Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
berkshirehathaway.com
berkshirehathaway.com
Linking to this website without written permission is strictly prohibited. Really hope meesterdude obtained said required written permission prior posting.
There have been lawsuits about it! See, for example, https://www.seroundtable.com/linkage-lawsuit-15131.html (the first useful hit in a Google search for "lawsuit about linking"), and a survey article https://btlj.org/data/articles2015/vol16/16_3/16-berkeley-te... by Mark Sableman.
Despite me pointing out the ridiculousness of the situation, as well as the SEO benefit to the original site no one would listen and it ended as "remove the links in the next 48 hours or we take down your sites until you do."
Wasn't worth the fight, so I removed them. Still can't get over the waste of resources and the ridiculousness of the whole thing.
[1] bottom of page 2: https://berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2021ltr.pdf
"Yes" or "Not right now"?
You selected "Not right now" the last 187 thousand times in a row, but maybe today you've changed your mind.
Your comment would almost fit better as a reply on the linked page from this other front page post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661
Of course there's a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a good reason. Big commercial websites do not choose their design out of a desire best to serve their customers, but out of a desire best to attract attention and to funnel that attention towards their ends—and what a website most wants us to do is not necessarily what is best for us to do.
But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
But maybe not everyone's priority is maximising the GDP of the web? (I'm not even sure what the 'D' there means, but I'm trying to take the comment in the spirit in which it must have been meant rather than excessively literally.)
But sometimes there's so much flash that you can't even tell what's being sold. And then there is the immediate blatant pop-over that demands that you make an account before you even have a chance to see the product.
Who designs crap like that?
I once raised a seed round with a dirt-simple (deliberately) deck that was just black and white text, Times New Roman default powerpoint style with zero design elements other than bullet points.
I got a lot of comments about how refreshing it was to just let the ideas and data stand for themselves without frills.
I accept that a deck and a website are not the same thing, but there is value in sometimes deliberately under-designing something.
Restaurant websites should be a readable pdf of the menu and prices and operating hours with a link for further information about the restaurant.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https://berkshirehathaw...
I think this startup has a shot. Maybe even become a $100B+ company someday.
How do you define success? BRK beat the S&P 500 returns for a few decades. They are one of the largest companies on planet earth(top 10), and their net income after all expenses is approaching $100B USD a year.
They own well known public companies like Dairy Queen, Duracell, BNSF Railroad, Geico Insurance, etc.
They seem pretty successful to me.
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 15">
That equates to Office 2013
The website is illegible on my phone. I have to do some zooming and panning and it feels awful.
It’s difficult to have a nice “classic web” page that runs on phones without a lot of care to use media queries. Not that that’s a deal breaker but it quickly departs from the “keep it simple” philosophy of these designs when you are effectively designing it twice.
I see this complaint often, but I don’t get it. Zooming and panning are two dead simple gestures on any smartphone browser, no more difficult than scrolling. Out of all the annoyances I’ve encountered visiting a website on my smartphone, having to zoom or pan ranks near the bottom for me. Why is it such a nuisance for others?
Double tap can sometimes work.
The other issue is that now the website has two overflow axes. So I’m just kinda wandering a page in some way that wasn’t designed by the author. To each their own but it feels janky and uncomfortable to have to wander a page. Especially if the page was designed with a certain viewport size in mind. They’re not expecting this case.
(Of course, really old HTML that uses table based layout has problems.)
> I want to make websites like this and run into the same problem every time: phones exist now.
If you start from unstyled HTML it works. My question is what are you adding in your development process of making simple websites that breaks it for phones?
This is a billionaire trying to sell low low prices to presumably investors.
“Value” is a big philosophy of his, in investing and in business strategy, and many of his followers believe the same.
It's not pushy or overly sales-like, but he is into a lot of the stuff he owns. The message about GEICO is really frank: different insurance carriers vary in their underwriting judgments, but he estimates that GEICO will offer the lowest rate for 40% of people which is more often than any carrier. Go to the website and see if you can save money.
For some of the businesses, it can be a bit personal. He bought Nebraska Furniture Mart over a handshake from someone he'd known for a long time.
It is a little weird, but it's certainly on-brand for him.
His advice on how to make money is basically that you should give some to him. Sometimes you just have to stand back and clap.
- popular saying amongst Dutch investors
40% of BH's publicly-traded holdings are AAPL stock. 11% is Bank of America. 9% is Chevron. 7% is Coca Cola.
https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/
You could replicate 84% of the publicly-traded side of BH with 8 US-based holdings.
But BH trades at 1.5x price to book... not sure if it's really worth it. But there's some VC-style genius in his non-trading holdings (e.g. GEICO and railways) directly held on its book or its <1% public holdings.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BRK-A/key-statistics/
(Though the asset value of the railroads, railcars, energy, pipelines, etc. (not even including liabilities) is about equal to its AAPL holdings, which is all asset/equity).
Overall, if you want a set-and-forget investment, I'd still say go for BH stock.
(That's if you ignore the websites of subsidies)
something something the 90s?
Disclaimer: am not a billionaire.
Same dude loves buying hail damaged cars. This is a hail damaged website. Works fine. Sells insurance while you’re there.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy owns and operates some of the world's largest wind and solar energy farms and is building state-of-the-art Terrapower (Bill Gates) nuclear reactors:
There's a lot for a "tech investor" to like about the company. As a consequence, Berkshire has a top-notch subreddit, probably the best subreddit of any company:
r/brkb (https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/)
Other investors will appreciate that Berkshire owns all of a large part of America's freight transportation system:
And is the largest investor in important parts of its financial system (Bank of America), etc.