nthot's comments

Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to twitter, so I may be misunderstanding something. On my Twitter Home Screen there are three little stars on the upper right of the central container which allow you to toggle between "top tweets" (ie. 'The Algorithm') and "latest tweets" which is the time based ordering.

I get that feeling as well, fartcannon. The meteoric rise over the past year of the subreddit just feels artficial. I don't have any evidence outside of the a rapid increase of subscribers. I'm sure there is a large number of people with that sentiment out there, so I'd maybe put it at 40% or less that this is being coordinated by an external actor.

The whole sentiment around the subreddit really seems to be amplifying a class war attitude in the United States.

I remember reading an article (I think this was it [1]) about reddit getting manipulated by advertisers. Either posting about a product, or upvoting posts that were positive about a product and downvoting negative posts. Imagine what someone with a larger budget could do.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

Here's a few ways I could think of: 1. It's much more difficult to gamble with debt/debt is not used for gambling to such an extent that the scale would have enough of an effect. 2. From an economy's perspective gambling is net zero. What is catastrophic to an individual is a benefit for the person(casino) on the other side of the bet. Whereas the loss of value from bitcoin would reduce the total balance sheet for the economy. 3. I think that Bitcoin as assets can be used as collateral for other purchases or to be loaned out for others to use. This creates a chain of wealth based on the value of a bitcoin. Break the foundation of this chain (reduce the price of bitcoin by 75%) and that entire chain of wealth creation is broken. 4. The revenue from gambling is around $40 billion per year in the United States, whereas the market value of Bitcoin is over $1 trillion. It's really not apples to apples at all though, since it's market value vs. revenue. I'm not sure a good way to compare the gambling market vs. the crypto market.

Are you implying a relationship between the two plots?

Many of the individual businesses within Berkshire are able to act with a long term horizon that I think is uncommon within the stock market as a whole. Profits and float are able to be reinvested within Berkshire in a much more tax efficient way than separate companies.

One example is BNSF. Most railroads are on warpath to increase operating margin as much as possible. Cutting routes, laying off staff, and neglecting customer satisfaction are the norm. Imagine being laid off after your company has had its most profitable year ever. These actions are being dictated by institutional investors. BNSF is the only major railroad not taking on precision railroading. It's possible that this will be a failure on BNSF's part, but Berkshire is willing to take the bet and act differently from everyone else on the idea that this will be better long term. Institutional investors are not interested in that.

Voting power is in my understanding the real reason. Dollar for dollar a shares have seven times the voting power of a b share. Following his death, the foundations he has bequeathed his wealth to need to sell his shares over the course of ten years. Ordinarily this would result in institutional investors having a majority of the voting power. To avoid this the a shares will be converted to b shares in order to reduce the voting power. A shares are by and large held by investors who have been with Berkshire for decades. Hopefully they will continue the long term focus of Berkshire. Once their progeny start inheriting the shares I think all bets are off. I worry activist investors will convince institutional investors to break Berkshire apart.

0.6% is orders of magnitude larger than the percentage of people who have a legitimate use case. In my opinion it's not that coin does not have legitimate uses, it's that the cost of providing those uses far outweighs the benefit by design.

The current increase in value and ramping up of energy use is not due to an increase in the usefulness of the coin, but instead on a renewed interest in the game of hot potato that is speculation.

Reading through the abstract it immediately doesn’t appear that they are using the correct statistical test to come to the conclusion they are claiming. Like another comment says, it takes minutes to criticize what takes months to make, so I’ll read through the article and work through how they came to their methodology before saying more.

The fact that they are already planning on making changes seems to run counter to the idea that they would be taking a "Berkshire Hathaway" approach. In my understanding Warren Buffett's current philosophy is to buy companies that need his capital, potentially his name, but definitely not his intervention.

Painting this as an unintended consequence of open source is really interesting. The rise of free open source alternatives to proprietary products has encouraged companies to provide products free, but these companies aren't going to be motivated to provide these products without some avenue for profit.

Is it stepped at all? Do you owe nothing before 50k and then once you cross that threshold you now owe money? That would seem to incentivise staying below that threshold for a percentage of borrowers.

I also have difficulty seeing the first benefit you list as being a benefit. I don't have a problem with people pursuing degrees in fields that aren't big money makers, but I also don't know that the government should be in the business of incentivising people to study in these fields.

On the other hand, there is societal benefit to these fields being pursued in general. And the market economy may not adequately pay for the benefits it receives. As a society we wouldn't want everyone to major in poetry, though.

Anecdotally, I have a few friends who work in the railroad industry and they are currently seeing something close to this. The company is almost entirely owned by large institutional funds.

Union Pacific has a huge drive for constantly increasing efficiency. Their profits are up significantly year over year, but this fall they cut about 500 jobs from their headquarters in Omaha, around 6% of their Nebraska employees, and this isn't even the first time they've done it. To keep the big investors happy they are constantly searching for ways to cut costs.

On the other hand, this might also be a product of the industry. The railroad is necessarily growth constrained. It's unlikely that significantly more products will move to being transported by rail and there is very little room for new lines to be constructed.

If the article posted last week is to be believed [1], which I do, then transportation makes up a relatively small portion of emissions (14%).

Also, the demand for gasoline is very inelastic. Very little driving done today is for pleasure, so the cost would have to be raised so much that people are reducing driving out of necessity/looking for alternatives.

Finally, consumption taxes on necessities act regressively (ie the poor are taxed proportionally more than the rich).

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...

Why do you train to failure? Very few training programs that I have seen encourage lifters to regularly train to failure. I think westside barbell's program may, but that is for people competing in powerlifting.

Also, it's my understanding that when most people talk about exercising for better sleep they are specifically talking about low intensity steady state cardio exercise.

I'd throw Omaha in that list as well. Three large to midsize universities within 1 hour, and there are few options outside of banks or insurance companies. The very few tech companies that I can think of in the area basically have their pick of graduates from the three universities. Anyone else has to look towards relocating if they don't want to work for one of the aforementioned banks or insurance companies.

Yeah, the only way to search reddit and actually get what you are looking for is through Google. I don't understand why the website's search is so bad.

In most recipes, if the tomatoes are not in season you'll have better luck using canned tomatoes anyways.

It's working for me now. Thank you!

The site appears to be broken for internet explorer 11. I am not able to follow any links.

O'Reilly has a weekly Fintech newsletter which is pretty interesting. It isn't weekly like most of O'Reilly's newsletters, but that can be a good thing as it doesn't have to stretch to find interesting articles.

http://www.oreilly.com/fintech/newsletter.html