Funny how nostalgia differs for different people. I hated all that so much at the time that I installed linux (RH 7.x) from a magazine cd and learned to program in C & perl.
That multirows tab UI thing was an utter abomination against usability, intelligence, good sense, decency, justice and obviously any and all aesthetics. Why bring it back? To fix it maybe?
The part where the rows switch order based on the last one you clicked so if you're searching you can't be systematic without an amazing memory is POISON for discoverability.
Start on the top left tab, now it's on the bottom row. Thanks.
Channelling the 1980s for off-balance sheet financing 101.
From an economic perspective there is zero difference between borrowing to buy an asset and entering into a non-cancellable long term (equivalent to its economic life) lease for the asset.
The first option causes an asset and a liability on the balance sheet, affecting debt ratios that appear in financing contracts and so on. The second does not appear on the balance sheet.
You pay every month, like it or not. You call it interest or you call it a lease payment. You need it off balance sheet for reasons, investment bankers will structure that to make it happen for a fee.
Technically, from an economic perspective, it's debt.
There's regulation update and work around. The point of channeling the 1980s is because it was simple for the 101 explanation. Investment bakers will structure it for you if you need it, inline with the current regulatory environment. At one time cross border leases were fashionable for tax purposes. I don't keep up with such things to know if they still are.
How will they structure that for you to not show up on the balance sheet then? I'm not aware of a way, and the way you described wasn't true. All you now offered is "bankers can do it", but how without having to report it?
This isn’t something in which I’m an expert on any of the current details.
You can borrow a million dollars and use it to buy gold. An asset and a liability on the balance sheet each ba million dollars.
You can buy futures contracts with an underlying value of a million dollars. Nothing on the balance sheet. Zero dollars on both assets and liabilities.
The two are economically indistinguishable.
There are regulations around leases, for example, about what you have to capitalise on the balance sheet and when. Then there are workarounds for those rules. New rules cause the investment bankers to go to work. For a fee.
If you borrow a million dollars and buy gold both of those will have to be communicated to shareholders and indeed show up in the balance sheet. It doesn't matter if you say the lines add up to zero, that's still in the balance sheet shown for everyone to see.
Yes. That is the point. Borrow & buy is on the balance sheet as an asset and liability, as I explicitly said.
If you buy a futures contract with 1m of underlying value - it is NOT on the balance sheet. The balance sheet is unchanged. Economically it is exactly the same thing. It is exactly like you borrowed a million and bought gold with it but the loan and asset are invisible. Shocking, isn't it?
The structured finance dept of an investment bank uses exactly this (among other techniques) for off-balance sheet financing. There are rules they have to follow designed to prevent or minimise off balance sheet financing. You think the regulators have the investment bankers in a bind where they can do nothing and can't charge big fees resulting in the closure of all the structured finance departments? Well you know that could have happened without my knowledge, but I'd be quite surprised. You might know better? Do you want to bet?
> Technically, from an economic perspective, it's debt.
Isn’t the important difference that it doesn’t trigger bankruptcy on default? Economically it might not be that different but it has some significance legally because the courts have some fast tracks that trigger bankruptcies (IANAL but that’s my layman’s understanding).
If they “default” in this case it will lead to lawsuits that they will almost certainly lose but in the mean time they kick the can down the road hoping to recover on general economic headwinds like lower interest rates. IMO the risks are obviously correlated here but I’m betting short term incentives drove this mess.
Economist here. There are 3 parties and I’d focus on the investor’s perspective. The investor gives money to the intermediary company that signs a contract with the using company. If the contract fails, the intermediary still has the asset and can still make money. It can still payback the investor.
If the investor was given a bond, it is possible they aren’t paid back in full. And that’s where I would worry. The Great Recession was so bad because bond rating agencies marked bad bonds as investment-grade. That is, bonds you could rely on. When “sure future money” isn’t sure, the system glitches.
tbh this is only novel for the tech companies because they have never really had these types of product lines or unit cost structures before. a sass and brick and motor retailer scale very differently.
Investors get spooked the only thing they can do is mark it to zero. There's no "getting your money back" It has been spent on salaries, servers, Washington PR firms, political donations...
Legal fees are insignificant to open ai. Either they get profitable and the money does not run out or they don't, eventually can't raise more and close leaving these proceedings irrelevant.
At no point is money as a resource being spent on this legal case any kind of meaningful constraint. Equally true for both open ai and apple.
You? You're toast if you need legal justice with either co on the other side. The law exists so that the strongest might not always get their way. It was a good ideal, maybe we should bring it back.
yep the most that will happen is apple/openai co-branded devices or some sort of "corporate synergy" now that everyone knows apple tech is in the upcoming openai stuff.
there's no value in it for apple to go nuclear like there was for google to push a competitor out of the market w/ uber vs waymo
Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advantage isn't small.) And it had clearly been going on for many years before Armstrong entered the event for the first time.
I really don't care for Armstrong's yellow banded hypocrisy but blaming him for the "cheat or don't bother competing" reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
But I'm sure that's all in the past and it's not like that now. Just as was said when Armstrong won 6 times while correctly stating he was the most tested athlete on the planet.
Wrapping it up and tying all that to Armstrong, as has been done, stinks. He was clearly a bit player in that extensive fraud. Six titles with no meaningful positive drug test as the most tested athlete on the planet.
He was literal ring leader and innovator of doping. He was also openly forcing others into doping. That is not controversial statement, but result of subsequent reports.
> Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Yes, he was doping for years before being caught. He found novel ways how to do it.
> reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
No it does not. It just guves credit to where it is due. But we also have track record of Lance scapegoating others.
Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.
Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.
Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?
Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.
If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.
I did not said Armstrong was the first cyclist to dope. I said he made a real innovation in the world of doping. There were computers in 1975, but can you agree with me that several people brought in innovations between then and now? It is the same thing.
Doping existed prior Armstrong, Armstrong revolutionized it and led worsening of the doping situation. His teammates were bullied by him personally to dope. That includes testimonies of people who left for that reason.
> or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
Yes, plenty of them actually wanted to and Americans were acting butthurt. There were regular accusations of French just being jealous, like it is an international offense to suspect and American sportsman could cheat.
Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."
Google's entire "do no evil" bring your own identity to the job and all of that was pure marketing to hire better engineering talent.
Instead of monetising software sales, they monetised access to Free software performing an end run around the GPL by distributing access to it over the internet allowing them to make the public good proprietary google property. They threw out some crumbs at best.
Remember the un-publicised puzzles to paradoxically get media attention, hiring highschool kids with a demo that made the news because it made the news and all the rest of the BS. I guess it worked. Now they're big and bad and the Free software optimism is largely dead so they don't have to bother and now make killbots for the Pentagon.
Where else you gonna work? Go test the market, nerd.
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