Liberty

Mr. Money Mustache speech at WDS 2016 (26 minutes):

Until after the US election, macro is just politics now.

The Macs were great when they were released, but too many haven't been updated in a very long time. Part of the blame rests on Intel, which can't seem to be able to deliver its roadmap on time, and then when you miss an upgrade window sometimes it's better to just wait for the next one... But part of this also probably is Apple's fault -- maybe they're stretching themselves thin with too many platforms to develop in parallel and too many new products in the pipeline. In any case, most of that should be fixed tomorrow when new Macs are announced.

Looks like Google Fiber is having problems: http://www.recode.net/2016/10/25/13411182/google-access-executive-changes-craig-barratt

Also:

Please teach me how to think as well as you. Edit: By the way, your question is the implicit question asked by the journalists: They have named quotes by many people and many hard numbers from the insurance company in the story. The implicit question is: "Why did the insurance company cut a 17m cheque if the damage was apparently relatively small?". The answer to that question might come from the fallout of this story, and we'll see what it is. If they had been able to find the answer to the question, they would've included it in the story, but it certainly doesn't look very good. If they've made up the named quotes and figures in the story, I'm sure that the Trump camp will be able to come up with evidence to disprove it, or the insurance company will come forward, or whatever. But unless these journalists are about to lose their jobs because they made stuff up, the facts that they point to are certainly adding up to enough for the question to be raised.

Was thinking of ordering some sencha, either from Harney & Sons or David's Tea. I have a gift card for DT.. But David's Tea website has been down since this morning. Seems like their technology isn't very good. Anecdotal, but still... Which online retailer has a "scheduled maintenance" for hours in the middle of the day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/politics/donald-trump-interviews.html

Who said there was no question asked? You think insurance fraud is a new thing? You think this would be below Trump's organization's golden standard of integrity? I'm just linking to an associated press story, if you want more details, ask the journalists.

Donald Trump took $17M insurance payment after a 2005 hurricane that left little evidence of damage to his property http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/news/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/news/world/trump-took-17-million-in-insurance-for-damage-few-remember&pubdata-ipsquote-timestamp=2016-10-25

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/25/trump-cites-police-military-ice-endorsements-that-didnt-happen.html

Very impressive for a phone camera : https://medium.com/@lanewinfield/stress-testing-iphone-7-plus-portrait-mode-99ec01bfbd34#.2qwv7n7wi

Via Ed Borgato on Twitter: "Grateful that the correspondence of President Trump's life will be forever preserved at the Smithsonian for generations of school children." http://i.imgur.com/2AXcxHK.jpg There's apparently a bottomless well of this stuff. What a strange man Trump is: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/369439265446309888 Such a non sequitur two years after Jobs' death.

Visa fiscal Q4: http://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2016/Visa-Inc-Reports-Strong-Fiscal-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2016-Results/default.aspx

You keep shifting around from one thing to the other. It's like whack-a-mole, as soon as I address one thing you shift to another. Buffett didn't tear a new one to Trump for "using the tax code to his advantage", he did so because Trump is a liar and hypocrite about his tax returns, and because Trump compared himself to Buffett saying that "Buffett did the same thing" while Buffett paid taxes every year and Trump probably had a streak of almost two decades of not paying taxes. This doesn't mean that Trump did anything illegal, but he shouldn't have hidden the fact or pretended he was going to release his reports if he wasn't going to. Obviously Buffett thinks that people should follow tax laws and minimize their taxes; this doesn't mean that he can't think that maybe tax laws could be changed. Buffett wrote an op-ed about "stop coddling the super-rich" and wrote about closing exemptions that allow some super rich who earn more than $1m and $10m per year to be taxed at very low rates so that they are taxed at rates closer to others. He didn't set up a tent at Occupy Wall Street and adopt every single "inequality" belief that you seem to be projecting on him. Obviously Buffett believes that earning a lot of money should be possible. He's spent his life being a teacher on business and investing and admiring successful businesspeople and capital allocators. He didn't have to be a teacher, btw, most people who earn a lot of money never share their techniques and ways of operating. This is another way that he's been generous. He just thinks that the super rich shouldn't be further advantaged with favorable tax breaks. Why is that so complicated?

