throwlogon

I believe the poster has $450K in cash, in addition to the real-estate holdings, and that is already more money than they know what to do with. I don't know if it makes sense to mortgage "the base" to add more cash to that pile.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted; companies in other sectors (e.g. oil) get involved in US politics regularly.

But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly. (IANAL, but I suspect there are legal impediments as well). Taking a political stand, or providing support for one side, might force big tech companies to resolve the ambiguity as to whether they're media companies or not.

EDIT: Actually maybe there is nothing stopping tech companies from choosing a side; apparently media companies do make political contribitions: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/08/news-corps-million-...

EDIT 2: I can see I've accidentally opened a can of worms about biased coverage and editorials; but my usage of "support" was intended as overt and consistent involvement in political campaigning, generally through donations. And to my surprise, that does occur.

Demanding a "deeper, more consistent, and prolonged commitment than in the past" from people whose profession you've already made more difficult is pretty galling.

It may be the case that their careers were going to get more difficult anyway; nevertheless, Ek is in fact one of the main drivers and beneficiaries.

If the alternative is artists not being paid enough to make a living, then one side has to push until the other side loses. The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies trying to commoditize their complements that there isn't enough money to support both the creators and the distributors. Why should the creators lose by default?

[T]he other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

Sure, but that's different than "You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music." Of course you can, and you can do so long-term provided that new tech companies appear as existing ones fail.

Exactly this. Bandcamp's straightforward, egalitarian deal is exactly what any artist below the superstar level needs.

Put your stuff out, set your price, handle your own publicity, Bandcamp takes their cut. That's it.

You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music.

Sure you can. Tech companies are constantly losing money at the margins, by paying out more than they take in for a wide variety of things.

It's sustainable as long as tech companies can find financing, or fund one part of their business from another part, which seems fairly long-term.

EDIT: I know I'm gonna lose karma on this, but I'm right. There's no shortage of tech companies with negative revenue, or negative revenue in certain business units, and that money isn't disappearing, it's being paid to counterparties in business deals.

There's some symmetry to the way the Internet Archive assumes consent to reproduce other people's content, and people assuming consent to take advantage of the Internet Archive's mirroring. I don't know if this is in line with the Internet Archive's terms-of-service, or the law.

In this case they'd be getting stuck with a pretty big bandwidth hit.

I don't know, the "it's just" part kind of indicates that the real probability of things remaining correlated were not what LTCM thought they were, to the point where they couldn't afford to stay in the position long enough for things to snap back. I don't buy that as "always winning".

The coin flips are in fact what I was alluding to. I guess we disagree as to whether what LTCM was betting on were a form of coin flips.

Instead you [the bank] go to an anonymous arb firm, for $1m in bonds, and you say, "okay we're going to sell you the bond that is actually ours, you will sell it back to us, here is your fee, now we can sell this bond back to the client and wash the fact that it is ours."

How does the bank make money doing this? Routing the sale of this bond through the "anonymous arb firm" doesn't do anything to the price. If the bank's competitor is selling their bond at 1.00, the bank could directly offer their bond at 0.99 without getting "anonymous arb firm" involved. If the bank routes the trade through the "anonymous arb firm"... what difference does that make? If it shows up on the market at 1.01, the bank still has to give the client the 1.00 bond first, and if it shows up on the market at 0.99, the bank could have just done that itself.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but if you can't reduce the size of your position without losing your shirt, you're not really winning; and if staying in your position requires you to put up more money than you can raise, you've hit the limit I was referring to. No one can expect to keep finding money to support their trades until they turn profitable.

EDIT: Maybe you mean that they didn't try to make a larger bet after they got in trouble? But whether they needed to make a bigger bet or whether their existing bet was already too big, it's still the same issue; the only way to avoid liquidation is to expand the use of credit, which hits a limit at some point.

What does "launder arbitrage" mean?

If LTCM was given enough credit to stick it out, they would have made a killing.

Anyone making bets will eventually win big if there is no limit on credit, just by betting bigger and bigger until they catch a break.

But there's always a limit.

A burnt-down courthouse is less of a threat to civil liberties than actual paramilitaries literally grabbing people off of the streets. We're better off when vandals are the bad guys, rather than state security.

EDIT: I'm not sure why I took your false dichotomy at face value in the first place. A burnt-down courthouse and an informal military occupation aren't the only two options; but even if they were, the former is preferable.

I disagree as well. The violence is an unintended consequence, but it's also a known consequence, and has to be taken into account. You can't separate the good and bad consequences of a decision and wave off the negative ones because they manifest themselves indirectly.

If you're savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency

Savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency, but not savvy enough to not buy cryptocurrency.

What you described sounds like a pain.

strong disagreement about the cause of a bug

That sounds more like a hypothesis than an opinion.

In the less testable world of opinions (over, say, business strategy) it isn't always possible to settle things by experiment, making it more difficult to let those opinions go.

No, by idle I meant idle, not what's left over after you've already put in a day's work.

[T]he vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house.

Why didn't the non-technology side prevent this if it was so clearly detrimental? I can't imagine that the technology side of a media concern has that much influence over the company's overall priorities.

I guess stable just wasn't good enough

I suspect that's meant to be rhetorical, but from a business perspective, was stable good enough? Sometimes what works now won't be competitive in the near future.

I think there underlying question is why can't we afford to hang out, and why can't a business afford to let people hang out on their premises?

The average person seems to have no large stretches of idle time. Neither did the people who built the pyramids, I guess. What are we doing?

Do the Duluth trousers "anchor the bottom of the pocket bag to the side seam" as well? To me this seems like a clever solution that I haven't seen before.

Slavery wasn't and still isn't that long gone.

The reductio ad absurdum where any mention of a color is considered harmful is based in the assumption that the issue is with mentioning color. It might be useful to distinguish when a color is just a color (e.g. red/black trees), and when a metaphor is borrowed from an actual crime against humanity (e.g. master/slave).

It's easy to use Monte Carlo methods and find that when n is large, the average cluster size is approximately 2.15013

It never occurred to me before, but running simulations and looking up the result in a dictionary of constants might be a helpful learning approach for people who are more adept at going from practice to theory.

For many reasons. Anecdotally every BMW owner I know is constantly taking their car in for repairs.

Most empty malls are in places where economic demand, including demand for land, is very low. Investing money to make efficient use of something that cheap is unlikely to be a profitable move.

On the other hand, it may be the case that steps such as those this Google VP was taking are what is reducing the likelihood of a bad outcome.

In that case you still have to trust the escrow service.