Charlie Munger has died
berkshirehathaway.com
berkshirehathaway.com
Acquired podcast got to do one of (possible the) last interviews with him a month ago for anyone looking for recent content from him: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/charlie-munger
Also Stripe Press is releasing just next week a book (technically re-release of an older book) on his collected thoughts: https://press.stripe.com/poor-charlies-almanack
"TRUE G IS IF YOU DIE AT AGE 99 AND THEY STILL WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE CLOSE FOR THE ANNOUNCEMENT."
[1] https://x.com/INVESTMENTSHULK/status/1729608350751449218?s=2...
Charlie often interrupted the question, answered one that could have been asked, and then later on the interviewer (Ben or David) came around to actually finishing the question, and it turned out not to be the one that Charlie prematurely answered.
He also gave several answers that I didn't think were really insightful, of course YMMV.
I found this interview to be one of the least interesting to be ever published by Acquired.
My understanding of Munger's intent: find the issues and risks that you are not aware of, by looking at the project from a different perspective.
What Google X (and many others) do: do the most risky parts first, so you fail fast and minimize the wasted effort (save time and money by not doing the less risky parts first, in case the project is doomed).
Munger gives a tool to identify new (yet unknown) risks. Seeking what needs to be addressed so that the project doesn't fail.
The other thing is a tool to help us deal with the known risks (derisking the project, identifying the complete blockers). Checking if the project is doomed, and should not receive more investment.
I see it as two very different things from the project management perspective.
It's an extension, not a distinct approach.
What I've seen, people focus on the business requirements and only the obvious risks. That's for the regular projects.
I have seen Munger's proposal in practice. In form of intentionally breaking production (in a controlled manner) to uncover unknown issues (similar to Netflix's Chaos Monkey), and in form of think tanks with senior engineers who take time to think about potential reliability issues.
What Munger describes is exactly the latter approach. From my experience, it's done very rarely. And never in some companies. While Munger advocates to do it for every project.
I've made a point of seeing him at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting every last few years. He had many trials in his life but lived it well. His wit and wisdom will be missed.
Arguably the guy did nothing worthy of admiration. Sure he managed to multiply cashflow, but on my books that doesn't stand nearly to definition of hero.
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy his books and interviews perhaps like everyone else. He was incredibly smart character, no doubt about that. But hero?
Not trolling, genuinely curious.
And they've stayed course since the 60s!
For that alone they've become (cult) legends among small time investors. As a small time investor myself born in the 90s it is insane the amount of bullsh*t social media will push onto you regarding finance.
Their annual meetings where they answer questions are some of the only sane financial advice to be found on YouTube.
They did't do anything with the cash except piling it up and multiplying. By all means they could do that - don't get me wrong again, but that doesn't make them heroes, does it?
Their videos are by far _not only_ sane advice out there. They are good, but any decent book on the subject value much more.
If you are looking for positive externalities to qualify "hero", he probably played a part in creating a large number of the companies you have ever heard of, employing millions and large part of the success of US markets today.
Would you kindly clarify what “defacto investment hero” means? Hopefully not in cult-like definitions.
To be clear, i am not looking for any positive externalities, just wondering what he did to warrant being called a hero. That’s it.
"a person who is admired for their courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. "a war hero" ".
With not much imagination I bet you could place him in one of the categories.
Nothing wrong in that at all.
Same with certain actors (Alan Rickman springs to mind), chess legends like Gary Kasparov, albeit on a smaller scale.
I think I understand what you're getting at - Charlie Munger didn't change the world the way, say, Jonas Salk did - but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to idolize him. He was at the top of his game, and incredibly bright and witty.
It’s understandable some people will idolise him - pretty much like they can do same for anyone else, no matter how big or small, benevolent or malevolent his/her impact is.
Was just wondering if there is objectively something justifying the definition or it’s deeply subjective.
Guess I grasped the answer by now
Moreover, he taught and inspired many others do the same.
That's a hero in my book. Not some sports player, actor or worse - some politician - people are usually worshipping.
RIP Charlie Munger.
They gave a lot of the cash to effective charities, thereby saving tens of thousands of lives. (I'd need to look up the exact number.)
Being. Being well is an achievement.
What you come up to be is something you do - you develop it.
Now I am doing much better. And seems to be an achievement per your statement.
Does that make me a hero? Or even just a decent human being?
Being well is not much of achievement if we don't look at bigger picture - how it was made and if it was put to work at greater good.
