This is one of his greatest. I wrote a nice summary of Poor Charlie’s Almanack back in 2021 which I’ve occasionally kept coming back to. I think today I‘ll revisit it with a sense of emptiness inside me. I’m sharing it here for others to enjoy: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/poor-charlies-almanack...
I just listened to the Acquired interview walking through the redwoods on Sunday. I am gutted because he talked about his 100th birthday celebration at the California club and joked how it was a full party with no invitations left. It broke my heart that he isn't around to celebrate and enjoy that experience.
I actually found that interview to be quite hard to listen to.
Charlie often interrupted the question, answered one that could have been asked, and then later on the interviewer (Ben or David) came around to actually finishing the question, and it turned out not to be the one that Charlie prematurely answered.
He also gave several answers that I didn't think were really insightful, of course YMMV.
I found this interview to be one of the least interesting to be ever published by Acquired.
I always remember him saying "I always tried to find ways to kill my pilots" referring to his days as a meteorologist in World War 2. This is in reference to "Reverse Thinking", the way I approach all my projects by trying to wreck them from the start and shipping once I can't.
I particularly liked his saying that went something like, "before you invest in a company, you should understand and be able to make the argument against the investment better than those who hold that position."
I read they use that methodology at Google X - the team take pride in proving ideas can't work by doing the hardest part first. There's some good blog posts on how this works and how they kill projects fast.
My understanding of Munger's intent: find the issues and risks that you are not aware of, by looking at the project from a different perspective.
What Google X (and many others) do: do the most risky parts first, so you fail fast and minimize the wasted effort (save time and money by not doing the less risky parts first, in case the project is doomed).
Munger gives a tool to identify new (yet unknown) risks. Seeking what needs to be addressed so that the project doesn't fail.
The other thing is a tool to help us deal with the known risks (derisking the project, identifying the complete blockers). Checking if the project is doomed, and should not receive more investment.
I see it as two very different things from the project management perspective.
From your experience, what's usually done when new projects start?
What I've seen, people focus on the business requirements and only the obvious risks. That's for the regular projects.
I have seen Munger's proposal in practice. In form of intentionally breaking production (in a controlled manner) to uncover unknown issues (similar to Netflix's Chaos Monkey), and in form of think tanks with senior engineers who take time to think about potential reliability issues.
What Munger describes is exactly the latter approach. From my experience, it's done very rarely. And never in some companies. While Munger advocates to do it for every project.
Charlie Munger is one of the closest things to a "hero" I've ever had. Others have named them, but Poor Charlie's Alamanack or his Psychology of Human Misjudgement are both incredible.
I've made a point of seeing him at Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting every last few years. He had many trials in his life but lived it well. His wit and wisdom will be missed.
Arguably the guy did nothing worthy of admiration. Sure he managed to multiply cashflow, but on my books that doesn't stand nearly to definition of hero.
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy his books and interviews perhaps like everyone else. He was incredibly smart character, no doubt about that. But hero?
Not OP but mr Munger and Buffet have also held steady course in an increasingly hype driven financial world.
And they've stayed course since the 60s!
For that alone they've become (cult) legends among small time investors. As a small time investor myself born in the 90s it is insane the amount of bullsh*t social media will push onto you regarding finance.
Their annual meetings where they answer questions are some of the only sane financial advice to be found on YouTube.
They did't do anything with the cash except piling it up and multiplying. By all means they could do that - don't get me wrong again, but that doesn't make them heroes, does it?
Their videos are by far _not only_ sane advice out there. They are good, but any decent book on the subject value much more.
He is a defacto investment hero. Berkshire Hathaway is reality in sea of insanity. They defined the strategy of finding companies with a good structure, good fundamentals, and a good product and capitalising them.
If you are looking for positive externalities to qualify "hero", he probably played a part in creating a large number of the companies you have ever heard of, employing millions and large part of the success of US markets today.
You’re overplaying your hand a bit here with the cult comparison. It’s becoming pretty obvious that you’re interested in making a case as to why Munger doesn’t deserve to be called someone’s hero, not that you’re here to learn. People have answered your repeated question pretty earnestly but you continue asking it again.
The GP is not trying to convince you that Munger ought to be your hero. Among investers, I can see why he'd be among the most admirable. That's all you need to understand to understand why someone that is not you might consider him a personal "hero".
I mean, half of Australia views Don Bradman as a hero and all he really did was play cricket very well.
Same with certain actors (Alan Rickman springs to mind), chess legends like Gary Kasparov, albeit on a smaller scale.
I think I understand what you're getting at - Charlie Munger didn't change the world the way, say, Jonas Salk did - but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to idolize him. He was at the top of his game, and incredibly bright and witty.
It’s understandable some people will idolise him - pretty much like they can do same for anyone else, no matter how big or small, benevolent or malevolent his/her impact is.
Was just wondering if there is objectively something justifying the definition or it’s deeply subjective.
His actions and the value he created helped to (or actively did) build countless companies, and millions of jobs. Services and products we are using every day. People that earned a living, kids and families enjoying a prosperous life - are all result of his actions.
Moreover, he taught and inspired many others do the same.
That's a hero in my book. Not some sports player, actor or worse - some politician - people are usually worshipping.
> They did't do anything with the cash except piling it up and multiplying. By all means they could do that - don't get me wrong again, but that doesn't make them heroes, does it?
They gave a lot of the cash to effective charities, thereby saving tens of thousands of lives. (I'd need to look up the exact number.)
>Arguably the guy did nothing worthy of admiration.
Hm, isn't that a purely subjective thing? And did he really did nothing worthy of admiration? Isn't it admirable to be great at your job? To write books that people read and enjoy, and draw inspiration from?
That’s why i put the word “arguably. Because it seems to be debatable and naturally i would like to hear the other side.
Clever and smart scammer is extremely great at his job sending people into poverty. Absolutely great at the job. Is it admirable? I’ll leave the judgment to you.
>Clever and smart scammer is extremely great at his job sending people into poverty. Absolutely great at the job. Is it admirable? I’ll leave the judgment to you.
You did the opposite of leaving the judgement for me.
You wanted to argue that he did nothing worthy of admiration - so it would be interesting to hear the reasoning (if any) behind that. He lived 99 years, are you sure he did nothing worthy of admiration in his life? I know nothing about the guy but I can see on wikipedia that he was at the top of his class at Harvard. Isn't that potentially admirable? What about him providing free legal aid while being a student? Nothing worthy of admiration? Are you sure that none of his family members didn't find him admirable? His neighbours or colleagues?
Again, saying that he never have done anything admirable is a pretty strong claim that you have failed to argue for.
I feel like you're just trying to understand someone else's position, but you're coming across as very militant. Tangential: do you disagree that someone could consider an athlete a personal hero?
Could be a case of mismatched focuses. If someone is focused on tech, they might idealize Musk or Jobs. If someone has roots in the financial realm, they might thing Buffet is their hero.
That’s why I’m asking. Is it possible you can’t understand why Munger is a hero to some because you don’t live in that world?
For the record my heroes are Steve Irwin and my Aunt Patty, so it’s also completely subjective and highly contextual.
> Is it possible you can’t understand why Munger is a hero to some because you don’t live in that world?
Absolutely so. That’s why i am wondering if those people who consider him as a hero can explain reasons. Loving making money is a legitimate reason - no problem with that, everyone has own goals in life.
My heroes, if you will, happen to be regular people, whose names won’t tell you anything, so I hope you kindly excuse me on that.
Again, there’s arguably nothing wrong with idealising, however by definition it rarely has anything to do with real life qualities. Again, nothing wrong with it.
Specifically, this paragraph is the general way I was thinking about:
"Munger’s hero was Benjamin Franklin, whom he admired for his curiosity, ingenuity and wit. Munger’s own common sense, biting humor, pathological bluntness and disdain for conventional wisdom made him a celebrity among investors"
For me, personally, it was the way that he lived his life, was extraordinary brilliant, a polymath, and changed multiple fields of study (investing and arguably behavioral psychology.) He has not only directly created jobs, as others have stated, of millions, but has also indirectly altered the lives of millions for the better. He is one of the greatest minds in investing and he freely educated millions on his methods.
At the same time, he had some incredibly rough times and bore it with grace. For me, setting this type of example is also noteworthy. There are also the small things -- people who have been around him, he's incredibly respectful on an individual basis, always showed up early, and in general, lived in a way that I aspire to living.
The unfortunate aspect of what you are positing is that we cannot capture the opportunity cost of Munger’s actions, and so therefore your argument cannot be disproved. As a corollary, I also wonder if Bill Gates’ shepherding of his personal charities is actually any better than the alternatives. Lionizing ultra-capitalists represents an opportunity lost for a more wholistic and democratic economic system. Glad you found someone to motivate you to work smarter.
