lhh

Very sad, for more reasons than one. For pretty much everyone, heart disease is totally preventable now. If you’re over 30, get your ApoB checked (non HDL cholesterol is a proxy), and if it’s high, get a calcium scan on your heart. If you score above zero, get your ApoB down as low as possible (which will probably require drugs - diet barely moves the needle on this for most people). Low ApoB -> no heart disease.

Source: Peter Attia

Titan (about John Rockefeller and the making of Standard Oil) and House of Morgan (about J.P. Morgan, the man and the investment bank, and the making of the modern financial system) were both excellent.

Interesting, I'd always assumed people snorted the powder because it's not absorbed if consumed orally, but apparently that's not true. Maybe just it's just for the absorption speed? So... if someone drank industrial quantities of coca tea in one go, it'd be a 2-12 hour cocaine high?

Three friends and I summited Vulcan Misti in Peru (~19k ft) over 2 days with no altitude training. All of us came from sea level, had 2 days to acclimate staying in the town nearby (~7k ft). This was a year out of college, all of us were D3 athletes so reasonably fit but probably not considered elite level fitness.

The altitude impact was no joke, but for whatever reason it affected all of us to different degrees. I just felt a little more winded than usual, had to take my time a bit but was overall fine, whereas one of the group had a rough go of it, needed frequent breaks and vomited a couple times. The other two were somewhere in between.

So I'm sure being fit helps, but it seems there's more to it than that.

I likewise had it in tea several times hiking in Peru. I personally didn’t notice any effect whatsoever, might as well have been mint tea.

Disappointed that Nigel Pennypinch is missing from the acknowledgements.

Yes: “Hey, our company is on the market for sale and I thought you might be interested in taking a look before we accept another offer.”

And you can tailor it based on the specifics.

Working with an advisor can sometimes make this easier because they can be more direct and say things like: “Competitor X has made an offer and I know it’d make your life difficult if this asset ended up in their hands, so I wanted to give you an opportunity to take a look first.”

By the way, waiting until you get an offer to start trying to bring in competing ones isn’t great, definitely better to do that as early as you can if you’re serious about selling. You risk pissing off the interested party if you’re making them feel like they’re just being used as leverage and drag things out before giving them an answer.

All great points!

If anyone is interested in how things tend to work if you're trying to proactively sell a company (especially a profitable one), I put together a write up a while back: https://www.fivecastfinancial.com/guides/how-selling-a-compa...

(I used to be an M&A advisor - no longer!)

"If you're an optimist you're probably an idiot" has to be one of the most British hypotheses I've ever heard.

Don't underestimate the benefit of exercise on mental performance. Your brain is a physical thing after all, mitochondria and all, and exercise improves its ability to function. Plus you'll feel way better, and probably live better for longer.

23andme will tell you your APOE genotype, one of the variants of which is a major risk factor for Alzheimer's.

I agree that spreadsheets are still extremely useful, and surprisingly difficult to improve upon. Maybe it's because spreadsheets combine a bunch of the primitives used to build many types of applications - tabular data, persistent data, operations on that data (CRUD, per the article), trivial to inspect the data, and can make various views on the data.

It seems to me that quite a few successful software companies boil down to a spreadsheet with enforced structure to the data and codified operations performed on the data specific to the problem domain. CRMs, accounting systems, project management systems, and ordering & inventory management systems are some examples.

Our product focused on financial projection & reporting (https://www.modeloptic.com/) is another example: Excel-like functionality at the core, and since we've constrained the domain and know how different pieces of data relate to each other, we can automate away a lot of the manual labor that'd be needed in completely free-form Excel.

Hopefully TransUnion is more respectful of your rights.

I really don't understand all the outrage in most of the comments here. Seems to me like they're just trying to launch a new cryptocurrency, they're trying to find a reasonably equitable way to distribute the initial tokens to bootstrap it, and iris-scanning is the best non-centralized, technically and logistically feasible way to identify new unique human entrants that they came up with. The principle of it sounds great to me!

Does the specific mechanism they're attempting to employ raise some concerns? Sure. Instead of the vitriol though, how about some suggestions for a better mechanism?

Trying to tear people down who pretty clearly seem to be making a good faith attempt to make the world a better place is reprehensible in my opinion. What does that say about you?

He mentions several times that accountants do their work in Excel, but any account would consider it barbaric to actually try to do transaction-level double-entry bookkeeping in Excel instead of a purpose-built system like QuickBooks/Xero/NetSuite/etc. I think I've also probably seen more broken financial models than logically sound ones in Excel, so the integrity of spreadsheets is oftentimes not even safe in the hands of finance professionals.

