Liberty

For those starting to think about the CSU AGM, I've heard from the CFO that it'll be on May 2 this year ("current plan is to schedule from 8-noon at the Carlu (downtown Toronto)"). I'll most likely do a little get together at a nearby pub on the evening of May 1.

Your assumptions are made up. You don't know his expenses and how much he added per year, and whether the article just cites peak earning figures (as these things tend to do -- journalists love to just use the biggest number they can find). Fact is, someone who holds onto a 5m investment and turns it into 800m and someone who holds onto millions of Apple and MSFT from IPO is a great investor, especially since he did it by doing technical research and identifying these companies when they were basically unknown microcaps. 99.999% of other investors couldn't have done this, as is proven by them not being able to hold on a double or a triple for more than a couple years.

Parsad is right. Too many of you try way too hard to miss the point of these things just to complain and whine. I don't care that the journalist put all kinds of flourishes on it and called him whatever. This isn't the important part; can't you tell what's important and what isn't? Look at the life and the process and the principles. And it's possible to appreciate what someone else has done without caring that not everybody can do the same or whatever. Others successes never being good enough and pure enough and done the way you'd want is disguised jealousy... It's not supposed to be easy to replicate, it's about celebrating someone's success. And trying to create some math to show it's not that impressive. Give me a break. There are lots of entrepreneurs making a few milions a year that will never have a net worth much above a few tens of millions. Trump inherited hundreds of millions and I'm pretty sure this guy is richer than him (esp if you remove the fuzzy brand value) starting from zero. It's very impressive. Most here have trouble holding a stock more than a couple years or without selling a bunch if it doubles...

They put his net worth at $2.3bn. And the assumption that he made 10m/year for 30 years might not be correct, it could be a lot shorter than that. They say he bought MSFT at IPO and held it since then, so his returns there are certainly pretty good. He might just have put less than he put into HEI.

There's one part that seems to be contradictory, saying he likes to double down when the price goes down, and then it says he tends to sell when a position goes 25% against him. I'm guessing this is the journalist not explaining his reasoning fully (he sells if something happens to make him lose confidence and it moves by more than 25%, maybe? and if he remains confident, he doubles down). He's certainly a nice rags to riches story, boostrapping himself from dunce-cap dyslexic with abusive father, forced to go into the navy by a judge to inventor and investor billionaire.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/02/19/the-greatest-investor-youve-never-heard-of-an-optometrist-who-beat-the-odds-to-become-a-billionaire/#a76196b22e8a

Instagram engagement: https://www.axios.com/top-facebook-twitter-instagram-accounts-interactions-1550456097-439fdbe1-33c1-42be-a8d4-189c1899a6bb.html

Cool stuff. Claims can get to 3 cents/kWh, which combined with solar now at 2c is still competitive with fossil fuel plants (and price of solar keeps falling).

Video of Jeff Bezos presentation at Startup School 2008:

You are distorting what I said and tearing down strawmen, as well as ignoring most of what I said. I have no interest in playing this game with you. And if you don't think the financial industry hasn't already been given a sweet deal by the city....

Favoritism? NYC wasn't doing that out of the goodness of its heart. It was doing it because it saw a benefit for itself. Cities are competing against each other to attract capital and jobs, as they always do. You can compete on various basis... Lower tax, or if you have higher tax, more tax breaks (it's what the US did vs other countries before the corporate tax rate went down), nicer weather, better schools, better night life, better infrastructure, less corruption, better housing, etc. None of those things are fair either, some cities have more of one and less of the other, many are historical accidents or things that nobody can change. As for "the people have spoken", what I saw was that a majority of locals were in favor of the deal, and most elected politicians too (since they offered the deal in the first place). It's a minority of people who killed the deal, which is kind of undemocratic, and seemed more about scoring points in politics than any rational cost-analysis case.

I saw the 2016 sci-fi movie Passengers. It wasn't my pick and I had very low expectations, which probably explains why I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a 6/10 and it was something like a 7.3/10, so I'm not saying it's great, but there are so few decent sci-fi films and series that I'm mentioning it anyway. It basically felt like a short-story from the 1950s. Passenger wakes up early from cryo-sleep on a long interstellar flight. What to do next? I can easily imagine how someone seeing it with high expectations could not like it, though, so be warned. It's not deep or anything, but it's decent entertainment.