Miles away from what you seem to have understood. Re-read that statement, and make an effort to understand it. It is very simple really: Charlie Munger was admirable after his wisdom - intentionally and purposely built.
Incidentally, your (delirious and disconnected - I speak of Being, "Being" which is opposed to "having" after at least Fromm, and you are there attempting to adapt what I wrote into concepts of theft) process seems to fall into that bias that Charlie Munger insisted on, of having embraced some judgement so tightly that it blinds you.
Returning to what I expressed: people «not well off», in wisdom, they met somebody «way better», in wisdom - which is a core point in the «achievement» in question -, and through their own effort, facilitated by gifts, «take part of the wealth». With a collective gain.
My original reply was faithful to your question: "what did he do in life worth of admiration", to which you have been replied: "he built himself well". And he shared that achievement generously. Other matters like faults are contextual to different questions.
This saddens me. I recently started psychology of human misjudgement.
Someone in thread asked what’s big deal about him. what did he achieve
My answer would be I never tried to look into his achievements or did care about them. The man was genuinely curious, humble and a geek. He constantly published his ways of thinking. I enjoyed how he thought about things, how i could relate self correct based on it.
You have to remember that Bogle/Munger/Buffet all gained prominence when value investing wasn't a thing and investing of any kind was wildly out of reach for the common man. Today anyone can go online and buy VTI in minutes. Every financial advisor and 401k plan recommends index funds by default, and it is how the vast majority of people and organizations store their wealth. It doesn't need any more cheerleaders or icons. It had simply become synonymous with investing at large.
> Every financial advisor and 401k plan recommends index funds by default, and it is how the vast majority of people and organizations store their wealth. It doesn't need any more cheerleaders or icons. It had simply become synonymous with investing at large.
This is passive investing, not value investing.
Value investing is very much active investing, otherwise how would you select the undervalued assets?
Value investing is about finding undervalued companies and buying them while avoiding the properly valued or over valued companies. It has nothing to do with ETF's or index funds.
The term "value investing" is confusing because it is used in two different ways:
The first way it's used is to describe buying stocks that are cheap relative to their current financial characteristics (price to book, price to earnings, price to FCF, etc). This approach is usually contrasted with "growth", which would refer to investing in companies with a compelling thesis and bright future ahead of them.
A second way the term "value investing" is used is to describe the approach of Buffett/Munger where the investor compares the current price to the present value of the future cash flows and seeks a margin of safety above that.
You can do passive investing in the first approach. Just go buy ETFs that weight towards value metrics, like Vanguards $VTV value ETF. You can't really do passive investing in the second approach, aside from investing money in the funds of people who do that for you.
You’ve just described the same thing twice. You have a model for how to value a company, and you look for examples of market inefficiencies. Buffet/Munger initially took advantage of the fact that there used to be much more opportunity to find these inefficiencies, because information was used much more inefficiently (via mountains of paper records). That’s not the case any more with huge amounts of digital information available along with the technology to process it as quickly as it becomes available.
So-called "value ETFs" mostly don't contain stocks that I consider value stocks. A value stock's price at the time of purchase must be below the historical average market P/E multiple, with a reasonable growth rate expectation and analyst forecast. It should not have a high LT debt-to-capital ratio, and it should pay a stable dividend. If you look into those "value ETFs," there is a lot of garbage. Some companies from their portfolio were good value stocks many years ago, but they still keep them in the portfolio now, even though growth and expectations have deteriorated substantially. As a passive ETF investor, you would end up much better with a simple SPY/SPX or even BRKB than with those so-called value ETFs. Just compare the charts if you don't believe me.
"Value investing can be confusing as it has two meanings: buying stocks cheap based on current metrics or evaluating future cash flows for a margin of safety. Passive investing suits the first, like Vanguards $VTV, but the second requires a more active approach. How do you see these concepts applied in the Superstonk community?"
"Value investing can be confusing as it has two meanings: buying stocks cheap based on current metrics or evaluating future cash flows for a margin of safety. Passive investing suits the first, like Vanguards $VTV, but the second requires a more active approach. How do you see these concepts applied in the Superstonk community?"
Here is a detailed guide abour r/superstonk at thenewsinsides: https://www.thenewsinsides.com/blog/r-superstonk/
Here is what Buffett says about value investing (in his 1992 BRK shareholder letter):"In addition, we think the very term “value investing” is redundant. What is “investing” if it is not the act of seeking value at least sufficient to justify the amount paid? Consciously paying more for a stock than its calculated value—in the hope that it can soon be sold for a still-higher price—should be labeled speculation (which is neither illegal, immoral nor—in our view—financially fattening).
Whether appropriate or not, the term “value investing” is widely used. Typically, it connotes the purchase of stocks having attributes such as a low ratio of price to book value, a low price-earnings ratio, or a high dividend yield. Unfortunately, such characteristics, even if they appear in combination, are far from determinative as to whether an investor is indeed buying something for what it is worth and is therefore truly operating on the principle of obtaining value in his investments. Correspondingly, opposite characteristics—a high ratio of price to book value, a high price-earnings ratio, and a low dividend yield—are in no way inconsistent with a “value” purchase."
Value investing is a strategy. Index funds are a vehicle. The two can and do coexist, even more so than any other such pair because their risk profile (conservative) and time horizon (long term) are so well aligned.
Exactly. What makes it index investing is low fees and simple, objective stock selection without human judgement. There are various well-studied criteria for value stocks.
An S&P500 index does stock selection too, it's just picking large-cap stocks instead of value stocks.
Large/Small are not correlated to value/growth. I for instance, invest pretty much all my money on ETFs such as ISCV, that invest on companies that fit the small and the value criteria. Over the decades, these two factors combined seemed to be the ones that on average gave the most returns.
Former Financial Advisor [This is not personal financial advice]:
Stock prices go up and down, but usually your goal is to buy stocks low and sell them high.
Growth investing looks to trending sectors and companies and lets say 'bets' on a certain future playing out and thus being good for certain companies.
Value investing is an investment strategy where you deep dive on the financial fundamentals of a company and determine your own measure of worth, or what is sometimes called a fundamental value. In essence your own financial calculations give you a fundamental value that you think the stock is "actually" worth.
Having done this for a number of companies you then keep track of the market, and when, and only when, the stock price drops below your own fundamental value price then you buy.
Munger and Buffet would pair this approach to also planning to hold the stock for the long term and see themselves as owning part of the business over many years.
Often a stock might drop when the growth story turns against it (eg. AI is more exciting than crypto stories now), and this is likley when Value investors would get into a stock as it was now below their fundamental valuation and hence predicted on their models to go back up over time.
Mutual fund managers can often be classified as having a value or growth or index approach (and others). And for most normal investors it's usually good advise to take advantage of diversification and back a few different approaches in building a long term focussed portfolio.
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EDIT: My hobbyist, lay understanding, this is not investment advice, I likely have errors in my understanding
I've seen Growth and Technical investing be contrasted to Value. Growth being looking for companies which have not actualized revenue goals but appear to be able to do rapidly(they're growing, look for the ones that grow fastest), Technical is looking at trends and patterns (they're trending, catch the trend and get off before others do).
In my lay understanding Value investing looks for margins of safety through companies which are worth more on the books than they're shares are selling for, or where their cashflows make them look attractive relative to bonds of their equivalent grade. An example might be if AAPL took a nose dive and was selling for less than $167B (which is their cash on hand) that'd be an excellent Value play.
Or assume their equivalent bond rate was Single-B (Currently 9.5%) and their Price to earnings rate was less than 10.5 --> Buying AAPL would be similar to buying a Grade B bond for less than the current market rate.
Growth is about future value, which is subtilty different from what you said. You make predictions on what the company will earn in the future.
Value by contrast is looking at current earnings.
Both are predictions of the future value, one just weights the current earnings high. While you often have a bias to one, generally you should consider both. Don't buy current income if growth says the company will collapse. Don't buy growth if the company won't grow to support the value in the future.
Most people buy exciting stocks, not cheap stocks (cheap relative to intrinsic value).
Value stocks are by definition boring and unknown. Think iron ore mines, regional banks, house builders, carpet makers, and other yawn-fest-profit-machines.
If it's well known and great value, it's got to be boring. For the most part, they're just completely unknown though - most people could name maybe 5 public companies, nevermind 100.
In addition to getting in on the 'value investing' train early, they built their fortunes because they were there with capital in the 1960s, the best time to begin a 'buy and hold' strategy.
Back in the '60s and '70s, stock market capitalization grew roughly in line with GDP. But from the 1980s onwards, it grew at a level that far outpaced GDP growth [0]. So investors who were already wealthy in the '60s had the capital necessary to take advantage.
> investing of any kind was wildly out of reach for the common man
Oh baloney. I signed up for a Schwab account and started buying stocks at my first job long before the internet. My dad started buying stocks in the 1940s on his military pay (never much). Elevator boys were famously buying stocks in the 1920s.
