booly @ booly @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

That shouldn't mean we make up the facts.

You're the one getting facts wrong!

You've said that the Jones-affiliated bid was higher, which is incorrect. The Onion's $7 million bid was higher, which is why the bankruptcy judge said that the other bidder should've been given an opportunity to improve its bid.

You've said that the $7 million valuation wasn't based on anything. It's a straightforward formula for determining the value when to reduce the claims of the creditors who wanted to credit bid.

You've said that the $7 million valuation was made up based on estimates of future cash flows. Future payments have nothing to do with the bid, and weren't used in the formula to calculate the value at $7 million. That value is how much this bid brings to the estate immediately.

Even future payments were a percentage of profits and but not guaranteed.

That's not part of the bid. The bid only had two components: a cash portion and a commitment to reduce claims by certain creditors. For non-participating creditors, it's the exact same equivalent as a $7 million cash payment to the estate.

Future promises were made to families to incentivize them to reduce their claims (and therefore bring more money to the estate), but that's not part of the bid itself.

I think you're struggling to understand what's happening here because you're so anchored on your initial incorrect perceptions.

There was some future payments promised

It's not future payments promised. Just a division of who to split the proceeds with. And so for the typical creditor who didn't credit bid, The Onion's bid was worth the equivalent of a $7 million cash bid, and therefore was more valuable than the Jones affiliates' $3.5 million cash bid.

It's just math. The Onion bid was higher, and the judge said that the losing bid should've been given an opportunity to improve the bid to get a chance to win, and maybe raise even more money.

The value of the Onion's bid was $7 million ($1.75 million in cash, $5.25 million in credit), when you include the credit bids from the families. That's where you're getting tripped up in trying to understand what the court was ruling.

They are not telling the onion to offer more money, they are giving the one with the highest bid the chance to make it even bigger.

No, the Jones-affiliated bidder had a smaller bid, but should've been given the opportunity to try to outbid the then-highest bid from the Onion.

Basically the judge said that the trustee, as auctioneer, should've gotten the two bidders into a bidding war to maximize the price.

I've been following this closely.

The normal way bankruptcy auctions go is basically some version of this:

1. Everyone who wants to bid has to sign an NDA about the assets.
2. Everyone who signs the NDA can perform their due diligence, look at financial statements and other confidential information about the assets in the auction, to figuratively kick the tires. If there's actual physical property involved, bidders are generally allowed to physically inspect it (if it's a tractor, for example, you can bring a mechanic to help sort out the tractor's condition).
3. Before the deadline, every bidder submits a secret bid to the trustee.
4. The trustee evaluates the bids, looks to see which is best, and decides whether the top bids are close enough to hold a live public auction or allow topping bids for the bidders to say "hey you're only $1 million short from the current top bid, you want to throw more money at this?," and going around and around until the trustee is sure they've gotten the best and final bid from everyone.

The judge is upset that the trustee didn't really do step 4, which in the bankruptcy process is designed to squeeze out the highest possible price for the sale. The losing bidder says they submitted a lower bid than their absolute top "best and final" they would have, because they thought they'd have an opportunity to improve the bid in a step that never happened.

So they're going back to do it again. Presumably the trustee will propose a new auction process that explicitly puts out well defined rules on how creditors (like the Sandy Hook families) can credit bid with credit against their own claims, instead of actual cash. They'll need to calculate exactly how much each dollar of credit bid brings to the non-participating creditors (like Sandy Hook families who don't want to credit bid), and make sure that for each creditor who isn't credit bidding gets the most money out of the sale.

I don't think it's over. The judge specifically said that he believes the trustee tried to do the right thing, but ultimately didn't follow a process that was designed to raise the most money.

there was a $10k bounty,

$60k. $10k from NYPD and $50k from the FBI.

I think that some people had trouble with the raised angle of the hostel smile photo, and the way that cameras of different focal lengths (technically, more a function of distance between camera and subject) tend to flatten three dimensional features in slightly different ways. The posts where people were saying that various pictures don't look like the same person, but like you, I think they look pretty similar.

when he emigrated to New York

New York City?!?

