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In an interview with Fortune in 2013, legendary investor Warren Buffett shared his insights on avoiding speculative investing and adopting a disciplined, long-term approach. What Happened: Buffett, known for his value investing philosophy, highlighted the importance of understanding the productive potential of assets rather than making impulsive decisions based on market noise. During the interview , Buffett compared evaluating stocks to assessing tangible investments like farms or apartment buildings. For a farm, he advises calculating expected crop yields and determining their value. Similarly, for an apartment building, rental income should be weighed against taxes and expenses to estimate the expected return. In both cases, the focus should be on paying a fair price for the asset's productive potential. “You always want to look at the productive ability of the assets you're buying, whether it's a farm, an apartment house, or a company. The company is represented by a stock. If you always get your money's worth, you'll do very well,” Buffett said. Also Read: Warren Buffett’s Timeless Advice: ‘If You’re Gonna Do Dumb Things Because Your Stock Goes Down, You Shouldn’t Own A Stock At All’ “If you buy a farm, you look at the farm and say, "I expect to get so many bushels per acre of corn or soybeans." Then you figure out how much that will be worth and you figure out what the price should be. If you buy an apartment house, you should look at what the rentals will be, what the taxes and expenses will be, and then decide how much income you'll have. You pay a fair price for that,” Buffett added. However, when it comes to stocks, Buffett warned against buying based on hearsay or speculative advice. He encouraged investors to prioritize the long-term productive ability of assets over short-term price movements. "The biggest mistake people make is listening to a lot of other people and buying something because they think it's going to go up next week or next month, for whatever reason people give you. You should understand what you buy," he said. He emphasized that understanding the intrinsic value of a company, which a stock represents, is key to successful investing. “With stocks, their neighbor whispers something to them and then run out and spend money that it took them years to earn,” Buffett said. Why It Matters: This advice aligns with Buffett's broader philosophy of value investing, which has guided his decades-long track record of outperforming the market. His focus on fundamentals serves as a reminder that patience and careful evaluation remain the cornerstones of sound investing. Read Next Warren Buffett’s Career Advice: ‘Don’t Think About Money, Take The Job That You Would Take If You Didn’t Need The Job’ This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. © 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
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TOM HARRIS: The SNP is chronically addicted to spending on the bloated public sector - as services get ever worse. But without seismic reform, this tartan gravy train is doomed to hit the buffers Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport By TOM HARRIS FOR THE SCOTTISH DAILY MAIL Published: 16:46 EST, 6 December 2024 | Updated: 16:52 EST, 6 December 2024 e-mail View comments The devolution era has brought with it an employment bonanza. There are more jobs than ever. Workers are better paid than ever before. And they’re retiring on ever more generous pension packages. There’s just one problem – and it’s a serious one. An unsustainable one. That growth in jobs and in remuneration has been in the public sector, not the private one. It’s the private sector which creates wealth through economic growth, through taxes – corporation tax as well as the income tax of its employees. It’s thanks to that revenue that governments can afford to spend on vital services like health, education and transport. The public sector, on the other hand, doesn’t generate wealth; its chief function is to provide services, not generate profits. That’s a balancing act, a virtuous cycle, that has endured for as long as there has been a welfare state. But it’s a system that is now in danger of collapsing in on itself. Stephen Boyle, Auditor General for Scotland, has warned that the current situation, with wage and jobs growth in the public sector outstripping those in the private, is ‘unsustainable’. Even before last week’s Scottish Budget, when Finance Secretary Shona Robison announced her spending plans for the next year , Mr Boyle set out in stark terms the challenge facing Scotland’s political leaders, and the consequences of those challenges not being met. He said: ‘For some time, myself and others have called for urgent reform of Scotland’s public services to address the public sector’s unsustainable finances and the threats these pose to services. It’s critical that the Scottish Government moves at pace to reform the design and delivery of public services.’ Spending on Scotland’s public sector has soared - but the system is now in danger of collapsing, argues Tom Harris Political generosity has given public sector workers an economic advantage over staff in private industry and an advantage over workers doing the same jobs south of the Border. Which is fine – but only if it is affordable. Devolution was never going to result in a leaner, more efficient public sector. Just cast a glance back at the main proponents of the devolution project in the 1980s and 1990s: trade unionists (representing far more public than private sector workers), churches, charities and a whole range of politicians from the Left-wing parties, many of whom, astonishingly, ended up being elected as MSPs themselves. The campaign was energised by the Thatcher government’s financial discipline. Asking local authorities and Whitehall departments to constrain the growth in public funding was anathema to those on the Left. Scotland needed its own parliament in order to produce ‘Scottish solutions to Scottish problems’ – code for ‘more spending than the UK Government will allow’. And so it has proved. Scotland is addicted to public spending, public jobs and public services for which we shouldn’t have to pay . Take a look at Ms Robison’s Budget as a fine example of the ‘something for nothing’ principle that dominates Scottish political discourse. She wants the two-child benefit cap in Scotland to be abolished (though not until the beginning of 2026) and wealthier pensioners will hold on to their winter heating allowance, unlike in England. There was even some mild relief for Scotland’s taxpayers – some of them, at least, who will be marginally better off once thresholds on lower income tax bands have been shifted slightly upwards. It’s time Scotland started cutting its coat according to the cloth we can actually afford, Tom Harris argues But the Scottish Government’s own figures suggest that the number paying the higher rate of tax (42 per cent) will rocket from 60,000 to 554,000, while the number of advanced rate taxpayers who pay 45 per cent is forecast to soar by 14,000 to 128,000. Wealthy Scots are regarded by our political classes like the private sector: only there to provide a ready stream of cash to fund the public sector. Exactly how well spent is that money raked in from business and individuals? Glasgow City Council, which has some of the worst areas of financial deprivation in the country, recently hired a new chief executive at a cost of £200,000 a year. Salaries must be competitive with the private sector to attract the best candidates, we are told. But the new incumbent, Susanne Miller, like almost all her predecessors, is another veteran of the public sector. Caroline Lamb, who’s in charge of our struggling NHS, received a pay rise earlier this year, taking her own salary up to £200,000. Meanwhile, Audit Scotland raised concerns about ‘unacceptable use of public funds’ at the Water Industry Commission for Scotland. These included spending £77,350 of taxpayers’ cash sending the chief operating officer of former boss Alan Sutherland business-class to an extended MBA course at Harvard and £402.41 on a dinner for two at a luxury hotel. And let’s not forget Ken Thomson, the former senior civil servant with the Scottish Government, who told a group WhatsApp chat during the Covid pandemic: ‘Just to remind you (seriously) this is discoverable under FOI. Know where the “clear chat” button is.’ He also said ‘plausible deniability’ were his middle names. Mr Thomson retired from the civil service in November 2023 with a CBE and a pension pot worth £1.4million. It’s not just exorbitant salaries but ill-judged policy decisions that put pressure on government budgets. The disastrous debacle over ferry procurement by the Scottish Government has seen costs spiral from less than £100million to more than £350million, on vessels that are now more than seven years late. Click here to visit the Scotland home page for the latest news and sport Advertisement Had a private company embarked on such a slipshod, incompetent process to secure two new boats, it would either have gone bust or its shareholders would have stepped in. But in Scotland, the public purse is regarded as bottomless, so long as politicians are spending the cash on the ‘right’ things. Before she was forced out of her job as Secretary of State for Transport , Louise Haigh awarded an inflation-busting pay rise to train drivers without asking for workplace reform in return. That approach is writ large in Edinburgh, where the answer to every political problem is always more cash. In years gone by, it was generally accepted that public sector pay, on average, was a bit lower than what the private sector could afford, due to the greater efficiency and profit-making mindset of the latter. But health and local government workers were compensated with better pensions and the prospect that their retirement, when it came, would be more comfortable than if they had paid into a private pot. That is another assumption that has been upended. The public sector now leads the private in both salary and pensions. It’s little wonder that demand for work in the public sector is growing while the private sector faces serious skill shortages and unfilled vacancies. This mindset is not confined to Scotland and pre-dates devolution – even if devolution has given local politicians more freedom to feather the public sector nest. In the 1980s, when local authorities lost much of their housing stock to people who exercised their right to buy, it might have been expected that housing departments, with significantly fewer properties, would shrink or even go out of existence. Instead many of them grew in size! More staff were hired to do less and less work. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. But change would take two qualities that are sadly lacking in our political institutions – leadership and courage. No Scottish politician ever lost votes by saying they wanted to expand the tentacles of the state ever further. No MSP ever failed to win a round of applause by demanding that, however tough a local government spending round, there must be no reduction in any local authority’s workforce. Labour, with its close ties to the unions, is particularly vulnerable to political pressure to maintain support for profligacy in the public sector. Unions themselves have reflected that cultural shift from private to public in the last four decades. In the 1970s, they dominated the workplace, ordering bosses around by threat of industrial action that could be triggered with no more than a show of hands at a meeting hastily convened in a nearby car park. Following legislation introduced to regulate the unions, membership has dwindled to about 22 per cent of the workforce. And only 12 per cent of members are employed in the private sector. So it’s logical that when unions organise for better wages, more job security and more jobs for their members, they’re doing so overwhelmingly on behalf of the public sector. And Labour, funded largely by those trade unions , knows which side its bread is buttered on. The SNP also likes to preen itself as a left-wing party and has, while in charge of the Scottish Government, extended its relationships within Scotland’s trade unions. The Scottish Trade Union Congress, once the exclusive domain of the Labour Party, has developed positive relations with SNP ministers. There is little prospect of tighter financial discipline in public institutions when the country’s two biggest political parties are in thrall to the unions and to the public sector workers they represent. The gravy train that is so generous to senior council, health service and quango officials isn’t about to be derailed so long as either the SNP or Labour hold the financial reins at Holyrood. But opinion polls make bleak reading for the prospects of the Scottish Conservatives – at least for those ambitious Tory MSPs who might hope for a ministerial job one day. And it remains to be seen what disruption will be caused when the first cohort of Reform MSPs arrive in May 2026, as the polls suggest they will. Whichever party grasps this particular nettle, doing nothing to restrain the disastrous growth of the public sector is no longer an option. We've all heard the joke about the three schoolkids arguing in the playground about which of their dads is the fastest. One says his is a racing car driver, so is the fastest. The second boasts that his is an airline pilot and therefore the swiftest. But the third boy says his dad works for Glasgow City Council and must be the fastest because although he finishes work at five, he’s always home by four-thirty. As a former local government employee I’ve seen the waste and inefficiencies that have become ingrained in the system. The fiercely-defended ‘flexitime’ system was designed to allow those with particularly large workloads to accumulate extra hours that they could ‘bank’ and use for extra time off later. But it became an entitlement that was regularly abused by staff, who would arrive early in the day and sit at their desks reading newspapers, or wait in the office doing the same at the end of the day, just to add to their total of accumulated time off. Woe betide any manager who threatened to reform or even scrap the system. Up to two whole days a month could be wrangled if you knew how to exploit it efficiently enough. And many did. It is just one of the countless ‘Spanish practices’ that still hobble the public sector, and that’s before we even look at the extraordinary cost to the public purse of employing ‘agency’ (private, freelance) healthcare staff on our hospital wards in lieu of proper full-time nurses. Meanwhile, private sector workers struggle on with their lot: lower pay, more hours, less job security. Private firms must sink or swim, depending on their own efficiency and ability to innovate, not to mention the hard work of their workforce. Yet the public sector is guaranteed, from one year to the next, that it will keep going, no matter what. Scotland desperately needs that spirit of efficiency and innovation in every part of our economy. Those who genuinely care about the future and quality of our vital services must understand that they are doing them no favours by allowing inefficiencies and costs to spiral. If the current situation is, as Audit Scotland has warned, unsustainable, that means action must be taken and taken soon. For the sake of our public services and those many Scots who depend upon them, it’s time to start cutting our coat according to the cloth we can actually afford. 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Thousands of protesters marched through Barcelona on Saturday demanding lower rents in Spain's second city. Barcelona, which has already taken action to stop the spread of holiday rental apartments, is the latest Spanish city to see protests for cheaper housing. Backed by left-wing parties and unions, the demonstrators gathered in central Barcelona behind a giant banner declaring "Lower the rents". "Today a new political cycle starts concerning housing," Carme Arcarazo, spokesperson for the Catalan Tenants Union, the main organiser, told reporters. "Investors must not be allowed to come to our cities and play with the apartments like a game of Monopoly," she added. The union would target "profiteers" who are taking "half of our salaries", Arcarazo said. The demonstrators demanded a 50 percent cut in rents, leases with an unlimited term and a ban on "speculative" sales of buildings. They threatened to start a rent strike. An estimated 22,000 people took part in a similar demonstration in Madrid on October 13. Campaigns have been launched in other cities. According to the Idealista specialised website, rental prices per square metre have risen 82 percent across Spain over the past decade. The average salary has gone up by 17 percent in that time, according to the national statistics institute. Facing pressure over a housing crisis, the government in 2023 passed legislation calling for more social housing, greater restrictions on rents in high demand areas and penalties for owners who do not occupy properties. But rents have continued to rise while the government has battled city and regional authorities to get some parts of the law applied. vid-vab/tw/jmNoneNine killed in Haiti in latest gang attack
