Sure. BRK/A has a price to earnings of 8.19. It takes 8 years and 2 months for Berkshire Hathaway to make the money equivalent of its stock price. Or 12.5% ROI. That is ridiculously cheap stock. The 'intrinsic' value of a share would be a P/E of one, I suppose. The company would earn its total share price in one year. Generally speaking 1-5 means the company is not worth much or is stupid risky. 5-10 is a bargain. 10-20 is normal, depending on the industry. 20+ and you need to do some serious research because the stock is probably overpriced. It might still be worth buying, but it is a riskier gamble.

The Class A stocks just aren't split very often. So the entire market cap is not divided as many times. If you split Berkshire Hathaway stock 458,000:1, the value of the company would not change a dime. The total worth would not change, just the price of each individual share. You'd just have a lot more of them.

The reason why Berkshire Hathaway doesn't split is pretty text book. It would become more volatile because people typically move batches of stock in 100 share batches. Not many people own a hundred shares. So it trades less, and the price is more consistent. Less wild swings up or down.

It's not unsustainable. It's that the stock price is overpriced. People bet on Netflix finding ways of growing. Turns out, Netflix can't.

If Netflix cannot grow, that is absolutely fine. But it shouldn't have a P/E of 36. It should have a P/E of 15-25. So the share price should roughly half of what it currently is. Plenty of healthy companies are in that range. It'd be better for Netflix as a company long term to have a realistic stock price rather than an overpriced stock price. It's less good for current stock holders.

High schools need to cover personal economics and investing basics.

Netflix is considered a Growth stock. It's stock price is valued on how much it will grow. Its target investor demographic is someone who is willing to gamble for higher returns. Higher price to earnings is expected. Normal P/E varies on industry, but generally higher is bad. P/E is basically how many years of revenue it would take for the company to actually earn its stock price. With growth stocks, people expect the company to well, grow. They figure the overvalued P/E is justified because the company will figure out how to earn money in new ways. For example if Netflix made a successful game rental division, and brought in new revenue.

Netflix's stock is tanking because the overvalued P/E is getting corrected. People don't think Netflix will figure out ways to justify an overpriced stock price by growing. There's too much competition. They think Netflix might just become a boring normal company that makes ok money rather than finding tons of new money. Netflix has a P/E of 36. It would take 36 years of revenue for Netflix to make the equivalent of its stock price if their revenue doesn't change dramatically. This is ok for a growth company. That is insanely overpriced for a non-growth company.

When companies stop growing, they typically become dividend companies. Their P/E varies but think 10-25. They are not expected to grow, but are also expected to be more stable. Lower risk for lower reward. These companies have hit the limits of their business. So rather than dump the money into new ventures, they return the profits to the investors.

Basically, you should buy growth stocks when you're young. When you get closer to retirement, switch to dividend or stable stocks while also moving money out of stocks and into bonds. Moving everything into bonds isn't recommended, because you might live longer than expected. But on the other hand, move enough into bonds to live on comfortably.

No, buying a rifle or shotgun is not a better safety choice than buying a security container, safe or gun lock. This is horrible safety advice.

Smart guns are categorically less safe, less reliable and less child resistant than a $0-5 gun lock. Separating the ammo is not necessarily safer either unless you lock that up as well. Every gun store on the planet has gun locks for low to no cost. Police stations offer them as well. With a few calls, you could get a shoe box worth of them for no cost. Security containers are better than gun locks. A safe is better than a security container. But the bare minimum level of acceptable security is an exterior clamshell gun lock, which is included with every single new firearm. I believe by law.

Outside of the movies, snatching the gun is a bit on the rarer side. Cops are the only ones who have to deal with that and proximity based RFID protection schema would not help if you were within contact distance of the criminal. Again, poor design.

Most of the time, "snatched guns" mean the firearms are stolen when the owner was not home. Sometimes home invasion, sometimes family members selling off anything worth money, etc. Theoretically this would help with that. But again, criminals may not be the smartest individuals but I suspect they can defeat the the lockout with the magnet and glue.

For protection from kids "snatched gun", you're a hundred times better off with a safe. If you can't afford that or aren't allowed that option (apartment owners have civil rights too), every gun shop on the planet has gun locks for low or usually zero cost. Most gun stores have a bin full of them, as I believe by law every new firearm comes with one. They are great for beginner lock picking folks as well. $0-$5 gun locks are cheaper, safer and more reliable than any smart gun developed so far.

Ayep. I agree that it sounds like a death trap. A $5 gun lock (exterior clamshell model) would be cheaper, more reliable and safer. While it can be picked easily, it provides some barrier. A gun safe is obviously a lot more preferable for cold storage.

I notice the article very much overlooks that the firearm is very clearly open source design they 'borrowed' without attribution. It's the FOSS Glock knockoff of choice.