Miles away from what you seem to have understood. Re-read that statement, and make an effort to understand it. It is very simple really: Charlie Munger was admirable after his wisdom - intentionally and purposely built.
Incidentally, your (delirious and disconnected - I speak of Being, "Being" which is opposed to "having" after at least Fromm, and you are there attempting to adapt what I wrote into concepts of theft) process seems to fall into that bias that Charlie Munger insisted on, of having embraced some judgement so tightly that it blinds you.
Returning to what I expressed: people «not well off», in wisdom, they met somebody «way better», in wisdom - which is a core point in the «achievement» in question -, and through their own effort, facilitated by gifts, «take part of the wealth». With a collective gain.
My original reply was faithful to your question: "what did he do in life worth of admiration", to which you have been replied: "he built himself well". And he shared that achievement generously. Other matters like faults are contextual to different questions.
Hm, isn't that a purely subjective thing? And did he really did nothing worthy of admiration? Isn't it admirable to be great at your job? To write books that people read and enjoy, and draw inspiration from?
Clever and smart scammer is extremely great at his job sending people into poverty. Absolutely great at the job. Is it admirable? I’ll leave the judgment to you.
I feel like you're just trying to understand someone else's position, but you're coming across as very militant. Tangential: do you disagree that someone could consider an athlete a personal hero?
You did the opposite of leaving the judgement for me.
You wanted to argue that he did nothing worthy of admiration - so it would be interesting to hear the reasoning (if any) behind that. He lived 99 years, are you sure he did nothing worthy of admiration in his life? I know nothing about the guy but I can see on wikipedia that he was at the top of his class at Harvard. Isn't that potentially admirable? What about him providing free legal aid while being a student? Nothing worthy of admiration? Are you sure that none of his family members didn't find him admirable? His neighbours or colleagues?
Again, saying that he never have done anything admirable is a pretty strong claim that you have failed to argue for.
Genuinely wondering who your heroes are?
Could be a case of mismatched focuses. If someone is focused on tech, they might idealize Musk or Jobs. If someone has roots in the financial realm, they might thing Buffet is their hero.
That’s why I’m asking. Is it possible you can’t understand why Munger is a hero to some because you don’t live in that world?
For the record my heroes are Steve Irwin and my Aunt Patty, so it’s also completely subjective and highly contextual.
Absolutely so. That’s why i am wondering if those people who consider him as a hero can explain reasons. Loving making money is a legitimate reason - no problem with that, everyone has own goals in life.
My heroes, if you will, happen to be regular people, whose names won’t tell you anything, so I hope you kindly excuse me on that.
Again, there’s arguably nothing wrong with idealising, however by definition it rarely has anything to do with real life qualities. Again, nothing wrong with it.
Specifically, this paragraph is the general way I was thinking about: "Munger’s hero was Benjamin Franklin, whom he admired for his curiosity, ingenuity and wit. Munger’s own common sense, biting humor, pathological bluntness and disdain for conventional wisdom made him a celebrity among investors"
For me, personally, it was the way that he lived his life, was extraordinary brilliant, a polymath, and changed multiple fields of study (investing and arguably behavioral psychology.) He has not only directly created jobs, as others have stated, of millions, but has also indirectly altered the lives of millions for the better. He is one of the greatest minds in investing and he freely educated millions on his methods.
At the same time, he had some incredibly rough times and bore it with grace. For me, setting this type of example is also noteworthy. There are also the small things -- people who have been around him, he's incredibly respectful on an individual basis, always showed up early, and in general, lived in a way that I aspire to living.
Someone in thread asked what’s big deal about him. what did he achieve
My answer would be I never tried to look into his achievements or did care about them. The man was genuinely curious, humble and a geek. He constantly published his ways of thinking. I enjoyed how he thought about things, how i could relate self correct based on it.
Munger is gone, Bogle is gone, Buffett is 93. Who takes up the mantle of value investing now?
The only older than elders writing off the youth is the youth proving them wrong. Let's hope some follow Charlie's quote instead: "If you've got anything you really want to do, don't wait until you're 93. Start now, and don't stop!"
Correct me if wrong, but I don’t think index funds come under that paradigm.
An index constructed specifically using value measures as the criteria for inclusion can be (at least arguably so).