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Water heaters are essential for a comfortable and efficient home. Choosing the right model ensures safety, durability, and reliable performance. This guide highlights the best options designed to meet your instant hot water needs. Hot water is a necessity, whether for cooking, bathing, or cleaning, and a reliable water heater makes it effortlessly accessible. With various types available, instant water heaters are particularly convenient for modern households. The market is flooded with numerous options, making it hard to decide which one to pick. Known for its dependable products, the featured brand offers exceptional models tailored for different requirements. In this article, we explore the best water heaters that deliver on performance, safety, and value. 1. AO Smith EWS NEO-3L | 3 Litre 3KW Instant Water Heater Image Credit: Amazon.in Order Now The AO Smith EWS NEO-3L is a compact, powerful water heater designed for instant hot water needs. With its shockproof outer body and five-level safety shield, this model is built to prioritize safety while delivering high performance. Ideal for kitchens and bathrooms, it provides instant heating with a sleek and durable design. Key Features: -3KW heating capacity for rapid water heating. -Shockproof outer body for enhanced safety. -Five levels of safety shield, including thermal cutout and pressure relief valve. -Compact design, perfect for bathrooms and kitchens. -Reliable brand warranty for peace of mind. -The 3-litre capacity may not be sufficient for larger families or multiple uses in one go. 2. Bajaj Splendora 3L 3kW Vertical Instant Water Heater Image Credit: Amazon.in Order Now The Bajaj Splendora 3L offers a seamless solution for quick and efficient water heating. Its stainless-steel tank ensures durability, while the copper heating element guarantees consistent performance. This water heater is well-suited for homes needing compact yet effective heating solutions. Key Features: -3KW power for fast heating. -Stainless steel tank for durability and corrosion resistance. -Copper heating element for efficient performance. -Compact vertical design ideal for bathrooms and kitchens. -Impressive warranty: 1 year on the product, 2 years on the element, and 5 years on the tank. -Best for use at one point, like a sink, and not ideal for showers or multiple taps. 3. Orient Electric Aura Rapid Pro | 5.9 Litre Instant Water Heater Image Credit: Amazon.in Order Now The Orient Aura Rapid Pro is a slightly larger instant water heater offering reliable performance and robust safety features. With its stainless-steel tank and shockproof construction, this model is ideal for low and mid-rise buildings. Its 5.9-liter capacity is perfect for small to medium households. Key Features: -5.9-liter capacity for extended use. -Stainless steel tank for longevity and resistance to rust. -Shockproof body for added safety. -6.5 bar pressure compatibility for low and mid-rise buildings. -Long-lasting warranty with 5 years of coverage. - The unit might require more space for installation compared to smaller models. 4. Havells Instanio 10 Litre Storage Water Heater Image Credit: Amazon.in Order Now The Havells Instanio 10L offers a perfect combination of aesthetics and functionality. Featuring a colour-changing LED ring indicator, this water heater ensures you know the water temperature at a glance. With its heavy-duty heating element and feroglas-coated tank, this model is both efficient and durable. Key Features: -10-liter capacity for larger families. -Color-changing LED ring for visual temperature indication. -Feroglas-coated tank for corrosion resistance. -Protective anode rod for extended tank life. -Heavy-duty heating element for consistent performance. -The unit can take up significant space, which might be an issue for smaller bathrooms or kitchens. Conclusion: Investing in the right water heater ensures convenience, safety, and efficiency in your daily life. The models highlighted in this article cater to diverse needs, offering reliable performance and durable designs. Whether for quick heating in kitchens or steady supply in bathrooms, these water heaters combine modern technology with essential safety features. Choose the one that fits your requirements and enjoy hassle-free access to hot water every day. With trusted warranties and proven quality, these options are a great addition to any home. Simplify your life and stay comfortable with a dependable water heater. Disclaimer: Above mentioned article is a sponsored feature. This article is a paid publication and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of IDPL, and IDPL claims no responsibility whatsoever. Stay informed on all the latest news , real-time breaking news updates, and follow all the important headlines in india news and world News on Zee News.
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