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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Private equity ghouls have a new way to steal from their investors

Private equity is quite a racket. PE managers pile up other peoples’ money — pension funds, plutes, other pools of money — and then “invest” it (buying businesses, loading them with debt, cutting wages, lowering quality and setting traps for customers). For this, they get an annual fee — 2% — of the money they manage, and a bonus for any profits they make.

On top of this, private equity bosses get to use the carried interest tax loophole, a scam that lets them treat this ordinary income as a capital gain, so they can pay half the taxes that a working stiff would pay on a regular salary. If you don’t know much about carried interest, you might think it has to do with “interest” on a loan or a deposit, but it’s way weirder. “Carried interest” is a tax regime designed for 16th century sea captains and their “interest” in the cargo they “carried”:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity is a cancer. Its profits come from buying productive firms, loading them with debt, abusing their suppliers, workers and customers, and driving them into ground, stiffing all of them — and the company’s creditors. The mafia have a name for this. They call it a “bust out”:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Private equity destroyed Toys R Us, Sears, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and many more companies beloved of Main Street, bled dry for Wall Street:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

And they’re coming for more. PE funds are “rolling up” thousands of Boomer-owned business as their owners retire. There’s a good chance that every funeral home, pet groomer and urgent care clinic within an hour’s drive of you is owned by a single PE firm. There’s 2.9m more Boomer-owned businesses going up for sale in the coming years, with 32m employees, and PE is set to buy ’em all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

PE funds get their money from “institutional investors.” It shouldn’t surprise you to learn they treat their investors no better than their creditors, nor the customers, employees or suppliers of the businesses they buy.

Pension funds, in particular, are the perennial suckers at the poker table. My parent’s pension fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Fund, are every grifter’s favorite patsy, losing $90m to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency scam:

https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers--statement-on-ftx/

Pension funds are neck-deep in private equity, paying steep fees for shitty returns. Imagine knowing that the reason you can’t afford your apartment anymore is your pension fund gambled with the private equity firm that bought your building and jacked up the rent — and still lost money:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/25/pluralistic-your-daily-link-dose-25-feb-2020/

But there’s no depth too low for PE looters to sink to. They’ve found an exciting new way to steal from their investors, a scam called a “continuation fund.” Writing in his latest newsletter, the great Matt Levine breaks it down:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Here’s the deal: say you’re a PE guy who’s raised a $1b fund. That entitles you to a 2% annual “carry” on the fund: $20,000,000/year. But you’ve managed to buy and asset strip so many productive businesses that it’s now worth $5b. Your carry doesn’t go up fivefold. You could sell the company and collect your 20% commission — $800m — but you stop collecting that annual carry.

But what if you do both? Here’s how: you create a “continuation fund” — a fund that buys your old fund’s portfolio. Now you’ve got $5b under management and your carry quintuples, to $100m/year. Levine dryly notes that the FT calls this “a controversial type of transaction”:

https://www.ft.com/content/11549c33-b97d-468b-8990-e6fd64294f85

These deals “look like a pyramid scheme” — one fund flips its assets to another fund, with the same manager running both funds. It’s a way to make the pie bigger, but to decrease the share (in both real and proportional terms) going to the pension funds and other institutional investors who backed the fund.

A PE boss is supposed to be a fiduciary, with a legal requirement to do what’s best for their investors. But when the same PE manager is the buyer and the seller, and when the sale takes place without inviting any outside bidders, how can they possibly resolve their conflict of interest?

They can’t: 42% of continuation fund deals involve a sale at a value lower than the one that the PE fund told their investors the assets were worth. Now, this may sound weird — if a PE boss wants to set a high initial value for their fund in order to maximize their carry, why would they sell its assets to the new fund at a discount?

Here’s Levine’s theory: if you’re a PE guy going back to your investors for money to put in a new fund, you’re more likely to succeed if you can show that their getting a bargain. So you raise $1b, build it up to $5b, and then tell your investors they can buy the new fund for only $3b. Sure, they can get out — and lose big. Or they can take the deal, get the new fund at a 40% discount — and the PE boss gets $60m/year for the next ten years, instead of the $20m they were getting before the continuation fund deal.

PE is devouring the productive economy and making the world’s richest people even richer. The one bright light? The FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division just published new merger guidelines that would make the PE acquire/debt-load/asset-strip model illegal:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/07/ftc-doj-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines

The bad news is that some sneaky fuck just slipped a 20% FTC budget cut — $50m/year — into the new appropriations bill:

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1681830706488438785

They’re scared, and they’re fighting dirty.

