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The following is is OT, but I suppose Bill Ackman is a familiar name here. What he says here

https://x.com/BillAckman/status/204054755367519453...

I think is very enlightening.


P.S.: It reminds me on the 10(!) years long lawsuit which ended last year and which I financed, to help an American friend to reclaim money she lend 1999/2000 to a childhood friend to enable him to make his first movie, about a wedding; the guy who then said "Forever grateful ... You are my Angel who made all possible" became a wellknown Hollywood director, working with Charlie Sheen, Whoopie Goldberg etc. --- but somehow all those years "forgot" to pay back his loans to her. 10 years of dealing with US lawyers and the US justice system I will never forget.

Lesson: If someone cheats you in the US: Accept it and walk away. Don´t try to claim your rights in the legal system. You might win in the end (we did), but it´s just not worth it, as you have incredible work, stress on relationships - and in the end no matter how right you are after all the expenses you might get just peanuts. If your name is not Bill Ackman, you can´t afford it.

Sorry for ranting, but this is personal - and not the most brilliant side of the US, see Bill Ackman´s post.

His is an interesting tale. Further complicated in one way that he does not really mention, the perhaps unprovable possibility that his nephew may indeed be a dick.

Jim

" His is an interesting tale. Further complicated in one way that he does not really mention, the perhaps unprovable possibility that his nephew may indeed be a dick.

Jim"


Good morning, bud, you think Ackman is the kind of guy who wouldn't do very vigorous due dili prior to taking his position? Come on man. ::))

Ackman raises valid concerns about employment litigation—and it’s very sad to hear he’s dealing with an incredibly difficult family situation.

But let me see if I’ve got this right.

Bill Ackman says he largely ignored a family office for years while headcount, turnover, and costs ballooned—despite managing mostly passive investments.

One employee was paid over $1M annually for an administrative role: Shows up to office 3 days a week

Now there’s a severance dispute involving that person, and the takeaway is a broader indictment of “the system.”

But isn’t the more relevant point:

If you tolerate weak oversight, rising costs, and unclear accountability, you increase the odds of exactly this kind of outcome.

Which makes the current moment especially ironic.

Because, as you know, Ackman is promoting a Berkshire-like investment vehicle—with layers of fees Berkshire investors have never had to bear—he’s also describing an operation where cost discipline appears to have been an afterthought.

You don’t find $1M, three-day-a-week roles in Omaha.

Berkshire without cost discipline isn’t Berkshire. It’s just… expensive.

" You don’t find $1M, three-day-a-week roles in Omaha.

Berkshire without cost discipline isn’t Berkshire. It’s just… expensive."


Buffett agreed to give half his life's work to the Gates Foundation, before he amended the agreement, let's be serious.

Further complicated in one way that he does not really mention, the perhaps unprovable possibility that his nephew may indeed be a dick.

Of course it’s possible but why even say that if you have no evidence one way or another?

What Ackman highlights isn’t just one dispute, it’s one example of a much broader problem with the system where it’s cheap to threaten litigation but expensive to fight it, leading companies to settle again and again, even when claims are weak.

Living in Florida, we’ve seen first hand how this plays out. FL once generated ~80% of all U.S. homeowners insurance lawsuits while accounting for < 10% of claims, and home insurance premiums exploded as a result. The previous racket was roofing companies teaming up with lawyers to sue insurance companies for, what were in many cases, weak/frivolous claims they wouldn't have otherwise paid out.

And the exact same thing happened with auto insurance. Lawyers took advantage of FL's mandated $10K personal injury protection insurance to file countless frivolous lawsuits, driving auto insurance rates to the highest in the country while the lawyers enrich themselves. Thankfully, the trend has finally slowed and started reversing after legislation that has put some common sense restraints, but that's just one state tackling this beast.

And what Ackman is describing is a less visible, but no less insidious, issue that also becomes a tax on consumers - because companies don’t just absorb the legal costs of lawsuits like these, they pass them on.

Collectively, this results in higher insurance premiums, higher prices of products, and lower wages for all over time. Nationwide, the US tort system is estimated to cost the over $500B/yr. That translates to ~$4,000 per household!

Not all of that is abuse, but if even part of that is driven by low-merit, settlement-pressure claims, that’s potentially thousands per year in hidden costs consumers are likely having to absorb.

In other words: this isn’t just a legal issue, it’s a quiet, ongoing tax on everyday families.

Nationwide tort reform is desperately needed to stop this trend from worsening.

" And what Ackman is describing is a less visible, but no less insidious, issue that also becomes a tax on consumers - because companies don’t just absorb the legal costs of lawsuits like these, they pass them on.

