spfzero

Maybe he's anticipating making a quick getaway?

It's not the investment thesis, it's a thought experiment to test market efficiency. It's a test to see whether markets are always efficient, and to me demonstrates that they are not, and that value investing might be an interesting thesis to pursue still.

People have been saying for decades that value investing is not possible since the market is too efficient. My point is that it is not efficient enough to prevent value investing from being a successful strategy.

Sure which is why I said "unlikely", rather than "unheard of".

Test requirements often arise after system design is complete. Engineers need time to examine the system, theorize failure modes, and design the tests. Also time to test the system, find some unexpected failure mode, and then design yet more tests.

This was a test fixture so probably banana leads.

That stood out to me as well when I read the article.

As a counter-argument, you usually need to read a lot into the reported numbers, for example read the 10K notes for multiple years in the past. That's the only way to know that the 3B in assets showing up on the balance sheet for "goodwill", to use one easy example, are not really worth 3B. There are many more-nuanced factors that work alike. The reported numbers are what the accountants think might fly under GAAP, and the accountants work for the CEO, who has a say in the accounting "intent".

To test whether markets are perfectly efficient, just look for large movements over time. If a stock goes up 20% in a year, the market might have undervalued it last year, or is overvaluing it this year. It's unlikely the it was correctly valuing it at both times. In the absence of a Covid-19 pandemic, act of god, etc. of course.

You could say that the market just takes "investor sentiment" into account, and is therefore still efficient. But value investing is a strategy that looks for misplaced investor sentiment and exploits it. If that's the way you define an efficient market, than I'd say an efficient market is no obstacle to a value investor.

Yes. Building something complicated requires formal education plus years of experience attempting to build the complicated thing.

Some endeavors require historical knowledge, aircraft engineering being one of them. If you break the chain, you lose it; policies that were developed over decades are discarded. "Why do we need to do it this way, this other way is faster and cheaper!" No one is around to explain why any more, so the lesson is learned the hard way, again.

It's fun for them and they don't have the expectation that it will make money. And probably it doesn't, and that's fine, move on to the next thing. But once in a while, maybe it resonates with a greater need.

But it's your chance. It may or may not become a business model. That's the risk. You take a risk to get a chance to make a profit.

It's impossible to come up with a business model that does not depend on chance.

> we can't adequately absorb the intellectual capacity of the population

Think that's been true for a long time, yank any early 20th-century factory worker out of their job, you'll find a human intellect not being fully utilized. In fact just use a contemporary worker and the same thing is true. We can't all be getting grants to study something, society has to create some extra wealth first.

It wasn't like programmers were less creative or productive than they are now. The languages were fully capable of doing anything on a server you could do now. It was mostly C. Programmers were creative and smart, just like now, and could implement anything, albeit ground-up since there were fewer existing building blocks to reuse.

A lot of sophisticated anti-spam software depended on some sophisticated anti-anti-spam showing up first, and there is a lot more of that now for sure.

Its hard to imagine so many people could have known about this for so long, yet it remained secret. I expect you could keep something like an assassination secret since everyone who knows about it is probably in some way complicit. Wouldn't be the case here.

Also of course the energy required to get to Earth from somewhere else, for an organism that used any kind of "vehicle" we could recognize as such, would be enormous.

But, good to stay open-minded.

One thing that might be a problem here, is the ongoing oversupply of advanced degrees. This creates a ready supply of replacement faculty whenever needed. As science faculty leave the university, the university has the option of easily replacing them one-by-one, probably at lower cost, and are left with no need to hire the new scientists' organization. The research quality might drop, but the university's reputation would paste over the difference for a while at least.

Or, the individual scientists' reputations are enough to pull along the grants when they go.