I’m at San Diego Comic-Con!

Today (Jul 20) 16h: Signing, Tor Books booth #2802 (free advance copies of The Lost Cause — Nov 2023 — to the first 50 people!)

Tomorrow (Jul 21):

1030h: Wish They All Could be CA MCs, room 24ABC (panel)

12h: Signing, AA09

Sat, Jul 22 15h: The Worlds We Return To, room 23ABC (panel)

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

[Image ID: An old Punch editorial cartoon depicting a bank-robber sticking up a group of businesspeople and workers. He wears a bandanna emblazoned with dollar-signs and a top-hat.]

#pluralistic #buyout groups #continuation fraud #pe #pyramid schemes #the sucker at the table #pension plans #continuation funds #matt levine #fiduciaries #finance #private equity #mark to market #ripoffs

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thenewsfactsnow · 6 months

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Tata Group's Wistron India Takeover: A Win for 'Make in India' iPhones, Semiconductors

Tata Group has acquired Wistron India operations, marking a milestone for the ‘Make in India’ initiative and positioning Tata Electronics as the premier manufacturer of Apple iPhones in the country. The move comes as a strategic decision by the Tata Group, as it aims to solidify its position in the high-end smartphone manufacturing sector and expand its presence in the global electronics value…

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#Tata Group Wistron India Buyout #Wistron India

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reportwire · 1 year

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NDTV takeover: Adani Group to launch open offer on November 22

Adani Group has announced that its open offer to acquire an additional 26 per cent stake in NDTV will be open for subscription from November 22 to December 5. The open offer for acquiring 1.67 crore equity shares with a face value of Rs 4 will tentatively close on December 5, 2022, said JM Financial, which is managing the offer. The price fixed for the deal is Rs 294 per share. Earlier, the…

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zvaigzdelasas · 1 year

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so twitter's going well [8 Dec 22]

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treethymes · 2 months

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With the exceptions of North Korea and Cuba, the communist world has merged onto the capitalist highway in a couple different ways during the twenty-first century. As you’ve read, free-trade imperialism and its cheap agricultural imports pushed farmers into the cities and into factory work, lowering the global price of manufacturing labor and glutting the world market with stuff. Forward-thinking states such as China and Vietnam invested in high-value-added production capacity and managed labor organizing, luring links from the global electronics supply chain and jump-starting capital investment. Combined with capital’s hesitancy to invest in North Atlantic production facilities, as well as a disinclination toward state-led investment in the region, Asian top-down planning erased much of the West’s technological edge. If two workers can do a single job, and one worker costs less, both in wages and state support, why pick the expensive one? Foxconn’s 2017 plan to build a U.S. taxpayer–subsidized $10 billion flat-panel display factory in Wisconsin was trumpeted by the president, but it was a fiasco that produced zero screens. The future cost of labor looks to be capped somewhere below the wage levels many people have enjoyed, and not just in the West.

The left-wing economist Joan Robinson used to tell a joke about poverty and investment, something to the effect of: The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalists is not being exploited by capitalists. It’s a cruel truism about the unipolar world, but shouldn’t second place count for something? When the Soviet project came to an end, in the early 1990s, the country had completed world history’s biggest, fastest modernization project, and that didn’t just disappear. Recall that Cisco was hyped to announce its buyout of the Evil Empire’s supercomputer team. Why wasn’t capitalist Russia able to, well, capitalize? You’re already familiar with one of the reasons: The United States absorbed a lot of human capital originally financed by the Soviet people. American immigration policy was based on draining technical talent in particular from the Second World. Sergey Brin is the best-known person in the Moscow-to-Palo-Alto pipeline, but he’s not the only one.

