matco11

Just in case there was anyone still left thinking that China's manufacturing advantage is in low labor costs

There are several things that give away that he is unlikely to have been a real hedge fund manager (oh well, maybe he managed $5mm of friends and family money, but that does not make him a pro!), but what he says on the fee structure is not one of them: several hedge funds would have the standing to claim 2/20 (or even more) without hurdle rates.

A tiny fraction of hedge fund managers would be infringing any laws, if at all. Excluding the over-the-counter markets(!), the better you are as a hedge fund manager, the more you know what can make you money, what can lose you money and which of your decisions were wrong and which were right: there is no room to blame it on other people doing insider trading.

That's Nokian Tyres.

Quite the opposite. I am making the point for an approach that does NOT treat them like monkeys!

Exactly. That is exactly what I meant. Thank you.

This post is so wrong in so many ways. First, it is extremely bad practice to leave commitments of any kind open in perpetuity. Secondly, if you are looking to hire 3000 monkeys and you are searching for people that are good enough to pass you minimum standards, sure you can wait one month and see if each candidate you make an offer to joins your company. What if you are hiring only 20 people, 10 of which for very specific, key roles? You want the PERFECT candidate for the position, and you cannot keep the process open forever. you have a budget, you cannot make multiple offers for the only one position you have to fill?! Third, you do want to know if the candidate wants to accept the offer because he likes your company and the position or because he cannot find anything better. Many would argue that is much better to hire a candidate that would put passion in what he does, rather than hiring a mercenary. Finally, what other business activity do you do without a clear timing commitment?

>"These places weren’t necessarily vast repositories of lost literature, but the eruption froze them nearly perfectly in time, preserving them for nearly 2,000 years—and preserving thousands of pieces of graffiti along with them."

Actually, Pompeii and Herculaneum are precisely one of the largest and most precious repositories of lost ancient literature.

http://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/papyri/JankoRecentD...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-invisible-l...

The ancient Pompeii is much closer to Vesuvius than it is easy to gather from photos... The eruption took time, when the pyroclastic flow finally came down and hit the city, the city got buried quite quickly. However, before the pyroclastic flow came down, many people had plenty of time to escape, and many others died because of respiratory problems, or hit by debris.

Key thing to bear in mind is that, back then, very few people would have had an idea of what was happening and how dangerous it was, even less so about the fact that there was an actual need to escape and what was a safe distance... (Consider this: there is a lot of stuff falling from the sky and low visibility because of the dust in the air, would you run outside or seek cover insider?)

Here there is a more accurate and comprehensive description of events: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/pompeii_portents...

Another commenter clarifies: The authenticity of the water color drawings sheet is undisputed; what was shown to be a forgery – see http://skyweek.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/nuncius-mit-angeblic... – was an alleged proof copy of the Nuncius that also contained water colors.

Howard Marks is one of the world's leading hedge fund managers and investors. This is one of his monthly letters and was sent out two days ago.

If you actually read the de bello gallico you would have a quite different opinion. Julius Caesar avoided battle and military confrontation as much as he could and usually the armies he had available for his campaigns were a fraction of the size of the armies he was confronting.

Edit: it is also worth adding that Julius Caesar was regularly agreeing to peace agreements with surrounding tribes and populations. Yet, many of his military activities had to be swiftly planned to reject surprise attacks by those same tribes and populations that had been asking for the peace agreements in the first place.

Funny that today's TechCrunch Disrupt winner is an AI service for music generation http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/jukedeck-wins-disrupt-londo...

Anybody remembers getdropbox.com before dropbox.com?! :-) Or... thefacebook.com before facebook.com?!

Name, logo, domain name, are all important things, and - like for all things - their importance changes over time. You go in a circle of executing to "good enough" for the stage you are at (keeping in mind that you do not want to create problems for yourself in the future with the choices you make today) and then move on to the next item on the execution priority list.

If you wait to have the perfect logo before launching, you will never launch... Then 6 or 12 months later you might find yourself analyzing the perfect palette of Pantone colors to go with your brand...

You are right. A few months ago Jawbone UP3 definitely had HRV listed in the heart health features. That's specifically why I was looking to buy it. I guess that's close to impossible with an optical sensor.

Volatility is the result of several factors and liquidity is only one of them. For example, the oil market is very large and liquid, yet still fairly volatile. Volatility is obviously undesirable for anything that is intended to function as a reserve of value. This is why, for example, there is no discussion of oil being a reserve of value, or a currency. As for the example above, greater liquidity in the Bitcoin market will not automatically make it less volatile, or lower volatility enough.

Bitcoin's volatility is structural (it goes well beyond the issues with the exchanges). Effective currencies have several mechanisms designed to protect their value and minimize volatility: Bitcoin lacks them and hence it's structurally fragile and volatile. So, Bitcoin cannot represent a reserve of value. Stable preservation of value is a key characteristic of a currency (this is one of the reasons inflation is monitored by central banks, for example), hence, if Bitcoin cannot work as a reserve of value, it cannot work as a currency.

Perhaps, other crypto currencies, in the future, may be structured with more robust mechanisms and work better.

The reference to the AirBnB valuation is completely misplaced: The best rated hotel chains don't own the real estate. Furthermore the ubiquitous coverage that AirBnB offers is unmatched by any hotel chain.

The current valuations reflect the perfectioning of business models and practices since the nineties. Everybody has learned a lot since.

It's not like 1999. This feels more like 1998.