Liberty

Indeed, though I wish they could buy back higher volumes. The number of shares outstanding doesn't seem to have moved much since at least 2009.

https://medium.com/a-programmers-tale/f7b8c66109ea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5811564 Posting this because it's good food for thought, not saying I necessarily agree or disagree with it all.

Latest announcement on Supercharger network expansion: http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-dramatically-expands-supercharger-network-delivering-convenient-free-long

Happy birthday, Tim! :)

Here's the video of the interview: http://allthingsd.com/20130530/tesla-ceo-and-spacex-founder-elon-musk-the-full-d11-interview-video/

Musk at the AllThingsD conference: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/30/elon-musk-says-a-roughly-30k-tesla-in-3-4-years/

The 1990s version of this is the Tightwad Gazette, a newsletter that was compiled into a book (looks like a phonebook). Basically the bible of frugal living. Some parts are a bit dated, but it's very readable, and it does help reinforce the right mindset to get expenses down if that's what you want/need to do. http://www.amazon.ca/Complete-Tightwad-Gazette-Amy-Dacyczyn/dp/0375752250/ Also, the original "here's how to retire young with minimal expenses" book that inspired many: http://www.amazon.ca/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship/dp/0143115766/

Ooh, upgrades :) I'd love to get a list of what the changes are if you have a chance. Thank you, Sanjeev.

Really? Impact doesn't matter? "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." I just said that of course running water is more important than an iphone because it fulfils a more basic human need. And of course you won't often get inventions that meet basic human needs because there aren't that many of them, so once they are met, everything else can seem comparatively superfluous. It doesn't tell us much because it's an obvious statement (just like the obvious statement that it's much harder to invent the iPhone than running water -- also doesn't tell us much). Other questions are more probing, IMO. Not sure what you thought I meant.

You could also ask: "What's harder to invent, running water or an iPhone?" It wouldn't really tell us more, though. Of course we start with the most basic and important things to keep us alive, and then when those needs are met we can move on to less vital things for survival. These basics will always be more important than everything else for survival. But are they more impressive inventions? If we're waiting for more of those before calling them real innovation, then I suppose that curing the diseases of aging will be the next thing (ie. when people's mortality per year isn't higher at any age than for young adults).

I don't think it's surprising that it didn't have an effect immediately. In fact, I'd be surprised it if had. Technologies spread a lot slower back then, but also it wasn't a sufficient innovation in itself. As long as you just keep printing religious texts with it, it's not going to make you move forward. But once you have the scientific method and the enlightenment, then you can use the printing press to make real progress. But if you have the scientific method without a printing press, then you are held back tremendously and you have isolated pockets of people constantly reinventing the wheel because there's no easy way to spread knowledge widely and know what others know. You also have a huge leakage of knowledge over time as people die and forget and things aren't being archived efficiently for others to later (re)discover.

http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm Except if 300 years is short term. Do you have a more direct citation? I'm not going to read that whole site. But this highlights the difficulty of looking at a single piece of technology or scientific discovery in isolation. How many of the developments starting in 1800 would have happened in a world without a printing press?

No economic impact at all from the invention of the printing press? That's a pretty bold claim that would need some very solid data to support, IMO, unless you mean in the very short term. Almost all technological and scientific innovations that happened after the printing press depend on its as a way to spread and archive information. As for religious wars, those always found some excuse to happen... It says more about religions (which all claim to be about peace) than about the printing press.

Science and technology don't only exist to grow the economy, though. The James Webb space telescope* won't have the effect of containers on GDP, but it might help us better understand the universe. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

Thiel funds some very forward looking people, like the SENS Research Foundation (the only charity I donate to). I think he's just trying to bring some attention to the real problem of not enough smart people going into more productive fields, and encourage people to get off their butts and help move us forward, which is not a bad thing -- all this innovation doesn't just happen by itself. But it still doesn't make the general claim that there's been no innovation in decades true.

There's a ton of stuff happening, it'll just take a while before we realize how important it is, mostly because people look in the rearview mirror instead of forward. Just look at genetics and biotech.. How many genomes have we decoded now? We used to dream of the day when we could do just the human one (which wasn't so long ago). And now we're learning so much about epigenetics. Synthetic life is close too (Craig Venter's one person working on that). There's groundbreaking particle physics happening, exoplanets being found, great stuff coming out of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, etc. Great breakthroughs in clean energy, battery tech, smart grids, etc. Or even look at the internet and google (software not getting smarter?) and all the tech - hardware and software - crammed in internet-enabled smartphones. There's a ton of stuff we take for granted that would look like total sci-fi to people 30 years ago (heck, even 12 years ago wikipedia was just starting out and Youtube was founded in 2006, yet we're already blazé about such marvels). Just watching that documentary about the days of the dot com bubble on youtube the other day made me feel like I was watching something terribly old (all those huge CRT monitors and slow dial up modems)... Someday we'll have our ubiquitous 3D printing (including 3D printed scaffolds for replacement organs filled out from someone's own stem cell line) and personalized drugs that cure cancer and alzheimer's and self-driving cars and all that and we'll look back to today as a great period for science and technology, just like we're now looking back to past decades, IMO. Though by then we'll probably be totally unimpressed by all those things and will complain about nothing new happening.

https://maps.google.com/help/maps/helloworld/desktop/preview/ http://www.google.com/wallet/send-money/

Could you elaborate on the reasons why you didn't end up following your original plan and sold now? What changed your mind?

Not being a shareholder, I hope there is a lot of competition in that industry. I care more about cleaning up the power grid than about SolarCity succeeding.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/05/13/autos/tesla-sales-bmw-mercedes-audi/index.html http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/130510073830-tesla-model-s-sales-chart-620xa.png

Tesla + solar panels = good combination ;)

Thanks! I have no problem with the adsense ads, but this floating banner on mobile browsers was creating a bad user experience, especially because it was so easy to hit it with a finger by accident.

Great post, Kiltacular. Very true.

For those who missed it, it is archived here: http://www.livestream.com/levoleague

Thank you, really interesting. I don't think I had ever seen a video of Buffett this young (if anyone knows of other good ones, I'd love to see them).