With the currently available smart guns, you just need to glue a magnet in a specific spot to disable the lockout mechanism. To disable the authentication, you just need a baby monitor or cordless phone.

Stuff like this is why I avoid smart appliances and IOT whenever humanly possible.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.defcon.org%2FDEF%252...

By popular, you mean defeated with a $20 gizmo. Or worse, is very likely to be accidentally jammed by using a baby monitor and cordless phones that use the same band. Oh, and you can get the weapon to fire sans the authentication with a magnet.

I can't imagine why folks are skeptical.

Per their site, they use an RFID tag in the ring. So you just need an RFID jammer to disable the weapon. They don't list patent numbers, but it won't take long for folks to find out the frequency. It likely will be 125 KHz or 134 KHz

You can download the jammer circuit designs here: http://www.ladyada.net/make/wa... Or get a portable SDR transmitter, and port RNG output to those two frequencies.

So... not so extremely reliable.

If you're not familiar with firearms, I can understand your confusion.

If it worked 99.999% of the time (false positive or false negative, mind), I'd love one. Mind, if it worked in the rain. Mud. Underwater. In a sandstorm, or arctic conditions. If it worked if I used the firearm as a club. With minimal maintenance. That's the standard for modern firearms, and should be.

Don't think of smart guns as a car. Think of them as the brakes on a car. You want them to absolutely work when you want above absolutely all other features. All other features, no matter how great, are minor to trivial to negative value.

I avoid smart appliances because they tend to have terrible security. I really don't want malware in a firearm. And I'd expect the first (and only) customers to be people who would be developing malware, jammers, etc.

Also, the summary is misleading. People are annoyed at smart gun development because NJ has a law on the books that if a smart gun becomes commercially available, all non-smart pistols are banned from sale after three years. The New Jersey Childproof Handgun Law does not have reliability, security or price standards. So even if you have a malware ridden death trap, by law, NJ will only allow this model to be sold. Cops would not be forced to follow said law, of course.

Correct, it's a marketing stunt. Hence the doom and gloom, "downfall of civilization", etc. To be addressed by a meaningless gesture that will accomplish nothing.

Look, anyone with an above room temperature will tell you dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere is going to have consequences. Serious ones, with long term impact. But this isn't helping and will only hurt.

Correct. The US is the largest contributor.

The issue is more that the WHO believes it has to play to China's politics and facesavings or they would be kicked out. As many significant viruses originate from China today and official government epidemiology sources are untrusted, they are worried about losing a critical foothold. I do get that logic. On the other hand, if the WHO has to sacrifice their integrity for severely moderated access anyways, I question the value of the trade.

Quite the contrary. Nuclear weapons are apparently more stable than previously believed. Originally we ballparked a 45 year lifespan. Now it looks closer to 85 years. The physics package needs swapped out more frequently. The shortest lifespan part is tritium, with a half life of 12 years. Thankfully that is easy to replace. I'm not sure why you'd think the US military would pick a design with a two week shelf life. Especially when ballistic missile submarines tend to stay out for months at a time.

The longest a nuclear weapon can be fully operational is around 10 years. They are maintained on a regular basis. National Nuclear Security Administration handles that.

No, it doesn't. The launch has to be authenticated for weapons release. You'd need a coup at the Pentagon, plus the guys in the bunker. And they'd have to hold off against the entire US military trying to kill them and detonate the nukes in flight.

I'm admittedly not sure if ICBMs have a published minimum range, but some back of the napkin math says the bare minimum range would be around 1000 miles. Unless you wanted a high altitude explosion. You could try aiming it near straight up, but they're not purpose designed for it.

On the plus side, white nationalists are pretty rare. Any number is still too high, of course. You'd need to find some white nationalists that would be capable of infiltrating the USAF and the highest ranks of the Pentagon. Mind, these would have to be both highly capable and highly suicidal people. This terrorist act would be a death sentence if successful, and life in prison or death if unsuccessful. If the action was successful, it would be significantly more damaging to their cause than their opposition. OKC Bombing kinda proved that. Mind, all of this while ensuring no one found out. White nationalist groups tend to have a high percentage of federal agents. While not impossible, the odds are low.

At this point, I'd say the most probable would be either complete idiotic accident or miscommuncation.

The best insight for why Blue Origin is having so many issues can be found here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fscienc...

- Lack of customer focus
- Lack of cost as a design constraint
- Poor cost estimating
- Lack of vertical integration
- Lack of employee motivation
- Not understanding that especially younger employees are willing to work longer and harder for passion projects rather than just a paycheck
- Giant projects instead of iterative design


Blue Origins can't and won't be competitive until they sort out their internal issues. The issue is probably too much funding, poor management hiring and lack of a strategic goal.