Look at the economic composition of China and Russia in the wake of Soviet dissolution: Both were headed toward capitalist social relations, but they took two different routes. The Russian transition happened rapidly. The state sold off public assets right away, and the natural monopolies such as telecommunications and energy were divided among a small number of skilled and connected businessmen, a category of guys lacking in a country that frowned on such characters but that grew in Gorbachev’s liberalizing perestroika era. Within five years, the country sold off an incredible 35 percent of its national wealth. Russia’s richest ended the century with a full counterrevolutionary reversal of their fortunes, propelling their income share above what it was before the Bolsheviks took over. To accomplish this, the country’s new capitalists fleeced the most vulnerable half of their society. “Over the 1989–2016 period, the top 1 percent captured more than two-thirds of the total growth in Russia,” found an international group of scholars, “while the bottom 50 percent actually saw a decline in its income.” Increases in energy prices encouraged the growth of an extractionist petro-centered economy. Blood-covered, teary, and writhing, infant Russian capital crowded into the gas and oil sectors. The small circle of oligarchs privatized unemployed KGB-trained killers to run “security,” and gangsters dominated politics at the local and national levels. They installed a not particularly well-known functionary—a former head of the new intelligence service FSB who also worked on the privatization of government assets—as president in a surprise move on the first day of the year 2000. He became the gangster in chief.

Vladimir Putin’s first term coincided with the energy boom, and billionaires gobbled up a ludicrous share of growth. If any individual oligarch got too big for his britches, Putin was not beyond imposing serious consequences. He reinserted the state into the natural monopolies, this time in collaboration with loyal capitalists, and his stranglehold on power remains tight for now, despite the outstandingly uneven distribution of growth. Between 1980 and 2015, the Russian top 1 percent grew its income an impressive 6.2 percent per year, but the top .001 percent has maintained a growth rate of 17 percent over the same period. To invest these profits, the Russian billionaires parked their money in real estate, bidding up housing prices, and stashed a large amount of their wealth offshore. Reinvestment in Russian production was not a priority—why go through the hassle when there were easier ways to keep getting richer?

While Russia grew billionaires instead of output, China saw a path to have both. As in the case of Terry Gou, the Chinese Communist Party tempered its transition by incorporating steadily increasing amounts of foreign direct investment through Hong Kong and Taiwan, picking partners and expanding outward from the special economic zones. State support for education and infrastructure combined with low wages to make the mainland too attractive to resist. (Russia’s population is stagnant, while China’s has grown quickly.) China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, in 2001, gave investors more confidence. Meanwhile, strong capital controls kept the country out of the offshore trap, and state development priorities took precedence over extraction and get-rich-quick schemes. Chinese private wealth was rechanneled into domestic financial assets—equity and bonds or other loan instruments—at a much higher rate than it was in Russia. The result has been a sustained high level of annual output growth compared to the rest of the world, the type that involves putting up an iPhone City in a matter of months. As it has everywhere else, that growth has been skewed: only an average of 4.5 percent for the bottom half of earners in the 1978–2015 period compared to more than 10 percent for the top .001 percent. But this ratio of just over 2–1 is incomparable to Russia’s 17–.5 ration during the same period.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, certain trends have been more or less unavoidable. The rich have gotten richer relative to the poor and working class—in Russia, in China, in the United States, and pretty much anywhere else you want to look. Capital has piled into property markets, driving up the cost of housing everywhere people want to live, especially in higher-wage cities and especially in the world’s financial centers. Capitalist and communist countries alike have disgorged public assets into private pockets. But by maintaining a level of control over the process and slowing its tendencies, the People’s Republic of China has built a massive and expanding postindustrial manufacturing base.

It’s important to understand both of these patterns as part of the same global system rather than as two opposed regimes. One might imagine, based on what I’ve written so far, that the Chinese model is useful, albeit perhaps threatening, in the long term for American tech companies while the Russian model is irrelevant. Some commentators have phrased this as the dilemma of middle-wage countries on the global market: Wages in China are going to be higher than wages in Russia because wages in Russia used to be higher than wages in China. But Russia’s counterrevolutionary hyper-bifurcation has been useful for Silicon Valley as well; they are two sides of the same coin. Think about it this way: If you’re a Russian billionaire in the first decades of the twenty-first century looking to invest a bunch of money you pulled out of the ground, where’s the best place you could put it? The answer is Palo Alto.

Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto

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darkficsyouneveraskedfor · 1 year

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Yeah, I just was vibing. Hope you don't mind if I go off again...

I do not mind!! I now want to meet Steve’s girl and have the reader teach her some recipes. Or maybe the boys take them on a group date to a baseball match?

This is from Steve's girls' POV

Baked Over

No explicit warnings but you know the tone of my work. Bucky is a big jealous baby.

Please let me know what you think <3

🥧🥧🥧

“Try not to make a mess,” Steve’s large hand rests on your hip as he kisses your forehead, “and listen,” he whispers.

You wince as his breath tickles your ear and you give a nod, “yes, Captain.”

