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"Basically, It's Over" by Charlie Munger
- chrisbolt 17y agoDupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144930 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144930
- cookiecaper 17y agoIs there much point in pointing out a dupe if there is no discussion on it?
- fnid2 17y agoThis problem has to be solved by pg, or whoever maintains the code here. It's really too much to expect users to review all posts to see if what they want to submit has been submitted before. It's also too much to expect that there is only one url to the same content.
- c1sc0 17y agoAnd as a bonus it's a problem waiting for someone to solve
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoNo there isn't. I've already suggested a solution that will work in almost every case of duplication I've detected, and it appears to be completely ignored. To be fair the general decline in civility and quality, and the general increase in spam might be regarded as more pressing issues, but the solution I suggested seems trivial to implement and moderately effective. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215
- dlib 17y agoIsn't this what plagiarism algorithms are doing? Scrape the content, run through the plagiarism filter (although not a very strict one to prevent false positives on quotations and the like) and you are done. If there's a match, show it so the submitter can see for himself.
- david927 17y agoThis is my submission and I looked as much as I could. Not only does YC have no dupe check, there's no search either.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agohttp://searchyc.com/ http://searchyc.com/ It wouldn't necessarily have helped in this case, but scanning through the previous 12 entries in the "new" listing would've found the duplication.
- david927 17y agoI looked at the new ones and just didn't pick it up. (I did see it later.) I think I was expecting the original title.
- paraschopra 17y agoURL detection isn't as trivial as it sounds - lots of edge cases http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/challenge-realtime-url-matching-how-we-do-it/ http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/challen...
- Nwallins 17y agoI wonder if you could do a quick content check -- something along the lines of: Run the content through the "Readability" filter (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) Hash the first N paragraphs Compare the hash on a submitted article to all hashes from that domain
- fnid2 17y agoIt doesn't have to be a perfect solution. Making an http request to a submitted url and grabbing the contents of the title tag is a trivial development effort that add a lot of value to a community that doesn't want to see the same stuff on the front page over and over...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- Tichy 17y agoProof by fiction is even worse than proof by anecdote.
- david927 17y agoIt's not "proof by fiction" but a parable. He and Warren have always traded based on fundamentals, and he's saying the fundamentals got lost along the way. It's a fair point.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- yungchin 17y agoAs a completely uninformed person, can I ask whom "the good father" in the parable refers to? I have to say that while parables can be very powerful, this one only so thinly veils reality, that it confuses more than it helps.
- GFischer 17y agoI guess it's an amalgamation between Benjamin Franklin, Lee Kwan Yew.. and I can't recognize the third (Google suggests Paul Volcker)
- yungchin 17y agoAha - thanks! The good father indeed sounds like Volcker: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/paul-volcker-finds-a-hammer/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/paul-volcker-fi...
- megaduck 17y agoI wouldn't dismiss this piece out of hand. As co-captain of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger's got a pretty good window into the global financial system. Both he and Buffett have a pretty folksy manner, but behind the goofiness is usually some razor-sharp analysis. To make it more palatable, substitute 'United States' for 'Basicland', and 'investment banks' for 'casinos'. Then it becomes a pretty accurate picture of our current situation.
- miked 17y agoFrom http://seekingalpha.com/article/97158-goldman-sachs-buffett-s-the-milkman-and-he-always-delivers http://seekingalpha.com/article/97158-goldman-sachs-buffett-... : "In the news yesterday, Goldman Sachs (GS) announced that Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), Buffett's investing vehicle, will purchase $5B worth of perpetual preferred shares with a 10% dividend being paid in return for exclusive use of this capital injection. Not only does Berkshire get a dividend nearly double that of Canadian bank issued perpetuals, but the holding company also receives warrants to purchase $5B of common stock at $115 during the next five years." So let's put it together. * Buffett and Munger buy tons of stock in the above mentioned "casino". * The casino loses big. * Casino gets huge tax bucks from you and me to cover its loses and pay huge bonuses to itself. * The tax money flows back to Berkshire via the holdings listed above, and form thence to Buffett and Munger. * Munger writes folksy article damning "casino gambling". For those who weren't aware, Buffett was a director of Goldman for many years. You know, the years when all this latest crap was happening. The years when he and Munger must have talked at least once a week. Those years. EDIT: Buffett is the largest individual investor in GS, and was apparently asked (on that basis) to join the board, but apparently never did. My bad. On the other hand, his involvement in TARP is even worse that I knew: From http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/04/05/65496/buffett-champion-of-bailout-is.html http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/04/05/65496/buffett-champion... : "Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway, hasn't received any of that federal aid, but Berkshire, based in Omaha, Neb., owns stock valued at more than $13 billion in the top recipients of TARP funds, including Goldman Sachs Group, US Bancorp, American Express and Bank of America, which analysts all thought were in deep trouble before TARP was approved in October." I'm a huge believer in economic freedom, i.e., the free market. I only wish that most large businesses were. It's so much easier for them to rent-seek.