Collectively, this results in higher insurance premiums, higher prices of products, and lower wages for all over time. Nationwide, the US tort system is estimated to cost the over $500B/yr. That translates to ~$4,000 per household!

Not all of that is abuse, but if even part of that is driven by low-merit, settlement-pressure claims, that’s potentially thousands per year in hidden costs consumers are likely having to absorb.

In other words: this isn’t just a legal issue, it’s a quiet, ongoing tax on everyday families.'


BINGO you get it partner. Been there done that, I didn't pay her or her sbag ambulance chasing lawyer one dime. End of story. That was in 1991.

Of course it’s possible but why even say that if you have no evidence one way or another?

That's exactly my point. We have no evidence one way or the other, and neither does Mr Ackman. His post leaves out that rather important point...it's all about how he's an easy rich target for a scam, which is likely true and unfortunate, but also maybe the accusations are valid and it's not a scam.

I have to agree that the ask seems a bit outrageous, but that could be good strategy with both valid and fake accusations, so it doesn't change the key unknown.

Jim

Hi Jim (with my apologies to all for the interuption), I *think* I just emailed you privately from this same post, but it's hard to say, so here is a public reply with no other information in it :)

Whafa!

How are you!!!!!

Whafa!

How are you!!!!!


Hey! It's amazing how the old "paste with italics tags" macro is still so serviceable in my muscle memory. Like an old friend. It was Chris, right? You, not the macro.

Gosh, where to begin. I got married in 2015, moved to the SF Bay Area, back to my hometown of Alameda (a small island off the coast of Oakland). Rescued an 1894 Queen Anne that was fairly literally crumbling to dust. Had two kids. Got a job at Kaiser Permanente and been working in there for the past 10 years or so, mostly doing internal Web Service Governance for our massive Epic installations. Wife was Dxed with Stage 4 colon cancer in early 2024. That is heavy but it's our life now, so.

In case you (or anyone else here) might be interested, I'm trying to find a novel treatments for her with computational pharmacophenomics (apparently not a spell-check dictionary word yet!) and documenting my progress at https://whafa.substack.com. There's nothing about cancer there yet because I just started, and first I am documenting the data processing platform I built to support that work. I could really use supporters, and subscribers, and domain experts(!), in case you are any of those. Briefly, I intend to train a projection into the latent semantic space of a biomed knowledge graph using Maureen's specific genetic data, of which we have lots. It's inspired by the work of David Fajgenbaum, who found a treatment for his own "uncurable" disease, and I'm following the work of a paper published just last August, 2025, where they did *exactly what I am trying to do* but with less granular patient data. I've convinced myself I can contribute meaningfully to her care after the existing treatments stop working, which is the only thing our doctors can say for certain will happen. She's turning 40 this month, and the standard of care chemo treatments, though they have saved her life to now, do not contemplate survival past 5 years.

It may seem like I have drifted way off course here, but I have not! As PART of building that data processing platform, I created a TMF archive with ~18 million posts... All of them, +/- from MessageID 10000000 in Oct 1997 through 28xxxxxx in 2010 or so. Thank goodness for the foolish API hygeine of the early 'aughts, amirite? In fact, the only reason I was confident enough to remember your first name is that I asked my AI life partner, Maple how you used to sign your messages. She confirmed it! You can check that out too at https://whafa.com; all you need is a gmail account for OAuth login. Wish I could attach a screenshot of my ETL pipeline here because I'm pretty proud of it. Oh! Here's where I announced it on the "real" TMF in their new discussion boards:

https://discussion.fool.com/t/update-and-introduct...

That may have been more than you asked for, but I'm online for a Go Live tonight. It's so nice to be in this old familiar format. Thanks much to manlobbi for making it! If you want to host 18 mil old TMF posts vintage 2010 or so, I'd happily share them!

Finally: To Jim: The only message I've received from you has been a private reply you made to my last post to you, yesterday, asking whether I had gotten your response. I responded by forwarding the email to what was stated as yours (m%%%%%%%%%h@b%%%%%%%%%e.com), saying that was the only thing I've gotten so far. If you have replied to me since then (or at all, besides that private boards reply yesterday) I haven't gotten any of it. Please email me at my user name, plus 23@gmail.com (I was 22 when I made that, and in my great wisdom, realized I wouldn't be 22 forever, hah!). Sorry I've missed your responses, but you seem to have an unusual domain to send mail from and Google can be funny with those. I checked my spam folder and searched in a few different ways, but haven't seen anything except that one message.

