Liberty

Are you trolling now? Obviously I don't literally mean that there's no enough water, I meant that when you're trying to pipe in lots of water into the parking lot of SpaceX and pipe out lots of slurry, things get complicated quickly, including with logistics and permitting and such. Driving away with trucks filled with dirt, though, is a lot easier.

Does anyone have the URL of the old MSN boards? Have you looked on archive.org and archive.is to see if copies have been archived?

I'm sure you can use it, but I'm not sure if it makes sense to use it for a test tunnel. I'd have to know the capital intensity of each method and whether you need different permits and resources to use lots of water and have huge amounts of slurry coming out in Los Angeles rather than dry earth that can be taken away by trucks or whatever.

I'm so sorry to hear what you're going through, Eric. If I had been on the board in those years, I'd be digging through archives and helping in any way, but I joined later (in 2011). But for the little that it's worth, I can vouch for everything that you wrote above to the best of my knowledge. You made very few, very intermittent bets that happened to be very large and asymmetric. You made your money by being smarter and having higher conviction, not by spending more time on investing than others. You've always presented yourself as retired and doing this as a hobby, and you explicitly said that your big trades were based on what public investors did (ie. BAC trade was after Buffett invested, etc), you wrote about all kinds of non-investing topics, and even many of your investing-related posts were clearly more thought-experiments to amuse yourself than anything you'd actually try to make money with, and you frequently talked about your family and your kids and walks on the beach and enjoying your free time and freedom from work. Wishing you the best!

Depends on the size of the tunnel, I think. For the diameter of their test tunnel, which is what they were talking about and showing in the video, seems like diesel equipment is usually used but they used an electric locomotive instead. But I could be wrong.

If you watch the presentation, you'll see that they originally had a conventional boring machine, then they created a new upgraded one that is 3x more powerful and faster, and they've designed one that should be orders of magnitude faster than current tech. What's currently electric and that usually isn't is the earth moving locomotive, which also removes the need for large ventilation pipes to clear up the dangerous diesel exhaust. Basically, it looks like tunnel boring is an industry that hasn't progressed in decades, mostly because those that do it have little incentive to and make a lot more money by extending projects and charging more. Nice to see how fast progress can be made by talented engineers with different incentives. I'd love to see this happen to all kinds of other industries (and it already is, to a certain extent, but more please).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-personally-pushed-postmaster-general-to-double-rates-on-amazon-other-firms/2018/05/18/2b6438d2-5931-11e8-858f-12becb4d6067_story.html

Problems at Tesla. Response: Look at this shiny thing over here! Out of curiosity, have you watched the presentation?

Musk presentation about his Boring Company. Not directly related to Tesla, but I thought people reading this thread might be interested:

That's what I keep hearing about it, but I haven't read that one.

This has gotten a lot of praise in the past few years, and I've finally got to it in the recent past. I can recommend it too, it's a very interesting book that covers a lot of ground in a very interesting and useful way (IMO): https://www.amazon.ca/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/077103850X

They're on Charter's investor relations site, May 14 and 15.

This video showing a simple (and entertaining) explanation of how machine learning probably belongs here, then:

There's been two interesting Charter presentations a couple days ago, one by Tom Rutledge and the other by Chris Winfrey (CFO). One of Rutledge's lines was interesting. He said he didn't think spectrum was worth as much as others thought, partly because some low-cost or no-cost spectrum was becoming available soon (not sure on the details of that, maybe more white space being freed up soon?), but also because at very high frequencies, you need to be a lot closer, and with small cells, you can re-use the same spectrum over and over again more easily than with large cells without the interference.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-whole-foods/amazon-cuts-whole-foods-prices-for-prime-members-in-new-grocery-showdown-idUSKCN1IH0BM

I agree that MCO is a more pure-play into CRA and thus should be a better business when you account for the "quality dilution" from the other segments, but from a purely empirical point of view, I kind of see it like this:

Q1: https://www.tencent.com/en-us/articles/15000691526464720.pdf https://www.tencent.com/attachments/ResultsPresentation1Q18.pdf

I thought this probably deserved a new thread since there's only one for McGraw Hill that hasn't been updated in a long time. http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/mcgraw-hill-financial-(mhfi)/ In that thread there's a comment that says: "To me, MHFI is one of those "great, growing companies that are not cheap" (e.g. Transdigm, Amazon). In other words, it's on my doomsday shopping list. If market multiples compress to 2009 levels, I'm in." Interesting how the three companies mentioned there as expensive in 2015 have beat the market since (with TDG you need to remember to include all the large special dividends), with Amazon, the one no doubt considered the most expensive at the time, beating it by the most. Here's the most recently Q for SPGI: http://investor.spglobal.com/Cache/1001235952.PDF?O=PDF&T=&Y=&D=&FID=1001235952&iid=4023623 http://investor.spglobal.com/Cache/1001236158.PDF?O=PDF&T=&Y=&D=&FID=1001236158&iid=4023623 The Indices business grew 25% organically at almost 70% operating margins. Wow. Probably also worth linking to MCO, since this is a bit of a Visa/Mastercard dynamic: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/investment-ideas/mco-moody's/

https://www.movesmartly.com/articles/the-mistake-that-cost-sellers-millions-when-torontos-housing-bubble-burst

With the rates on the 5-year bonds going up in Canada, it'll be interesting to see what happens when mortgages start going higher again.

https://twitter.com/alex_macdonald/status/996416773057474561

New Q&A is up: http://www.csisoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/QA-May-14-2018-Final.pdf

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/amazon-is-said-to-test-new-ad-that-competes-with-google-criteo

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/tesla-moves-a-step-closer-to-china-production-by-setting-up-unit

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/spectrum-enterprise-to-invest-1-billion-to-increase-the-density-of-its-national-fiber-network-and-transform-its-approach-to-the-client-experience-300647801.html