geothermal power companies... I looked up a few. Ram Power has a website that hasn't been updated since 2012 and isn't listed anymore, Magma Energy merged with some other players (probably in distress) who then got bought be Alterra, a company who's stock hasn't been going anywhere... Rule was saying similarly glowing things about Altius many years ago, back when the stock was the same price as now but the SP500 was probably around 1100-200.

I enjoyed this one, covers a lot of things (startups, tech industry, nuclear power, AI, social issues, housing, etc): https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-sam-altman-ai-tech-business-58f530417522

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-06/waymo-starts-selling-sensors-to-lower-cost-of-self-driving-cars

It's a challenge, but it's not like there aren't challenges with any reactor design. Since thorium has had a fraction of a fraction of the attention of other fuels, it's not surprising that some questions remain open while other questions with U or P have been solved over time as they were implemented... I doubt it's a show-stopper: "Using high Nickel and Molybdenum content, experimenting with Manganese and other additive content, and reducing Iron and Chromium content has proven to be relatively effective for reducing corrosion. For MSRs to become a viable option, a more effective alloy or material should be used to lengthen the life of the containment structure and to maintain relatively pure salts." http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/sunde1/

https://redef.com/original/big-media-isnt-ready-to-fight-back-netflix-misunderstandings-pt-5

If these companies have a durable competitive advantage, it's not because they have invented a model that can be copied by anyone. Maybe they are better at sourcing deals than others or have more talented management or whatever (which is an open question for Altius), but inventing a financing contract that anyone else can copy isn't a competitive advantage. Being a first mover can provide an advantage for a time, but if what you're doing is providing good returns and nothing stops others from doing the same, that advantage will be competed away. It's capitalism 101. That's what a competitive advantage is, it keeps competition away so that you can maintain higher ROIC. But what keeps competition away when you invent a new financing contract?