Yes it does. It's only offered on an irregular basis, so for the people that would only go to McDonald's for the McRib, and no other item, would need to be notified when it's available.

Harnessing this phenomenon .

Yeah, a nuclear blast is gonna be totally deadly within a particular radius, no matter what you do. And then at some larger radius, everything outside that radius will be safe, regardless of what you do. So the area in between is going to be the area where the response can make a difference.

And as you mention, the area of the "can actually make a difference" zone is much larger than the "dead-no-matter-what" zone, because it scales by the square of the distance. So if the outer safe radius is twice the inner death radius, the area of the in between zone is gonna be about 3 times the size of the death zone (π(2r)^{2 - πr}2 = 3πr). If it's 3 times the radius, it'll be 8 times the area.

Which business leaders were killed on the way to securing a 5-day workweek? Those gains were achieved through direct action affecting business bottom lines: strikes, sabotage, and direct action on the streets, not secret targeting of soft targets.

Put another way: there were two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump in the past year. Do you think that will change his political actions to be more popular?

Do you think that United Healthcare's next CEO will suddenly forgo profits? What about hospital administrators, pharma CEOs, or any of the other tens of thousands profiting off of this fucked up system? Do you think that a mass assassination campaign will actually happen in large enough volume to change any behavior at all?

You'd take the 2nd choice and hire bodyguards. Sure, you might. But not everybody would.

No, the question isn't whether everyone would. It's whether anyone would. And the answer is obviously yes.

So now the position is filled. Did the healthcare system change?

My argument is that no, you can't kill your way to reform on this one. There will always be another CEO to step into that place.

And the ratio of dead would-be assassins to CEOs would also pile more bodies on.

This is ludicrous. A person faced with unpopular decisions that might send assassins after him is going to make himself harder to assassinate, not less hated.

There's a difference once they start considering their own lifes on the line.

They won't. Anyone who has a semblance of belief that their decisions in the job might actually cause their own death just won't do the job. Instead, it becomes a filter for choosing even more narcissistic/sociopathic people in the role.

And once they've internalized the idea that any decision made by any one employee of the company, including their predecessor CEOs, can put them in danger, it's pretty attenuated from the actual decisions that they themselves make.

It's a dice roll on a group of people, which isn't enough to influence the individuals in that group.

We all know that the death of a CEO is a blip in the actual day to day operations in the company. The teams and departments will continue operating as before, and the broad strategic decisions made by the executives aren't going to factor in a remote likelihood of violence on a particular executive.

After all, if they're already doing cost/benefit analysis with human lives, what's another life of a colleague, versus an insurance beneficiary?

They'll just beef up personal security, put the cost of that security into their operating expenses, and then try to recover their costs through the business (including through stinginess on coverage decisions or policies).

You're absolutely right and I'd argue it boils down to the fundamental error in OP's shower thought:

Killing the CEO doesn't save the lives on the other track. It just adds another dead body to the pile.

There's no legitimate reason to intentionally take losses (or refuse to take revenue) for tax reasons, though.

If you lose $1000 and get a tax benefit worth $200 on those losses, it's still a net loss of $800, so you should rather get at least some money back. Getting $500 back might mean that you lose $500 and then get $100 back in tax benefits, so that your net loss is $400 instead. That's an improvement over losing $800, so it's worth doing.

More likely, the contracts around the movie had them needing to pay rightsholders, actors/writers/directors, and producers based on certain formulas on the gross revenue, or would be contractually obligated to spend a minimum on marketing and promotion if there was going to be a release, etc.

Taxes just alleviate the degree of losses (or reduce the amount of profit), which can change behavior around risk taking, but it wouldn't make sense to abandon a finished movie solely for tax reasons.

Well, efficiently, at least.

You can always heat up a hot air balloon and have it yank a system of pulleys, but you're gonna lose a lot of energy that way.