All the "reach" required was some get-up-and-go to sign up for a brokerage account. It didn't cost anything. They didn't check your tax returns or do a credit check.
The whole point of the stock market was to sell stock to anyone who would buy it.
So that is about $3k in todays money you had laying around and could risk. Are you sure you are well attuned what is within the reach of the common man?
Many "financial advisors" will put you in funds with high expense ratios that give them a good sales commission, then take another 1% of assets under management on top. Eventually people wise up and move elsewhere.
Value investing is “an investment paradigm that involves investing in stocks that are overlooked by the market and are being traded below their true worth”.
Correct me if wrong, but I don’t think index funds come under that paradigm.
It depends on how the index is constructed. A market cap index cannot be value investing. A market sector index is almost surely not value investing (unless that entire sector is undervalued).
An index constructed specifically using value measures as the criteria for inclusion can be (at least arguably so).
But then also a fund or an index fund or an Index ETF wouldn't be complete without ethical review for the sustainable competitive advantage given e.g. GRI+#GlobalGoal sustainability reports.
When you own enough of a company to bring in a new team.
I think the larger point is that public capital markets have become steadily more efficient. There are no "value stocks" anymore because nothing is overlooked by the market, those old opportunities have been arbitraged away. Modern computing systems have made it practical to look at every stock every day, so all stocks now trade at their "true worth" because all publicly available information gets instantly priced in.
Now pretty much the only way for investors to (legally) beat the market is to do proprietary research in ways that others can't easily copy. You need information that no one else has.
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.
> 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.
Or the company has grown its revenue by 20% in 1 year which isn't necessarily unheard of. Or they significantly beat the expectations of analysts / their own guidance. In all of those cases the stock could have been correctly valued & still experienced growth.
>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.
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.
The efficient market hypothesis has been dogma for about half a century, but there's a lot of academic research showing that value and various other factors outperform anyway. There are all sorts of structural and psychological reasons they might persist; e.g. a short-term bias among fund managers, who tend to lose investors if they underperform a few quarters.
The research does say that value doesn't work quite as well as it did decades ago.
There is no reliable evidence that value investing still outperforms the market on a risk-adjusted basis. Everyone knows the trick now so the trick no longer works.
There's no reliable evidence that it doesn't, either. Value has never been something that works all the time. You have to put up with lagging performance when growth stocks are ascendent, which could be a reason that value keeps working in the long term. Time will tell whether it has its day again.
This doesn't happen any more. Back then you could find companies with a cap that was LESS than the money they had in the bank. Those were no brainer deals.
This strategy was actually pioneered by buffets mentor Benjamín graham. By just blindly following a formula you would do value investing by calculating NAV vs market cap.
Buffet took it one step further. He calculates another type of value called intrinsic value and that relies on other factors rather not just the ratio of assets to cap. Part of it relies on consistency of revenue, growth and qualitative aspects of the business as well.
> This doesn't happen any more. Back then you could find companies with a cap that was LESS than the money they had in the bank. Those were no brainer deals.
For a while, Yahoo was famously worth less than its stake in Alibaba. But it was also not clear whether shareholders could get management out of the way to stop destroying value.
> This doesn't happen any more. Back then you could find companies with a cap that was LESS than the money they had in the bank. Those were no brainer deals.
Plenty of companies trade at a discount to book value. I found over a thousand with a stock screener.
Value investing has very little to do with investing in ETFs/indexes. By definition, investing in an ETF can't be value investing, because value investing is about picking (yes, picking) stocks that are undervalued. And that implies going against the market. The complete opposite in buying into the market through an ETF.
VTV (to name the biggest one) has been consistently either tracking below or severely underperforming the S&P. If there is value to be found, that's not there.
I found this out the hard way when I saw an email from vanguard saying they would be charging me $25/year/fund unless I signed up for e-delivery AND moved all my accounts over to their brokerage.
Vanguards death by a thousand nickle-and-diming-cuts has begun.
Yes. I got that too. I don't want their brokerage, just their funds. I'm paying the $25/year fee. I want separation of functions, for security reasons.
In the annual letter to shareholders on 2014, it was suggested that both [Ajit] Jain and Greg Abel could be appropriate successors for Warren Buffett as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
That is a good question. With Gen Z being trained to only be interested in get rich quick schemes and having a TikTok attention span, we may never see another great pure fundamentals investor for a long time.
"The youth of today love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for elders, and love talking" ~ Socrates, 432 BC.
The only older than elders writing off the youth is the youth proving them wrong. Let's hope some follow Charlie's quote instead: "If you've got anything you really want to do, don't wait until you're 93. Start now, and don't stop!"
You do realize that societies rise and fall, right? Greek culture was falling from its golden age around the time of that quote (regardless of who actually said or wrote it). Things would soon get so bad Plato recommended his disciples drop out of society into a sort of monasticism.
> It’s very important to not put your brain in chains too young by what you shout out.
From his speech at Harvard in '95, he's talking about how loudly proclaiming something, shouting about it even, locks our brains into this, making us resistant to contradictory ideas, regardless of evidence.
This observation has felt more and more important over the last decade.
A bit of a stretch to say Charlie didn't practice what he preached just because he [an extremely well known value investor] did not invest in cryptocurrencies [a market driven by hype and speculation and with unclear underlying intrinsic value].
It still seems too early to declare Bitcoin a success. It’s still primarily a tool for speculation. Buffett and Munger aren’t/weren’t fans of non-productive assets that fell into the realm of the greater fool theory.
That’s a great advice. I happened to learn that naturally and I’m thankful I did. Proclaiming things also creates expectations from others and people generally tend to be prone to fulfill those outside expectations. This effect seems to be particularly magnified by social media, where everyone assume a certain persona online. Seems to be at the root of bigotry, too. How can you change your mind if your entire networking is made up of people who confirms the biases you’ve been preaching for the longest time? There’s a great line of dialogue from the movie Millennium, where Daniel Craig’s character breaks into the house of the killer, only for him to show up at the next minute. Craig tries to escape but the villain notices him. They both know what the other is up to. But the killer is smart, and he pretends he doesn’t. So he invites Craig to come inside, and he accepts it. Later, when Craig is subdued by the killer, tied up and about to be killed, the villain reminds him of how stupid he was to have accepted the invitation, noting how this is a trait common to people, who go to great lengths to avoid letting others down, and that, in this specific scenario, Craig did exactly that even though he knew the danger, just so he would not pass for a dismissive character, just to maintain his status as a nice person. And even though I know that, I still find myself falling for that trap from time to time. It’s so hard to be true to yourself when we are social beings, ultimately dependent on others in various ways, for various reasons. Being true and truthful is so scary, as you risk burning so many bridges, but we hardly consider that by being true we may end up building other, better bridges, more aligned with who we are, or at least ought to be. Attachment is enemy with progress, Charlie certainly knew that. Rest In Peace.
I don't think you understand the quote if you're focused on being true to yourself. The whole point is your opinions change over time, there's no true self. Just keep a curious humble mind and keep going.
If there's something to be true to and then you'd find it, now you'd have validation to act shitty towards others in the name of being true to yourself. That's the type of brain chains "this is how I am" he means.
> Assume life will be really tough, and then ask if you can handle it. If the answer is yes, you've won.
> Is there such a thing as a cheerful pessimist? That's what I am.
~~~ Charlie Munger
--
It is a disservice to salute the Man by picking just a partial idea, in the rich amount he was so kind to share, yet there is something fundamental in that message above.
It was Warren Buffett that said «You should write your obituary and try and figure out how to live up to it», and this seems very relevant with Charlie Munger.
It's a fantastic read that can really help you understand why supposedly rational masses of people can end up being so wrong. In the tech world, it ends up being more relevant than one would like it to be.
It was revised and updated by Munger - it's better than the original because it has more experience and information. The old one is fine too, but is harder to read and a bit more dated.
That's referenced in this interesting blog post with some Munger quotes from ~10 years ago. For context Munger appears to have been centrally involved with Berkshire's various energy plays and investor-owned utility deals (a major fraction of their portfolio).
> "… running out of hydrocarbons is like running out of civilization. All this trade, all these drugs, fertilizers, fungicides, etc. … which China needs to eat with a population so much, they all come from hydrocarbons. And it is not at all clear that there is any substitute.
> "When the hydrocarbons are gone, I don’t think the chemists will be able to simply mix up a vat and there will be more hydrocarbons. It’s conceivable, of course, that they could but it’s not the way to bet."
That's in the context of his arguments about for ignoring any calls for 'energy independence' because it's better to preserve domestic resources for future emergencies.
Once you start observing the biases he has mentioned in the talk, you realise how vulnurable you are as a human to be co erced into making decisions which could be so wrong.
Thank you for the link, it is an interesting read, and has a lot of funny quotes, stories and some interesting ideas. In the beginning I felt it was insightful, but by the end of the read I felt it was just a bunch of opinions based on personal anecdotes.
