Liberty

Same way that I believe in atoms and radio waves; reproducible, conclusive and falsifiable evidence. So, you believe in value investing, although evidence is clearly against it? Most academics largely dismiss value investing, even saying that Buffett's streak was luck. Also, let's say you had a personal story like I discussed. Would that change anything? Are you comparing investing, which is mostly a social construct based on man-made institutions, to the laws of physics? I'm sorry but I can't follow you there (and I also disagree that evidence is against value investing -- there's a difference between what most people believe and what the evidence is -- even when most people thought the earth was flat the evidence was that it was an oblate spheroid, and even if most people believe in EMT, the evidence is that markets aren't completely efficient).

For people who like to follow Musk, here's another great interview (more about Tesla than SpaceX): http://www.autoblog.com/2012/09/07/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-q-and-a/

That's interesting, I hadn't heard that one before. Thanks for sharing :)

Same way that I believe in atoms and radio waves; reproducible, conclusive and falsifiable evidence.

You just made me think of two pics which I had to Google: https://images.nonexiste.net/popular/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/The-few-seconds-of-silence-that-followed-felt-so-good-.png http://i.imgur.com/caWYC.jpg As well as a book by Dawkins called Unweaving the Rainbow where he talks about, among other things, how it isn't true that science makes the universe less wonderful and amazing by revealing its secrets, but that it is religion's mysteries and revelations that are small and uninteresting - basically what a bronze age civilization could come up with - compared to the great questions and discoveries of science about the nature and composition of the universe and how things in it actually work. I also like this sequence of posts on Less Wrong. Here's an excerpt: "If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo - but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical - then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. [...] I have already remarked that nothing is inherently mysterious—nothing that actually exists, that is. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon; to worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious, is to worship your own ignorance; a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory, it is just somewhere we haven't visited yet, etc. etc... Which is to say that everything—everything that actually exists—is liable to end up in "the dull catalogue of common things", sooner or later. Your choice is either: Decide that things are allowed to be unmagical, knowable, scientifically explicable, in a word, real, and yet still worth caring about; Or go about the rest of your life suffering from existential ennui that is unresolvable." http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Joy_in_the_Merely_Real Slightly related: :)

Nice to see things moving in the right direction overall. Not too much to comment about, except that the plan for me at this point is just to be patient and wait for Thurso + cogen and then LSQ to be producing at full capacity. If they can execute and get to that point, I believe shareholders will do really well. If they can get Landquart in the green, even better. Wouldn't be surprised if they acquired another plant once they can self-finance a new conversion from cashflow (if good candidates are still available at the right conditions, of course), and we'll probably see some move over to specialty certification and maybe even some biorefinery stuff as soon as things are stable, which should boost margins.. Gotta say that Dresden's a real gem.

I wonder how much that is in purchasing power after adjusting for inflation. Anyone has an easy way to do the math? Still sounds like a good deal, but probably a bit less impressive :)

So for you if the eye can't "just happen" by accident, it's much easier for you to believe that it's creator "just happened"? The Deity seems more complex than the eye. Me, I favor the less complex of the two as more likely to happen by accident. Occam's razor is definitely warranted here, but it's not even necessary since natural selection DOESN'T say that things happen just by accident. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The only thing that is random are the mutations. The selection of those mutations isn't random at all, it is the 'fittest' individuals that are selected in the gene pool by having more offspring than the less fit individuals. In the same way, organs like the eye evolved gradually by conferring advantages and thus extra fitness. They were passed on to offspring giving benefits, and some offspring then had slightly better eyes which were then passed on and so on. Rinse and repeat a few million years. So the first eyes were very simple and had limited capabilities, and they progressively got better and more complex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye It's truly a fascinating topic, and not a mystery at all. But to show how the eye evolved and wasn't designed, you only have to look at the optical nerve. It's backwards! That's why we have a blind spot. Our eyes would be much better if the nerves were in the back rather than in front of the retina, but it happened that way first and evolution can't always backtrack after errors like that, and since it still works well enough, no real need. Same thing for how one of man's two testicles has a cord that goes all the way around some organs in the abdomen while the other is much shorter; an error that wasn't too bad for fitness and thus was left there, but definitely not a sign of design (unless you have one hell of an incompetent designer). Another example is how human women have such trouble with childbirth compared to most other mammals. It's because over time we evolved to walk upright, and there's a tradeoff there in pelvis size. Narrower is better to walk, but wider is better for childbirth. So basically, human brain size at birth has been limited by what can fit through a woman's pelvis at birth, and it's still just barely what fits without killing too many women (without modern medical help, a lot more would die in childbirth than do now) for the tradeoff to become an evolutive disadvantage. In any case, it is certainly more plausible to me to say that complex things such as eyes and humans have simple origins and have gradually, incrementally become more complex over billions of years than to say that complex things like eyes and humans have an even more complex origin, a god. That's just answering a question with a bigger question. Without evolution by natural selection, absolutely nothing we're observing in biology makes any sense, and we can see evolution at work by sequencing DNA (even rewriting DNA!), in fossils, in selective breeding of plants and insides and bacteria (antibiotics, etc), in zoological categorization, in geographical and temporal diversity of species, etc. We can see it in action, we know it works.