Buffett's proposal is about fairness, not about making people equal. If you make a lot of income but pay 15% because you happen to be making your money from certain favored sources while others who make a lot less pay double that, that's unfair. He never said anything about making Bezos and Zuck poorer and ending inequality with his proposal. And yes, if you don't sell a business, why should you be taxed on holding it? The government's fine with letting it compound and taking its share later because it'll be a bigger amount. And if the business fails, you won't be taxed, it cuts both ways. The business pays corporate taxes in the meantime, and if you receive dividends that's taxed too. And if you want to donate to charity, legislators have decided that this is something worth encouraging, so there are advantages to that too. I'm not the biggest fan of taxes or anything, I just think that whatever system we do have should at least attempt to be as even-handed as possible. No need to give further advantages to the group in society that is already doing the best. You really like to throw around the word hypocrisy, don't you?

Maybe a hair off topic, but I don't for a second blame Trump for not releasing his return right now. And Buffett, being a guy who is clearly smart enough to read between the lines and definitely capable of sizing up the current situation, shouldn't fault Trump either. But again, pushing his pro Clinton agenda, advocates it anyway. Can you honestly say it s a wise business, or more importantly personal choice for Trump to release his taxes in this environment? Good Ole Grampa Buffett gets praised for releasing a tax return because he's on the same side as all the major news outlets. It shouldn't take a genius to understand that should Trump release his returns, everyone, ranging from some small time j/o with the slightest understanding of tax law, all the way up to the most heralded forensic accounting firms (probably put on task with dollars coming from the Super PACs/Mark Cubans of the world) would immediately start dissecting his release with the full intention of trying to "find" some sort of evidence that would harm him, or at the very least, insinuate he's doing something awful and un-American. So that then begs the question, if you were Trump, why would you release your return? There is literally NO benefit to doing so. Oh, I understand that it's better for Trump to not be transparent. But is it a good thing? He's running for president. Buffett isn't. All presidential candidates release their tax records. Trump said many times in print and on camera that he would release his tax records. He's attacked others in the past for not releasing their tax records. So if he's not releasing them, it makes all the sense in the world that he's going to look like a liar and a hypocrite and people will think that he has something to hide (and apparently he did, based on the 1995 leaked document -- but I wonder what else is in the rest?). Should people just say: "Oh, it's better for him not to release them, because there could be embarrassing stuff in there. Fair enough, we don't want to know and won't hold it against him, he can play by different rules." You think republicans aren't scrutinizing the tax records of democrats and that Fox News and talk radio and a thousands websites wouldn't be all over things if there was something scandalous in these documents? Scrutiny comes with running for office, and the highest scrutiny goes for the highest, most high-profile office in the world. Trump just likes to have his cake and eat it too. I'm going to run for president, but I don't want to be held to the same standards as other presidential candidates. Well, it blew up in his face; maybe he shouldn't have been sexually assaulting women all these years and then telling his campaign not to do opposition research... What are the odds that there isn't some security camera footage of him grabbing a woman against her will somewhere..?

Are you saying unrealized capital gains should be taxed? That would be going much farther than Buffett. He's never suggested that as far as I know. As for the rest, I'm sure you're describing many people, but not the guy who buys hail-damaged cars only after his daughter pesters him to upgrade his car because it's getting too old... I'd bet he's a lot more scrupulous than most about not having Berkshire pay for personal expenses; if you're going to keep your salary and staff this low and have almost no perks, why then try to screw around and cheat? It'd be a lot more simpler just to increase his salary or perks and NOBODY would hold it against him because he's a model of restraint for a CEO. In fact, other CEOs don't want Berkshire to be used as a comp by compensation committees because he brings the average down so much.. I think you're mental model of Buffett isn't very close to the person that he seems to be in reality.

I enjoyed it and thought some here might enjoy it too. Good look at the realpolitiks of taking and keeping power in both dictatorships and democracies.

I'll leave out the rest because we're also going over ground that we've already covered, but on this point: I think he's only named his son in a position where he can be a kind of guarantor of the culture of BRK. He's not in any real position of power except as someone who can sound an alarm if he thinks that his father's wishes are not being respected. And maybe as someone who can offer some cultural continuity as some of the older board members depart over time. In other words, I think it would be nepotism if he said: "Howard is the best person to run Berkshire" when he's clearly not, but I think it makes sense to say "Howard knows me and my thinking as well as anyone because he's been around me all his life, and I trust him as much as anyone because he's my son and has proven his integrity on boards". In fact, not giving much of his fortune to his kids to make a point is kind of anti-nepotism. He'd probably have asked Munger if he was younger, or Gates if he was also younger and less busy with the Foundation (though Gates will no doubt play a big role). I've also not seen (but I could have missed it) him deriding people like Trump for using the tax system. But I've seen him point out how un-transparent and hypocritical they've been about it (ie. Trump not releasing his taxes after he said he would and after mocking Romney for taking a long time to release his taxes, trying to hide his big losses by pretending he's always successful, blaming an IRS audit when Buffett is also under audit and can release his taxes and even the IRS itself said it's fine for him to release his taxes, etc).

