Liberty

True, but I don't think those two things are quite comparable. There are hundreds of stocks that went huge over the years that Buffett didn't buy for whatever reason. Who catches them all? Impossible. But Buffett is usually very careful not to take a position on assets being in bubbles unless he feels pretty strongly about it. He does it very rarely. He did it famously at sun valley. And he kind of did it now. Doesn't mean he's right, but it's not the same kind of threshold as admitting to missing Amazon or Google or whatever.

https://cheddar.com/videos/exclusive-facebook-dives-into-home-device-market-with-video-chat-product-named-portal

Something a bit different (refreshing), an investing book for young people, written by one (the author is 15). https://www.amazon.com/Early-Bird-Power-Investing-Young/dp/1973235439/ I haven't read it yet, but I read a review here: http://www.rationalwalk.com/?p=16593 For those of you with kids who want to start teaching about investing (the younger you start the better), this might be a good tool.

Another one in dialysis software industry at QMS: http://m.digitaljournal.com/pr/3616869

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-09/tesla-powers-up-new-york-gigafactory-solar-roof-assembly-line

Meanwhile... https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16869998/kodak-kodakcoin-blockchain-platform-ethereum-ledger-stock-price This is fine.

Not really, but if I invert, I don't think x% of sales sounds like a good incentive. In general, I more easily know what I don't like because it stands out, usually as too much or as not incentivizing the right things. I think the general idea should probably be that the board compensation should be competitive within the industry so that you can get the right kind of people on your board. Ideally they would be paid a token amount and have huge stock ownership, but that's rarely the case.

I haven't yet, but I want to re-read 'Gödel, Escher, Bach' by Douglas Hofstadter at some point. That one was really challenging, but really rewarding too and I often think back on it fondly...

I think it's more important to find an investing style that works and that you're comfortable with through the cycle and that you'll stick with rather than bounce around between styles too much. Much of my biggest mistakes in investing came from trying to do things that didn't really feel natural to me, but I was trying to imitate the style of investors I admired at the time (deep value, cyclicals, etc)

Maybe Google starting to understand that fragmentation isn't good for branding, and that when it comes to consumer services, brands are important: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/google-rebrands-all-its-payment-solutions-as-google-pay/

I was starting to think that maybe they had had second thoughts about this bad decision, but now there's a new notice again on Google Finance: This is so stupid. Let's take down a working product that millions use, and replace it with something that doesn't do the same thing at all.

The value of the US dollar also changed during that period. Pretty big difference between changing that much over 40-50 year and that much in a year.

https://stratechery.com/2018/meltdown-spectre-and-the-state-of-technology/

Acquisition in Croatia for Vela: http://www.cbj.ca/constellation-softwares-vela-operating-group-completes-acquisition-of-croatian-software-and-services-provider-in2-group/

Would you pay with a currency that could move 10 or 20% a day?

Comparing revenues isn't enough. How fast are those respectively growing? What kind of ROIC are they getting on the growth investments, what kind of margins could they get at a stable rate?

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/05/google-investing-120-million-into-chushou-chinas-e-sports-market.html

This is fine: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/04/cryptocurrency-dogecoin-now-has-a-market-value-of-more-than-1-billion.html

https://medium.com/@twobitidiot/i-see-you-xrp-fcf151feb96d

RBC: Someday we’ll wake up to CSU having acquired a larger-than-usual corp (similar to TSS in 2013, maybe significantly bigger) and a bunch of analysts will have to scramble to redo their models… if CSU does it without dropping their discipline & hurdle, a lot of value will be created.

https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/more-details-about-mitigations-for-cpu_4.html

The advantage is it is much, much faster as you don't need to do mining. They do appear to have a custom set of validators, so you are trusting ripple to be honest about which validators they use. What's the advantage over a traditional database/ledger, I mean. I know it's faster than, say, Bitcoin, but if it's not decentralized, then the whole point of a "distributed trustless network" falls down. You're still having to trust an entity, just like with traditional banking, and their control of the currency means that they can change the rules/software down the line without external consensus.