Click on "value indexes" here: https://www.crsp.org/indexes/ to see some underlying value indexes, and funds like this one track the Large Cap version of it: https://fundresearch.fidelity.com/mutual-funds/summary/92290... (perhaps not surprising, the fund's largest holding is Berkshire B shares)
https://github.com/openlink/Virtuoso-RDFIzer-Mapper-Scripts/...
/? query XBRL https://www.google.com/search?q=query+xbrl
https://github.com/topics/xbrl
But then also a fund or an index fund or an Index ETF wouldn't be complete without ethical review for the sustainable competitive advantage given e.g. GRI+#GlobalGoal sustainability reports.
When you own enough of a company to bring in a new team.
https://pandas-datareader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/remote_da...
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.
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.
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.
If you say that value investing still works then where is the evidence?
This is technical analysis not value investing.
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.
The research does say that value doesn't work quite as well as it did decades ago.
This strategy was actually pioneered by buffets mentor Benjamín graham. By just blindly following a formula you would do value investing by calculating NAV vs market cap.
Buffet took it one step further. He calculates another type of value called intrinsic value and that relies on other factors rather not just the ratio of assets to cap. Part of it relies on consistency of revenue, growth and qualitative aspects of the business as well.
For a while, Yahoo was famously worth less than its stake in Alibaba. But it was also not clear whether shareholders could get management out of the way to stop destroying value.
Plenty of companies trade at a discount to book value. I found over a thousand with a stock screener.
This is passive investing, not value investing.
Value investing is very much active investing, otherwise how would you select the undervalued assets?
Value investing is about finding undervalued companies and buying them while avoiding the properly valued or over valued companies. It has nothing to do with ETF's or index funds.
I've seen Growth and Technical investing be contrasted to Value. Growth being looking for companies which have not actualized revenue goals but appear to be able to do rapidly(they're growing, look for the ones that grow fastest), Technical is looking at trends and patterns (they're trending, catch the trend and get off before others do).
In my lay understanding Value investing looks for margins of safety through companies which are worth more on the books than they're shares are selling for, or where their cashflows make them look attractive relative to bonds of their equivalent grade. An example might be if AAPL took a nose dive and was selling for less than $167B (which is their cash on hand) that'd be an excellent Value play.
Or assume their equivalent bond rate was Single-B (Currently 9.5%) and their Price to earnings rate was less than 10.5 --> Buying AAPL would be similar to buying a Grade B bond for less than the current market rate.
Value by contrast is looking at current earnings.
Both are predictions of the future value, one just weights the current earnings high. While you often have a bias to one, generally you should consider both. Don't buy current income if growth says the company will collapse. Don't buy growth if the company won't grow to support the value in the future.
Value stocks are by definition boring and unknown. Think iron ore mines, regional banks, house builders, carpet makers, and other yawn-fest-profit-machines.
Stock prices go up and down, but usually your goal is to buy stocks low and sell them high.
Growth investing looks to trending sectors and companies and lets say 'bets' on a certain future playing out and thus being good for certain companies.
Value investing is an investment strategy where you deep dive on the financial fundamentals of a company and determine your own measure of worth, or what is sometimes called a fundamental value. In essence your own financial calculations give you a fundamental value that you think the stock is "actually" worth.
Having done this for a number of companies you then keep track of the market, and when, and only when, the stock price drops below your own fundamental value price then you buy.
Munger and Buffet would pair this approach to also planning to hold the stock for the long term and see themselves as owning part of the business over many years.
Often a stock might drop when the growth story turns against it (eg. AI is more exciting than crypto stories now), and this is likley when Value investors would get into a stock as it was now below their fundamental valuation and hence predicted on their models to go back up over time.
Mutual fund managers can often be classified as having a value or growth or index approach (and others). And for most normal investors it's usually good advise to take advantage of diversification and back a few different approaches in building a long term focussed portfolio.
An S&P500 index does stock selection too, it's just picking large-cap stocks instead of value stocks.
That's not completely true. The indices can involve plenty of human judgement, the S&P500 does, for example.
Yes, that's correct. They are orthogonal concepts.
The first way it's used is to describe buying stocks that are cheap relative to their current financial characteristics (price to book, price to earnings, price to FCF, etc). This approach is usually contrasted with "growth", which would refer to investing in companies with a compelling thesis and bright future ahead of them.
A second way the term "value investing" is used is to describe the approach of Buffett/Munger where the investor compares the current price to the present value of the future cash flows and seeks a margin of safety above that.
