his point is not that sanctions or good or bad, but rather that the people doing the sanctioning were elected by the people. Albright was appointed by a president who won in a democratic referendum and was confirmed by senators who too were elected by the people in their respective states. There is accountability there. If you don’t like the leaders you can vote them out and replace them with new leaders. The American republic is by no means a perfect system, but it has a lot more accountability built into it than allowing private entities to control whether or not a foreign entity is sanctioned. Moving to a system where unelected billionaires have control of sanctioning powers with no accountability to the people is less desirable and offers less accountability
YC is a monopoly in the same way that Coca Cola is a Monopoly. And if you’ve ever been to a Taco Bell, Pizza Hut or KFC you’ll know exactly how much they are not.
“ But what we can tell you is his portfolio is up nearly 20% since he started trading in June”
It’s a catchy headline but very misleading. Buffett has done a good job outperforming the market for the past like 50 years (idk the exact number but something like that. He reads through tons and tons of financial disclosures to understand how businesses operate and find businesses that are undervalued by the market, then snatches them up. It requires a lot of reading, learning and an incredible amount of patience and self control.
It’s a bit unfair to compare woth a hamster or monkeys and dart boards or anything like that. Yes the random picking of stocks or crypto’s or whatever can beat a lot of asset managers that don’t really know what they’re doing, but Buffett is different and has a track record to prove it
You are spot on. I actually built TweetSpacer because there are lot of existing players in the market.
I've spent 2.5 years building "original" products that never made me any money.
So I decided to try something totally different this time, I decided to go into an existing market and just put my spin on it and produce a product with good build quality.
I figure the market for social media automation tools is monopolistic and so I think that if I make a good product, talk to customers and carve out a niche I could have a small business.
It may not work. It could blow up in my face. But so far it's the first thing I've made that's generated any revenue. Not much yet, but it's better than the $0 I was stuck at for so long.
I used to loathe the idea of making something that's already out there, but I kept thinking about pepsi. Why does pepsi exist? I still don't know why. I like coke. But I think it's ok to have multiple proudcts that achieve a similar task. There's lots of dimensions you can compete on.
I think you misunderstand his investment philosophy.
He's a budding value investor and his role model is Warren Buffett which means he's buying undervalued stocks that have good fundamentals.
One of the companies he says he bought is Samsung. And while there may be a correction in the future, it's self evident that Samsung is a legit company with strong fundamentals.
Also he said in the article that he's investing long term:
“Rather than short-term focused day trading, I want to keep my investment for 10 to 20 years with a long-term perspective, hopefully to maximize my returns.”
Value investors and students of Warren Buffett know that part of investing this way means you need the equanimity and tenacity to weather any short term volatility.
You’re missing costs in this equation. Without the sale of the credits they would not have been able to post a profit for the quarter. They may have had $31.5B in revenue but the cost of that revenue was greater.
If I sold a $1 can of coke for $0.70. I can report $0.70 of revenue but i still lost $0.30 on the transaction.
When I was in Thailand a few years ago, I went to see a movie.
Before the movie there was a montage about the king and everyone had to stand up out of respect. It showed pictures of the king throughout his life.
Then I read up on the king and found out he's real bad news. He's basically an overgrown spoiled rich kid who doesn't do much other than throws birthdays for his dog.
I think I'm the only one here who liked this article.
While there are some good, albeit somewhat pedantic, points raised in the comments. I think we may be missing the forest for the trees.
There is a sort of sophomoric myopia that exists in silicon valley and maybe it's not technology per se that is the problem, but in fact the incentives created around the tech community. I think the problem is more accurately described as the combination of access to large amounts of capital and low cost mass communication/experimentation technologies (i.e. the internet). This has a created a culture that thinks they can solve any problem with one of the two.
But I think what's even worse is that the solutionists subconsciously have an unspoken prerequisite to "solving" a problem, which is "It needs to be wildly profitable". And it's that incentive that lead to the myopia and pervert the "solutions" they create.
Instacart and Uber are great examples. Did they actually solve a problem? For whom did they solve it for? For whom did they not solve it for? Did they make certain things worse than they were before? You probably have your own answers to those questions.
I do this. Sometimes it's in preparation for a conversation I know I'm going to have soon. Sometimes it's just because someone's on my mind and maybe I have things I want to say to them but don't currently have the opportunity to. I don't know if it's bad. But I don't like that I do it. And I wish I did it less.