Liberty

Part 1 of a podcast interview with Diller: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-being-infinite-learner-helped-barry-diller-become-reid-hoffman/

If you issue equity at an overvalued price, are you diluting value or creating value for remaining shareholders? Have past equity raises made the stock tank? Seems to me there are many ways Tesla could fail, but raising more cash is a way for them to reduce risk, not increase it. There's this http://schwert.ssb.rochester.edu/f423/jfe86_am.pdf which says: This study investigates the effect on stock prices of seasoned equity offerings. The results demonstrate that the announcement of equity otlerings reduces stock prices significantly. For industrial issues, regression results indicate that announcement day price reduction is significantly and negatively related to the size of the equity offering. The results appear not to be explained by changes in capital structure associated with the equity offerings. The findings are consistent both with the hypothesis that equity issues are viewed by investors as negative signals and with the hypothesis that there is a downward sloping demand for a firm’s shares. I think it's a case of psychology rather than fundamentals that would be driving the effect on a stock price due to a dilution. I'm sure that's correct on average. But most industrial equity issuers aren't valued like Tesla (or growing like Tesla) at all, so I'm not sure that's useful. A better base rate would be to look at past equity raises for Tesla.

If I have to I'll go to Excel, but I didn't have to so far because I don't do anything that Google Docs can't (couldn't) do. Pretty simple. Different people have different needs. So far I didn't need the bloated thing that is Excel.

My investing journal is in Pages, and I have some stuff in Numbers, but most of my spreadsheets are in Google Docs. I guess if they stop having Google Finance live updating in Google Docs I might switch over entirely to Numbers...

https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/08/sources-apple-is-acquiring-music-recognition-app-shazam/ For Apple this is a tuck in.

Simplicity + portability + free. It meets my needs. Excel's overkill for what I'm doing.

Thanks, sounds good. Have you found a guide on how to use it in a Google Docs spreadsheet? I've Googled around a bit and couldn't find much... I don't want to do anything too fancy with it, just get some stock prices to auto-update in a Google Sheet to track my portfolio...

Have you thought about using excel with the IB API? What does the IB api provide? It does lots of things. You can even trade from excel. But you can definitely set up stock lists and then pull prices and quotes from IB. That's very easy to do. If you're a coder I'm thinking that you can do many cool things above and beyond that. I have an IB account but I don't pay for the real-time data feeds. Is the API still available, or is it only for paying data customers? Thanks.

And this morning it's back... I don't know what's going on, but there's a possibility that when they turned it off yesterday they got some backlash and now they're looking at their options and turning it off in the meantime. In the event that this is what's going on, if you'd like to improve the odds of Google Finance staying around as a separate site (which are probably slim, but hey, doing nothing isn't helping at all), I suggest using the "send feedback" link at the bottom of Google Search pages and let them know what you think. There's ever only a very tiny fraction of users sending feedback about a specific product, so it can make a difference when you do. It's easier for en engineer to tell a boss "hey, we got huge volume of complaints about this" to then get a change of direction. Long shot, I know.

Thanks for sharing. It's indeed incredibly hard to figure these things out, and even with self-experimentation, it's easy to get fooled by the placebo effect or too many variables changing at once.. Still, it's better to make your best effort than to give up and do nothing, IMO. I think one concept that helped me think about this is understanding the difference between the "minimum recommended dose" and what would be the "optimal dose". You might need a minimum of X of nutrient Y to avoid getting certain known diseases (ie. a certain amount of vitamin C to avoid getting scurvy), but this tells you nothing about what would be the optimal quantity of nutrient Y that you should get. For things where there's a known toxicity at relatively low levels, I tend not to even play around. But certain nutrients have very low toxicity up to ridiculous doses, so if there's good evidence and logic for their benefits (like vitamin D3), I have no problem taking bigger doses than the minimum recommended because it's a very asymmetric risk profile. P.S. Yes, it's bonkers that D2 is still being prescribed rather than D3.

Interesting. I've been having seasonal asthma, mostly in the fall or winter. I get a cold, and then cough for a month+, with inhalers not helping all that much. Can you elaborate a bit on your experience and how you got to levels that work for you with D and Mg? Thanks.

If you're looking for something non-financial, 'Shadow Divers' was a great audiobook.

Wait a sec, maybe it's not dead yet, Jim. Signs of life again... Seeing pretty much 100% negative feedback on Twitter directed at Google for the new finance stuff, and hopefully people are also sending feedback using the "send feedback" link at the bottom of any search page. Update: Out again at 1:06 PM...