You can do passive investing in the first approach. Just go buy ETFs that weight towards value metrics, like Vanguards $VTV value ETF. You can't really do passive investing in the second approach, aside from investing money in the funds of people who do that for you.
Whether appropriate or not, the term “value investing” is widely used. Typically, it connotes the purchase of stocks having attributes such as a low ratio of price to book value, a low price-earnings ratio, or a high dividend yield. Unfortunately, such characteristics, even if they appear in combination, are far from determinative as to whether an investor is indeed buying something for what it is worth and is therefore truly operating on the principle of obtaining value in his investments. Correspondingly, opposite characteristics—a high ratio of price to book value, a high price-earnings ratio, and a low dividend yield—are in no way inconsistent with a “value” purchase."
Excerpt from (my non-monetized blog): https://sileret.com/projects/buffett-shareholder-letters/199...
Original 1992 shareholder letter here: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1992.html
Back in the '60s and '70s, stock market capitalization grew roughly in line with GDP. But from the 1980s onwards, it grew at a level that far outpaced GDP growth [0]. So investors who were already wealthy in the '60s had the capital necessary to take advantage.
[0] The Big Bang: Stock Market Capitalization in the Long Run, 2022: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.09.008
Oh baloney. I signed up for a Schwab account and started buying stocks at my first job long before the internet. My dad started buying stocks in the 1940s on his military pay (never much). Elevator boys were famously buying stocks in the 1920s.
All the "reach" required was some get-up-and-go to sign up for a brokerage account. It didn't cost anything. They didn't check your tax returns or do a credit check.
The whole point of the stock market was to sell stock to anyone who would buy it.
Historically you typically bought shares in blocks of 100 and the transaction fees were also meaningful.
You couldn't easily buy 1 share of a $20 stock. If you had to buy 100 shares @ $20, that's $2,000 - in 1970 that was a lot of money.
Now, of course, you can buy fractional shares with no transaction fees. (Ignoring things like payment for order flow, etc.)
I also had an ancient car and a cheap apartment, and didn't spend money on booze.
Average new car prices were $14,000 in 1982. I bought my car for $800. So yeah, I'd say investing $1,000 was well within common man finances.
Seth Klarman
David Einhorn
Howard S. Marks
Joel Greenblatt
There are alot of famous and very good value investors who are at the top of their game right now.
Bogle was not a value investor. He was a low(er)-costs advocate (and not even necessarily passive/index investing: e.g., Vanguard has active funds).
There were very, very few people who could do what he did.
In the annual letter to shareholders on 2014, it was suggested that both [Ajit] Jain and Greg Abel could be appropriate successors for Warren Buffett as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
Why would it be important that a particular flavour of investor (wealth accruer) is around?
I found this out the hard way when I saw an email from vanguard saying they would be charging me $25/year/fund unless I signed up for e-delivery AND moved all my accounts over to their brokerage.
Vanguards death by a thousand nickle-and-diming-cuts has begun.
> It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.
From his speech at Harvard in '95, he's talking about how loudly proclaiming something, shouting about it even, locks our brains into this, making us resistant to contradictory ideas, regardless of evidence.
This observation has felt more and more important over the last decade.
If there's something to be true to and then you'd find it, now you'd have validation to act shitty towards others in the name of being true to yourself. That's the type of brain chains "this is how I am" he means.
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."
You can passionately believe in one thing but try to understand why others don't.
> Is there such a thing as a cheerful pessimist? That's what I am.
~~~ Charlie Munger
--
It is a disservice to salute the Man by picking just a partial idea, in the rich amount he was so kind to share, yet there is something fundamental in that message above.
It was Warren Buffett that said «You should write your obituary and try and figure out how to live up to it», and this seems very relevant with Charlie Munger.
We are grateful for all the good teaching.
It's a fantastic read that can really help you understand why supposedly rational masses of people can end up being so wrong. In the tech world, it ends up being more relevant than one would like it to be.
A transcript of the original speech at Harvard, June 1995, should be e.g. at
https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/psychology-of-human-mi...
A recording of the original speech is at
Youth really is fleeting.
So is all of life.
Signed, a 60 year old
As an aside, it does aggravate me that so many companies have reverted back to the 2 digit year after going through so much Y2K refactoring.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~venky/teach/Munger-misjudgmen...
https://fs.blog/energy-independence-is-a-terribly-stupid-ide...
