Category: uncategorized

What economic laws have worked best for Berkshire?

~ Mark

It is all a matter of trying to find businesses with wide moats protecting a large castle occupied by an honest lord. Moats might be a natural franchise, brand loyalty, or being a low-cost producer. In a capitalistic society, all moats are subject to attack: if you have a good castle, others will want it. What we want to figure out is what keeps the castle standing and how smart is the lord. [Charlie Munger: We also like to look for low agency costs on that lord, economies of scale and “economies of intelligence.”]

Buffett elaborated on the “economies of intelligence”: the idea is to find businesses where you have to be smart only once instead of being smart forever. Retailing is a business where you have to be smart forever: your competitors will always copy your innovations. Buying a network TV station in the early days of television required you to be smart only once. In that kind of business, a terrible manager can still make a fortune. Given the choice between the two (a business where you have to be smart forever or one where you have to be smart once), Buffett advised, pick the great business–be smart once.

Be smart once!

What economic laws have worked best for Berkshire?

Wehr in the World: The importance of family and such

~ Mark

Family first? This is one of the best things I’ve read recently.

I can think of a few questions to gauge what is important to someone:

If you could only achieve one thing in your life, what would it be?
If you could only spend your life doing one thing, what would it be?
If you could only know one person in your life, who would it be?
How do you want to be remembered?
How do you want to be perceived right now?
Whose respect do you most hope to earn?
Whose admiration do you most hope to earn?
Whose love do you most hope to earn?
What ideas/principles are you willing to die for?
Who are you willing to die for?
What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life?
What is the best way you can spend your time?
What is the best way you spent your time today?
If you knew you had only weeks to live, how would you spend your time?
If you knew you had only hours to live, how would you spend your time?
If you knew you had only minutes to live, how would you spend your time?
Of all the things in your life, which would you be the most sorry to lose irrevocably?
What would you most like to gain in your life?

Solid gold. By all means, read the whole thing.

Wehr in the World: The importance of family and such

~ Mark

seoulbrother:

Six years ago Wikipedia started with a radical idea. That’s true. I ain’t promising you nothing extra. I’m just giving you life and you’re giving me life. And I’m saying that men can live together without butchering one another.

Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.

Dyin’ ain’t much of a living, boy.

Please consider a generous donation to the Wikimedia Foundation.

UPDATE: Download the Safari extension by Troy Gaul that puts this on Wikipedia. After installing, see it in action here.
(via Daring Fireball)

~ Mark

oldhollywood:

“I am not funny. My writers were funny. My directors were funny. The situations were funny…What I am is brave. I have never been scared. Not when I did movies, certainly not when I was a model, and not when I did I Love Lucy.”

–Lucille Ball (Rolling Stone, June 23, 1983) (photo by Walt Sanders for LIFE, 1943, click to enlarge)

~ Mark

They get one letter from me every couple of years. And basically it says, run this business like it’s the only business that your family can own for the next 100 years. You can’t sell it. But every year don’t measure it by the earnings in the quarter that year. Measure it by whether the moat around that business, what gives it competitive advantage over time has widened or narrowed. If you keep doing that for 100 years, it’s going to work out very well. Then I tell them basically if the reason for doing something is everybody else is doing it, it’s not good enough. If you have to use that as a reason, forget it.

Warren Buffett’s thoughts on building a business work well on a personal scale, too. Build your moat, make it bigger. See also Douglas Adams’ career advice (via):

If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. […] Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix.

Poignance Measured in Digits – New York Times

~ Mark

July 16, 1989 article by Hans Fantel. He writes about a CD his father gave him, a Vienna Philharmonic performance of Mahler’s 9th–the very show that they’d attended together 50 years earlier, which also happened to be the last the Vienna Philharmonic would give before Hitler rolled in.

But it wasn’t the music alone that cast a spell over me as I listened to the new CD. Nor was it the memory of the time when the recording was made. It took me a while to discover what so moved me. Finally, I knew what it was: This disk held fast an event I had shared with my father: 71 minutes out of the 16 years we had together. Soon after, as an “enemy of Reich and Fuhrer,” my father also disappeared into Hitler’s abyss.

That’s what made me realize something about the nature of phonographs: they admit no ending. They imply perpetuity.

All this seems far from our usual concerns with the hardware of sound reproduction. But then again, speculating on endlessness may be getting at the purposive essence of all this electronic gadetry – its “telos,” as the Greeks would say. In the perennial rebirth of music through recordings, something of life itself steps over the normal limits of time.

(via Alex Ross’ new book)
Poignance Measured in Digits – New York Times

Le Samouraï

~ Mark

Le Samouraï. When I came across this I was thinking something along the lines of “Alain Delon as assassin ≈ Cary Grant as Treadstone asset”. Count me in. Four minutes into the movie we get a bit of pulsing ostinato organ riff and somehow I knew I’d love it. (There’s also some great diegetic jazz later in the film.) Early on, Delon goes out to do a job BUT he screws up pretty big. He gets arrested, we get a long, fascinating ensemble interrogation scene (François Périer is great) and the rest of the movie unfolds in a taut but not frenzied way. Great movie. David Thomson’s Criterion essay.

~ Mark

He chose a way of death guaranteed to bring down a hailstorm of prying analytical chatter far in excess of anything he had experienced while he was alive. This is the paradoxical allure of suicide: to leave the chattering world behind and yet to stage-manage the exit so that one is talked about in the right way.

Alex Ross on Kurt Cobain. From the obituary that first appeared with slightly different wording in the New Yorker. [$]

The Searchers: Radiohead’s unquiet revolution – The New Yorker

~ Mark

Alex Ross on tour with Radiohead. I like this bit from Nigel Godrich on Radiohead’s ongoing effort to figure out their sound and musical directions. At one point,

People stopped talking to one another. ‘Insanity’ is the word. In the end, I think the debate was redundant, because the band ultimately kept doing what it has always done—zigzagging between extremes. Whenever we really did try to impose an aesthetic from the outside—the aesthetic being, say, electronic—it would fail. All the drama was just a form of procrastination.

The Searchers: Radiohead’s unquiet revolution – The New Yorker

~ Mark

I read an interview with Tom Waits, around the time of his album “Rain Dogs,” in which he talked about how you come to a point on an instrument where you have to stop playing it and find another instrument that you don’t know what you’re doing with. Part of songwriting is having that naïve excitement about not quite realizing why you’re getting off on it, because you haven’t had time to pull it apart yet. Songwriting relies on not pulling things apart: the best ideas are the simple ideas.

Thom Yorke in an interview with Alex Ross.
~ Mark

The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can’t change at 60; the time to look at that list is now.

Warren Buffett on habits and being a better person. Ties in with some of my thoughts on a well-balanced life earlier this year. Write it down, check in every so often, re-calibrate as needed.