It is a good book. I've read it. I also have Collapse by Diamond, but I haven't read that one yet.

Those are good points, but it doesn't mean they aren't trying to differentiate (why buy all those chip designers?). Maybe they'll succeed, maybe they won't and will just go commodity. I think either way they should be fine since their chips aren't their secret sauce.

Getting exactly the designs you want without letting your competitors have access to them or outsourcing it to a third party over which you don't have complete control (and which can leak things or make blunders that are harder to prevent from outside). It fits with Apple's strategy of vertical integration when it comes to design (as opposed to manufacturing). I think there's a fair chance that over time Apple's silicon will become more and more differentiated from the competition, as efforts from the recently acquired companies have time to bear fruits. Who knows, maybe we'll hear more about that on the 12th. To inverse things: Why do you think it would be better for them to go with commodity chips? (as opposed to leveraging general ARM improvements and then adding some custom stuff on top)

I don't know, Apple has bought two chip design firms (PA Semi and Intrinsity), I think they'll probably keep designing them but based on the ARM standard, which means they don't have to do all the heavy lifting of making something from the ground up. I think there's an advantage to doing some chip design in-house, though I hope they won't start buying/building fabs. That's the part that is best left outsourced.

You'll find a lot of discussion of this in Dawkins' writings. But basically, postulating a god as an answer to these questions is just answering them with an even bigger question, so it's no answer at all. It's like saying in ancient times: "How does the sun work?" "God makes it work!" "Well, how does god work then?" While the correct answer we now know is nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms under massive pressure from the star's own gravity well :) But if you really want to go deep into each of those topics, there are neuroscience textbooks (I have this one: http://cognet.mit.edu/library/erefs/mitecs/ though I can't say I've read it all), biology textbooks, cosmology textbooks, cognitive-language stuff (Pinker is an expert on that - http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/0061336467/ and http://www.amazon.com/The-Stuff-Thought-Language-Window/dp/0143114247/) etc. Lots of answers for you there, but remember that things we don't know (yet) just mean that we don't know, they don't automatically mean that there must be something supernatural behind it. A way to instinctively get that is to think back to all the questions that we've answered about how the world works during the past 300 years, and ask if back then it would have been rational to postulate supernatural causes for them. So is it any more rational now? It's ok not to know some things. When we get evidence to fill that hole, we should look into it, but without evidence, that square should stay blank until we find some. Mysteries don't exist in nature. The mysteries are in our mind; they are on the map, not on the territory, so postulating 'a mystery' as an answer to something isn't really an answer, it's a confusion between the map and the territory. As a rule, if after an answer you don't know more than before, it's not really an answer :)

[amazonsearch]How To Get Rich[/amazonsearch] This one is more of a motivational/inspirational book. There's lots of advice and wisdom in it, but I think the main benefit I'm getting out of it is psychic rather than tactical or strategical. Dennis is a publishing magnate and certainly has a big ego, but he's also often self-deprecating and has a way with words, so it's a pleasant read if you aren't looking for something that the book isn't (if that makes sense). I'm about halfway through, and the central message seems to be that getting really rich is really hard, and you won't succeed if you don't really want it and aren't ready to disregard advice from well-meaning people around you who want to steer you to the 'normal' path of least resistance (get a job, stop obsessing about this thing, give up when things are bad, etc) and persevere through a lot of crap and bad times. A lot is about steeling yourself for the marathon and picking the right goals (if you want to be rich -- if you have other goals, that's fine, but being rich rarely happens by accident so if it's not your explicit goal, it probably won't happen). Anyway, I woulnd't necessarily call it a 'must-read' for investors here (at least not yet -- maybe the second half is amazing), but if like me you like to alternate between more technical readings and more 'meta' inspirational/biographical stuff, this might be one worth putting on the list.

Will do. I just put a hold on the revised edition at the library. ;)

I guess my wife would probably describe me as a book with legs. I've structured my whole life and work to have as much unstructured time as possible - kind of like Buffett, except I did it because it fits with my personality, I only learned later that it's what he also did - to pursue whatever interests I have, and that includes reading lots of books on various topics. To me having all that unstructured time available is the key to getting better at investing. If I had a busy schedule and constantly had to fit investing-related reading into holes, it probably wouldn't work as well. It also gives me a lot of time to post here, as my post count can attest... Sorry guys :)

If you read it, feel free to private message me with your thoughts. I'm curious to know what you think. Cheers!