“Good girl,” he winks as he pulls back and looks at you, “I really like this,” he plays with the frilly trim of the apron he gave you that morning, “you look nice.”

“Thank you,” you smile and rub your arm as you glance over at your visitor. She watches you vacantly as her husband’s hand lingers shamelessly on her behind. “We should get started.”

“Yes, I can’t wait,” Steve says, “Buck, come on, we gotta figure out this thing today or I’m just gonna trash it.”

“I told you it was a clunker,” Bucky parts from the other woman with one last pinch, “but you never listen to good sense.”

You give a shallow laugh as the men leave. The other woman goes to the counter and unpacks the cloth bag she brought with her. She’s quiet as she sets down three shining Gala apples.

“Thanks so much for this,” you come to her side, “I’ve been watching all these videos but my pastry just doesn’t turn out.”

“No problem,” she says, “pastry is… fickle. And I need to do something with these apples.”

“Last time I served pie, Captain got sick.”

She tucks her lower lip under her teeth and nods as she continues to pull out ingredients, “you really call him Captain all the time?”

“Um, habit, mostly just… to him, but it’s easier,” you have to keep yourself from hyperventilating, “he likes it.”

She looks over at you, “yeah, they’re like that. Anyway,” she sighs, “I wasn’t sure if you had a good pan but I have a spare, so I brought it with me.”

“Oh, thank you, you didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s fine,” she shrugs.

You smile. It’s nice, you only hope you don’t ruin it. She starts, running through the steps by rote; peel and chop the apples, next, mix the dry ingredients, then… you try to follow her instructions, even as she slows down and has you do it yourself. Still, you don’t have a mind for it. You told Steve a dozen times, your head doesn’t work like that.

“You okay?” She stops as she lines the pan with the dough. It looks better than anything you’ve ever done.

“Mhmm,” you hum weakly. She’s so confident about all this. “Um,” you stare at the band on her finger, the large stone sparkling beneath the remnants of flour, “how long have you and Bucky… been married?”

“Couple years, I think,” she answers dully, “are you and Steve planning to…”

“Oh, er, he really wants to. It’s all he talks about but I just think it’s so early. Moving in that was… a lot. And it’s only because my building kind of… well, there was something about a buyout. Anyway, um, I’m rambling.”

“No, it’s fine, Bucky’s not much of a talker.”

“Yeah, he’s scary,” you say without thinking then cover your mouth. She looks at you but doesn’t answer. You drop your hands, “I’m sorry, I didn’t–”

“Let me give you some advice, don’t marry him,” she says, “if you can, get out. This Captain thing, that’s the first step.”

“What do you mean?”

She gives you another long stare. You teeter on your feet and blink as you avoid her gaze.

“You know,” she says and she’s right, you know, but she doesn’t know, you can’t leave.

#steve rogers #dark steve rogers #dark!steve rogers #steve rogers x reader #drabble #dark drabble #dark!drabble #ask drabble #mcu #marvel #bucky barnes #captain america

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grison-in-space · 8 months

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Via a conversation on Metafilter about the state of Florida's decision to crush its public institutions, a person I think is particularly wise left a comment about the state of the legislature on higher education in Wisconsin.

The situation in Florida is atrocious, but it's important to be aware of how widespread this movement on the part of MAGA politicians to ban all academic and support programs related to gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality is. I'm a professor in the Wisconsin state university system, where, in addition to my regular fulltime work in my home department I direct the LGBTQ+ Studies Program (a more-than-halftime job I have done for many years in return for zero additional salary, or summer funds, or course buyout, or any other compensation...).

This summer, the Wisconsin state legislature, gerrymandered into permanent Republican control, voted to ban all DEI programs in the state university system, and cut $32 million from the university budget, which it stated was amount of "taxpayer money being wasted on divisive indoctrination efforts" (to paraphrase Assembly Speaker Robin Vos). This comes after years of successive budget cuts and a ten-year tuition freeze and years of faculty and staff taking pay cuts in the form of "furloughs" through which we were expected to just keep working. The situation is now somewhat improved in that Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, vetoed the DEI ban, but he cannot restore the funding. Anyway: a few days after the legislative vote to ban DEI , I was giving a talk about the range of state bills attacking trans youth and adults, and there was a Democratic state legislator on the panel. When we were introducing ourselves and I told her I directed the LGBTQ+ Studies Program, she said, "Oh, but that's no longer legal. Well, unless Evers vetoes the ban; we'll see."