And it looks like this broke the live updating of financial data from Google in Docs and sheets... Thanks, Google! :(

RF is great for the data on fundamentals. Google finance was great to have a long watchlist to keep an eye on. For RF international data, look here and send them a email: http://www.rocketfinancial.com/InternationalData.aspx

Google Finance stopped updating at 10:34 this morning for me... Looks like it might be dead, unless this is a temporary problem...

I've been updating my bayesian priors on this for 15 years, this isn't just one article. I wanted to share it, though. Make up your own mind, but please don't project things on me without knowing how much research I've done. Vaccines don't cause autism, not because of one article, but because of a ton of evidence in one direction and little to none in the other. Just from first principle, it's pretty easy to see how most of the world's population could be deficient in Vitamin D based on the conditions in which our bodies have evolved.

I don't. Daily I take Omega 3, vitamin C, and Vitamin D, and K2 (MK-7).

I too have been taking D3 in about the amounts you have for almost 10 years. I take 10K UI 5-7 times per week. I always take it on work days where I spend the whole day in the office. I always take it everyday in the winter (not much sun in NH) and I'll take it or not on the weekends in the summer depending on what I am doing. If I'm going to be outside all day in August I'll skip it that day. Also I look for the gell caps packed in olive oil or coconut oil rather than high omega-6 oils. These are the two brands I've been using: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JGCBGZQ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0032BH76O I've also read somewhere that Vitamin K2 helps with the absorption of D3 (and vice versa) so I take K2 with it as well: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0771YC3GQ For some weird reason I haven't been able to find 5000 UI per unit in Canada for the past couple years. It's almost as if some weird regulation made it so that the max concentration in the country is now 1000 UI. Very annoying to have to take so many small gelcaps... I hope this madness will soon end.

All of the above, looking at the varying amounts of evidence for each that there are benefits to supplementing, especially in northern countries like Canada, where I live. You can go read his stuff, I'm sure there's an archive on his site.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28768407/ There's been signs of this for many years. I've been taking 4000-8000 UI daily for over a decade now (in gelcaps -- vitamin D is fat-soluble, so the dry tablets aren't as well absorbed). I recommend you also look into Vitamin D supplementation, especially if you don't live in tropical areas where you get plenty of sun year-round. One guy who's been writing about this for a long time is a cardiologist named William Davis, I remember reading some of his stuff maybe 6-7 years ago. Some discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918

Yeah. Once the grid starts to get smarter, there's all kinds of interesting things you can do. For example, demand response mechanism could pay large industrial customers money to, say, increase or reduce the temperature in large refrigerated warehouses to help smooth out the curve (f.ex. If you need your food to be kept frozen, when there's a lot of cheap power you can go lower and drop the temps in your warehouse to -10, and then during the next peak cycle you can let the warehouse progressively warm up back to, say, -2. The food stays frozen, it's not affected, but the warehouse acts as a kind of battery, soaking extra power off peak and "releasing it" (ie negawatts) during peak time -- conceptually the same thing can be done with hot water heaters and all kinds of other things, as long as you remain withins safe parameters. If you have enough of them, changing things by a couple degrees won't be noticed by users but can make a huge difference in power requirements).

Yeah, Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) tech will be interesting to watch over time. You can combine with variable pricing mechanisms to, for example, tell your car to charge more when rates are lower. This helps flatten the demand curve and reduce the need for peakers, as well as help absorb extra renewable energy when it's available. The reverse of this is also true: When rates spike up, you can have your car delay a charge, or not charge fully (based on some pre-defined rules, like "make sure to be charged by the morning on weekdays" or things like that) to help reduce load when supply's tightest (ie. you might plug in right after work, but the car might wait until after the evening demand peak is over to start charging once it's over a minimum charge in case you need to go out again, etc). Then the next step is to have the EV owners get paid by grid operators to use part of their batteries. So you might say "the grid can use 10% of my battery capacity when rates are higher than X" and now you can draw on millions of batteries to help find extra supply when you need it most.

If you issue equity at an overvalued price, are you diluting value or creating value for remaining shareholders? Have past equity raises made the stock tank? Seems to me there are many ways Tesla could fail, but raising more cash is a way for them to reduce risk, not increase it.

Li-ion packs down 24% from 2016: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-05/latest-bull-case-for-electric-cars-the-cheapest-batteries-ever