Indeed, that ability to recognize human cues was bred in over-time. Dogs that do what you tell them to and can read your moods have higher value than those who do not, so there's higher selective pressure and those will have on average more offsprings via human-guided selective breeding, over time making those traits generalized in the population (it's fascinating to me that even very small advantages can mean that certain adaptations/genes take over a whole population over enough generations -- the math is slightly counter-intuitive). Evolutionary science if fascinating. I recommend this classic book on the subject by George C. Williams: http://www.amazon.com/Adaptation-Natural-Selection-Christopher-Williams/dp/0691026157/

If you are really open to it, read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. If you don't find those arguments convincing, then you'll be able to say that you've really looked at the good arguments in favor of a non-supernatural universe. Lots of religious people do ad hominem attacks against Dawkins and cherry pick what he says, but I've yet to find a religious person who has actually read him. Maybe, but there's the No True Scotsman problem here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman If everytime someone religious does something bad we post-facto says he wasn't really religious or wasn't doing it right, you don't end up with religion as much of a predictor for anything. I have read them, which is why I call them magical books. That's what they claim, no? Telepathy, transmutation, supernatural occurances and miracles, raising people form the dead and killing whole nations because voices in people's heads said so, invisibility, talking animals, disembodied presences and entities, prophecies, virgin births, burning bushes, whole seas defying gravity, other dimensions (or at least some places we can't find where some stuff supposedly is), etc. If that's not magic, then I don't know what the word magic should be used for. If someone came to you and told you they had witnessed any of that today, you'd probably say they believed in magic, yet they would be a more reliable first-hand witness than a centuries-old book from an era back when there was not tradition of objective reporting of facts (scientific method, journalistic method, photographic or video evidence, a literate population brought up with critical thinking, etc), and pretty much all of it written years after the supposed events by non-eyewitnesses. Those two books are very interesting for a whole lot more than any religious argument, I highly recommend them as they are an excellent study of human nature and can help investors. I haven't read that one, I'll put it on the list. Cheers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field

All dog species have as common ancestors wolves. As with all selective breeding, useful traits were selected and reinforced over generations. Selection from wolves probably started with docility as the primary traint, but once you have a lineage that doesn't want to attack you, you can then start selecting for other traits; Some dogs were bred to hunt, or herd sheep, as alarm systems, or to act as companions, or just to be cute. In fact, it's no surprise why puppies and especially kittens are so cute -- the cuttest animals in any litter had more chances of being picked by humans for companionship, and over thousands of years, this results in huge selective pressure for traits that humans would describe as cuteness* :) *Exhibit A: http://cuteoverload.com/

I don't know, it's the opposite view that scares me; without a big security camera in the sky, the religious people would no doubt try to kill and rape me and steal my stuff? That's scary. There are quite convincing evidence from evolutionary psychology that morality is evolved (the brain is an evolved organ and we are not born blank slates -- in fact, certain types of brain damage can affect people's morality and ethics), and common sense shows that even religious people who pretend they get their morality from their religion know how to pick and choose from their religious texts, so they actually have a moral foundation that doesn't come from their magical books (ie. the bible is full of genocide, prejudice, antiquated beliefs, etc, yet most religious people leave that stuff aside and won't stone women for wearing certain types of textiles or idolatry or whatever). There's also no evidence that people raised in non-religious families are any less moral, or that religious leaders are more moral (how many scandals with priests and preachers?). I recommend reading The Moral Animal by Robert Wright, and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Anyway, I'm out. Religious and partisan politics aren't productive to discuss on the internet. I just wanted to give my 2 cents about the origins of morality. Domesticated animals are the result of selective breeding over many generations, so they've been shaped by humans to fit their needs. It's not really an example of morality; It's the real 'intelligence design' because it was done by people :) Natural selection has its own criteria for selection (reproductive fitness), but humans have different ones, including not being eaten :)

What a mess. If I had to guess, I'd say that they will eventually monetize the debt one way or another. There's no way that the german voters are more resolved to avoid bailouts than southern voters are resolved to avoid the pain of austerity and pro-growth reform, especially since the germans are in a kind of lose-lose situation; if they say no to bailouts forever, they can still get hit by an Europe-wide crisis, while the southern countries can win if they just get the germans to pay for them (through monetary inflation, most probably). The real question is 'what then?'. Once that's done, will they try to federalize Europe more, or will they leave it as is and periodically subsidize the south with newly printed money? Or maybe I'm missing something important... In any case, I don't feel confident enough about any of this to base an investment on it.

I just want to say, this was an excellent post. Thanks writser!

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything/261913/