(disclaimer -- I'm obviously much less wealthy and successful than Munger)
Human judgment is often flawed due to various psychological biases and tendencies hardwired in our brains through evolution, such as incentive-caused bias, consistency and commitment bias, and deprivation super reaction syndrome.
Figures like B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov conducted important experiments demonstrating how reinforcement and conditioning shape human and animal behavior.
Marketing, advertising, and product design frequently exploit psychological tendencies like contrast effects, reciprocity bias, and social proof to influence consumer choices.
Board of directors are often ineffective at reining in CEOs due to psychological factors like commitment to prior decisions and not wanting to undermine authority figures.
Understanding psychological tendencies can help avoid being manipulated and make better decisions by considering disconfirming evidence and alternatives objectively.
Applying insights from psychology and economics together gives a more holistic view of human decision-making than either field alone.
Education should teach about these psychological tendencies so people can recognize their own biases and make more informed judgments.
Case studies of companies like Coca-Cola and mistakes of leaders like John Gutfreund demonstrate impacts of psychological factors consequentially.
Figures like Charles Darwin and Sam Walton applied self-awareness of psychological tendencies to achieve remarkable success and wisdom.
Secretive conventions and forcing priority on difficult tasks can help overcome natural human biases revealed through experiments.
Pretty Sharp til the end. The fact that people were still listening to what he has to say about investing in Alibaba as recently as this month is actually pretty nuts (in an impressive way).
Was he? I listened to an interview of his a year or two ago and he didn't seem to be all that sharp at point. Amazingly sharp for a guy who was almost a hundred, sure, but not relative to a typical 80-year-old. He must have been amazing when he was younger, though.
I think it depends on what you mean by sharp. Quick? No, physical capabilities. His understanding of companies/markets/etc still were considered quite sharp by most investors I know.
time will tell. I don't think there is anything to vindicate here. Also, really smart people are wrong about a lot of things all the time - being wrong about one thing should not diminish your other contributions.
He leaves behind a legacy greater than most intellectuals of his time. He has profoundly touched many lives and I am forever grateful for his existence on this earth. Thank you for all the wisdom Charlie, you will be deeply missed.
They pioneered the modern private equity playbook. Ultimately, they're largely responsible for transitioning the economy based on driving productivity through innovation, to driving "productivity" (if you can call it that) through financial engineering. Absolute evil.
I think the most charitable take was they rode the longest American bull market in history with dead simple buy and hold strategies. Many of which would not pay out today while holding companies that gave minority groups diabetes and tried to restrict water distribution to th me third world.
I can’t believe people here think these were good smart guys. They were assholes with a folksy facade.
Genuinely sad to hear. His wit and sage advice will be missed. For anyone who has the means to visit a Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting, it's worth it at least once.
The Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting will never be the same. As we previewed in 2020, Buffett without Munger is still illuminating but not nearly as dynamic.
It saddens me that he is gone, but I am glad he lived the long good life that he did. I first started reading his "Psychology of human misjudgment" around 10 years ago. I try to reread it every year. Whenever I see a young person who appears to have a little drive, I recommend that they read the speech. I really wish I had run across these concepts when I was in my early twenties, but I am still grateful that Charlie packaged them up for me. I hope everyone here takes some time and reviews this list, and then takes up the assignment and peruse some of the other literature in the field.
i find it funny how the bryan johnsons of the world take like 123 pills every day and optimize all the fun out of life and we still dont really really know if it works or not
and then old geezers like munger and buffett do whatever the hell they want and outlive everybody
Jack LaLanne died at 96 years old, yet my grandpa who's eaten tons of Taco Bell for most of his life is alive at just a hair from that age. I wonder what people will think about the obsession with "longevity" in the likely outcome of David Sinclair or Andrew Huberman dying in their 80s or earlier.
There a tribe in Ecuador with reduced height studied by Walter Longo etc. They have a mutation in their growth hormone receptor, that means that they experience less effect of human growth hormone, hence reduced height. And their lifestyle is rather unhealthy: alcohol, smoking, sugars, junk food, obesity etc. Yet they rarely experience diabetes, cancer etc probably due to reduced mTOR pathway activation.
In the context of this specific post regarding Charlie Munger, you can't say that it's genetics unless you measure specific genes. He could be 100x Bryan Johnson, but Bryan Johnson at least makes his protocols open for use. And Munger didn't even bother to make a genetics test with his curiosity, thus providing no essential value to human civilization.
genetics. they matter a ton . read the bios of really old people (100+ yrs old) and nothing really stands out beyond having a lot of family member who also lived a long time. I think a low-stress lifestyle helps a lot too.
Commenting only on their professional lives. Their investment strategy was generally not a high stress one, they clearly enjoy their work so one could assume their professional lives were generally low stress.
They lived frugal lives, with everything needed covered for probably 10'000 years ahead. Large families, plenty of friends and a lot of wisdom. Yeah, I think Charlie and Warren's life's have way less stress than most people do.
This is a fair point. If you exclude the early part of his life, working as an asset manager is easy work. Most jobs are much more stressful. Basically, you sit around and read annual/quarterly reports and try to find the next company to buy. To be clear, this type of asset management is similar to private equity. They are buying whole companies. This business is much lower volatility than buying/selling stocks for fund management. Also: Fewer transactions. So I would say the 2nd half of his life was low stress (outsider's view, of course).
As smart and rich as this guy was, and I know very little of him besides his critique of cryptocurrencies, I wonder about his empathy. That dorm design...https://youtu.be/VKXOQ8duhRg
The lack of windows sucks, but there's another term in the equation -- one the high-brow architecture critics I guess think beneath their dignity to mention. And that is: All rooms have a single bed, meeting the prime requirement for a young couple's first "love nest".
Furthermore I'll argue that "sexiling" is really a gross injustice, and damaging to the education of the sexilee, as if he hadn't already been dealt a pile of misery. The Munger dorm then shows great social wisdom and benevolence in its proactive elimination of sexiling through architectural design.
The reason for the design was to put the communal areas by the windows so people would come out and mix. It seems popular at the one they built https://youtu.be/LzsjKdGehb0
I only just recently discovered how awesome of a person he was in the past few months. I've really enjoyed absorbing his wisdom. Sad there will be no new content :(
What you mean is probably 'as far as public billionaires goes'. And with regards to 'down to earth' like anyone of prominence they don't care about you or wouldn't help you in any way (and couldn't possibly). So we are not talking about the guy next door who lends you his saw and is already around for advice and a helping hand.
Don't think for a second they aren't selfish in their own way they would have to be in order to be involved and run an enterprise of that magnitude.
What does down to earth mean anyway? Most people probably think that it means you appear to be more like the common man and don't have the typical trappings of wealth (or if you do nobody knows about them).
> What you mean is probably 'as far as public billionaires goes'. And with regards to 'down to earth' like anyone of prominence they don't care about you or wouldn't help you in any way (and couldn't possibly)
That applies to any stranger. Basically, a billionaire is human like any other.
We do idolize Billionaire / celebrity too much, but these unkind takes don't help anyone.
> Don't think for a second they aren't selfish in their own way they would have to be in order to be involved and run an enterprise of that magnitude.
every human is selfish in their own way.
> What does down to earth mean anyway? Most people probably think that it means you appear to be more like the common man and don't have the typical trappings of wealth (or if you do nobody knows about them).
by your definition, he is down to earth. I would not define it like that, but i don't even know how to define it, but i would say that it correlates with not living for the apparatus or "big life" / hype / spend, and enjoying "small" things (ie, good and long lasting friendships, healthy family relations, simply enjoying a meal with people they care)
I guess lots of people find
him interesting (see HN guidelines)
Charlie (and Buffett) are often recommended here for their mental models as their approach to investing and finance are very transferrable in startups/engineering. At the end of the day, large scale software engineering is mostly about managing risk, strategy, and corporate finance/value. Often, Poor Charlie's Almanack is recommended by my top Staff+ colleagues.
Every now and then the mask fully slips and you see how many users here really think. Munger was famously anti modern tech and even called the internet a "net negative" for capitalism at one point in 2000, but it doesn't matter because he was rich. Also he made so much money that all the comments where he praised a brutal dictatorship are apparently no big deal, for example for cracking down on Jack Ma who dared to mildly criticise Xi's leadership.
Everything for that share price, Chinese people don't need human rights anyway.
I really liked Charlie. His stance on China was wrong. People aren’t black and white. It’s a tragically small and uninteresting world if you can only learn from and admire people who never make a wrong step and who only ever agree with you.
i think it does matter. Also let me take a minute to disconnect the person - which anyone dying even at this age is tragic - from the persona that many people here seem to worship. Personally I don't think that he was a net positive for the hackers that are still around here but I may be wrong.
