Doesn’t it make the assumption that they are rarely off and that the underlying value of the stocks hasn’t changed since they made that purchase. Imitating without understanding the underlying reasoning just seems like a risky proposition to me.

Why not just diversify yourself in holdings managed by those investors? The trade-off is the value of the timeliness of the information and how its acted upon versus the cost of management fees.

The hedge fund people might like it because its an easy sell and they make money from the fees shut it down if its not working out...

The problem is at least two fold.

First, how would you balance your holdings? A lot of these famous guys have plenty of crap investments, but end up making huge bets on something that worked out. Look at what berkshire is actually holding.

Second, these mega investors get sweeahart deals because they bring their name and aura to the table. Just look at buffets investment in goldman sachs during the financial turmoil.

Here's a related article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/te...pagewanted=all

At a mall I frequent to when I am back in California, Irvine Spectrum, has this exact system. It is very cool and I am surprised that many other parking structures have not done this.

Parking lot thing is technically quite easy to do, probably ultrasonic sensors on the ceiling would be cheaper than digging up the floor.

The problem is that while its a great system for drivers, does it add value for the owners? 100% of drivers would want this but can the car park owners make a return on the investment?

Doesn't sound worth it for a normal business, but for parking structures specifically the cost may be justified by the increase in efficiency. People are getting in and out faster, meaning you got more turnover.

I wonder if you need to add a system whereby someone can "reserve" their spot? Make the display a touch screen and I can tap a spot to reserve it. The spot now shows up as "unavailable" to subsequent drivers. If I don't get to the spot in 2 minutes (or however much time is appropriate) it switches back to available.

Such a system would barely increase turnover. In the situation where the parking garage is way below capacity, it wouldn't make a difference, and in the situation where there are more cars than spaces available, every time a person leaves, the spot is taken almost instantly. Plus, turnover is limited more by the amount of time people spend inside the establishment than it is by the short amount of time those spots stay empty while someone else is looking for it. Unless people are willing to pay more to park in a high tech parking garage, I find it hard to see the benefits warranting the costs.

Yea I thought about this more after posting and I may agree with you. But to be fair the added cost of my idea is extremely low. It just requires a touch screen and a two-minute timer.

Its a good idea and there is a sizable cost-benefit. The benefit is in areas where it takes a lot of time to park (which is very common in UK town centres and I assume elsewhere), the time wasted parking is a considerable deterrent to going to the town center at all.

Normally a car-park is linked with one particular big shop or a specific group of shops and they will definitely pay to increase people using their car-park. They already do - they have detectors counting cars in and out and advertise how many spaces they have free. I believe they are well aware that the big queues put people off.

I think you can also do it cheaper and better using existing CCV where its available and AI sofware to detect free spaces - they already use it to read car registration so I assume it can cope with this fairly easily.

To make it work really well in UK style car parks you probably need to monitor the location of cars entering the car park so that when a car(s) is already heading to a space(s) you dont direct someone else to it.

They already have something like this in one of my local city centers. There is a censor by each parking space and also a light above each bay, the light changes colour from red to green when it becomes free. There is also a sign above each row in the car park telling you how many parking spaces are down that row and how many are in further rows.

Lots of parking garages have 'level full' signs. Getting down to the parking space specifics seems a bit over the top.

thx for the link (and the discussion)

one more way in which it might get installed is if a city requires every new garage built to have one of these systems (to make their town more attractive to come shop or w/e)

had no idea this was reasonably widespread already, apparantly some garages in brussels have the system too

Some malls in australia have them also (green/red lights above parking spots and monitors with xx spots left on the side of the rows)

los angeles have these

Some cities are also doing this with street-side parking. You check your mobile phone for availability. Pricing is dynamic, based on how busy it is, with the goal being that there should always be one free parking space in the area.

the TSA takes away how much **** from people at the airport? How about a coat check service for small items or even coats at the airport? If you're up north in the winter and flying to San Diego, you prob don't want your winter coat on the plane.

