Liberty

This will sell like hotcakes.

So if it rents for $24,000 per year, then at this listing price the yield (as an investment) is 1.3%. That's a little less than what you can get for cash sitting in the bank. Likewise, at the assessment price of 1.1 million, the yield is 2.1%. Also something you can probably get at the bank. I'm even wondering if the property assessment department is drinking something as well! For that money you can get something in the south of France or Spain and still have spending money left over. It's even worse than that. You get $24,000/year, but that's a gross amount, it doesn't include all your costs for maintenance, municipal taxes, etc.

Ouch. https://medium.com/@gduffy/the-dropcam-team-b9e81f44f259

On top of that, US states that have recourse mortgages fared pretty badly in the housing bust. That's not a panacea.

Google is using 1980/90's AI tech which Hinton himself admitted. I remember when I went to Grad School in 2004, I would talk to people about Neural networks and they thought at that time it was old-fashioned. One guy was telling me then that graphical models like Neural Networks, Bayesian Networks and other ideas were deeply related. I think he was talking about this paper: http://www.psi.toronto.edu/~psi/pubs2/2001/frey2001factor.pdf Anyways its pretty funny to me that people think Google is ahead. No one is ahead. People have just realized that computational power has made a lot of old algorithms feasible. It's not because an idea or a technique was first invented a long time ago that it hasn't evolved since. Radio waves were discovered a while ago, but gigabit wifi isn't the same as morse code.

Profile of Google CEO Sundar Pichai: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/searching-for-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-the-most-powerful-tec

http://fortune.com/ackman-valeant-ceo-pearson-inside-story/

Good thing it isn't Microsoft's job to secure people's smartphones: http://9to5mac.com/2016/03/28/windows-10-china-govtos/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/28/business/media/charters-67-billion-cable-merger-hinges-on-the-cord-cutters.html

Maybe its not just COBF. ?? I don't get you... are you saying Giverney is a contrarian indicator? Maybe that everyone can expect to have periods of underperformance, and that includes organisations like investment firms and discussion forums.

http://www.greaterfool.ca/2016/03/24/seriously-7/

Got this in the mail yesterday from the author. Looking forward to reading it. Conceptually, it looks like a compilation of interviews with Canadian investors, sub-categorized by their dominant styles (macro, value, growth, etc). I usually enjoy long-form interviews with practitioners, even those who do things that I don't think I can do; there's usually at least one thing to learn from their approach or way of thinking even if you never try to do what they do. https://www.amazon.ca/Market-Masters-Interviews-Investors-Strategies/dp/177041343X/ I'll share my thoughts when I've read it.

Do you have the population figures for the same periods? I'd be interested to compare. For Toronto, it would also be interesting to look at the larger GTA's area, since at some point toronto proper just runs into the suburbs and these are the ones that grow.

For those who follow him, here's Francois Rochon of Giverny Capital, in the 2015 letter: http://www.givernycapital.com/en/doc/206/Giverny_Capital_-_Annual_Letter_2015_web_.pdf For those who don't know Rochon, the letter contains the performance of his fund. Beat his index by 6.1%/year since 1993, 15.2% CAGR over that period.

Looks like the Nest division at Google isn't going so well... https://www.theinformation.com/inside-tony-fadells-struggle-to-build-nest

I'm not saying it's not a factor, I'm saying it's the common excuse for everything. As Buffett said, every bubble is initially based on something real, but every time there are rationalizations that people use to go from that real thing into la-la land (how many comparisons of Vancouver have I seen with New York, Paris and London in the past few years?). Question anything about Vancouver, and it's the Chinese. I happen to think that the realtors and the media echo chamber have really overblown the Chinese situation because it benefits them tremendously. They've taken something real, and turned it into something else. I think the vast, vast majority of houses in Vancouver are probably being bought by people who aren't from wealthy foreign money, but they're still paying princeling prices, and that will end badly.

It's not. It's a very small sample of the high end market. "Routledge compiled the data by extrapolating from a Financial Times survey of 77 high-end buyers and data from the U.S. National Association of Realtors." Wow, 77 high-end buyers turns into media articles about the Chinese taking over all of Vancouver. There's a constant flow of these. Once the idea has taken root, confirmation bias does the rest. Every time someone who looks asian is seen, it only confirms what people think (even if they're Canadian). Reminds me of the fake asian buyers from news stories not that long ago. Realtors rented a yellow helicopter and had Canadians of asian heritage (one who works as a condo promoters, iirc) pose as rich chinese buyers for TV cameras.. http://www.greaterfool.ca/2015/05/12/the-frauds/ http://www.greaterfool.ca/2013/02/14/the-myth-of-ham/

I didn't say it was the same. Still hasn't stopped prices from rising almost 10% YoY despite 1.6% foreign buyers, most of them from US.

I doubt this "back of the envelope" is anything by myth. Victoria's real-estate board tracks these things, unlike vancouver, and in 2013 only 1.64% of buyers were foreign (most from the USA). Now that's not vancouver, but pretty unlikely that Vancouver next door is orders of magnitude different. http://origin.library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1116729122123-37/Buyers+Origins+20130101+to+20131231.pdf

People's ability to carry their massive debt with their negative saving rates is predicated on constantly rising prices. Flat won't do it, IMO. And this isn't taking into account that at some point interest rates will rise in the US and Canada will face a dilemma; either follow and kill housing, or don't follow and further kill the dollar.

For the price of one crack shack in vancouver, I can retire elsewhere on the income generated by that money. I know which one I'd pick.

I still wouldn't pay 1-2 million for a tiny parcel of land surrounded by other crack shacks, only to then have to pay a ton more to build a new house (because new-building construction has to be overpriced there too, right?).

Yeah, that site is probably pretty old, I doubt it has been updated. I bet these crack shacks are selling for much more now.

The argument that this has been going on for a long time always reminds me of the turkey story. The longer an untenable situation has been going on, the closer we are to thanksgiving. Vancouver's nice and everything, but there's a difference between some wealthy foreigners coming in and nabbing some luxurious properties and increasing prices in some neighbourhoods and the whole city going nuts with real-estate fever and starting bidding wars over decades-old unrenovated crack shacks going for $1-2 million.. http://www.crackshackormansion.com/

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-home-depot-cloud-idUSKCN0WO380