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 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.
> 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".
> 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.
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.
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.