Joshua Kennon is a Managing Director of
Kennon-Green & Co., a private asset management firm specializing in global value investing for affluent and high net worth individuals, families, and institutions. Nothing in this article or on this site, which is Mr. Kennon's personal blog, is intended to be, nor should it be construed as, investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell a security or securities. Investing can result in losses, sometimes significant losses. Prior to taking any action involving your finances or portfolio, you should consult with your own qualified professional advisor(s), such as an investment advisor, tax specialist, and/or attorney, who can help you consider your unique needs, circumstances, risk tolerance, and other relevant factors.
As tends to happen once every year or two, the unexpected “make the front page of Reddit” event occurred last night, in the midst of the site renovations; an inopportune time but I’ll take it. Aaron and I were watching Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell on iTunes at around 2 a.m. when I saw the MySQL server straining under an incredible amount of requests. It was the old post about the secret Coca-Cola millionaires in Quincy, Florida. Something like 90 requests a second were slamming the data center up in Michigan. Traffic source: Reddit. Short investigation later, turns out it became the number one post of the “Today I Learned” subreddit and made the overall front page of the site.
A recent experience involving my four-year-old nephew made me appreciate how powerful marketing is in motivating consumer behavior.
Marriage Equality Declared a Fundamental, Constitutional Right: My Personal Reaction to Obergefell v. Hodges It’s been almost a week since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges declaring marriage equality a fundamental right under both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. I’ve…
If you weren’t careful in drafting that patent royalty or licensing agreement, the Supreme Court just confirmed the intrinsic value of your cash flow stream is a lot smaller than you thought following its refusal to overturn an older decision from the 1960s.
You may never look at raisins the same way again. The highest court in the United States just handed individual citizens a major win in terms of personal property rights, striking down one of FDR’s New Deal programs by depriving the Federal Government of a power it has illegitimately exercised for decades. The case was called Horne et al., v. Department of Agriculture. It stemmed from The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937, which gave the Secretary of Agriculture authority to issue “marketing orders” for the purpose of maintaining stable markets in specific commodities.
On August 9th, 1995, the company behind Internet browser Netscape went public, skyrocketing as people fought to get a piece of the so-called “new economy”. It set off a buying panic among the public that lasted five years; otherwise rational men and women convinced that this time really was different, the mania feeding on itself. Anything and…
It is January 15th, 1919. You’re in Boston, Massachusetts shortly before lunchtime. Sitting at 529 Commercial Street is a three-year old tanker owned by the Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of United States Industrial Alcohol. At 50 feet high, housed within the steel body of this five-story behemoth is 26,000,000 pounds of sticky, sweet molasses; one of the most popular sweeteners…
With so much of my time spent away from the site in the past 4-6 weeks, I thought I’d give a “here’s roughly what’s been going on” round-up. I had intended for a lot of this to turn into their own stand-alone posts but this will be faster.
As time passes, ideas that were once unthinkable become mainstream. From racial equality to marriage equality, equal rights for women to voting rights for non-landowners, what issue do you think will be considered with abject horror in the future that we think commonplace today?
Now that we’re back from Chicago, I’m going to try to spend a few hours each day working on the blog upgrades we’re rolling out as part of Google’s new focus on mobile-friendly sites. With somewhere around 40% of the changes done on the backend, we’re reactivating the first of the cache tools today, combining it with the Cloudflare network to see if there are any conflicts.
