I am
inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken and I am often well out front
of my headlights. I am often appropriately accused of hyperbole when it
comes to the Bakken.
I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market.
I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple.
See disclaimer. This is not an investment site.
Disclaimer:
this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial,
job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read
here or think you may have read here. All my posts are done quickly:
there will be content and typographical errors. If something appears wrong, it probably is. Feel free to fact check everything.
If anything on any of my
posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find
typographical / content errors, I will correct them.
Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken, US economy, and the US market.
I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple.
And
now, Nvidia, also. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things
Nvidia. Nvidia is a metonym for AI and/or the sixth industrial
revolution.
I've now added Broadcom to the disclaimer. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Broadcom.
A map from early 1969. So much water under the bridge.
I graduated from high school in 1969.
In 1984, I was shown the first packet of information sent on an early version of Fetchit or Mosaic or something along that line (I've long forgotten the details) sent from the Pentagon to a USAF hospital in eastern Turkey.
The above map popped up on X today. This brought back a lot of memories. I vividly remember this map having read The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, c. 1989. I was a mid-level officer in USAF, transitioning from RAF Lakenheath in England to Bitburg Air Base, Germany in 1989.
I had forgotten the name of the book, but google found it for me. The book:
I lost my first copy but ordered a second copy, and then, of course, lost that one, also, over the years. I think STEM students in middle school or high school might enjoy this book.
Still available Amazon for as little as $13.
Tag: SRI (Stanford Research Institute -- Menlo Park), University of Utah, UCLA, and UCSB (UC-Santa Barbara).
Holy mackerel -- going down that rabbit hole.
From that "box" above, I went to locate the individual at University of Utah that led the effort from that location. That led me to Ivan Sutherland, see box above.
From there it was easy.
But this is amazing. Sutherland invented Sketchpad in 1962 while at MIT. A mathematician named Claude Shannon signed on to supervise Sutherland's computer drawing thesis.
That was too tempting to ignore.
AI prompt: Anthropic's Claude. Was Claude named after Claude Shannon?
first to describe the use of Boolean algebra -- essential to all digital electronic circuits -- and helped found the field of artificial intelligence;
the roboticist Rodney Brooks declared Shannon the 20th century engineer who contributed the most to 21st century technologies;
formally introduced the term "bit";
the mathematician Solomon W Golomb described his intellectual achievement as "one of the greatest of the twentieth century."
USC: my alma mater -- whoo-hoo
among much else, his work went on to inspire Tetris;
Baltimore City College high school graduate --> Johns Hopkins --> Harvard University (Ph.D., 1957) --> University of Osla --> Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech (researched military and space communications) --> joined faculty of USC in 1963; awarded full tenure two years later;
accomplishments go on and on and on for Ivan Sutherland (and, really, all these folks)
For all the reading Charlie Munger did, it appears he was reading the wrong stuff.
******************************** A Musical Interlude
Berkshire Hathaway
Chairman Warren Buffett is a longtime student of the silver market. The company made a sizable investment in silver in 1997 and 1998 when the metal was around $5 an ounce.
The company purchased 129.7 million ounces of the metal, but sold out of the position within a decade at an unspecified profit.
That holding now would be valued at about $13 billion with silver trading at $100 an ounce. Silver has tripled in price over the past year, including a 40% gain so far in 2026.
Buffett had followed the silver market for decades before the company purchased the metal in 1997.
“I bought it very early. I sold it very early. Other than that, everything I did was perfect,” Buffett said at the 2006 Berkshire annual meeting. “I was the silver king there for a while. We did make a few dollars on it. But we’re not good at the game of, when it gets into the speculative area, figuring out how far a speculative boom will go.”
The silver foray is one of several examples of Buffett making a smart call, but then selling the investment too soon. He sold most of Berkshire’s stake in Apple in 2024 and 2025 and a group of bank stocks in 2020 and 2021 at below current prices.
I guess ...
One has to wonder ...
So many story lines ...
Working backwards, does that mean his original investment cost about $65,000,000? And in 2026 would have been worth $13 billion? In 1996 I would have been about 30 years old.
Google Gemini:
The average annual rate of return for an investment that grows from $5 in 1996 to $100 in 2026 is 10.50%.
Silver:
The overall market during the same period -- from Google Gemini:
Since 2006,
Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B) has shown strong, often market-beating performance, but has largely closely tracked or slightly underperformed the S&P 500 (SPY) in the last decade, with significant outperformance during downturns like 2008 and 2022. While long-term, Berkshire's CAGR remains strong, the last 10–15 years have seen tighter competition with the S&P 500.
