brockwhittaker

He’s talking about paying 5% interest to borrow leverage. That’s about the going rate.

In theory in a model where the government just prints it’s own expenditures, your taxes are in the form of inflation.

The biggest issue with this aside from creating an unpredictable currency is that everyone’s effective tax rate would be the same, so you would have to reinvent the welfare system to recreate progressive taxation levels.

For a dataset like this, Highcharts would be slower for sure since it will create DOM SVG components for each of the points. <canvas> (which this is built with) is much quicker at presenting tons and tons of data points like this.

"Boston strog" is how you would say "Boston Strong" if you had a cold, perhaps.

Cute.

You could also look at it the other way (the correct way):

Service hasn't declined in airlines. If you spend the same on a ticket today as you would have had to in the 1970s to fly, you receive better service. That's because you'd have to be flying first class.

We just decided over time that we were only willing to pay at most $200 to fly across the country round trip, yet still romanticized the idea of having a great experience while doing so.

Keep in mind that of the $200 ticket price, about 30% usually goes to fees and taxes; not airlines. You should be grateful a system so robust exists. One that can take you across the country for such an incredibly low price, given that your only alternative is to drive across the country or take a train; both taking an order of magnitude more time and cost an order of magnitude more.

> Increase pay/benefits to your rank and file employees for helping you get so much cash

The auto industry did this through high wages and very large pension plans, and got absolutely destroyed in '08 and also demonized by taxpayers for creating an undeserving "welfare class" of autoworkers that was too expensive to maintain.

> Invest back in the business at reasonable levels so as to keep enough cash for an emergency fund

What if you feel like any further investment yields negative return? Berkshire Hathaway has been sitting on cash for years because they felt that they couldn't put their money into any constituent businesses and generate the right return. Why purposefully throw money into a black hole?

No, because dividends don't benefit from compounding stock prices.

If you buy back your stock from 20 -> 80 a share vs. having paid out the same amount in dividends, the share buybacks yield a much greater income than dividends, which once paid no longer compound unless individual investors re-invest them.

Sure, but that still wasn't the best option.

1. We had the sharpest market drop in history. Models could predict this, but while this drop is say a 1 in 30 year event across all industries, this drop for certain sectors (like airlines) is more of a 1 in 100 year event. If companies all planned all the time for once in a century events, global growth would be much slower.

2. Most companies in most industries are still better for having done share buybacks. We're only back at 2017 stock levels. They've been buying back since 2010. The best return most companies got for their cash was doing this, and I'm not sure that's changed with this downturn. Most companies will be back to normal pricing in a year's time from now anyway, and their share buybacks will still have been as brilliant of a decision as ever.

Sure — what are your other options if you have lots of cash?

1. Keep it in cash and get sub-inflationary levels on it, and perform poorly due to your lack of leverage.

2. Invest it in other market securities, effectively running some hedge fund. Not a great idea, distracting from your core biz, and shareholders may not appreciate the exposure to outside risk.

3. Buy back your own stock, which gives back to shareholders.

I'm not saying it was the best thing companies could have done with their money, but there aren't a ton of amazing ways to deploy billions of dollars in cash unless you're expanding operations outside your area of core competency.

I think that lots of people here are creating a lot of revisionist history right now. Almost nobody had any problem with share buybacks for the past five to ten years. The biggest note was that it would increase stock price over time due to the lower availability of shares and higher earnings per share, but hardly the critique most people have these days.

COKE is not only a real thing, they’re also involved in bottling Coca Cola, so while they’re not financially the same company, they are inextricably related.

Here’s another chart that’s more mobile responsive: https://flu.io/

I think people tend to think of "female" as a bit clinical of a term.

> The problem is it'll take over $1 trillion to upgrade US drinking water infrastructure.

That can't be possible — and I think estimation is way off. Even if there were a drinking fountain for every American (which I'm sure is an over-estimate by an order of magnitude as well), that would still imply an upgrade cost of $3,000 per drinking fountain. If there's a fountain for one in ten Americans; that's $30,000.

For context, most modern Elkay drinking fountains are around $1,000.

I think this overwhelming figure serves to enhance the point of the author but I think it bares no basis in reality.

French numbers are actually quite easy though if you learn even a little bit of French.

You don’t think of quatre-vingt dix as four-twenties ten, you just think of it as ninety just like in English.

I suspect the same is true even for native speakers, your brain is going to pretty quickly map to the actual number it represents rather than the arithmetic statement.

Wow this happened to me when I was a teenager. Drove out to a mountain on what was a dirt road turned river bed.

I had less luck, got stuck, and had a very panic-inducing experience leading to me hike a mountain to get reception to call 911 (the only # I could dial) for a tow.

Quick correction: Best Buy is doing very well. Very profitable, and up 3x in the past five years. As far as retail big-box goes, they're basically top of the pack.

Sounds illegal/like a violation of TOS.

Facebook made $48B in revenue last year. That's around $38/user (with much more coming from people in North America). Even $1/mo doesn't come close to covering it.

I would normally agree but the difference could be around $5 each way for 250 work days a year. A few thousand dollars a year is quite a lot.

Against TOS, this just further worsens the situation for newspapers. :(

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Blockchain isn’t necessary. You can have a debit account system and change cents per article without the high friction cost of making people buy some cryptocurrency.

There's some planning when skiing (for reference, I ski at A Basin yearly too; great place), but I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. Usually it's pretty easy to plan, esp. at A Basin to say, "meet at the midway restaurant".

And from a technological standpoint, all the maps that you can have printed are all online as well, so in the same way that Yellow Book entries are now database rows, maps are either primitive PNGs or interactive terrain maps.

This doesn't account for SALT deductions it seems, which is a huge reason why instead of my bill going down by 10% or so, it goes up about 5%.

Hey, I built this in my spare time over the past few days to calculate some of the basic implications of the new House and Senate Tax Bills on personal income taxes.

This is open source and available on GitHub here: https://github.com/brockwhittaker/House-Senate-Tax-Bills/

If you have any questions or issues, you can open them on GitHub or contact me at: whittakerbrock@gmail.com

Sorry, I'm doing this while the new DNS info propagates to point it to a new server. My old server was too small and got crushed immediately. :(

Fixed now. Was getting hugged to death. :)

It should be fixed now! Didn't work too well on a DigitalOcean server w/ 512mb RAM and 100 requests a minute. :)

Completely agree. My point is that readers should not stop reading at this source, and to keep digging, as this isn’t the “answer” to valuation.

I would reference this as one would reference a physics book from a hundred years ago — a possibly decent starting point but old knowledge that has been proven incorrect in dangerous ways.

For example, the Black Scholes model that was developed in 1973 assumes a normal distribution, which is not only wrong, but an extremely dangerous misunderstanding of the markets that leads to the underestimation of Black Swan events and rail risk.