Liberty

Planmaestro on the 650m:

Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson http://www.bing.com/ Not so good at answering questions posed in natural language, which is what could make Siri much more useful than just a voice-to-text input field for a regular web search. Watson could easily be integrated with a web search engine like Bing or Google, and the combination would be better than just the web search alone. This is not even conjecture; Siri is already attempting to do just that, it just isn't good enough yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson

That would be great for both companies, and I expect it to happen to some level. It might take too much resources at present time to have the full Watson engine being hit tens of millions of times each day by the iOS installed base, but maybe a subset of its capabilities could be incorporated into Siri.

That's the kind of guy I want to listen to.. He says: Except Valeant doesn't include tax benefits in its deal models..? Only the biovail deal was about changing the tax domicile..? And they've shown that they get the synergies they claim to get if you look at how their early deals turned out..? Maybe if the US wants to make its tax code even more restrictive and start taxing foreign companies' foreign operations, things will change, but I think there's more likelihood that the US will eventually get a tax system that is more harmonized to the rest of the world so its companies are more competitive, not less harmonized. In the meantime, Valeant, as a Canadian company, appears to be playing by the rules (most of its US tax is shielded by interest expense there, not by anything more fancy than that). In any case, seems like a bitter guy talking about what he doesn't know. Except maybe moving for tax reasons, since he lives in Barbados. Update: Watching the video now. Holy crap. He actually says, while talking about how the synergies are 'fake', and I quote: "What does a company that makes Botox have to do with a company that makes dermatologicals? There's no synergies there." Even the TV host pushes back against that, and he says that she should be on the spin team of Valeant. What a clown that guy is.

Ackman letter to the board of Allergan: http://online.wsj.com/articles/ackman-rebukes-allergan-board-over-response-to-valeant-takeover-bid-1405516592 http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140716-907178.html Ouch. Webcast tomorrow:

At first glance I like the deal. Almost like if Apple had acquired IBM without having to pay for it. They get access to the gigantic salesforce and customer relationships, enterprise brand equity, will get all the software and services developed on iOS first, will have IBM engineers help them on certain projects (Apple has fewer people working on most stuff than most people think -- this will make a difference in keeping enterprise stuff more up to date).

I came back here to delete my previous message because I know this will go nowhere. Oops, too late for that. But I'm out, I'm not about to try to explain what logically follows from sentience and empathy ("hey, I don't like when people treat me this way, maybe they don't like when I treat them like that").

Not that poppycock again. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_ethics Frankly, I'd rather live in a world where people are ethical because they use reason to realize that it's the better course of action (empathy tells us most of what we nee to know) than live in a world where the only reason people are ethical is because they're afraid of a security camera in the sky threatening torture, and if that camera was to disappear, they would lie, cheat and steal in a heartbeat (is that really your case? that's what you imply). That's a depressing worldview. I know, I know. Best not to write about this stuff. But some strawmen need to die.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-ibm-forge-global-partnership-203000199.html http://recode.net/2014/07/15/apple-and-ibm-team-up-to-push-ios-in-the-enterprise/ That's exactly the kind of partnership that Microsoft could do (could've done? probably too late now) with Apple if it didn't insist on losing money on mobile device hardware... http://www.asymco.com/2014/07/15/catharsis/ You can't say things don't change: http://i.imgur.com/Ds86pvW.jpg

Yeah, because all the single mothers I know do it for the money and life of leisure. If we made that life less attractive, maybe they would stop consciously choosing to become single mothers; heck, maybe it would even force them to stay in bad relationships and be financially dependent on abusive men, like in the good old days...

I saw their explanation, but I thought it was kind of BS to look at it like that just to get a bigger number in the headline. Should be about how they destroyed a business worth around $700m in the 80s or something like that. Otherwise, you can write an article about how someone's grandfather lost the family's millions*. *$1,000 bucks in 1900, and if they only had kept pace with the dow jones, they would have X millions now...

I think that's obvious. It's also obvious that it's a lot easier to be rich if you start out with millions than if you start out with nothing.

Thanks, always interesting to read about big failures. Looks like the never had $9 billion ($700 million in the 1980s), but they still blew through a lot of money and made a business fail through all the usual suspects: diworsification, too much debt, damaging the brand, lack of a frugal culture, replacing the founder with his kids who might not be the best people for the job (maybe partly because they never knew hard times?), etc.

http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/books/business-adventures-john-brooks/

Valeant you mean? They restructure it quite extensively (zero-budgeting, outsourcing lots of it to other labs (there's over-supply, so they get marginal cost on a lot of it), etc). This is all explained quite clearly in the 2 main presentations they gave to explain the AGN deal. There's over 1 hour of material just on R&D if you're interested.

New, desperate presentation by AGN attacking VRX: http://www.allergan.com/assets/pdf/investor_presentation_ju114_2014.pdf Lots of unreliable IMS data again (the same source they previously used to claim that some products were sold by VRX while they actually weren't, or not in all countries, and that doesn't cover all distribution channels)... They're setting themselves up to look like fools, because Valeant can just release all the data they're asking for on their top 15 products and B&L sales and such. They already said they would release that stuff, and it's not like IMS health knows better what the company is selling than the company itself.

More details on this mess: http://www.businessinsider.com/cynk-founding-2014-7

Mike Fries at Sun Valley on Liberty Global's strategy: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101830388

No posts in this thread for a week. Maybe a sign we've hit bottom?

From memory, they said that if you don't come back to pick up your original battery after a certain amount of time, you'll get invoiced for the new battery. They know exactly which Tesla gets which battery pack. A couple other things to consider: By the time some of the current crop of batteries need replacement, new batteries will be a lot less expensive, and probably last quite a bit longer too. But I suspect that for many, batteries holding just 90% or 80% of what they used to hold won't be a big deal; gasoline cars also get less efficient with age, so you can't drive as far on a tank of gas. This hasn't caused a big uproar. I think most Tesla owners will probably keep the same battery for the life of the vehicle. Good power management can make batteries last quite a long time. There are some 10-year-old hybrids used as taxis that have hundreds of thousands of miles and are still going strong with old battery tech compared to a Tesla.

Daily Closing Prices and Drawdowns for the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJIA) from May 1885 to July 11, 2014 http://greenbackd.com/2014/07/14/daily-closing-prices-and-drawdowns-for-the-dow-jones-industrial-average-djia-from-may-1885-to-july-11-2014/

One possibility is that Buffett recommends Graham to the larger public because he wants them to learn about that way of thinking, but when Bill Gates came to him, he wasn't going to recommend Graham to Gates - he already knew that stuff - so he recommended something that's less educational/didactic and more what he enjoyed reading (kind of like the difference between how a textbook can teach you more, but you get more pleasure reading Michael Lewis).

Here's a very interesting and very detailed post on Uber by one of the early investors and board members: http://abovethecrowd.com/2014/07/11/how-to-miss-by-a-mile-an-alternative-look-at-ubers-potential-market-size/ Regardless of whether you are interested in the company, I think it's an excellent read. Thanks to Whopper Investments for pointing it out.