It may seem like I have drifted way off course here, but I have not! As PART of building that data processing platform, I created a TMF archive with ~18 million posts... All of them, +/- from MessageID 10000000 in Oct 1997 through 28xxxxxx in 2010 or so.

Wow, that's impressive!!!

I just realized something. When I first started on TMF, I was single with no immediate prospects. Since that time (1995 or thereabouts when it was still on AOL), I've married, had 5 kids, have retired, and recently had 2 grandsons! Amazing how time flies when you're having fun!

Wow, that's impressive!!!

For some reason (mostly because it was possible, I think, and I couldn't believe how easy it was) I started systematically downloading everything from the first post on, starting mid-2010. They allowed anonymous http requests, exposed the API right on the URL, used a very predictable integer PK, and anyone who posted there with any regularity "grokked" how it worked.

There were all kinds of hacks to that system; do you remember when they botched an upgrade and accidentally allowed font and color changes? They spent hours chasing down all the violating posts. I still have a reference to the original "Breakfast!" post which hit BestOf in 24pt font (and consisted of one tiny pancake.) somewhere. They tried to delete that too, of course, but thanks to the bug that didn't check to see if a post was deleted before loading the reply page, which contained an entire copy of the OP, nothing was ever *really* deleted, just hidden. That was a fine time for me.

Anyway, I grabbed everything to date in 2010 -- ~1TB in ~18 mil .html files (it took months!) -- and it sat on an external hard drive for over a decade. These AI coding tools came out right as I was starting to worry that background radiation would scramble my precious files, giving me both motivation and means to do something with it. And using this non-trivial data processing project to build and validate the platform for my wife's research project was a perfect fit. Message board posts, genetic data, they're *basically* the same, right? :D

I do deeply regret not figuring out how to do authenticated requests in batch files, because you *did* have to be logged-in to post a reply, and so could not see any "deleted" posts anonymously. So I left all of those behind. I have a little side project where I search the Internet Archive for those deleted posts, hoping I can catch a snapshot after it was posted but before it was deleted. Can't say for sure that I've recovered any that way, but I *have* found many posts there. There's just not enough time in the day to look at everything.

Good morning, if you have an easy way to find it I would love to read my old post, “ foundation sales forever effect,” thanks even if it’s too hard to find. Who knows the fools may have put me in the deceased file and deleted all my posts? ::))

Good morning, if you have an easy way to find it I would love to read my old post, “ foundation sales forever effect,” thanks even if it’s too hard to find. Who knows the fools may have put me in the deceased file and deleted all my posts? ::))

Hi, this is what I found with a *quick* search (we are getting ready for a long trip, I really shouldn't be data mining). I have 53 posts of yours, all from the BRK board, and Maple thought this was the most relevant one. It was a reply inside a larger thread; I can get you the whole tread if you like. Based on this post date, I suspect you did a lot of posting after my capture epoch. I am slowly backfilling these posts from the Internet Archive, but this is what I have now. I don't have a great way to transmit these things yet, unfortunately.

MessageID 28211852
Post Date 2010-01-07 12:55:00.000
Recs: 6
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jim, rule 10b5 came into effect in the early 2000's after I retired in 1994 so I never used it. I had to use RULE 144 and File form 4s in my 25 years of selling restricted securites. My friends who are still active have used rule 10b5. Keep in mind if you were the brokers holding these 10b5 orders to sell, in the real world, would you trade the stock from the short side, knowing you can cover your position from the Foundations when you need too or from the long side knowing the Foundations had stock to sell, every day ? It's a bit complicated but I'm sure you get my point. Buffett and Gates didn't handle this very well. Buffetts position that the FSFE, foundation sales forever effect was NOT material in a stock that trades like brkb does is wrong, flat out wrong. The 50-1 split is step one in dealing with this issue.
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Greetings Sir. I am sorry about your wife’s trials. Be as well as the fates will allow…

-Mark

“ The 50-1 split is step one in dealing with this issue.
---“. Thank you that was 16 years ago, the 50-1 provided the liquidity required to get added to several indexes.

Hey! It's amazing how the old "paste with italics tags" macro is still so serviceable in my muscle memory. Like an old friend. It was Chris, right? You, not the macro.

Yup, it's Chris. Sorry to hear about Maureen's diagnosis. I hope you find useful information that helps her care. This is a heavy thing to have happen
at 40.

I'm retired now and a grandfather. Mostly playing pickleball and goofing with embedded processors these days.
(And it is wonderful that Manlobbi has made this nice haven for those of us that enjoyed the old Fool vibe.)
Planning on holding my Berkshire stock until I need to sell it a bit at a time to cover living expenses.

Chris

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