Why should Walmart or Costco get a better deal from its suppliers when they buy a billion dollar worth of some widget over some other customer who buys a million worth? Maybe because to the supplier, it's the absolute dollar amount that matters most, not the percentages. Maybe NYC would rather have had 25,000 jobs at 95% of its usual tax take (plus all the tax it would get at 100% take on all the second and third order jobs) than 0 jobs at 100% tax take.

Acquisition at Harris: http://www.collain.com/resources/collain-healthcare-joins-harris-computer-systems http://www.collain.com h/t @pearnick

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-18/arrest-of-baring-vostok-s-michael-calvey-is-a-message-from-russia

Apologies if this has already been posted, but interesting email from Zuckerberg in 2015 talking about VR/AR, platforms vs apps, etc. Interesting look into how he sees strategy in the space: https://www.scribd.com/document/399594551/2015-06-22-MARK-S-VISION#fullscreen&from_embed

Transcript of Barry Diller interview at Recode: https://www.recode.net/2019/2/18/18228927/barry-diller-iac-expedia-netflix-amazon-prime-hollywood-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast-interview h/t @Bluegrasscap

Not sure if this one has been posted before, but I'm just getting to it now, and I thought others might find it interesting too: https://moiglobal.com/latticework-2018-tom-russo/ It's a podcast of a presentation by Russo from last september. Also an interesting blog post about Russo and his framework: http://www.scuttlebuttinvestor.com/blog/2018/6/11/a-capacity-to-suffer-and-managing-expectations

This is stupid. Either that, or he's working out and taking care of himself, and didn't use to, y'know. Maybe he can afford the very best trainers and cooks now? Lots of people Bezos' age can achieve that look, I don't really care that Tilson can't. Veins in biceps (and this is barely anything... he's not quite Dwayne Jonhson yet) is more about body fat than anything else, anyway. He's probably just cut sugar and refined carbs and started doing heavy dead-lifting and pull ups.

You should take a look at "Pirate Hunters", too. I enjoyed it more than "Rocket Men" for some reason (seeing as Rocket Men has higher ratings on almost every website), but it may simply be timing on my part. I haven't read it yet. Thanks, I'll add it to the list.

This emotion is in your own mind, and you're projecting it. In mine, there's absolutely no pleasure at what has been happening in crypto. In fact, I was quite glad that a bunch of early adopters were making large donations to some non-profits that I support, and I've been interested by cryptography since the 90s (the PGP book!) and quite like following the technical side of the field. I post things that I find interesting. I'm under no obligation to post about both sides or whatever, I'm not a wire service. I've been following the inflation and deflation of this bubble with interest, and when I saw that someone had compiled those numbers, I thought it was striking (I hadn't seen them before) and gave it literally 10 seconds of thought. Had I known I would be facing a grand jury on it, maybe I wouldn't written down a contemporary memo detailing my state of mind to make sure my good faith wasn't impugned.

I didn't know this was a "positive posts only" thread. There's plenty of crypto boosters around here, and nobody gets much on their case for not posting the negative stories, so why is it a big deal if I post a few negative numbers without always making sure to put a positive spin on things? Crypto snowflakes? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have no opinion about the tech hub angle. As for the rest, that might be correct, or maybe not. It's hard to know for sure, there's no control group in history. But history seems to be on the side of big global cities being made stronger by large investments that create lots of high-quality jobs, rather than by minority NIMBY movements that block investment and development. All the nice neighborhoods of New York that used to be crap in the 70s and 80s (been watching The Deuce on HBO, so it's on my mind), it would be interesting to rewind history and see if many of the same arguments used today don't apply about a lot of what made them this nice today. Maybe there's a case to be made that the incentives offered were too high, but I haven't really seen it. I've mostly seen politics, which isn't the same thing. Ed says it well:

It's not a zero-sum game.