- marshallp 17y agoYou can disagree with the scheme of things while exploiting it. Buffet thinks his taxes are too low but he doesn't offer to pay extra unless he is forced to.
- bengebre 17y agoI think it's hard to criticize the man on those grounds since he has pledged to give the "bulk of his fortune" to the Gates Foundation. That's arguably more productive than donating money to the government. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/25/AR2006062500801.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06...
- pnelly 17y agogood article, how can a system based on greed, corruption, and imaginary wealth survive? The U.S. has concentrated less and less on production and innovation, and needs to refocus it's efforts it it's going to get out of this hole. Energy is a great example of where production and innovation is now needed, and could revive the U.S. Economy. I hope this comes to pass.
- nazgulnarsil 17y agonot trying to single you out, but your post is a good example of the type of rhetoric that i dislike on economic subjects. "feel good" statements about greed and corruption discourage the kind of dispassionate analysis we actually need.
- hga 17y agoI'll go further: all economic systems are based on greed and corruption because those are parts of human nature. The question is how to you harness the former and limit the latter. We seem to do a very good job with both when compared to the rest of the world. In terms of the bottom lines of economic growth, standards of living and employment, again, we do much better than the rest of the world (I'm not going to count the special case of China emerging from decades of communism, returning a billion plus people to the world market is a one time thing ... and their recent grow should be weighted against how much they lost economically during the previous period).
- nazgulnarsil 17y agoI think one of the underlying problems is the fact that economics gets described with such loaded phrases as greed and corruption. such thinking, as if parts of human nature are easily described as "bad" or "good", is what leads to much of the harmful meddling to begin with. it makes it much easier to get confused between intended ends and actual effects. basically, economic problems aren't ethical ones, even though they can cause ethical problems.
- akadien 17y ago
- JesseAldridge 17y agoSo what's going on with bank reform, anyway? I haven't really kept up. I distinctly recall Bernanke saying, "too big to fail has got to go" around the time of the bailouts. Yet I haven't heard much about progress on that front...
- asmithmd1 17y agoGood question. Since the Government bailed out the banks that were too big to fail they have midwifed the merger of a couple of those banks so the banks that were too big to fail are now even bigger.
- jrockway 17y agoAnd then they made enough money to pay the government back.
- asmithmd1 17y agoYes, government backed trusts can make lots of money - see: railroads and phone system. That does not mean that is the best state of affairs for most other businesses. I am pro free-market competition, but the trouble is most big businesses are not. Do you seriously think it would have been a good idea to have exactly one phone company in the US during the dot com boom? Can you imagine how long it would have taken to get a T1 provisioned from Ma Bell? Instead because the government sued AT&T and broke them into 7 smaller companies and forced them to open the CO to competitors we had many companies to choose from. I say companies should be able to do whatever they want as long as they are small enough to fail - i.e. I am not on the hook for paying off their bad bets
- chasingsparks 17y agoOne of my discomforts with almost all economic arguments is the strong partitioning of ideas. If you are free market, the government can do no good and if you are "Progressive" corporations are evil. Munger is mostly above this level of naivete, but not completely. He points out that government spending is too high and that leverage can be too dangerous (i.e. gambling.) However, he seems to be prescriptively mute on the former and favors prohibition on the later. The school of thought to which I am a recent entrant suggests a more uncommonly (expressed) alternative. Keep all the gov debt and spending as low as possible when times are good. Regulate to a minimum. When a crisis occurs, the government should sometimes step in to stabilize a violently turbulent system. (Sounds like Keynes, no?) However, you don't bailout a company. That ruins the fabric on which capitalism is built. The losers loose their money. An option is a derivative; not all derivatives are options. Bailouts make all derivative speculation, speculation in cheap options. Don't ban derivatives. Ban bailouts.
- cynicalkane 17y agoYou can be progressive and free-market if you believe corporations tend to be are anti-free-market. Which they often are.
- fifi33 17y ago"If you are free market, the government can do no good." Absolutely false, and I bet you can't name one scholar from Hoover who agrees with you.
- jbooth 17y agoOk, how about this phrasing, "If you're a scholar from Hoover, you'll write dozens of articles a year castigating government involvement in the marketplace as a general idea, while never, ever, once writing anything that praises government action [unless maybe if it was government action by a republican]"
- anamax 17y agoIf that's actually true, you could have provided examples. Feel free to tell us how many such articles you've read. No, reading articles about such articles doesn't count.
- joelhaus 17y agoMunger is clearly advocating for "the Volker Rule" and a middle of the road economic policy when it comes to regulation (It's hard not to agree). The finger pointing at Bershire here from self-proclaimed free market advocates is bunk. In theory, we all benefited indirectly from TARP, they just had enough foresight to position themselves to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the turmoil. It would also be nice to clearly differentiate Bucket Shops and Over-the-Counter Trades. The concepts are very similar, but only one is legal. Anyone have a good explanation? P.S. The article is a good parable, but switching from the casino metaphor to talk of actual casinos threw me for a loop. P.P.S. Most everything is a derivative. The problem is with counter-party risk and transparency. Derivatives are not inherently bad.