> "… running out of hydrocarbons is like running out of civilization. All this trade, all these drugs, fertilizers, fungicides, etc. … which China needs to eat with a population so much, they all come from hydrocarbons. And it is not at all clear that there is any substitute.
> "When the hydrocarbons are gone, I don’t think the chemists will be able to simply mix up a vat and there will be more hydrocarbons. It’s conceivable, of course, that they could but it’s not the way to bet."
That's in the context of his arguments about for ignoring any calls for 'energy independence' because it's better to preserve domestic resources for future emergencies.
and then old geezers like munger and buffett do whatever the hell they want and outlive everybody
People with good longevity genetic don't pay the price as much for their behavior, so they indulge in it and stand out.
But most people don't have that, and can only emulate a little their epigenetic by exercice, diet, etc.
In the context of this specific post regarding Charlie Munger, you can't say that it's genetics unless you measure specific genes. He could be 100x Bryan Johnson, but Bryan Johnson at least makes his protocols open for use. And Munger didn't even bother to make a genetics test with his curiosity, thus providing no essential value to human civilization.
the recent Stripe Press release-
Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38384587
RIP
Furthermore I'll argue that "sexiling" is really a gross injustice, and damaging to the education of the sexilee, as if he hadn't already been dealt a pile of misery. The Munger dorm then shows great social wisdom and benevolence in its proactive elimination of sexiling through architectural design.
Rest in Peace Charlie.
The amount of wisdom about society and life in general that man has delivered over the years rivals his own financial accomplishments.
Don't think for a second they aren't selfish in their own way they would have to be in order to be involved and run an enterprise of that magnitude.
What does down to earth mean anyway? Most people probably think that it means you appear to be more like the common man and don't have the typical trappings of wealth (or if you do nobody knows about them).
That applies to any stranger. Basically, a billionaire is human like any other.
We do idolize Billionaire / celebrity too much, but these unkind takes don't help anyone.
> Don't think for a second they aren't selfish in their own way they would have to be in order to be involved and run an enterprise of that magnitude.
every human is selfish in their own way.
> What does down to earth mean anyway? Most people probably think that it means you appear to be more like the common man and don't have the typical trappings of wealth (or if you do nobody knows about them).
by your definition, he is down to earth. I would not define it like that, but i don't even know how to define it, but i would say that it correlates with not living for the apparatus or "big life" / hype / spend, and enjoying "small" things (ie, good and long lasting friendships, healthy family relations, simply enjoying a meal with people they care)
Munger and Buffet do seem to fit that.
Everything for that share price, Chinese people don't need human rights anyway.
i think it does matter. Also let me take a minute to disconnect the person - which anyone dying even at this age is tragic - from the persona that many people here seem to worship. Personally I don't think that he was a net positive for the hackers that are still around here but I may be wrong.
Charlie (and Buffett) are often recommended here for their mental models as their approach to investing and finance are very transferrable in startups/engineering. At the end of the day, large scale software engineering is mostly about managing risk, strategy, and corporate finance/value. Often, Poor Charlie's Almanack is recommended by my top Staff+ colleagues.
I don’t know if it’s right or wrong but regardless, it’s extremely interesting as far as assertions go.
>BRK.A Off Exchange & Dark Pool Summary
>Today's Off Exchange & Dark Pool volume is 6,792, which is 98.11% of today's total volume. Today's Lit volume is 131, which is 1.89%. Over the past 30 days, the average Off Exchange & Dark Pool volume has been 97.51%. The average Lit volume has been 2.49%.
https://chartexchange.com/symbol/nyse-brk.a/exchange-volume/
So you're saying I (or whoever) can can buy shares for less in one of the "dark pools" and sell them on the market and make free money?
It doesn't matter if the trade happens on or off book, it all gets reported nearly instantly anyway.
So you're saying there is an arbitrage opportunity and you can literally make free money? Because that doesen't make much sense..
You might not see all the trades immediately, but they are still reflected in the price with minimal delay.
Thanks Charlie your wisdom and clear thinking. I hope I learnt something from your writings.
You will be missed.
It's that insane obsession with collecting more of what they love: $$$.
A few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena. Munger moved into “dreadful” conditions at the University Club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, “Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it?” The broke Munger replied: “To discourage gold diggers.”
Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son, Teddy, had leukemia. In those days, there was no health insurance, you just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Guerin, Charlie’s friend, said Munger would go into the hospital, hold his young son, and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying.
