Related book: Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 BillionHow the Animal Kingdom Sleeps - by Ed Yong (video) (LINK)
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it. It is the present, not the past, that dies; this present moment, to which we give so much attention, is forever flitting from our eyes and fingers into that pedestal and matrix of our lives which we call the past. It is only the past that lives.
Therefore I feel that we of this generation give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, athletic teams. But how, without history, can we understand these events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes?
The conglomerate controlled and run by Warren Buffett could get a 13% boost to its shareholder equity, or book value, in the quarter as a result of a lower corporate tax rate, gains in its equity portfolio, and operating earnings. Our analysis is based in part on calculations by Barclays insurance analyst Jay Gelb.
...Last week, Berkshire shares briefly topped $300,000, and are now valued at $489 billion -- sixth in market value behind tech leaders Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Facebook.
We estimate that Berkshire’s book value could end the current quarter around $211,000 per class A share. This suggests that Berkshire shares, now trading for nearly 1.6 times its Sept. 30 book value of $187,435 – the high end of its price/book value range dating back several years – are cheaper than they appear. If our estimate of Dec. 31 book value proves accurate, Berkshire shares trade closer to 1.4 times year-end book.
Its government is virtual, borderless, blockchained, and secure. Has this tiny post-Soviet nation found the way of the future?Sean Iddings on the Planet MicroCap podcast discussing Intelligent Fanatics: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (LINK)
Related book (I've linked to this before. And now that I'm nearly finished with it, I think it gives great context to viewing things like the article above. See THIS article for more about the book.): The China FantasyThe Ezra Klein Show (podcast): What life is like in North Korea (LINK)
Related book: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North KoreaConversations with Tyler (podcast): Andy Weir on the Economics of Sci-Fi and Space (LINK)
Related book: Artemis: A NovelNappuccino: A Scientific 5-Step Guide to the Perfect Nap (LINK)
Related book: When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect TimingInvesting book of the day: The Bank Investor's Handbook
So far, I’ve spent no time in the podcast discussing real estate, so I was excited to get the chance to talk to the team at Sorin Capital, a billion dollar hedge fund which specializes in commercial real estate, REITs, and commercial mortgage backed securities.Potash Corp: A Study in Patience (LINK)
Related book: Augustine's LawsTim Ferriss talks with Mike Maples, Jr. (podcast) (LINK)
The 3Q2017 GMO Quarterly Letter features Ben Inker’s “What Happened to Inflation? And What Happens If It Comes Back?” and Jeremy Grantham’s “Career Risk and Stalin’s Pension Fund: Investing in a World of Overpriced Assets”Bitcoin: Currency of the Future or Investment Mania? Bill Miller’s Transformative Innovation Case (video) (LINK)
Related book: Management Challenges for the 21st Century - by Peter F. Drucker40 Years Later, Some Survivors of the First Ebola Outbreak Are Still Immune - by Ed Yong (LINK)
Algorithms made him a Wall Street billionaire. His new research center helps scientists mine data for the common good.Disney and Fox - by Ben Thompson (LINK)
Related book: Discipline Equals FreedomThe drip - Seth Godin (LINK)
Change, real change, is the result of focused persistence.
It's easy to get a bunch of people sort of excited for a little while.
The challenging part, and the reason that change doesn't happen as often as it should is that we get distracted. Today's urgent is more urgent than yesterday's important.
The concept of breaking news and the crisis of the day proves my point. If the world ended every time Wolf Blitzer implied it would, we would have been toast a long time ago. The organizations that actually change things are the ones that have a time horizon that's longer than 36 hours.
There are very few overnight successes. Very few entrepreneurs, freelancers, non-profits, candidates, spiritual leaders, activists or people in a successful relationship that got there with thunder and lighting. It happens with a drip.
Related book: The Misbehavior of MarketsThe Motley Fool Interviews Trupanion Founder and CEO Darryl Rawlings [H/T @Connor_Leonard] (LINK)
Related book: Discipline Equals FreedomRecent a16z videos: 1) Decrypting Crypto: From Bitcoin and Blockchain to ICOs; 2) AI: What’s Working, What’s Not
Related book: Intelligent Fanatics: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Related book: Principles
Related book: The Four
Related book: Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? [For my thoughts on the book, see the bottom of THIS post.]StarTalk Radio (podcast) -- Cosmic Queries: Mysterious Cosmology, with Sean Carroll (LINK)
Related book: The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe ItselfHow to Tell If a Dinosaur Is Fake - by Ed Yong (LINK)
CURIOSITY AND OBSERVATION
In addition to his instinct for discerning patterns across disciplines, Leonardo honed two other traits that aided his scientific pursuits: an omnivorous curiosity, which bordered on the fanatical, and an acute power of observation, which was eerily intense. Like much with Leonardo, these were interconnected. Any person who puts “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” on his to-do list is overendowed with the combination of curiosity and acuity.
His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about: Why is the sky blue? How are clouds formed? Why can our eyes see only in a straight line? What is yawning? Einstein said he marveled about questions others found mundane because he was slow in learning to talk as a child. For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom.
...His curiosity was aided by the sharpness of his eye, which focused on things that the rest of us glance over.... The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely.
In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick—for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.”
The books: 1) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City; 2) The Sympathizer; 3) The Best We Could Do; 4) Energy and Civilization: A History; 5) Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz ChickensHoward Marks at the Goldman Sachs US Financial Services Conference (LINK)
Everybody who manages money has to end up somewhere on the spectrum between cautious and aggressive, and I don't see any encouragement for aggressiveness today. I'm not worried about missing opportunities today. I'm worried about losing money. And so in my opinion, that calls for caution. Not out of the market. Oaktree's mantra is and has been for a while move forward but with caution. Move forward means make investments. We're not terrified. We're not hesitant to make investments. We are, in most of our accounts, we are fully invested, but with caution. And we are a cautious firm, so that means more caution than usual. And fully invested with caution has actually been a good posture for the last several years. You look at last year, you look at this year, I think that in both years, the returns have come as a surprise. So the point is, we would've had a somewhat higher return if we hadn't been cautious, but our caution gave us the courage to be fully invested, which was the right thing.Howard Marks says tax cut won't trickle down 'too much' to regular worker (LINK)
Related book: Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of ThoughtGrant’s Podcast: Value Hunt (LINK)
This autumn I gave the keynote at Andreessen Horowitz's annual 'Tech Summit' conference, talking about the state of tech today and what's likely to happen in the next decade: mobile, Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon, innovation, machine learning, autonomous cars, mixed reality and crypto-currencies.
Related book: America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal ReserveTax Cuts, Debt, & The Pretense of Knowledge - by Frank Martin (LINK)