"What this has (deservedly) become is the story about how Bill Ackman can be so wrong. He spent (by his own admission) a year and a half analysing this company and his thesis can be falsified by visiting a few clubs in his home city. Bill Ackman's thesis is the most easily falsified bear-thesis I have seen from a major hedge fund ever.
You have to wonder how this happened. So I am going to tell you:
Bill Ackman a Harvard educated (magna cum laude) billionaire New York hedge fund manager bet over a billion dollars on a short position (imperilling his fund and his reputation) without checking the facts.
And he did not check the facts because he was so rigid with a misplaced silver spoon that he could not stoop to sit on a subway for thirty minutes and talk with poor people for ninety minutes."
> with a misplaced silver spoon that he could not stoop to sit on a subway for thirty minutes and talk with poor people for ninety minutes."
I'm not an Ivy League alumni by any means (I'm a last-year CS drop-out from an Eastern-European country), but I got to see a Herbalife presentation in person 10 years ago and realized it was a scam 10 minutes into said presentation. As a matter of fact, I had a intense verbal fight with my ex-wife and my ex-MIL immediately after the presentation, as I was trying to explain to them that the money they had just spent on those Herbalife products was money thrown out of the window and that there were other ways to lose weight. I was right, those Herbalife products stood on top of one of our drawers for half a year, touched only once or twice, after which we threw them away. The gist was that we should have brought more of our acquaintances and friends into the scheme, but my ex-wife was a smart enough woman to realize that that was a no-go.
Long story short: companies like Herbalife deserve to die. They feed on people's insecurities, more than that, those people which Herbalife feeds on are not very well-off, quite the contrary (the money we spent on their products that one time was money taken from other necessity purchases). They're a despicable company, I'm genuinely let-down that Ackman failed.
I hate these type of companies as well. My father has been deep into the Nikken scam for over a decade now. I try not to think about how much money he has spent on their products or how many people he has tried to get to be resellers. Its pure poison.
How is Ackman's reputation not tainted by Valeant at this stage? This is just more of the same for me: a not really objective investor making mistakes due to his skewed perspective.
Car commercials feed on your insecurities but then sell you an actual vehicle you can get use out of. Pyramid schemes have the negative of a drastically overpriced product (all that investment is wasted) and the negatives of a crooked boss (you'll get that promotion in six months) rolled into one organization.
Hmmm. If true, I wonder if cmd-clicking the top N links into other tabs can be distinguished or if it's harmful for their ranking. Also, does going back cause a reload?
I'd guess that various clicks in a small time frame can be trivially detected and discarded as noise. The vast majority of the users do not use that pattern.
I don't think it causes a reload, but it can also be trivially detected using JavaScript.
"What this has (deservedly) become is the story about how Bill Ackman can be so wrong. He spent (by his own admission) a year and a half analysing this company and his thesis can be falsified by visiting a few clubs in his home city. Bill Ackman's thesis is the most easily falsified bear-thesis I have seen from a major hedge fund ever.
You have to wonder how this happened. So I am going to tell you:
Bill Ackman a Harvard educated (magna cum laude) billionaire New York hedge fund manager bet over a billion dollars on a short position (imperilling his fund and his reputation) without checking the facts.
And he did not check the facts because he was so rigid with a misplaced silver spoon that he could not stoop to sit on a subway for thirty minutes and talk with poor people for ninety minutes."