No, it hasn’t. The CIA didn’t do this under Clinton because it’s a war crime, and Cold War Republicans prided themselves on saying we were better than e.g. the Viet Cong. The Bush cadre broke the U.S. law written just a few years before by their own party[1] by adopting techniques American forces were trained could be used against them if they were captured, not things which were previously sanctioned.
Obama’s greatest moral failing was not having war crimes trials. There is a direct line between the Bush-era embrace of torture abroad and the mistreatment we’re now seeing domestically.
Out of curiosity, do you know if these events get taught in history lessons in American schools? I'm by no means throwing shade here - I'm a Brit and our history lessons barely mentioned the unending list of atrocities Britain committed in the name of empire.
A bit, but it varies some by state and most skip at least some things (do any cover labor struggles in the early 20th century?)
Ours stopped after (an extremely cursory coverage of) the ‘50s and ‘60 civil rights movement because there was no way to cover Vietnam and Nixon and such basically at all without greatly upsetting Republican parents. Anything newer than ~30 years (at the time) was treated as about as handsome-off as religion. Dunno if that’s changed.
Yepper. Trail of Tears, German/Japanese internment are all primary education topics. Now interestingly, I don't think Bush has made it into the history books yet, but I don't have kids, so can't verify current day education materials.
What I find interesting is the bits we leave out. Like we touch on the Banana Republics, but the annex of Hawaii and how that was skulduggerously done is completely skimmed over.
There was, in fact, but the proportion of German (and Italian, also) nationals and citizens of German (and Italian) descent interned was far lower compared to the population of such foreign nationals and citizens than was the case for Japanese nationals and citizens of Japanese descent.
> White people got a pass.
Relatively speaking, yes, but there still were internments, including of US citizens based on German and Italian descent. (But with more individualized review before internment or eviction from coastal areas than was true of citizens of Japanese descent.)
This is classic Buffett year, being fearful when others are greedy & building a massive war chest for when a correction inevitably occurs.
When it comes to Buffett (and Berkshire), it's really only reasonable to look at 5-year returns. 1-year or YTD are too susceptible to market sentiment rather than true value. Eg the Buffett indicator (stock market value / GDP) is 2x std dev above the norm right now -- way overpriced by historical standards.
Buffett has repeatedly said that Berkshire's size means it will no longer be able to deliver outsized outperformance. He also says that most people should invest in index funds. It is perfectly reasonable to just buy the S&P if that aligns with your financial goals.
> BRK-B's 5 year return is 2% per year more than SP500.
That said, 2% per year is generally considered a lot in diversified mutual fund / ETF land. You might not be able to charge hedge-fund level 2-and-20 fees for delivering that, but you could certainly charge multiples of what the low-cost indexers do (instead, Berkshire charges you approximately nothing). Now, Berkshire is a conglomerate, not a fund, and you could argue 2% is an appropriate risk premium for a single stock, even one as diverse as Berkshire (which is still less diverse than the S&P). But it is pretty impressive for something that is not a tech company. Those are the only things in the S&P that seem to be generating any returns these days (besides Berkshire, JP Morgan is the only other non-tech company with a market cap over $1tn, and arguably banks really are tech companies now, too).
> Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings
The public company investments are a minority of Berkshire's current value. The majority comes from wholly-owned operating companies and insurance businesses.
Another user posted the difference between sp500 and Berkshire returns in the last 2 decades. Starting with 10k in one case you end up with 160, in the other at 240. And if the 2% delta stays there, it's going to compound even further.
Also, standard deviation on Berkshire is lower than the SP500, so the second is riskier.
BRK-B is also a top-10 (currently #10) component in the S&P 500 with a 1.74% weight. They also own ~40 stocks and I think around half of them are in the S&P 500 (including Apple, Amazon, and Google, which are also top 10 components but a combined ~15% weight), so, yeah.
Kind of a niche use case, but BRK.B is nice if you want a single stock that is relatively diversified, kinda mirrors the greater market, and doesn't pay dividends.
My employer uses a shitty HSA provider (Healthequity) who doesn't provide any sort of tax reporting, and I live in a state that taxes HSAs. Investing in BRK.B instead of a broad fund is a bit riskier, but it saves me from spending an hour tabulating individual transactions when I do my taxes
You can easily transfer (or rollover) HSA funds from HealthEquity ti Fidelity. Do it at as many times as you want, but at least once per year should suffice.
You don’t even have to send anything to HealthEquity, if I recall correctly. Just send Fidelity the Transfer of Assets form and they do it all:
HealthEquity charges a fee to do this which is very annoying. I think you can avoid it with an indirect rollover but you have to space those 365 days apart (not just in different years) and I prefer to not deal with the bookkeeping
>Historically, BRK-B has very often outperformed the SP500.
Huh? The point I was trying to make that the returns seem to equalize the further back we go.
> It's a solid alternative if you distrust tech which is today very heavy in the SP500.
The only reason BRK kept up with SP500 over the last 10 years is because of its outsized investment in Apple in 2016 or so, after the disastrous results of sitting out of tech in the 2000s and early 2010s and pursuing other investments such as Kraft Heinz or whatever.
As of September 2025, Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings:
SPY has a cumulative return of ~370% from start of 2000. BRK.B is at ~1,200%. That's a pretty big difference.
