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:
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.
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.
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.
Nuclear gets more expensive. That’s worse.
Figuring out grid scale storage isn’t easy, but the good thing about it is that you can figure out storage at slightly smaller scales to alleviate the problem somewhat, and build on that success to try to get to daily storage to meet nighttime demand, then up to weekly storage to handle fluctuations in weather, and maybe even seasonal storage to deal with seasonal variation in both supply and demand.
But storage doesn’t have to just be chemical batteries, either. Some can be demand shifting, like desalination or water pumping based on excess power supply. Maybe even intermittently powering direct air capture of CO2 if there’s so much excess energy they don’t know what to do with it. Some can be storage of heat, whether really hot like molten salt that can run turbines for dispatchable electricity, or just at the residential scale with a bunch of distributed hot water tanks, or everything in between. There are also some storage technologies relying on gravity (pumped hydro if the geography supports it), compressed air, flywheels (could be important for maintaining grid inertia for stability).
And there’s always curtailment, where you just don’t generate the power, and turn off some the panels in the middle of the day.
Way too many birds.
But also I need to know about the maids a milking, the ladies dancing, the lords a leaping, pipers piping, and the drummers drumming. Like, this is a performance where the humans get paid and get to go home afterward, and not like a slave trade situation, right?
Okay, now solve for local transportation and create a single network that’s highly optimized for both long distance, medium distance, and last mile solutions.
Why does it need to be a single network? A shipping container can go on ship, train, and truck pretty seamlessly, and that combined multi-modal network can connect sources and destinations that no one method is sufficient for.
And once you design an optimized network under your parameters, it starts to look like a hub and spoke model, with high volume arterial routes connecting the hubs, pretty close to how parcel delivery tends to work. And once you have that, you can optimize specific segments, including using hubs connected by air for time sensitive stuff (same day, next day, 2-day service), waterways or rail for really heavy or bulky stuff, and all sorts of intermediate methods or a variety of last mile delivery needs for the specific needs of any given package.
Also, Relevant Username?
Probably. I don’t even know how I came up with this, but I do love me some logic.
Sometimes 1+1 is 2, like when you’re counting stuff.
Sometimes 1+1 is 1, like when you just need a Boolean indicator of whether something is true. Pressing the elevator button multiple times should behave the same way as pressing the elevator button once. Planning out a delivery route requires a stop at every place with at least one item to be delivered, but the route itself doesn’t change when a second or third item is added to that stop.
Sometimes 1+1 is 0, like when dealing with certain types of rotations, toggle switches, etc. Doing a 180° rotation twice is the same as doing it zero times. Same with doing a reflection transformation twice.
A good engineer understands the scope of what they’re doing, and its limits.
Contracts can be modified by the bankruptcy code.
In 11 U.S.C. § 365(f)(1):
Except as provided in subsections (b) and © of this section, notwithstanding a provision in an executory contract or unexpired lease of the debtor, or in applicable law, that prohibits, restricts, or conditions the assignment of such contract or lease, the trustee may assign such contract or lease under paragraph (2) of this subsection.
So any continuing contract in which there are obligations on both sides, such as a premium account where the accountholder pays a fee and the service provider continues providing access to the service, is assignable in a bankruptcy, even if the contract itself says it’s not assignable.
There’s a few other bankruptcy principles at play, but that’s the main one that jumps out at me.
There’s also a classic case where the bankruptcy trustee can sell a bankruptcy debtor’s Pittsburgh Steelers season tickets, including the right to renew for the next year on the same terms as all other season tickets holders. Just because the season tickets are revocable by contract doesn’t mean that the team has the right to exercise that revocation against a bankruptcy debtor just because they don’t like what’s happening in the bankruptcy.
Oh, he knows. They took him on an airplane and made him eat food he had just called “poison” for a photo shoot.
He couldn’t say no, because of the implication.
The “what is a bank” question is complicated, so “fintechs” have been operating in areas that are in some gray areas in between “definitely a bank” versus “definitely not a bank.”
At the most informal, you’ve got things like a roommate who collects everyone’s fair share of rent before sending one payment to the landlord, or a parent who keeps track of their kids’ virtual balances of what the kids are allowed to spend. These definitely aren’t banks.
Then you’ve got things like short term balances between people who deal with each other: an employer who keeps track of hours and pays the employee at the end of the pay period, a retail customer who has some store credit from a returned item, a contractor who periodically invoices a customer for work performed, etc. Despite the “credit” and “balances,” these aren’t bank accounts.
Some gray areas get a little bit more complicated. You have airline mileage and hotel point programs where the miles/points can be used to purchase goods and services, including sometimes those not even being offered by the business where the miles were accumulated.
Then you get into banking-like structures that might be, or might not be banks. Is it banking when you buy something on a periodic payment plan? What about when you put down a deposit to reserve a preorder for something you expect to buy when that product is released? Or give someone a gift card for a specific store? Does it matter if these programs are administered by third parties separate from the buyer or seller?
Even things like Apple Cash or PayPal or Venmo or CashApp perform functions that can be bank-like, or not really bank-like.
Fintechs have looked at the constantly updated rules of what they can or can’t do before needing to comply with certain banking regulations, and usually try to avoid accidentally triggering certain rules. And the rules don’t divide into just bank versus not bank, as many of the rules apply to non-banks that do certain things, and many of the rules don’t apply to even banks that stay out of certain product lines. So it’s not a binary yes or no, but a series of complicated areas where some are yes and some are no.
The big problem, where this Synapse bankruptcy is hurting people, is when people worked with an entity that provides certain services, who relied on the back end on a middleman that provides other services, and then the middleman fails. People operating in the gray areas are exposing themselves to systemic risks they might not fully understand.
Yeah, evolving lungs ended up clearing the way to make use of the much more plentiful oxygen in the air compared to what is dissolved in water. Amphibians and reptiles have pretty low metabolisms, but birds and mammals basically evolved endothermy (aka warm bloodedness), probably in support of much higher muscular power output. Ectotherms (aka cold blooded animals) have metabolisms that are correlated to temperature, which means they can’t exert themselves as well when it’s cold. Endothermy allowed animals to be warm all the time, and therefore use higher muscular power output in any environment, especially sustained.
That means mammals and birds were able to cover more distance, and survive in places where reptiles and amphibians can’t, and all the advantages that carries.
This article estimates at a 40kg sailfish uses about 2.7 megajoules per day of energy when hunting. That’s about 650 kcal.
An 80kg human weighs about twice as much and needs about 3 times the energy, without even exertion.
Warm blooded animals spend a lot of energy just maintaining body temperature. Plus water doesn’t have very much oxygen in it, compared to the atmosphere.
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.