A restaurant that sells Italian cuisine.

i am thinking about opening a whole in the hole place that does charcoal grilling. is there a reason why there is not more charcoal grilling? it smells so good. the place i have my eye on is next to a very busy dollar tree. there was a pizza place there that i never saw a single person go inside. i think because the people who go to dollar tree are busto financially. but my plan would be to buy ground beef and all the other meat like *******s and elbows and intesines and hearts and whatever is cheap and to ground it up and mix it with flour/corn whatever filing and to try and then throw some spice in and hopefully come up with a good combination and grill it over charcoal and try to sell a burger for $3 at a $2 profit margin and of course enough people will buy soda and fries that you make on that as well. it would be walk in walk out with maybe a stool counter on one of the sides. we could also do chicken and hot dogs and other meats. but you basically never see this? why?

the model seems to be mcd and other chains and then diner places that sells $9 burgers.

i would really like to come up with a model for hole in the wall that uses really terrible quality meat w/ probably even tons of MSG added for flavor but hides all of this by charcoal grilling the meat and a good big bun. i think there is a market opening for this.

Cross-posted from TV Forum.

Ninja Warrior Gym.

Need to have something traditional to use as the base. Rock Gym is probably the most likely contender here, add in some traditional lifting elements like barbells and power cages and such.

Then you create an obstacle course similar to Ninja Warrior (Sasuke) with varying levels of difficulty. Ideally you have obstacles that can be easily configured to several different levels. Construct the obstacles into a combined course where you can have monthly competitions with members.

Also good for parties for many ages - have a difficulty that even kids can complete, and up to bachelor parties or corporate events.

Challenges:
Location - need a lot of space, but need a somewhat central location due to niche appeal

Liability and Safety - a lot of obstacles seem inherently dangerous and need to choose only the ones that aren't terribly dangerous or build enough padding around them to protect people. Horseplay seems like it could be a serious issue that could hurt people. Might need to use significant cost to man the booth

Crowds - not sure what the number of people per hour could go through a course, especially if you need to reset it

Variety - need to constantly update the course and try new obstacles or change up the order. Could be tricky to do and expensive to keep updating the course

Fad - could be something people really like for a little and dies out due to oversaturation

On the other hand, rock gyms are profitable and can be long term stable, and you could simply have a rock gym and try to get some extra space to do the obstacle course on the side. Perhaps charge per run, which would allow you to easily afford to man it and pay for itself and the space, with a discount for members. Have one or two obstacles sitting on the side for members to do at will, but not the complete course.

this could be hudge

I would like to see a cam site where people pay for foreign language lessons from native speakers.

It would be great to learn and practice Spanish from, let's say, a Colombian and for many languages it would make sense for both parties. It would be inexpensive for the student and good primary or side income for the teacher.

The one drawback would be delivering high quality audio.

What do you guys think?

How do you keep out the wangs? Audio only?

For teachers, only a rudimentary pre-screening would be needed. They would not want to jeopardize their future earnings and have current earnings confiscated if they get banned.

For students... I'm not sure. I guess it would be up to the teachers to report and ban trouble cases, which would make it hard for trouble cases to sign up again unless they used a new name/address. I can see how this is a problem in random free video chat places, but I wonder if it would be that big of a problem on a site where people are giving up their credit card and real name... maybe... In other words, people may show their wang on 4chan, but they do not friend random people to post their wangs on someone's wall. Loss of anonymity is a strong motivator to not act stupid.

I'm just thinking out loud here...

Does it need to be actual teachers and students? I could see it even being a "talk to people in another language", and you pick what languages you speak, and what languages you'd like to speak to, and the other people do the same. Just having conversations with native speakers is helpful. I know in college there were foreign students who offered to pay people to talk to them in English to help them improve their skills.

Seems like it could work with randoms who just choose languages, then do a chat roulette thing, just people dick around.

"Teachers" wouldn't necessarily be real language teachers, but they would be vetted in some way and would need to act professionally. The same sort of people that hang around hostels in foreign countries offering language lessons would be the same sort teaching on the site. (wide variety of qualifications and prices)

The point of the site would be that this is where you come when you are sick of screwing around on random chat programs that are full of randoms, scammers, and people showing you their wangs. You would come to the site with the intention of learning, not for chitchat and to look at boobies. One would load up some credits with credit card, browse teacher profiles, pick one, and begin a semi-structured and - hopefully - regular lessons.

As far as economics, I would think that people would be willing to spend $10-15/hour for individual class or maybe $5/hour for 3-5 person class. So for example, Colombian/Mexican Spanish teacher would get half which would be decent enough to get quality people wanting to do this. Eventually, some sort of economy would emerge with dynamic pricing where high-demand teachers would charge more, and new and low demand teachers would charge less....

That said, it is easy to deliver high quality video these days... but high quality audio seems like it would be a lot harder? Even on Skype, audio is usually sh*t, but maybe they just realize that the attraction of Skype is video and most people don't care about audio?