One year after the diagnosis, in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, and burying his 9 year old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed.
But by the time he was 69 years old, he had become one of the richest 400 people in the world, been married to his second wife for 35+ years, had eight children, and countless grandchildren.
Beyond investing and business, Charlie teaches us about resilience, dignity, and life well lived. Rest in peace to a legend.
https://www.joshuakennon.com/if-charlie-munger-didnt-quit-wh...
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Though online discussions don't require linked references—unlike more formal environments such as in academia or in ethical journalism—it's a good habit to link to references whenever possible (especially when quoting word-by-word): it can only help both the author and the reader.
Don’t use <pre> when line breaks should be automatic. Use standard > for block quotes.
Hopefully the benefit of the doubt is well offered here because obviously lifting 100+ words of someone else's writing is poor form.
Also this in particular is particularly ridiculous:
"It’s a fair bet that your present troubles pale in comparison. Whatever it is, get over it. Start over. He did it. You can, too."
First that's quite a bit of an assumption. After all divorce and a medical problem (like Charlie had) as well as a child dying IS something you can get over. There are people that for sure have much worse situations than that. But even if that was not the case it's never a good idea to frame someone's problems by comparing to something worse that someone got through.
You are upset that you have let's say diabetes? Oh get over it 'it's not cancer'.
You have cancer? Oh get over it it could be pancreatic cancer.
And so on.
Many problems you can't just 'get over'. (Addiction and mental health issues holding you back are just 2 examples)
--praise them for the fight they have been managing so far --tell them that their talents are being looked forward to by others/the world when they manage to recover
[1]Paraphrasing from memory of a podcast interview he did with Andrew Sullivan ~a month back.
You can’t just wish away addiction, but many people can get help and leave addiction in their past. I did.
I'm not trying to downplay addiction, but let's be real - people can overcome addiction, but we can't bring back our dead family members.
I think many people feel they are incapable of taking care of offspring. Better not to bring into this world children you cannot care properly for.
The reason people choose to have less and less kids is because raising a child is a thankless/tough job and despite all the progress that has been made on the social aspect of raising kids, more often than not, it is still the woman's job to do the rearing and raising of the kids.
Family is not everything, I know countless people who were born in terrible families.
Leaving a legacy is so overrated, why do you feel like you need to do so? What is so important and so unique about you that if your family line were to end today, the world would be missing?
Please don't confuse your opinion with facts.
What is sad to me is people like you who think they got it all figured it out because you decided to procreate. Condescending much?
Its societal pressures. Our society has changed fundamentally, look at any graph, income inequality, household earning power, household debt, etc.
You can't blame animals who go extinct due to deforestation and habitat loss and say "it's sad they chose to not reproduce"
People commit the worst atrocities and embody a dog eat dog mentality, all 'for their lineage' or 'family'. Borges said that procreation is a mirror, I agree. To me, it only serves to multiply and if you're not careful, ie, you think you'll finally have 'meaning', you'll probably be eaten alive.
But of course, if you aren't thinking about it, and those questions are never broached and the 'genie' isn't out of the bottle. Well, I wish I was like you then haha
This shows how much white collar salaries have really exploded over the past few decades, especially since 2010 after financial crisis bottom. White collar work is more lucrative than ever even accounting for inflation and student loan debt. The media and ppl on Twitter complain about young people going into debt to get degrees; well, those same ppl getting those fat six-figure jobs too. If lawyers and doctors earned what they earned in the 40s, i am sure student loan debt crisis would miraculously go away.
The direct comparison of inflation ignores that the relative cost of things also changes. Our cost of living is much higher than it was post-war. But we get to have decent sanitation, phones and computers, better medicine, etc.
What's the expression... "the plural of anecdote is not data"?
It's important to keep in mind a few things... First of all, the point about $42,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars was that he was not doing well. Secondly, "inflation-adjusted" is not "cost of living adjusted" for where he was living. Pasadena was comparatively sparsely populated with a low cost of living back then, as opposed to the densely populated, high cost of living area it is now. Accordingly, he was not making anything resembling the median income of lawyers back then: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/SCB/pa...
Adjusted for inflation, the average legal salary from 1949 would be $104,108.17. The average pay for a lawyer in California in 2023 is... $90,028/yr. So yeah, accounting for inflation, lawyers have been earning comparatively less over time... and yet the cost of law school has been consistently growing faster than inflation.