Interesting observation. I agree, seems like people, especially so called "hackers", don't want to follow the threads and externalities of these people as far down the causal chain as they would with say, I don't know, starfish reproduction or some other curio. To me, it seems like the most fertile ground for the awareness that billionaires aren't in a vacuum, that fundamentally greedy decisions make our planet worse off..reality has a complexity bias, and it doesn't take much to realize how much harm these people have caused.
Doubt it. He believed Amazon and walmart did more good than any charity. Also 8 children could probably use a few hundred million each and still not be billionaires.
Wow, I knew he was old, but had no idea he wasn't well. Aftermarket movement of BRK.A/BRK.B seems to be muted, so I guess right now investors aren't too worried about the future of Berkshire.
No 99-year-old is "well" in absolute terms. A 99-year-old US man has only about a 66% chance of reaching 100: https://www.finder.com/life-insurance/odds-of-dying. A 95-year-old man has about a 16.5% chance of reaching 100, so he'd already done pretty well.
I wonder what killed him aside just being really old. he died at a hospital and not at home, so something must have happened. his last media appearance was on the 17th of nov 2023.
Most of the trades in that stock have been routed through dark pools (they don't hit lit exchanges), so even if there are (huge) trades you wouldn't necessarily see the price move.
>Today's Off Exchange & Dark Pool volume is 6,792, which is 98.11% of today's total volume.
Today's Lit volume is 131, which is 1.89%.
Over the past 30 days, the average Off Exchange & Dark Pool volume has been 97.51%.
The average Lit volume has been 2.49%.
"wisdom"... It's a really great video, to illustrate something else. Humanity continues to progress and evolve, as time is the ultimate boundary to those in power - time empowers new generations to perceive the world from a fresh perspective.
Almost any human being can live extremely comfortably with no financial worries at around $30m net worth. After $30m, it becomes a game of pride, ego and high scores.
billionaires are post-money. they don't get the normal thrills you and me get when we are spending money. now it becomes about "making an impact", about leaving a legacy, about being remembered.
In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm of Wright & Garrett for $3,300 per year, or $42,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
A few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena. Munger moved into “dreadful” conditions at the University Club and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Lowe, Molly Munger asked her father, “Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it?” The broke Munger replied: “To discourage gold diggers.”
Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son, Teddy, had leukemia. In those days, there was no health insurance, you just paid everything out of pocket and the death rate was near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Guerin, Charlie’s friend, said Munger would go into the hospital, hold his young son, and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying.
One year after the diagnosis, in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old, divorced, broke, and burying his 9 year old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed.
But by the time he was 69 years old, he had become one of the richest 400 people in the world, been married to his second wife for 35+ years, had eight children, and countless grandchildren.
Beyond investing and business, Charlie teaches us about resilience, dignity, and life well lived. Rest in peace to a legend.
Wow. I never knew all this about Charlie Munger, thanks for sharing. It’s rare gems like him that give me confidence that sometimes against all odds one can succeed. Also I appreciate his love for his family. That’s by far the most valuable asset one posses - if not the only.
Family first, followed by friends. It is sad to me that so many young people are voluntarily choosing not to have children. They are the ultimate - the reason we exist, the mechanism for leaving a legacy, the most beautiful thing on earth. Family is everything
The people who think they are incapable of caring for children, and then choose not to, are by and large people who are thoughtful and deliberative, who are the exact people who would be good at raising children.
That's your opinion. The reason I exist is because my parents made me. That doesn't mean I have to create a life to give my own life meaning.
The reason people choose to have less and less kids is because raising a child is a thankless/tough job and despite all the progress that has been made on the social aspect of raising kids, more often than not, it is still the woman's job to do the rearing and raising of the kids.
Family is not everything, I know countless people who were born in terrible families.
Leaving a legacy is so overrated, why do you feel like you need to do so? What is so important and so unique about you that if your family line were to end today, the world would be missing?
On your deathbed, you’ll look back and consider what the point of everything was. We all make our own purpose and reason for living. But I dream of my kids, they give me so much happiness, and the best thing I ever did was have them and the joy they bring. It’s sad that people cannot see the beauty in this.
Low resolution take. Not bad, nothing new, genuinely I think you're missing so many facets of the human experience.
People commit the worst atrocities and embody a dog eat dog mentality, all 'for their lineage' or 'family'. Borges said that procreation is a mirror, I agree. To me, it only serves to multiply and if you're not careful, ie, you think you'll finally have 'meaning', you'll probably be eaten alive.
But of course, if you aren't thinking about it, and those questions are never broached and the 'genie' isn't out of the bottle. Well, I wish I was like you then haha
Wow nice find! :) good research skills :) i mean it's hard to pin down exact text in a deluge of recent news about similar or the same! :D xx ;p ;) xx;p
Is this a copy paste of a blogger that wrote an article about why you shouldnt give up, because charlie didn't either. Are you the author? It feels weird to take 95% of someones article and just post it.
This is a great point but given their comment history and 7000+ karma, my money is on this being the original author taking an opportunity to repost their own writing.
Hopefully the benefit of the doubt is well offered here because obviously lifting 100+ words of someone else's writing is poor form.
Yes. It is a post by the head of a small investment firm simply trying to align themselves with the halo of Charlie Munger.
Also this in particular is particularly ridiculous:
"It’s a fair bet that your present troubles pale in comparison.
Whatever it is, get over it. Start over. He did it. You can, too."
First that's quite a bit of an assumption. After all divorce and a medical problem (like Charlie had) as well as a child dying IS something you can get over. There are people that for sure have much worse situations than that. But even if that was not the case it's never a good idea to frame someone's problems by comparing to something worse that someone got through.
You are upset that you have let's say diabetes? Oh get over it 'it's not cancer'.
You have cancer? Oh get over it it could be pancreatic cancer.
And so on.
Many problems you can't just 'get over'. (Addiction and mental health issues holding you back are just 2 examples)
Reminds me of the non-obvious tacks David Brooks[1] suggests to encourage depressed friends:
--praise them for the fight they have been managing so far
--tell them that their talents are being looked forward to by others/the world when they manage to recover
[1]Paraphrasing from memory of a podcast interview he did with Andrew Sullivan ~a month back.
I really don't understand the notion that people should be able to just get over their child dying, but addiction is something you can't just get over?
I'm not trying to downplay addiction, but let's be real - people can overcome addiction, but we can't bring back our dead family members.
It is an engineers solution, perhaps not pretty and perhaps not semantic but certainly functional enough for this crowd. FYI I mostly use mobile for HN and the solution works fine IMHO.
Agreed. Writing a reference is not just a matter of respect for the author who put in the work, but also a matter of material importance, as the practice can help both the author and the reader.
For the author, a reference to their original work can help the rest of their work (such as their website) become better-known. Their corpus of work (whether a book series or a website) can be a source of income. In this case, it appears that the author is able to use his blog to gain clients for his company—he describes his background, clientele, and company below the article, and includes a method of contact via the menu.
For the reader, a reference to the source material helps them find similar content by the author that may be relevant and interesting, as well as possibly a way to subscribe to notifications for future work released by the author.
Though online discussions don't require linked references—unlike more formal environments such as in academia or in ethical journalism—it's a good habit to link to references whenever possible (especially when quoting word-by-word): it can only help both the author and the reader.
In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm of Wright & Garrett for $3,300 per year, or $42,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
This shows how much white collar salaries have really exploded over the past few decades, especially since 2010 after financial crisis bottom. White collar work is more lucrative than ever even accounting for inflation and student loan debt. The media and ppl on Twitter complain about young people going into debt to get degrees; well, those same ppl getting those fat six-figure jobs too. If lawyers and doctors earned what they earned in the 40s, i am sure student loan debt crisis would miraculously go away.
Also remember that he was able to support a stay-at-home wife and family and buy a house on that salary.
The direct comparison of inflation ignores that the relative cost of things also changes. Our cost of living is much higher than it was post-war. But we get to have decent sanitation, phones and computers, better medicine, etc.
I’m not sure what you mean by direct comparison here. I believe the official government inflation stats do consider the relative cost of things, otherwise they would be totally nonsensical for the reason you mentioned.
Well then they're clearly getting it wrong, as this shows; you cannot support a family and buy a house on a single $42K income in 2023. Any statistics that suggest you can are just plain wrong.
> If lawyers and doctors earned what they earned in the 40s, i am sure student loan debt crisis would miraculously go away.
What's the expression... "the plural of anecdote is not data"?
It's important to keep in mind a few things... First of all, the point about $42,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars was that he was not doing well. Secondly, "inflation-adjusted" is not "cost of living adjusted" for where he was living. Pasadena was comparatively sparsely populated with a low cost of living back then, as opposed to the densely populated, high cost of living area it is now. Accordingly, he was not making anything resembling the median income of lawyers back then: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/SCB/pa...