I can't explain why Buffett thinks the way he does, regardless his reasoning is flawed. If you look it up the rich pay a much higher percentage rate than the middle class or poor. There has been a massive decrease in the rates the poor and middle class pay due to the Reagan and Bush tax cuts. The poor now have negative rates, and lower middle class pays 1/4 of what they did 40 years ago. Just look up effective rates by income. We are massively more progressive. Yes I absolutely disagree with his overall point. Data does not support it. Of course there are some exceptions, but his point is more across the board than a few isolated issues like carried interest. The group that gets hit the hardest is the upper middle class earning $150k to $250k. Their income is almost all earned wages and they are ineligible for most subsidies (e.g. child tax credit). The current debate is all because one party is using it to deceive people. It is so commonly believed that few are willing to stand up against it. He's not talking about people earning 150-250k, he's talking about the mega-rich and his proposal only applies to those earning more than 1m and 10m and the goal is to bring their levels back closer to what other people who aren't getting special breaks pay. So talking about how the poor pay negative taxes or how the middle class pays this or that is a totally different question, which Buffett wasn't talking about in his piece about coddling the super-rich. But this is going in circles, so let's leave it at that.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-24/canada-s-swelling-debt-pile-raises-questions-over-future-growth

You do know that he decided at a relatively young age to give away his fortune? Munger confirmed it. I believe it's Andrew Carnegie's influence. If this was some vanity gesture to secure a legacy and be popular, you think he'd be giving it to someone else's foundation without putting his name on it and wouldn't do a bunch of high profile stuff in his name while he's alive to bask in the glory rather than compound as long as he can to give as much as possible? The situation has gotten a lot more extreme over the past 10-15 years when it comes the issue that Buffett is highlighting, which can explain why he's been more vocal about it. The rise of the financial sector and hedge funds and high paid executives has a lot to do with it. Before the 80s this world used to be very different -- read up on the shocking excesses of the time and they seem super quaint. But if you read his letters and interviews, Buffett has pretty much spent his whole life criticizing the financial sector and overpaid executives and bankers who add little value yet have carved themselves preferential treatment. This is just in line with his long-term views. But anyway, you didn't say it was unfair or fair. But if you do believe it is unfair for some of the mega-rich to pay 15% on their income while much, much poorer people pay much higher rates, then maybe you disagree with Buffett's way of trying to fix the situation. That's all right. But I think maybe you can understand that there's substance behind his position, and that he's genuinely trying to correct a situation that he sees as unfair and damaging to the United States, and he isn't just playing games for whatever end. Anyway, if Buffett is such scum to some of the posters here, I'd love to be able to shine some light on their lives to see how they fare in comparison...

Yeah, how dare he pay himself such a low salary when most other CEOs of his stature pay themselves tens and tens of millions plus large stock awards and low-price options with easy vesting targets, not to mention non-monetary perks like fancy offices, large staffs, private planes, etc... ::) Many of those listed things Buffett has already enjoyed in spades in one way or another during his lengthy existence. Now however, much like Soros, given his age, things like his "humble salary" are far more significant because they allow him to craft a narrative that deceitfully wraps up his legacy as "kind, gentle, philanthropic, humanitarian" vs the opportunistic and shrewd, ruthless capitalist he truly is. Although I am sure Warren is thrilled there are people who interpret his 100k salary exactly as you have... Keep making stuff up if it makes you feel better and helps you support your ideological position. Buffett isn't saying this stuff to save a few millions or to be popular (this is actually the main thing that I see him criticized for, especially by his peers in the financial world who are worried about themselves). He thinks it's better for the country and for the system if the mega-rich who get favored treatment (15% carried interest, etc) were made to pay rates similar to other people. Maybe that seems unfair to you and you think they should keep their lower rates than everyone else despite being richer than everyone else, but don't pretend like Buffett's whole life has been a sham just so he could in his old age take positions like this. Taxes have been much higher than they are now during Buffett's life and it never stopped him from doing business. I'm sure you also view the fact that Buffett is giving all his money to charity and has convinced tons of other billionaires to do the same as some kind of nefarious scheme...

Yeah, how dare he pay himself such a low salary when most other CEOs of his stature pay themselves tens and tens of millions plus large stock awards and low-price options with easy vesting targets, not to mention non-monetary perks like fancy offices, large staffs, private planes, etc... ::)