Data integrity is definitely a hard problem.

These complaints don’t seem to align with reality from what I can tell. The TARP “bailout” was one of the biggest, which taxpayers profited on. The nationalization of Fannie and Freddie was hugely expensive, but I don’t see how that can be called a bailout, since equity holders were wiped out. As the article states, the vast majority of the benefits of such programs come from driving confidence in the functioning of the system so markets don’t freeze up.

Moral hazard is a real thing, but it seems like the government walked the line pretty well during the crisis. What bailouts enriched private citizens at the expense of the public?

I'm not arguing that "because they benefit they're therefore not being exploited". I'm arguing that "because they voluntarily enter into the agreement with full information they're therefore not being exploited". Or have I misunderstood your point?

If what you care about is lifting citizenry out of poverty, free markets have the best track record by far, despite countless attempts otherwise.

You cannot legally own slaves, even if both parties are consenting adults. So clearly, your premise is flawed: there are absolutely things that the government can determine to be illegal. In California, this includes exploitative labor relationships (again, even if both parties consent to the agreement).

If someone wants to sell themselves into slavery, I say let them (though perhaps there should be an exception if they're not of sound mind). Or alternatively, maybe slavery is just the degenerate case that removes your agency, and should be disallowed on that basis.

I challenge your premise that it's possible to consider a labor relationship exploitative if both parties voluntarily enter into it.

No, they got large enough by ignoring the law.

Sure, but I think this is unrelated to my point. I still contend that any voluntary agreements should be allowed, with size of company involved having no bearing on the matter.

That's a really harmful outlook.

Harmful how, exactly?

I don't agree that the government should be deeming any type of agreement that adults voluntarily enter into as illegal. The notion that the government should be doing that strikes me as very condescending to the governed. Shouldn't people be allowed to make their own decisions on what is best for their own lives? If someone is in a position where a $3/hr job is their best option, I think it's a pretty bad idea to then remove that option from them too.

You shouldn't get to just ignore the law because you're big enough.

Seems to me that the opposite dynamic is at play here - these companies have become large enough to be the target of legislation.

Becerra said in an interview on CNBC on Tuesday that he was unconcerned about the potential for Uber to leave the state as a result of the order. “Any business model that relies on shortchanging workers in order to make it probably shouldn’t be anywhere, whether California or otherwise,” he said.

This type of attitude drives me crazy. These companies have paid billions of dollars to drivers, who voluntarily decided to work and earn this money. If drivers felt the arrangement was unfair, wouldn't they do something else? How is anyone better off by these companies being legislated out of existence? They're already hemorrhaging cash as is.

It's astonishing to me that government leaders believe workers are better off with fewer options, regardless of the perceived quality of them. Or maybe they don't actually believe it but are willing to inflict the damage anyway for the sake of virtue signaling.

How does it follow that someone was exploited for that to have happened?

Uber has spent their entire existence dancing in legal gray areas. It's hard to have a ton of sympathy for them when their over-generous re-interpretations of the law bite them in the ass on occasion.

True. But it's also hard to have sympathy for taxi medallion companies.

It's not even an argument.

? It is, though. It's an argument that adults should be able to agree to whatever they want to agree to (or not). It's an argument for freedom.

Uber/Lyft/etc create jobs that otherwise didn't exist, thus providing an additional option for potential workers. With the additional option, maybe that option is better than some people's alternative options. We can surmise that it probably is for a lot of them, as evidenced by their choice to be drivers for these companies. If they had a better option, they would presumably take that instead.

Your proposition that if one person makes more money then other people are worse off has an element of truth to it, since, sure, more demand for a given item (like housing) will tend to increase its price, all else equal. But I think that's the wrong way to think about the situation. Wealth creation is not zero sum.

I'm not saying the companies need government assistance. I'm saying they and their drivers should be able to come to whatever agreement they want to come to (or not).

A worker’s will to do something does not necessarily mean that thing is good for the worker

That strikes me as a pretty condescending point of view. Shouldn't adults be allowed to make their own decisions on what is best for their own lives?

Exactly, the situation would be more desperate without Uber/Lyft/etc, not less.

Fair enough, the court's job is just to interpret the law; it's the law I object to. But a lot of people advocating for these types of laws make the moral argument that companies are exploiting workers. Given the evidence, I think that's a pretty difficult case to make in good faith.

Leave it to California to stick it to a company losing $7 billion per year trying to find its footing.

Drivers are voluntarily entering into the current work arrangement. Why does the government need to have an opinion on the matter?

We do corporate finance consulting, and here's how we present the "productized" version of our offering: https://www.fivecastfinancial.com/core-financial-package/