Adjusted for inflation, the average legal salary from 1949 would be $104,108.17. The average pay for a lawyer in California in 2023 is... $90,028/yr. So yeah, accounting for inflation, lawyers have been earning comparatively less over time... and yet the cost of law school has been consistently growing faster than inflation.
Beyond that, lawyers and doctors are a special class of white collar worker where scarcity is artificially inflated by trade boards. They aren't representative of the majority of people with massive, unmanageable student debts. As an example, median income for an accountant in California (I can't think of a more stereotypical white collar job) is... $49,479.
I also wouldn't presume that the dividing line between blue & white collar workers is a college education. About ~12% of people with college degrees work in blue collar jobs (and the numbers are way higher for college drop outs).
>>Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced.
>>But by the time he was 69 years old, he had become one of the richest 400 people in the world, been married to his second wife for 35+ years, had eight children, and countless grandchildren.
Some times there is a Ronald Wayne moment in relationships, if there could ever be something that could come close to it, this would.
The women in my life have all played a significant role in my ability to build my career. For some, like my mother and my kids mom, this incurred some cost to their careers. I wouldn’t be where I am without them, therefore in a sense yes, they did work for my income. Often in hidden and yet incredibly important, valuable ways.
My mom died, but if she were still around I wouldn’t think twice about taking care of her. As for my wife, whether things go well or not, she has undoubtedly carried me at times just as I’ve carried her, through the most crucial parts of our children’s lives. If that’s not a person who deserves my support, no one is.
It might not always seem fair. Sometimes it actually isn’t. But it’s exceedingly unlikely that his wife didn’t facilitate his success in some way over the better part of a decade.
What, exactly, are you talking about? The OP is referencing the fact that the wife got _everything_ in the divorce. I'd be curious to understand why "facilitat[ing] his success in some way over the better part of a decade" entitles her to everything he ever made.
Your parent comment argument is a flawed argument, of course.
By definition everything that ever happens, happens from cause-effect conditions. So if you end up winning, everything that happened that led to it, in some way is responsible. But that's splitting hairs.
I have seen these situations even in other relationships. There are these cousins, or uncles who would have dropped you to an interview, or lent you some money to get there. You work hard and are fairly successful a few years later. Now they think they are responsible for the whole thing, and you owe a great deal of things to them.
If you are not relatively old(and 30s goes as young as adults can), you should be responsible for yourself, your finances and your decisions. Pension guarantees, and handing over whole life's work and savings because they other person wanted out feels not only excessive, but also devoid of any logical sense.
Exactly. Especially in modern times. Women have equal rights now... which is hugely deserved.... but they don't have equal responsibility? That later part no longer makes sense.
I’d argue that equal rights aren’t yet global nor fully manifested even in places where they’re intended.
Look at studies around division of labour within North American homes and it appears women are still tending to take on most homemaking responsibilities. There are interesting psychological and potentially biological factors involved.
One take on this is that women do a lot of “hidden” labour. What men do is often very obvious and readily apparent. Women take on tasks more related to planning, preparing, organizing, or otherwise using mental energy and time to improve quality of life for their families. For the family it just seems like things are normal; it isn’t evident that a person went out of their way to ensure things went better. This work is actually quite demanding and often invisible and unappreciated. It can often lead to reduced time for self care, sleep, eating, etc.
Women aren't obligated to do the work you describe. They often do but they don't need to do it.
The man needs to fill his gender role fully by raw obligation. It is not a choice. It's a biological requirement expressed by women in mating preferences. It's a strong preference and pretty much Universal behavior among women.
Men impose no such requirement on women. So what you will see is that whether women do what you say or not varies widely. I lived in a family where my mother didn't plan anything and she wasn't diligent about making sure everything was smooth. She was chill about everything. Didn't mean our family was dysfunctional. That's just her, and she could be this way because my dad didn't care. But if my dad wanted to become a house husband? The marriage is over if that choice is ever made.
Either way. The split should be made by proof of work. Not hypothetical anecdotes from either of us. Historical Income is the only raw evidence of it.
And I'd go further to say. If a woman doesn't demand equal responsibility then she doesn't deserve equal rights. That goes for men too. Unfortunately male dating preferences are rather lax, but that's another story about another problem.
I agree, to a point. Everything should certainly be a case-by-case basis.
We’re also in complicated times because social norms aren’t as dependable as they were, once. Family structures are changing. Roles are changing for many people. My kids experience around the home is already far different from mine, and I believe it’s the case for most of their friends as well. Family structure in 20 years could be significantly different from what it was 20 years ago. The need to evaluate case-by-case will probably only increase.
Your point about equal responsibility and equal rights is a good one. I suppose my position is that a lot of hidden labour can be responsibility, and it can often be important and overlooked. Yet, it’s not as though men never share in this, or that being a primary provider doesn’t come with its own hidden labours. For example, the insane amount of learning required to stay competitive and relevant in my role - we’d very likely have a smaller income if I didn’t fit this in and move my career forward. It’s all very complicated, nuanced stuff.
At the end of the day though, I agree. If someone isn’t actively pursuing equal responsibility for themselves and their partner, they’re likely not equally entitled.
In a divorce it's much more about the kids than it is about the wife. The kids get stability in a divorce. Where possible kids live in their home with their primary carer, don't have to move to a new school etc.
Why is the wife the primary carer? It starts because the husband can't get pregnant or breastfeed. It's supplemented by the likelihood that he's already the highest earner, which generally meant that he slept on so he could work the next day, while she is more likely to lose sleep nursing a crying baby.
Biology is a reality. Reality is literally sexist, and women get the rough deal in almost every way. I wouldn't want that at any price. People think they can opt out of biology these days, but that's a luxury belief that comes crashing down when sex and reproduction comes up.
I can't imagine risking getting pregnant because of sex. I can't imagine having to be pregnant for 9 months for every kid, impacting my health. I honestly don't even want to imagine the painful, stressful and risky job of giving birth. I can't imagine lactating, and therefore being the one who can instantly feed a crying baby at night. And eventually losing out on a career because I'm tied to the home for 8 years straight to raise 3 kids.
Having said that, this norm, which has obvious and sensible roots in human history, is abused. And it is somewhat dated in some countries today where there equal parental leave for mother's and fathers, breast feeding stations at work, creches etc. But how many women, even in first world countries have those luxuries? And is childbearing and rearing not still extremely sexist by definition? Yes! Unless you're rich enough to pay a surrogate. But then it's still "some woman" taking on the physical discomfort and risk, albeit for money.
So, prime example: Heather Mills getting millions out of Paul McCartney was totally unfair because she didn't take a career break and lose out because she was raising their kids while he made his money.
Totally agreed biology IS a factor here. The problem is biology doesn't come with a label and sometimes it's not clearly designed for a singular concept.
There's no Label on exactly which parent is supposed to be the better care taker and maybe there's not supposed to be a clear answer here. But there is this:
Divorce is about people not wanting to live and share their life together, it is a union where both parties should benefit (why else go into such an agreement).
In many cases after a divorce the man does not get to see his children due to the women getting more money the less the man take care of the children. This is really bad for the children, research show that children do a lot worse the less they have contact with both parents.
In the modern western society (Europe/USA) the men get the worst deal and this show in almost every respect (93% men in prisons, double the amount of drug users, single custody (80/20). Women also live longer, die less often of work relegated injuries. In general women gets taken care of by society to a greater extent than men.
I don't know where you live but that's not how it works most places. I know lots of divorced people. They don't live together any more. The woman gets full custody of the kids for all the reasons I mentioned above, but again, it's more about what the kids want. Even if they choose to live with their mother the father does get to see his kids. But he can't continue living with his ex, and they both live busy lives and have other relationships, so he can't just drop in to see the kids whenever he likes. Which is why they decide on a schedule. That's how it works with almost every divorced couple I know.
In my nearly 40 years I’ve never seen a case where a woman got everything and actually got everything. It’s rhetoric. Sometimes men get unfair custody arrangements which leads to difficult support arrangements, but this is still not taking everything.
She got the house. Usually for American families that's the majority of their wealth. A huge majority. A split would mean selling the house. But that didn't happen.
In my family, my wife would get the house because although she has 5 degrees and a relatively good career with the federal government, I typically earn 2x more than she does. I can buy my own house if necessary. She can’t. It’s not for lack of trying. She earns more than all of her friends, and most of my friends for that matter. She would get the house because any other option would harm her and the kids.
This could have been the case for them as well. It seems likely to me. Getting the house when you have low income potential isn’t a “win”; it’s being thrown a life boat.
Why would it harm her kids? You can buy a house anytime according to uou. And why should she get the kids? She's better than you by virtue of you being male?
How about people make that judgement based off of evidence not gender.
Additionally my stance isn't that men should get everything. My stance is wealth should be divided according to contribution. Which is in alignment to what you're describing.