Beyond that, lawyers and doctors are a special class of white collar worker where scarcity is artificially inflated by trade boards. They aren't representative of the majority of people with massive, unmanageable student debts. As an example, median income for an accountant in California (I can't think of a more stereotypical white collar job) is... $49,479.
I also wouldn't presume that the dividing line between blue & white collar workers is a college education. About ~12% of people with college degrees work in blue collar jobs (and the numbers are way higher for college drop outs).
I don't think the data supports your narrative.
>>But by the time he was 69 years old, he had become one of the richest 400 people in the world, been married to his second wife for 35+ years, had eight children, and countless grandchildren.
Some times there is a Ronald Wayne moment in relationships, if there could ever be something that could come close to it, this would.
The antithesis of crypto bros selling tulip bubbles and some tech companies selling overpriced stocks based on hype. We need more Mungers in the world as the current gen die of old age.
Not directly comparable to crypto but an alternate method of investment.
> Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life... self-pity is not going to improve the situation... If you just take the attitude that, however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can, I think that works
As the discussion here is veering off topic, I think we may as well merge this subthread into that thread and magically make them all on topic again.
Multibillionaire hubris is truly something else.
To be clear, I think the building is awful and fails at most of its stated goals, but I think the goals themselves were solid.
My eyes popped the first time I learned what my American colleagues paid for their education.
That tells you enough about how this whole segment of the population jumped the shark and just started worshiping the same version of success as Wall Street.
The day HN shows a black banner for him, that site is officially over.
I won't comment on the general sentiment of your comment, but I will take exception to your characterisation of Munger as "the most boring, most conservative investor of all time".
Munger throughout his life Munger came up with many interesting (and sometimes controversial) ideas, he even made some fairly risky speculative investments. For example just in recent history he was looking to invest in building windowless dorms to much push back and outrage. He also made a very risky leveraged bet on Alibaba which was far from conservative.
Incredibly successful, and yet a penny pinching tasteless bore until the bitter end. At least "robber barons" of the past built things that looked good.
That he's worshiped around these parts of the internet is truly embarrassing and sometimes makes me question how I ended up here.
Firstly it would have been cheaper for the students. But secondly and more importantly, the buildings did have windows, it was only the dorms themselves which didn't, but the reasoning for this was that were primarily built for sleeping so he argued they didn't need windows. And not requiring windows meant that each student would get their own room and would not need to share. The building was designed so that when not sleeping the students would make use of the communal areas which did have windows.
You don't have to like it, but it wasn't a completely stupid idea. The main problem really was just that the idea of a billionaire who wanted to build dorms without windows to save on development costs was too tasty of a story for the media to not run with.
especially a couple thousand people?
If you're wondering how the kids are going to hook up - well, window or not, single-occupancy beats the hell out of literal room-mates, which was my dorm experience. And we sure as hell found a way.
If you ask students whether they'd rather have a windowless private room or a shared room with a window, what do you think the breakdown will be?
Ideally the common areas are plentiful enough that you can enjoy some solitude outside of the sleeping room (at least for some of the day).
As a person who hasn’t paid any attention to his corner of the finance sector, this horrible dorm was my introduction to the man. My immediate conclusion was that he rose to the level of his incompetence. I may yet read his speech on decisionmaking biases, but it will be with a degree of skepticism about whether it is cooked in its own juices.
Alexander and his team absolutely expected people to adapt the patterns to individual preferences, and so stated right up front. As a matter of general preferences, “light on two sides” was found through diligent research to be a “deep and inescapable property of a well-formed environment”. So if you’re designing a habitation for thousands of people, maybe lean heavily that way.
e.g. Active college students, so also mostly young, mostly unmarried, freshly liberated from the parental household.. And of course the main activities of the building and its rooms, like sleep vs work, should be considered more strongly before applying a general pattern. I don't mean to assert that form should always follow function, though, or that architects don't already consider inescapable tradeoffs, which by their nature some people won't like the decisions because they would have traded differently all else equal.
On a tangent, I was reminded of a funny architecture crime. CS students at MIT got a wacky Gehry building (the Stata Center) while the architects have and keep a very normal and tasteful building (the Rogers Building). Gehry was even sued at some point because the building had functional issues. That goes back to the point about windows: frequently it's actually not enough to just block a window. They change the environment more than just letting in light or not, they affect things like temperature (sometimes for the better! Ability to open one for a breeze or window AC is a blessing in many rooms), humidity, structural soundness, and ease of mold growth. When you have a window or two in the bedroom that you block out, it still affects where you can place things because of those other concerns.
