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spfzero commented on Canoo spent double its annual revenue on the CEO's private jet   techcrunch.com/2024/04/01... · Posted by u/hampelm
TRDRVR · 2 years ago
I think the real issue here is that a CEO who nobody has heard of and is doing a bad job running the company claims that he needs to fly private as a business expense.

It's one think for Zuck or Tim Cook to claim that flying commercial would be dangerous and a waste of time, but the way that attitude has filtered down to very small companies is astounding (especially given the outsized negative impact private jet travel has on the rest of us).

Any reasonable board for a public company that size and a CEO that unrecognizable should at most reimburse first class fare and if the CEO wants to fly private, the delta can come from personal funds.

spfzero · 2 years ago
Maybe he's anticipating making a quick getaway?
spfzero commented on Charlie Munger has died   berkshirehathaway.com/new... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
corethree · 2 years ago
>To test whether markets are perfectly efficient, just look for large movements over time. If a stock goes up 20% in a year, the market might have undervalued it last year, or is overvaluing it this year. It's unlikely the it was correctly valuing it at both times. In the absence of a Covid-19 pandemic, act of god, etc. of course.

This is technical analysis not value investing.

spfzero · 2 years ago
It's not the investment thesis, it's a thought experiment to test market efficiency. It's a test to see whether markets are always efficient, and to me demonstrates that they are not, and that value investing might be an interesting thesis to pursue still.

People have been saying for decades that value investing is not possible since the market is too efficient. My point is that it is not efficient enough to prevent value investing from being a successful strategy.

spfzero commented on Charlie Munger has died   berkshirehathaway.com/new... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
vlovich123 · 2 years ago
> If a stock goes up 20% in a year, the market might have undervalued it last year, or is overvaluing it this year. It's unlikely the it was correctly valuing it at both times. In the absence of a Covid-19 pandemic, act of god, etc. of course.

Or the company has grown its revenue by 20% in 1 year which isn't necessarily unheard of. Or they significantly beat the expectations of analysts / their own guidance. In all of those cases the stock could have been correctly valued & still experienced growth.

spfzero · 2 years ago
Sure which is why I said "unlikely", rather than "unheard of".
spfzero commented on My $500M Mars rover mistake   chrislewicki.com/articles... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen
dclowd9901 · 2 years ago
Ohhhh I hate things that you “just have to not screw up.” A fiddly manual process with so many possible ways to screw something up is almost guaranteed to see a catastrophic failure.

If this really manual fiddly process was really the only way they could test the motors, I’d say that’s a big failure on the design engineer’s part.

spfzero · 2 years ago
Test requirements often arise after system design is complete. Engineers need time to examine the system, theorize failure modes, and design the tests. Also time to test the system, find some unexpected failure mode, and then design yet more tests.
spfzero commented on My $500M Mars rover mistake   chrislewicki.com/articles... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen
genter · 2 years ago
So If I understand it correctly, the electrical connector was genderless? If so, that's relatively rare (the only ones I can think of are Anderson Powerpole, which I don't think are rated for interplanetary vehicles) and extremely stupid.

Edit: I suppose he could've been using alligator leads.

spfzero · 2 years ago
This was a test fixture so probably banana leads.
spfzero commented on My $500M Mars rover mistake   chrislewicki.com/articles... · Posted by u/bryanrasmussen
kragen · 2 years ago
maybe it was measuring the current rather than the voltage as he thought, which would require putting it in series with the circuit
spfzero · 2 years ago
That stood out to me as well when I read the article.
spfzero commented on Charlie Munger has died   berkshirehathaway.com/new... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
nradov · 2 years ago
I think the larger point is that public capital markets have become steadily more efficient. There are no "value stocks" anymore because nothing is overlooked by the market, those old opportunities have been arbitraged away. Modern computing systems have made it practical to look at every stock every day, so all stocks now trade at their "true worth" because all publicly available information gets instantly priced in.

Now pretty much the only way for investors to (legally) beat the market is to do proprietary research in ways that others can't easily copy. You need information that no one else has.

spfzero · 2 years ago
As a counter-argument, you usually need to read a lot into the reported numbers, for example read the 10K notes for multiple years in the past. That's the only way to know that the 3B in assets showing up on the balance sheet for "goodwill", to use one easy example, are not really worth 3B. There are many more-nuanced factors that work alike. The reported numbers are what the accountants think might fly under GAAP, and the accountants work for the CEO, who has a say in the accounting "intent".

To test whether markets are perfectly efficient, just look for large movements over time. If a stock goes up 20% in a year, the market might have undervalued it last year, or is overvaluing it this year. It's unlikely the it was correctly valuing it at both times. In the absence of a Covid-19 pandemic, act of god, etc. of course.

You could say that the market just takes "investor sentiment" into account, and is therefore still efficient. But value investing is a strategy that looks for misplaced investor sentiment and exploits it. If that's the way you define an efficient market, than I'd say an efficient market is no obstacle to a value investor.

spfzero commented on American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough   wsj.com/economy/american-... · Posted by u/ceohockey60
inamberclad · 2 years ago
School still isn't the same work. There's a lot more intricacies in the real world than you can ever be taught in school.
spfzero · 2 years ago
Yes. Building something complicated requires formal education plus years of experience attempting to build the complicated thing.
spfzero commented on American Labor’s Real Problem: It Isn’t Productive Enough   wsj.com/economy/american-... · Posted by u/ceohockey60
Animats · 2 years ago
Boeing moved production from Seattle, where they had people with experience building airplanes, to North Charleston, South Carolina, and cut pay. Of course they now have people who don't know what they are doing.

There's a more general problem. Who goes to college to learn how to set up a factory? Where do you go to learn that? That's a difficult skill, and it helps to have done it a few times as a junior before you're in charge. What happens if you don't know how is that you have to let the people who sell you the machinery set up your factory. This works for simple stuff, like a bakery, which you can buy turnkey. More complex stuff, not so much. Worse, much of the knowledge doesn't transfer. If you know how to design a production line for metal furniture, that may not translate well to batteries. One of the things that auto manufacturers have painfully discovered is that a battery plant is partly a chemical plant, which is not something automakers know much about.

Machine design is quite hard, not that many people are good at it, and it pays less than coding webcrap. The US used to have people who were good at this, and most of them were laid off in the 1980s.

spfzero · 2 years ago
Some endeavors require historical knowledge, aircraft engineering being one of them. If you break the chain, you lose it; policies that were developed over decades are discarded. "Why do we need to do it this way, this other way is faster and cheaper!" No one is around to explain why any more, so the lesson is learned the hard way, again.
spfzero commented on It's okay to make something nobody wants   zhangluyao.com/blog/make-... · Posted by u/levi0214
efitz · 2 years ago
Lately i have been wondering about the weird projects that people make- the “I built a web application framework in brainfuck” or “I built a text based bitmap image editor” or “I loaded an LLM on a Speak’n’Spell” kind of projects (I made up all of those but see similar on HN every day).

I understand passion projects and the article hints that might be the reason, but I just don’t understand why people would spend such enormous amounts of effort on such weird projects.

spfzero · 2 years ago
It's fun for them and they don't have the expectation that it will make money. And probably it doesn't, and that's fine, move on to the next thing. But once in a while, maybe it resonates with a greater need.

u/spfzero

KarmaCake day1412July 21, 2020View Original