https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortho-diethynylbenzene_dianion

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/basically-record-breakin...

So there is no use/will be no direct use because A. It is so reactive that it can't be in contact with pretty much anything else w/o reacting and B. there is no way to make it in any meaningful quanity - even micrograms would be exceedingly difficult. There might be some interesting theoretical/computational implications, but that's not my field of expertise. (and it seems to be claimed by pretty much every paper regardless)

Basically everyone in the world is dying to give Warren Buffet their money so he'd invest it for a fee. The reason he is now worth $81B and not $162B is that every investment strategy has a maximum AUM it can support, and trying to use more money than that will just lower your returns. Buffet is so amazing because he can reach consistent good results with such a huge AUM, by employing a strategy that acquires entire large-cap companies and grows them.

These are not mutually exclusive. Anyway, more on the latter:

"Berkshire’s more anomalous cost of leverage, however, is due to its insurance float. Collecting insurance premia up front and later paying a diversified set of claims is like taking a 'loan.' Table 3 shows that the estimated average annual cost of Berkshire’s insurance float is only 2.2%, more than 3 percentage points below the average T-bill rate.

...

In essence, we find that the secret to Buffett’s success is his preference for cheap, safe, high-quality stocks combined with his consistent use of leverage to magnify returns while surviving the inevitable large absolute and relative drawdowns this entails. Indeed, we find that stocks with the characteristics favored by Buffett have done well in general, that Buffett applies about 1.6-to-1 leverage financed partly using insurance float with a low financing rate, and that leveraging safe stocks can largely explain Buffett’s performance."

http://docs.lhpedersen.com/BuffettsAlpha.pdf

But my point about leverage was that Buffet could raise as much money as he believes he can put to good use and since he earns fees as well as interest losing a few years wouldn't mean as much as the article claims, the thing about the specific leverage trick he is famous for is just an anecdote and my point doesn't depend on it... I think?

Doesn't that just provide more support for the author's thesis?

In our world there are many people who want him to take their money and he did until he felt he couldn't use any more and then he stopped taking more money, and I am saying in the hypothetical world where he would be worth $24k at 30, by 60 there would be many people who want him to take their money and he would take as much as he think he can put to good use and then stop taking new money, and he would be worth about the same.

Of course, this is a bit of an exaggeration. There is some luck involved, both in the sense of his decisions playing out well and in the sense of him managing to put himself in positions where his personal investment skill is measured and recorded so he can later use it to attract investors in his own fund.

Also, at 20 you can take chances that you might not be able to afford at 30, by which time you may be starting a family, etc' etc'.

But I'm saying that Buffet, Simmons, all these consistently successful investors - their net worth is uncorrelated to how much money they were worth in the year when they started their fund, because there's always more people wanting to throw money at them than they could use, and they make money from fees as well as compound interest so they can play catch up to their millionaire-at-30-counterfactual-self pretty quickly.

And while "compound interest is a strong force of nature" is a very correct claim, all exponential growth processes I've seen in nature eventually flatten, so you shouldn't look at the world purely from that perspective. Buffet succeeded mostly because he is extremely talented and had some luck. Bezos succeeded mostly because he is extremely talented and had some luck. Antibiotics succeeded mostly because they save lives a lot. Radar, assembly lines, jets, rockets.

I mean, I've served as an engineer in a military force at a time of emergency. I've seen how much of a boost there is to inventiveness and getting things done when everyone starts thinking about winning instead of not being sued/etc'. I think our unit did about a year's worth of work in every week of a state of emergency. But we still would have gotten that work done.

I guess I'm saying I fully agree with the post's moral but strongly disagree with everything the author said to justify it. Maybe I should be more charitable.

Even in this case, isn't the author's thesis still valid? Don't focus on what the already successful person is doing right now, focus on what they did when they were in your position - i.e. young and scrappy.

"[...] it seems like you're implying [...] that there's some natural limit to wealth that Buffet would have hit in either timeline."

Yes, that's the implication. People give him more money as long as he can produce excess returns. At some point, he can no longer produce excess returns. That point is (theoretically) independent of his starting position - his knowledge/skills/luck allow him to invest, say, $100B successfully, but no more. So the reason he doesn't manage more isn't that he started with less, it's that this is the actual limit of his abilities.

(That's what parent is saying, I'm not 100% sure of this because I'm not 100% of how this plays out in a public company, etc. He's not a typical hedge-fund manager. But parent is probably pretty close to right).

It's true that Buffet did use insurance float. That basically became his principal, which he then compounded through investing.

This writer wasn't using Macs in the '90s.

Not crucial to the argument, I know, but seriously, Apple was famously inconsistent.

If only this question had asked for 8x8x8x8x8x8x8x8 instead... that's (2⁸)³=2²⁴=16777216, which many programmers would know. :-) (for example because it's the number of IP address in a /8 network, or the number of colors in a 24-bit color space, or the number of bytes addressable on by the Intel 286)

Edited with typographical correction pointed out a by commenter below (thanks!).

8^9 = 2^27, so 1000 * 1000 * 2^7 = 128,000,000.

    2^10 ~= 1_000 (2.5% error)
    2^20 ~= 1_000_000 (4% error)
    2^30 ~= 1_000_000_000 (7% error)

With this framework you have good anchors for all 2^(5k), which means you only ever have to divide/multiply by at most 8 to get a good approximation for any power of two. Now you can impress your coworkers with your amazing ability to fudge powers of two in your head.

I don’t do it in fives, I just remember that 2^10 ~= 1000, then memorize the powers from 0 to 9. Sounds like GP does the same.

(Anyone else play the old DC Heroes RPG?)

log2(8)=3 ... 3*8 = 24

To this day, Buffett regrets his display of petty rage and wishes he'd taken the money he used to spite Berkshire Hathaway's CEO and invested in insurance companies instead. As filthy rich as he is, he could have been even richer (about $200 billion richer), and that bothers him.

Slight correction. It was not that he was fond of the CEO, rather he was angry with the CEO for undercutting him on a deal. Here's the exact story from wikipedia:

"In 1964, Stanton (then CEO) made an oral tender offer of $11 1⁄2 per share for the company to buy back Buffett's shares. Buffett agreed to the deal. A few weeks later, Warren Buffett received the tender offer in writing, but the tender offer was for only $11 3⁄8. Buffett later admitted that this lower, undercutting offer made him angry. Instead of selling at the slightly lower price, Buffett decided to buy more of the stock to take control of the company and fire Stanton (which he did). However, this put Buffett in a situation where he was now majority owner of a textile business that was failing."

Link to one of his video lectures : Arithmetic, Population, and Energy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vII-GxsrR2c

Also, that does still sound like it could be an epiphany for some. It's not immediately obvious to apply game strategies to real world scenarios. I would consider that type of analogous thinking to be one of the hallmarks of cleverness.