My point still stands though. For the overwhelming majority of people and likely munger, the house is the majority of wealth.
And the best case for the kids in this scenario is for the parents to divorce but allow charlie munger to still own half of the house and live in it. That's best for the kids. Best for the kids is not meeting his wife's demands of forcing him to move out and making her own daughter watch him become pathetically destitute. I would hate my own mother if she did that, I cannot respect that even in my own parent.
Right, it seems like we’re mostly on the same page.
I definitely don’t mean to imply my wife would get sole custody. I think both parents should be given equal opportunity to do their best, and anything else will inevitably harm the kids in some shape or form.
What I meant is that if my wife didn’t have adequate housing, it would be bad for her bad the kids on her time with them. If we separate, I could readily use my income and credit to find adequate housing in a way that she couldn’t. As such, finding some arrangement in which she keeps the house would be best for her financial situation and for the kids’ experience as well.
I definitely don’t think moms are entitled to more time or more wealth. I’d expect equal custody of our kids. The housing part is just a result of our particular situation; it would work fine for us. This might not work well at all for others, and if that’s the case, they should do something else. Hopefully that makes sense.
Whenever I want to give an example about American capitalism...I always look to Buffett and Munger as examples. These are people who invested and created long-term value for shareholders, building up economies along the way.
The antithesis of crypto bros selling tulip bubbles and some tech companies selling overpriced stocks based on hype. We need more Mungers in the world as the current gen die of old age.
What? This sounds like it waz a company that ran a loyalty program for retailers. How is that anything like a tulip mania? Sounds like jist a normal, legit business
They invested in opportunities that provided value for them, but this not the same as value investing. They got special deals on stocks unavailable to ordinary investors, like in 2008.
I have a Munger quote on my corkboard behind my monitor, which I read every so often and try to embody:
> Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life... self-pity is not going to improve the situation... If you just take the attitude that, however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can, I think that works
Every plan should be on the table to provide more safe, affordable, community-oriented housing than is available today. Artificial light and ventilation in bedrooms are routine (e.g., every skyscraper in the winter) and should not have been a dealbreaker, especially if this is one choice out of many for the students.
"Imagine taking out much smaller student loans, to live in a space with vastly improved common areas, and having your own isolated space to sleep instead of having to share it with 1-2 others."
To be clear, I think the building is awful and fails at most of its stated goals, but I think the goals themselves were solid.
When is it that "hackers" and people into doing risky businesses started getting so into in the most boring, most conservative investor of all time?
That tells you enough about how this whole segment of the population jumped the shark and just started worshiping the same version of success as Wall Street.
The day HN shows a black banner for him, that site is officially over.
> When is it that "hackers" and people into doing risky businesses started getting so into in the most boring, most conservative investor of all time?
I won't comment on the general sentiment of your comment, but I will take exception to your characterisation of Munger as "the most boring, most conservative investor of all time".
Munger throughout his life Munger came up with many interesting (and sometimes controversial) ideas, he even made some fairly risky speculative investments. For example just in recent history he was looking to invest in building windowless dorms to much push back and outrage. He also made a very risky leveraged bet on Alibaba which was far from conservative.
Yup, the shitty dorm is indeed the one thing that stands out, of recent memory. Not sure that helps his case. That he made one uncharacteristically risky bet isn't exactly proof of anything, either. I'll happily grant you that my language was hyperbolic, however.
"Of course" the kind of investing Buffett and Munger do/did is the point here, not investing in general. Y Combinator is 1) early stage 2) tech. Neither of which are what Buffett and Munger cared about. You could make a good case that Buffett and Munger are the most "anti-tech" index around, almost a perfect YC hedge.
I don't understand the outrage over this. Are windows a major selling point of dorm rooms? When I was in college i don't recall dorm windows being that important. I was studying or elsewhere most of the time anyway.
I have noticed very online communities were outraged about this and other people I knew in real life weren't. I wonder if it's because people who dominate HN and reddit are more likely to spend their college life in their dorm, where a windowless environment would naturally get depressing very quickly.
My dorm room was windowless when I went to university and I didn't notice because I was only there when it was dark anyway. But I remember I got the flu once and was inside for a while and I very distinctly recall that the lack of natural lightcycle began to take its toll. Still, cheaper room and board would be my preference.
I'm going to assume your comment is in good faith. In which case, yes, they are more important than almost anything else. Modern humans spend more and more time indoors, and this has catastrophic consequences on our mental and physical health. Even in properly sized apartments, most of us have too much CO2 in our rooms. But worse (and especially in the US), there is all manner of ghastly outgassing from furnitures, fumes from cooking, germs from other people and whatnot. This is in buildings that are not too cramped to begin with (unlike Munger hall).
Not every college student is an outgoing, life-of-the-party, loves hiking type. And the trend thanks to the ubiquity of screens means more and more teenagers are shut-ins. In which case, the deleterious effects of no sunlight and no fresh air are even worse, especially at a developmentally-important age.
But what is worse is the hubris of billionaires who think they know best. It's what Maciej Ceglowski calls the lack of imagination at the top. What do the billionaires of our society, our overlords, want for the rest of us? What are their hopes and dreams, their utopia? Elon Musk wants to terrorise Mars with nasty bacteria from Earth. Bezos wants to run driverless cars around the city to replace public transport. And copy Musk. Page and Brin want to cure ageing, cowards unprepared to die both of them. Dipshit billionaires want shitty things like AI assistants who see and hear everything, lithium cars instead of walkable cities and trains. They want us to have Tide buttons in our houses so we can order it like a Pavlovian monkey. Dipshit billionaires convinced we're living in a simulation. Assholes buying bug-out bunkers in New Zealand. Or fuckers like Altman hoarding gold by the tonne, and gas masks from the IDF, while they pillage and rape San Francisco and its former residents shit on the streets and then sleep there.
And now, they even want to take away our sunlight and our fresh air. Even though the architects telling them otherwise railed against the idea, and resigned. Hubris like this gave us open offices. They want their chattel to be well-behaved and do what it's told. Sit in your privacy free 1m2 'office', drowning in the din made by your fellow plebs, during the day, and sleep in your windowless prison in the night.
> they are more important than almost anything else
I don’t think I had a window that wasn’t immediately blacked out until my mid twenties. And I always went for cheaper accommodation to have more cash on hand over luxuries I didn’t use nor value.
Congratulations? Now, what does that have to do with anything?
Oh wait, you thought that just because you were speaking "your truth" it should automatically be used to override research, discard statistics, override policy and make decisions for a teenage population?
> just because you were speaking "your truth" it should automatically be used to override research, discard statistics, override policy and make decisions for a teenage population?
Yes. Nobody is converting every building to a windowless room. Just providing choices.
Also, few opposing these plans care about the air quality in actual dorm rooms, nor quality of life of the people for whom they're making decisions with N = 4 studies sporting error bars the height of the Empire State building. They’re looking to win awards with illustrations. Or score brownie points on an adjacent class statement. (Consider the context within which this debate is occuring.)
so much envy and jealousy over someone's wealth that you must find ONE disagreeable/controversial thing from that person (Charlie munger was probably hard to do so for) and do some character assassination. maybe you should improve your way of thinking, you might live a healthier live.
That tells you about as much as you need to know about the guy, doesn't it?
Incredibly successful, and yet a penny pinching tasteless bore until the bitter end. At least "robber barons" of the past built things that looked good.
That he's worshiped around these parts of the internet is truly embarrassing and sometimes makes me question how I ended up here.
I actually agreed with his reasoning on this and don't think it was motivated by greed at all.
Firstly it would have been cheaper for the students. But secondly and more importantly, the buildings did have windows, it was only the dorms themselves which didn't, but the reasoning for this was that were primarily built for sleeping so he argued they didn't need windows. And not requiring windows meant that each student would get their own room and would not need to share. The building was designed so that when not sleeping the students would make use of the communal areas which did have windows.
You don't have to like it, but it wasn't a completely stupid idea. The main problem really was just that the idea of a billionaire who wanted to build dorms without windows to save on development costs was too tasty of a story for the media to not run with.
Speaking as a person with an architecture degree, it is, in my opinion, plainly a completely stupid idea. I cannot imagine one person I have ever met with similar professional training who would consider it anything other than completely stupid.
As a person who hasn’t paid any attention to his corner of the finance sector, this horrible dorm was my introduction to the man. My immediate conclusion was that he rose to the level of his incompetence. I may yet read his speech on decisionmaking biases, but it will be with a degree of skepticism about whether it is cooked in its own juices.
Natural light, fresh air, second means of egress, bla bla.
The egregious thing is it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect. It’s like if you wanted to make a safer car by building it out of 500mm thick concrete. Oh, it’d be safe alright, but slow, wallowy, dangerous for others, poor gas mileage. Fast downhill, I guess. Wouldn’t be any better as an EV. It might be good for a few people, apparently.
