"I get these people that...want to send me books with EBITDA in it, and I just tell them, you know, 'I’ll look at that figure when you tell me you’ll make all the capital expenditures.' If I’m going to make the capital expenditures, there’s very few businesses where I think I can spend a whole lot less than depreciation year after year and maintain the economic strength of the business. So I think the EBITDA has been a term that has cost a lot of investors a lot of money.... It’s not a non-cash expense. It’s a cash expense. You just spend it first. I mean the cash is gone, and it’s a delayed recording of cash. How anybody can turn that into something they use as a metric that talks about earnings is beyond me. " --Warren Buffett (2003)
"I think you would understand any presentation using the word EBITDA, if every time you saw that word you just substituted the phrase, 'bullshit earnings.'" --Charlie Munger (2003)
Excerpts from Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters over the years discussing share repurchases (LINK)
Thoughts on Share Repurchases and Capital Allocation (July 2018) (LINK)
Where Big Leaps Happen - by Morgan Housel (LINK)
Invest Like the Best Podcast: Keith Wasserman – Real Estate Investing (LINK)
Transparent Hospital Pricing Exposes Wild Fluctuation, Even Within Miles (LINK)
Facebook: Where Friendships Go to Never Quite Die (LINK)
The Story of the Senate [H/T @jposhaughnessy] (LINK)
This Dinosaur Had a Mohawk of Horns - by Ed Yong (LINK)
Lab Out Loud Podcast: 4000 Exoplanets and Counting (LINK)
For our 200th episode, Lab Out Loud welcomes Phil Plait (The Bad Astronomer) back to the show. Phil joins co-hosts Brian Bartel and Dale Basler to discuss the current status of exoplanet discovery and shares a glimpse of what we might find in the future. Listen to the show to hear Phil discuss new techniques and technology in planet hunting, looking for life on other worlds and the role of science in science fiction.