Liberty

The man is too bland to be a predictable distraction. But floating rumors about the US defaulting on its debt to China or Remdesivir or whatever...

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

Pence's wife had a different story to tell. She said that Mike didn't know about Mayo Clinic's rule, although she acknowledges that his staff knew about the rule. Liars have conflicting stories to tell. The M.O. of everyone involved here is just to make stuff up and change it until it either goes away on its own because they jam the news cycle full of daily stupidities and scandals and nobody can keep up, or one of the variants they made up works better than the others ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The man is in charge of a COVID task force, there must be signs all around Mayo about the rule (how do you think they get people to comply?), everyone around him is wearing masks, but oops, he didn't know. Not very convincing.

Pence was in a hospital where there is an explicit rule about everybody wearing masks (everybody else was following that rule), and he was visiting patients. He wasn't in a press conference room in a federal building where everybody gets screened constantly. See also: https://medium.com/@casanderson/mike-pence-and-the-bystander-effect-a698bbbe4d18 I am not defending Dr. Fauci logic. But Dr. Fauci logic is if someone is tested negative, atleast in immediate future, they dont have to wear masks. Pence is using the same logic (as his expert Dr. Fauci told) that Pence got recently tested negative. No, you don't understand. Pence was in a HOSPITAL with PATIENTS, where there's a RULE that EVERYONE wear masks. Some places are at higher risk than others, and some places have different rules. Taking a walk alone in the park isn't the same as sitting in a full airplane across the pacific ocean, for example. The fact that Pence wore a mask after that (in a less sensitive place than a hospital) shows he realized he was just being an ass, and that whatever BS reasons they gave before were in fact BS.

PE firms are good at cutting the fat. Roper is good at doing longer-term investments and culture improvements that PE firms won't do because their time horizon isn't that long. On Procore, just today: https://therealdeal.com/2020/05/01/construction-tech-startup-procore-shelves-ipo/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter "The latest coronavirus casualty is construction startup Procore, which has shelved its recent plans for an initial public offering."

Pence was in a hospital where there is an explicit rule about everybody wearing masks (everybody else was following that rule), and he was visiting patients. He wasn't in a press conference room in a federal building where everybody gets screened constantly. See also: https://medium.com/@casanderson/mike-pence-and-the-bystander-effect-a698bbbe4d18

He tweets that the stock price is too high when it's at a price level a lot of retail investors bought his stock in a secondary offering less than 3 months ago. Must be the drugs talking. 2013: https://money.cnn.com/2013/10/25/investing/tesla-netflix-momentum-stocks/ As for people buying the stock at whatever price, caveat emptor, as usual. Are most CEOs warning shareholders not to buy their stocks when they're overvalued? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I've seen Mark Leonard do this. Doesn't mean he was right (if you had sold the stock when he said this, it would've been a bad move).

"A militia group stands in front of the governor's office." Nice suppressor on that rifle. WTF is wrong with people? ::) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-protests-coronavirus-lockdown-armed-capitol#img-1

Yeah, if you look at businesses where they haven't done any M&A for decades, they still keep increasing margins and lowering working capital and improving. A bunch of their old industrial businesses have 30%+ EBITDA margins.

This is stupid take. It shows a lack of imagination. That's like saying that Steve Jobs never built anything because he was an idea man and mostly built a company and teams and high level strategy and then said what he liked and disliked about ideas others brought to him. There are many ways to contribute, and if you care about consequences of actions at all, then creating philanthropies that will save millions, do R&D that is being ignored by others, etc, has a much bigger impact than a lot of inventors who have a few patents to their names. Sir lets not insult each other. Please read Jobs biography him and Waz built the first computers and sold them together. Jobs was a BUILDER, like Elon. Soros, Munger, Buffet--Capital allocators/poker players. I'm not insulting you, I'm saying your argument is stupid, which isn't the same thing. I've also said and believed stupid things over the years, but it doesn't mean that I'm stupid. How many Jobs bios have you read? I know a fair bit about him (The Isaacson bio is mediocre, btw, mostly because Isaacson doesn't understand computer technology or design, the things at the center of Jobs' life -- what a wasted opportunity it was to give him all those exclusive interviews. For modern bios, the Brent Schlender one is better). Yes, he used to code a little, etc. But the vast majority of Jobs' lifetime contributions weren't writing code or directly creating hardware or software, that's not even arguable. He's a builder, he built a company with ideas and decisions. Just like Buffett built a company and a philanthropic legacy as large as anyone's and will have one of the largest impacts on the world of any living people today with ideas and decisions. He's spent most of his life building a company, Berkshire, that employees about 400,000 people, and his good leadership and decisions have a very real impact on the life of all these people and all the pension funds and such invested in it (on top of philantropy) -- ask GE employees and investors if they'd rather have had good leadership like Buffett? Your take is still stupid.

Taleb: Also: "Vitamin D Insufficiency is Prevalent in Severe COVID-19" https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.24.20075838v1

CHTR

This is stupid take. It shows a lack of imagination. That's like saying that Steve Jobs never built anything because he was an idea man and mostly built a company and teams and high level strategy and then said what he liked and disliked about ideas others brought to him. There are many ways to contribute, and if you care about consequences of actions at all, then creating philanthropies that will save millions, do R&D that is being ignored by others, etc, has a much bigger impact than a lot of inventors who have a few patents to their names.

The US is clearly not Sweden, though, right?

Q1: https://ir.charter.com/static-files/34377ce6-5cd4-40c1-bb41-1de0889a706d Cable FCF up 70.9% YoY!

The market is forward looking, and in a DCF, the next 1-2 years are only worth a certain amount.. So considering the massive stimulus and negative real interest rates, the market isn't being that crazy. I think it's inconvenient for many to not have had the prices go as low as they wanted, but the market has always been hard to predict and won't always go down when the economy is bad or go up when the economy is good. If it was easy, we'd all be richer.

I don't care about Tesla's cash balance. I'm not long or short Tesla and don't plan to be. But I am interesting in EV technology and products, and the comparison to how Ford has been doing there is interesting, considering Tesla was a startup a few years ago and Ford has been around forever with much larger financial and engineering resources.

Visa Q1 (fiscal Q2): https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2020/q2/Visa-Inc.-Q2-2020-Financial-Results.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/2020/q2/Visa-Inc.-Q2-2020-Financial-Results-Presentation.pdf

Q1: https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2020/Q1/Amazon-Q1-2020-Earnings-Release.pdf

New video by CGP Grey with good advice on how to not go crazy and deteriorate too much mentally and physically in lockdown Spaceship You:

New video, Spaceship You:

Why is past valuation relevant for a company that has changed this much over time? 100% agreed. ROP started really buying software companies in early 2000’s so we do have a decent bit of history here. They reached 50% recurring revenue in 2015 and are at 70% today. That mix will obviously continue to go up and maybe it is worth a higher and higher multiple as that transition continues. There's an acquisition history included in the attachment, and I'm not sure how exhaustive it is, but based on reviewing it, I would disagree that they started buying software businesses in the early 2000's in any material way. I would say that they have been buying software businesses as a primary focus since maybe 2009-2010. And looking back at their historical P/S, the P/S ratio has been steadily increasing since around that time from 3x sales to around 5-6x sales now. Indeed, they started buying better businesses after Jellison showed up in the early 2000s, and the transformational one for them was Neptune, I think. Software came later. For a while they were more focused on highly-engineered, capital-light, niche businesses. They had a more medical phase, and got some network businesses like Transcore's freight-matching unit, and more recently they started deploying a lot more of the capital in pure software stuff.

New Bill Gates: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/What-you-need-to-know-about-the-COVID-19-vaccine