Others might disagree, but I still don't think you've provided a good explanation for why you believe it's "plainly a completely stupid idea".
Your argument is:
> it tries to solve a complex problem by overweighting a single aspect.
But it does solve the problem? And unlike your concrete car example, the only downside here is that students won't have natural light in their dorms, which as many people in this thread have suggested probably isn't as big of a problem as having to share a room for many (perhaps most) students.
I think it's fine to say you don't like it and perhaps in most cases are better trade-offs that could be made, but it seems to me that for some people who just want to use their dorm for sleeping this trade-off does work. Would you not recognise this?
Sure, I recognize "some" people may be OK with no windows. How many is that? Lacking empirical data at hand, let's just look around. How many windowless bedrooms have you seen? I don't think I'm extrapolating from too few data points when I suggest the answer is, statistically, zero.
It's not just a couple of rooms, it's thousands (iirc).
The overweighting is out of all proportion and doesn't reflect common experience. Further, students tend to lack money and choices. Here is a choice between bad or worse. Even I would choose a windowless cell over sleeping rough. I would choose to eat bugs over starving. Must it come to this on a university campus?
I was just on a campus this past weekend and half the windows were blacked out by the residents themselves. Natural light shining into where you sleep is overrated.
I really dislike the "Light On Two Sides Of Every Room" pattern of Christopher Alexander, which is ideally accomplished with two externally facing windows on different walls. Windows compromise how I would like to layout the room's interior to my own preferences. I don't care what an architect envisioned for a generic human habitability, I want a space to feel habitable to me. Most of the time that means eliminating natural light.
That is, of course, your completely legitimate individual choice. If there’s a window, you can block it. If, on the other hand, there is no window and you want one, this is more difficult to resolve.
Alexander and his team absolutely expected people to adapt the patterns to individual preferences, and so stated right up front. As a matter of general preferences, “light on two sides” was found through diligent research to be a “deep and inescapable property of a well-formed environment”. So if you’re designing a habitation for thousands of people, maybe lean heavily that way.
Of course, and there's a lot to like about Alexander's approach. Though while designers may lean heavily one way at first, maybe they could also sample the perspective of the actual thousands of people who will occupy the space before construction starts? Priors are just that: priors. They are meant to be updated to posteriors, whether by an individual, or whether by thousands of people. Sometimes the update will be minimal no matter what sub-population you sample, which is a good sign something is actually deep and inescapable, but sometimes it will be rather large because even thousands of people can share a few specific characteristics not so prevalent in a random general population sample where the prior came from and which absolutely affect what feels habitable to them.
e.g. Active college students, so also mostly young, mostly unmarried, freshly liberated from the parental household.. And of course the main activities of the building and its rooms, like sleep vs work, should be considered more strongly before applying a general pattern. I don't mean to assert that form should always follow function, though, or that architects don't already consider inescapable tradeoffs, which by their nature some people won't like the decisions because they would have traded differently all else equal.
On a tangent, I was reminded of a funny architecture crime. CS students at MIT got a wacky Gehry building (the Stata Center) while the architects have and keep a very normal and tasteful building (the Rogers Building). Gehry was even sued at some point because the building had functional issues. That goes back to the point about windows: frequently it's actually not enough to just block a window. They change the environment more than just letting in light or not, they affect things like temperature (sometimes for the better! Ability to open one for a breeze or window AC is a blessing in many rooms), humidity, structural soundness, and ease of mold growth. When you have a window or two in the bedroom that you block out, it still affects where you can place things because of those other concerns.
> If, on the other hand, there is no window and you want one
You rent a different apartment. I don't know what's so difficult about this concept with regard to his building and the need for some people to call it a hellscape. He's trying to offer a less expensive place for people to live for a couple years while they go to school.
A dorm room is not a habitat. It is just one room that someone will occupy for part of their day, mostly while asleep. He hasn't blocked out the sun.
Get off your high horse. You don’t know what everybody wants. To choose between having a dorm mate or having no windows I would absolutely pick no windows.
It’s not a high horse, it’s an educated horse. If you want to live in a box, go for it. Students, especially poor ones, don’t always have a meaningful choice in the matter.
Why not make the coffin-rooms half height too? People sleep lying down, right? All that wasted space.
But it's not so much a "story" considering the reasoning is still motivated by cost savings. I don't really care to condemn "greed", to be honest. I'm mostly baffled by how terrible those rich people are at spending money.
Why doesn't a billionaire like Charlie Munger want to be remembered for building the most lavish building with the most incredible experience ever on the campus, instead of the one that optimizes for a problem with constraints that are mostly made up ("it might cost too much money for Charlie Munger")? It's just straight up dumb.
That's probably the whole point - they "just sleep" in their small single occupancy rooms and do most of their socializing in attractive common areas.
If you're wondering how the kids are going to hook up - well, window or not, single-occupancy beats the hell out of literal room-mates, which was my dorm experience. And we sure as hell found a way.
If you ask students whether they'd rather have a windowless private room or a shared room with a window, what do you think the breakdown will be?
According to Munger that was, indeed, the whole point. His dorm design focused on making the common areas nice places where people would enjoy spending time, while optimizing the dorm rooms for bed-related activities. It seems like a reasonable strategy.
Two years and two roommates, they literally only spent their time in our shared room when they went to bed. 95% of waking hours, they were in communal area or classes. Myself, on the other hand, I liked my window and full room for half the price. Although we really need to figure out the communal area for society, because bars, parks, and cafes in the US are not even close to cutting it for how communal people are in college.
Munger was the guy who kept Buffet at least somewhat grounded. It's relevant because it's true.
Or Peter Thiel. Or Larry Ellison. Or Jack Dorsey. Musk is just the most relevant example.
We've taken the mahogany-and-tweed businessmen who realized that at some level they had a responsibility to not be _complete_ assholes to the society and systems that created them, and replaced them with business cult figures.
Would Munger and Buffet make layoffs despite having billions? Sure. But they actually _believed_ in the system and would work to protect it in a way that protected their interests as well as the interests of others. See how BH handled Goldman Sachs vs. how Peter Thiel handled SVB, or how Musk handled the takeover of Twitter.
How was buffet ungrounded? If anything he was too conservative and his real estate still has predatory loans. The recent gains from BH are due to new management to the tech industry from other managers.
in his early days, Buffett made is money by buying "cigar butts", the analogy being that you can pull a cigar out of the ashtray for free and get one more puff.
These were trash companies that Buffett could wring for one more dollar before they inevitably expired. The problem was that it didn't scale. Munger revolutioned Buffetts method by essentially teaching him to buy great companies are fair prices rather than fair companies at great prices.
I completely agree. Read about Buffet’s favorite investment: See’s Candies. They bought a beloved, family-owned brand, cut costs, and jacked up prices. What does that sound like to you? It’s the typical private equity playbook that’s almost universally derided. Buffet and Munger were the original pioneers of PE. Their legacy is not positive.
The current CEO of See's is Pat Egan. Prior to this, Egan was an SVP at NV Energy, another Berkshire company. It's a pretty crazy coincidence that the CEO of See's would be an existing Berkshire employee if Berkshire had no influence in how the company was run.
so much envy and jealousy over someone's wealth that you must find ONE disagreeable/controversial thing from that person (Charlie munger was probably hard to do so for) and do some character assassination. maybe you should improve your way of thinking, you might live a healthier live.
>only the young and feeble minded live in absolute
If you could save $100 a day it would take 27,397.26 years to reach $1 billion. No human is so productive to earn that in only decades or even years.
Facts are absolutes, only an idiot would deny facts.
>the covid shot that saved your life was supported by investments
First: Pablo Escobar financed an hospital, doesn't mean he's a good person and drug dealing is a good thing
Second: I bet they met a lot a money from the vaccine, somebody has to pay for these profits, means this somebody lacks the money elsewhere. Not all went the way of AstraZeneca and renounced profit but AstraZeneca only had a vaccine because the BMG foundation convinced Oxford to sell their vaccine instead of giving it away for free as initially planned.
Third: Corona was an equalizer. Unlike climate change Corona also hit the rich and many of them are in the especially endangered age range and Corona hit them now and not in 10, 20, 30 years like climate change.
So the invest was also to save their lives.
Fourth: how many investments are done in things that harm humanity, for instance who is funding all those climate change denial think tanks.
Billionaires mean to much power for single people with democratic control. Just look at the damage the Koch brothers did.
Billionaires are financial dictators.
He literally had a fiduciary duty as a board member to his companies to maximize profits above all else, including human decency. The windowless dorms were intended to minimize the cost of construction of the housing his donated millions subsidized.
Acquired podcast got to do one of (possible the) last interviews with him a month ago for anyone looking for recent content from him: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/charlie-munger
Also Stripe Press is releasing just next week a book (technically re-release of an older book) on his collected thoughts: https://press.stripe.com/poor-charlies-almanack