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Comment by rauljara | Hacker News Reader

Whether or not Tycho understands your terminology or not, I don't, and I bet a whole bunch of people don't. You use a lot of jargon (not in the negative sense of the word, but in the sense meaning highly specialized vocabulary). Could you actually answer tycho's request?

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I hate to dumb down stuff that even wikipedia takes 2000+ words to summarize. But simplistically, Buffet is sitting on a mountain of cash. If interest rates go the wrong way, he is exposed to fiat risk. So his best bet is to trade that fiat risk for non-fiat income producing assets. He does that by outright purchases of very large companies whose competitive advantage is so huge they'd be impossible to defeat, and yet you can't get by without them. I mean, what are you going to do if you want 1000s of giant walmart containers sitting in LA moved to the midwest, and you don't like BNSF's pricing ? You are essentially fucked. So you play ball with BNSF. That's your moat right there. You can't build a railroad, not in today's climate. Its not like a gmail or an oracle in that you think those companies suck, so you switch to hushmail and mongodb. You basically have an out, so there's arguably no real moat in technology. But with large scale infrastructure projects, once you own a piece of them, you can just sit back & collect rent & everybody has no recourse other than to pay up.

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it well enough yourself." -- Einstein

In other words, express your command of a subject by how simple you make it appear, not by demonstrating how impressive and complicated the subject is.

I remind myself of this concept routinely, and struggle to reflect it in my writing and peer communications.

Thanks for the dumbed down explanation. I had a very clear idea of what you meant from your first post, however, the extra clarity gives me confidence that I understood it correctly.

Your first comment also dumbed down the exact same material - but in a different way. In the present day, among computer users and maybe people interested in finance, I have noticed the use of terser expressions, dense walls of text and shorter words to approximate the meaning of longer concepts (e.g. "moat", "sticky") to avoid recreating 2000+ word wikipedia articles.

Your first comment and the earlier commenter suggesting 'coca cola' having 'invented' santa claus (the user didn't mean the dictionary definition of invented), where two people are using language that has moved on from the dictionary definition, reminds me in some way of this essay by George Orwell.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

I prefer the present-day contracting "meaning concentrating" style of abuse of language rather than the olden-day expanding "meaning dilution" style of abuse, however both make for uncertain reading!

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