You can discount Apple as being part of the portfolio, but that's a bit like saying, well they wouldn't have done so well if we remove the high performing stocks in the portfolio.
It's disingenuous to lump AAPL in with the tech stocks that compose the top part of the S&P 500 right now. Much of their valuations are highly-leveraged bets on a massive and nearish-term realization of a dream AI business scenario (NVDA, TSLA, AVGO, and to a lesser extent MSFT, GOOG and META).
What % of AAPL is a highly-leveraged bet on AI, in comparison to those listed above? If you could only own 1 of those over the previous and incoming 10 years, it'd be challenging to not choose Apple, with maybe Google as second (albeit with a sizable regulatory asterisk).
I know there's a tendency to reduce everything to numbers, but Berkshire is playing a qualitatively completely different risk management game from the rest of the companies in the top 10 in the S&P 500 right now.
Edit: selfishly, I think you have more to gain from understanding why BRK chose to invest in Apple, than you do from aiming to "explain away" BRK as unremarkable.
If you're trying to choose where to lazily (i.e. with as little mental effort as possible) stash away your investments, that's a separate discussion. Buffet himself recommends S&P 500. But BRK is playing a fundamentally different game from the S&P. An investment in VOO vs an investment in BRK support very different theses.
> Huh? The point I was trying to make that the returns seem to equalize the further back we go.
Except this not factually true.
BRK-B has outperformed the SP500 on pretty much every time horizon outside of the 2009-2019 period and as you have pointed it significantly does so in the last 5 years.
> As of September 2025, Apple is still 21% of BRK's publicly listed holdings:
Tech is 34% of the SP500.
There is valid reasons to prefer SP500 ETF in a diversified portfolio. Hoping that it will perform better with less risk based on historical data is not one of them.
I would recommend the 2021 three-part Acquired podcast series on Berkshire. Episodes are long, though there are transcripts if you prefer reading over listening.
>“I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more money than I've ever made,” Buffett told the audience, referencing the remarkable 680% surge in Apple's stock since Berkshire first began acquiring shares in early 2016.
> When I ask a person something, I expect them to give me a short reply which includes another question/asks for details/clarification. A conversation is thus an ongoing "dance" where the questioner and answerer gradually arrive to the same shared meaning.
You obviously never wasted countless hours trying to talk to other people on online dating apps.
Life is isotropic, so it remains symmetric vertically. It travels horizontally but I don't know which direction because it's so unfathomably large you would need a supercomputer to run at least a cycle of it.
The majority of people with insider knowledge that are trading stocks will either use their knowledge to increase their gains or will tell their close friends and family.
> Luckily, in the UK you only have to scan your face and ID to access cat photos.
Please wait for us, the relentless chat control legislation will make us (the EU) overtake you and mandatory age verification is pretty much a certainty at this point.
People have to understand that individual cases of effectively curing HIV via stem cell transplants are merely providing a few puzzle pieces to HIV research, if at all, but have no clinical applicability, as a stem cell transplant is always an extreme, dangerous and last-resort treatment for otherwise unmanageable diseases, as which HIV generally does not count anymore.
People also have to understand that some weapons are useful having just in case, and that we might be a few mutations away from HIV becoming unmanageable again.
> curing HIV isn't something we now know how to do.
Technically we do but we will never ever give someone a stem cell transplant to cure their HIV because there are SIX highly effective different classes of medication to treat HIV. Majorly treatment resistant high fitness HIV is NOT a concern on the horizon.
> The second point is: this did not give us a significant new insight into the causes or mechanisms of treatment of HIV
The first unique cases of both variants of this DID lead to significant, valuable insights in several areas. But further cases, not so much. Myeloablation clearing the HIV reservoirs while the patient continues being on ART leading to a total cure does not excite any knowledgeable scientist anymore in 2025.
Did Microsoft just completely give up on QA in the name of accelerated slop delivery? They are in the news once a month for a serious windows bug. My disdain for windows id getting immense, at this point I'd rather have a linux computer, if I can't have a macbook. (But don't get me started on OSX & iOS, which are also total messes)
Microsoft is just relying on the feedback they collect from Windows Insider Program (a.k.a. program for volunteers beta testers) to fix bugs before a new version is released widely.
Once upon a time, you were able to get a free Windows 8 license if you join that program. And yes, when I was young and naive and couldn't care less about random things breaking, I joined the program, just like when I used to root Android phones and flash ROMs every other week.
(On the other hand, corporate IT almost certainly only roll out updates half or one year after they become available, when these bugs are likely already fixed.)
Anyone who would opt-in to use a buggier version of an already buggy and unreliable OS without being paid should be psychologically evaluated but instead they're trusted to be QA testers for the most widespread desktop OS in the world which is also a critically important tool in businesses and government organizations that keep most countries running.
They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
MS needs a 'windows xp sp2' moment. Where they stop jamming new things in and just fix as much junk as possible. They still have a mixed control panel situation. Things just randomly work/break for no real reason. Camera here one day gone the next oh look its back again. Hey my sound is broken again. Linux/MacOS in many benchmarks is faster. Hundreds of old programs now just flake out for random reasons. But then will work again sometimes. Backwards compat is a reason to stick with them. But if it doesnt work, why am I here? SteamOS is going to remove one of the large reasons people keep windows.
MS is losing the people who cared about using them. Those people are migrating to linux/macos. I dont blame em.
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
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