You rent a different apartment. I don't know what's so difficult about this concept with regard to his building and the need for some people to call it a hellscape. He's trying to offer a less expensive place for people to live for a couple years while they go to school.
A dorm room is not a habitat. It is just one room that someone will occupy for part of their day, mostly while asleep. He hasn't blocked out the sun.
The egregious thing is it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect. It’s like if you wanted to make a safer car by building it out of 500mm thick concrete. Oh, it’d be safe alright, but slow, wallowy, dangerous for others, poor gas mileage. Fast downhill, I guess. Wouldn’t be any better as an EV. It might be good for a few people, apparently.
Your argument is:
> it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect.
But it does solve the problem? And unlike your concrete car example, the only downside here is that students won't have natural light in their dorms, which as many people in this thread have suggested probably isn't as big of a problem as having to share a room for many (perhaps most) students.
I think it's fine to say you don't like it and perhaps in most cases are better trade-offs that could be made, but it seems to me that for some people who just want to use their dorm for sleeping this trade-off does work. Would you not recognise this?
It's not just a couple of rooms, it's thousands (iirc).
The overweighting is out of all proportion and doesn't reflect common experience. Further, students tend to lack money and choices. Here is a choice between bad or worse. Even I would choose a windowless cell over sleeping rough. I would choose to eat bugs over starving. Must it come to this on a university campus?
Why not make the coffin-rooms half height too? People sleep lying down, right? All that wasted space.
Why doesn't a billionaire like Charlie Munger want to be remembered for building the most lavish building with the most incredible experience ever on the campus, instead of the one that optimizes for a problem with constraints that are mostly made up ("it might cost too much money for Charlie Munger")? It's just straight up dumb.
My dorm room was windowless when I went to university and I didn't notice because I was only there when it was dark anyway. But I remember I got the flu once and was inside for a while and I very distinctly recall that the lack of natural lightcycle began to take its toll. Still, cheaper room and board would be my preference.
Not every college student is an outgoing, life-of-the-party, loves hiking type. And the trend thanks to the ubiquity of screens means more and more teenagers are shut-ins. In which case, the deleterious effects of no sunlight and no fresh air are even worse, especially at a developmentally-important age.
But what is worse is the hubris of billionaires who think they know best. It's what Maciej Ceglowski calls the lack of imagination at the top. What do the billionaires of our society, our overlords, want for the rest of us? What are their hopes and dreams, their utopia? Elon Musk wants to terrorise Mars with nasty bacteria from Earth. Bezos wants to run driverless cars around the city to replace public transport. And copy Musk. Page and Brin want to cure ageing, cowards unprepared to die both of them. Dipshit billionaires want shitty things like AI assistants who see and hear everything, lithium cars instead of walkable cities and trains. They want us to have Tide buttons in our houses so we can order it like a Pavlovian monkey. Dipshit billionaires convinced we're living in a simulation. Assholes buying bug-out bunkers in New Zealand. Or fuckers like Altman hoarding gold by the tonne, and gas masks from the IDF, while they pillage and rape San Francisco and its former residents shit on the streets and then sleep there.
And now, they even want to take away our sunlight and our fresh air. Even though the architects telling them otherwise railed against the idea, and resigned. Hubris like this gave us open offices. They want their chattel to be well-behaved and do what it's told. Sit in your privacy free 1m2 'office', drowning in the din made by your fellow plebs, during the day, and sleep in your windowless prison in the night.
I don’t think I had a window that wasn’t immediately blacked out until my mid twenties. And I always went for cheaper accommodation to have more cash on hand over luxuries I didn’t use nor value.
Oh wait, you thought that just because you were speaking "your truth" it should automatically be used to override research, discard statistics, override policy and make decisions for a teenage population?
Illustrating heterogeneity.
> just because you were speaking "your truth" it should automatically be used to override research, discard statistics, override policy and make decisions for a teenage population?
Yes. Nobody is converting every building to a windowless room. Just providing choices.
Also, few opposing these plans care about the air quality in actual dorm rooms, nor quality of life of the people for whom they're making decisions with N = 4 studies sporting error bars the height of the Empire State building. They’re looking to win awards with illustrations. Or score brownie points on an adjacent class statement. (Consider the context within which this debate is occuring.)