Liberty

Cite your sources, please.

On bandwidth usage, from CHTR Q2 call:

Part is definitely regulation (which can be a double-edged sword... can lead to cheaper service, and can lead to stagnation and less investment in future, better service). Part is that more profitable areas tend to subsidize less profitable areas, and so the different in cost between some far off rural region and a big city isn't as wide as it would be if each paid exactly for their local economics, I think.

I'm sure he'll now have more time to go hang out with John McAfee... https://investors.overstock.com/news-releases/news-release-details/overstock-ceo-patrick-m-byrne-resigns

In Canada, for most of the past 20 years we've had really low data caps and prices have been generally higher and/or speeds lower. In general we're getting screwed because of lower competition than in the US (with banks, telecoms, food, etc). In some places like South Korea where population density is very high, speeds are insanely high and prices relatively low (afaik)

I do most of the time, though I always end up hearing some over time when I can't skip or end up hearing the beginning or ends.. so it's still fairly effective on me at getting me to know some brands and products. Marco Arment who makes Overcast, one of the most popular podcast players, once shared some stats on ad skipping. It's less frequent than you might expect. You see in the graph people skipping the same spots in the audio, so it's the ad skipping, but it was still a small minority, maybe 10-20%... Can't seem to find the source anymore, so my memory could be failing me.

Broadband is one the great bargains out there, when it comes to value for what you pay. Smartphones are always one of the biggest bargains out there. It's often a Fields of Dreams situation: Build it and they will come. As faster and faster broadband diffuses through the population, new companies and products are popping up to take advantage of that capacity. Without the capacity in place, a lot of these things wouldn't be able to get traction. That's how the chicken & egg problem is usually solved with technology... Excess capacity first. If you had told someone 10 years ago that some regular internet user (ie. not running servers or whatever) would use 400 gigs per month, they wouldn't have believed you. "Charter cable Internet customers who don't subscribe to Charter's TV service are using an average of more than 400GB of data a month, the company said yesterday" [source]

Glad you liked it.

80 million market cap, down from 13.3 billion at peak. You almost have to respect the efficiency of the value destruction in just a few years.

If you want to learn more, he has a bunch of sample posts available for free that give an idea of the depth of his analysis. What I like is that he takes the time to understand industry dynamics and management and competitive advantages and company history and competitors and stuff like that, and he often ends up negative or ambivalent on things he spent a lot of time on, he's not just trying to sell you on stocks and pretend everything is the next multi-bagger. It's not just one more "here's the financials regurgitated, let's slap a multiple on it, along with some superlatives about how great this is" like a bunch of writeups you see out there. https://www.scuttleblurb.com/category/sampleposts/ IMO he's getting better over time too.

One more at the real estate group: https://www.prweb.com/releases/the_constellation_real_estate_group_acquires_assets_of_smartzip/prweb16512401.htm

I am not sure why this deserves a post here. If yourself not a subscriber, you can’t read/ listen to it, and if you are, you get a notification anyways. So non-subscribers interested on info about this company knows it exist and can consider subscribing. I've gotten many direct messages thanking me for pointing out SB. They don't exactly have the WSJ brand recognition... It's one of the very best sources of analysis on the entire web. It's worth posting about. Many wouldn't know this writeup (and the two others on BUR) even existed otherwise. In an industry where many here use services that cost thousands per month (for access to bad research, mostly), this isn't exactly expensive. Not to mention that a single good investment insight is worth many thousands to most here... Good thing it's non-zero sum. Those that get something out of it are happy, and those that just skip over it haven't lost anything...

Comparing operating margins with an investment fund's returns is still really ridiculous, though.

Scuttleblurb writeup on the Muddy Waters report (sub required): https://www.scuttleblurb.com/bur3/

A few more from earlier this month: https://www.volarisgroup.com/news/article/volaris-group-enters-the-isv-vertical-with-acquisition-of-akuiteo https://www.volarisgroup.com/news/article/volaris-group-welcomes-portfolio-to-banking-credit-union-vertical https://www.totalspecificsolutions.com/about-us/transaction-updates?tid=46 h/t @pearnick

https://www.ge.com/reports/follow-up-from-last-weeks-note/

Legally, possibly. Ethically?

Thread: https://twitter.com/pegobry/status/1162253145625395200

So the hedge fund is the only other party that knows about the report, gets a heads up about when it will be released, shorts GE the day before, covers the short the day it comes out (presumably), and then splits the profit from the trade with the report's author. How is it legal to engage in this type of scheme? Reminds me a bit of Ackman's move with Valeant when they tried to takeover Allergan...

Even Andrew Left thinks it's beyond the pale: https://citronresearch.com/citron-issues-comment-on-general-electric-ge-and-markopolos-report/

New acquisition at Jonas: https://www.newswiretoday.com/news/171105/Jonas-Software-Announces-the-Acquisition-of-ITWERCS-Point-of-Sale/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-interview.html

As Dr. Peter Attia says, the standard American diet is so bad that changing to almost any other diet (vegetarian, carnivore, low carb, whole foods, Mediterranean, pescatarian, keto, etc) will provide benefits, possibly very large. If you want to further optimize on top of that, then you can start to look at which of those provides the most benefits (and some people react better or worse to some of those, so it's not one size fits all), but anyone on the standard american diet (lots of processed foods, simple carbs, tons of sugar, low fiber, low micronutrients) should just get off that.

Software is a tool. You can do multiple things and run multiple business models using it. Generalizing about it this way isn't very useful. Roper happens to be very niche and deep into complex verticals. This is pretty far from commoditized software.

Acquisition: http://investors.ropertech.com/file/Index?KeyFile=399106539