After doing some blinking, I responded by explaining the difference between DEI programs and academic programs. DEI programs provide student support services, which is deemed administrative work, in contrast to academic programs. The LGBTQ+ Resource Center and the LGBTQ+ Studies Program at my university are both vital and important. But the resource center organizes support groups and social activities for students, while the academic program teaches classes and sponsors academic talks. Academic programs are not part of the DEI system--and the very same legislature that voted for the DEI ban had spent years prior threatening sanctions against students and faculty for supposedly not sufficiently respecting the absolute value of free speech in academia. Legislators presented instructors as censorious ideologues, students as snowflakes in love with a victim narrative, and the legislature as the champion of teaching and discussing all ideas freely.

The image of DEI programs presented by Republican legislators is some kind of kink fantasy, in which cis straight white men are forced to prostrate themselves, declare themselves to be bad and deserving of punishment, and lick the boots of students who are trans and queer, of color and feminist. The reality is that university DEI programs are providing mental health services and tutoring and social support to college students, at a time when their levels of mental health challenges are very high. They have zero to do with the kink humiliation fantasy, they really are about inclusion, and it is ludicrous and cruel to cut social support to marginalized college students.

But even if the state ban were not vetoed, a DEI ban does not dismantle programs like Gender Studies or African and African Diaspora Studies or LGBTQ+ Studies, because they are academic programs, I explained to the Democratic legislator. But from her response, it was clear that not only did Republican Wisconsin legislators think they'd banned all academic programs examining race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and who knows what else (disability studies? Jewish studies and Islamic studies?), but that the Democratic legislators seemed to believe so as well.

The flip from "we are the party of free speech!" to "we are the party that bans books and entire academic disciplines!" happened with dizzying speed. But take it from me as a trans person--these legislative attacks can burst across the country in the space of months, shifting the landscape radically. The thing about the MAGA movement is that it is made up of people who believe that the situation is desperate, the American project is on the verge of failure, and the time has come to destroy or be destroyed. Most Americans, including non-MAGA Republicans, want to see the culture war cool down and Americans get along, but MAGA-sorts want it to go hot. And I have to admit some despair about what to do about this, because of the unpersuadability of this group. Take a look at Question 39 from this CBS/YouGov poll of Iowa voters last week, and what percentage of Republican voters there believe they are being lied to by various parties. The percentage of MAGA voters who said they said they believed they were being told the truth by Trump was 71%, in comparison to 63% for friends and family, 56% for conservative news sources, and 42% for religious leaders. Only 32% of Iowa Republicans generally believed they were told the truth by medical scientists. (The figures for Joe Biden and "liberal media" were 10% and 8% respectively.)

It is hard to persuade people with facts and logic and calls for empathy when they think you are a liar attacking their great leader with whom 99% say they identify. What we have to do is persuade others to stand up. And I don't want to be doomy, but my experience with resisting transphobic legislation and action causes me a lot of concern. It's not just "the face-eating leopards won't eat my face" problem. The fact is, frankly, that a lot of institutions and people are craven. This past year I was in a working group with medical and social scientists advising the HHS about creating guidelines for research with intersex and transgender populations, and then Libs of TikTok spread lies about hospitals supposedly performing "sex changes" on little kids, and several children's hospitals received bomb threats--and suddenly most of the medical researchers working with trans youth were pulled from the working group by the hospitals they were affiliated with. Hospital administrators are shutting down research on trans youth and clinics serving trans youth, rather than having the backs of threatened doctors and patients, handing a victory to the face-eating leopards who growled at them.

My conclusion is that we need to focus energy on teaching people who have not dealt with serious bullying before how to stand up to bullies. For people like concerned parents considering attending school board meetings to oppose book bans, we could teach basic mutual aid strategies, like forming a supportive group to attend together. But what we are to do about people like college administrators and corporate executives who would like to do the right thing for students and employees, but not as much as they'd like to avoid offending a wealthy donor or receiving negative conservative media attention. . . that's a big question to me.

I have left my own longer comment in the wider thread.

(If you also like longform, thoughtful text conversation, this is my regular plug for Metafilter as a platform. If you DM me an email address, I can send you an invitation link for a free account.)

#metafilter #education #public education #colleges #legislators #cannot fucking believe the DEI thing #the thing is I have collaborated with this person in the past and he is a deeply sensible human being #so if he says this is what the legislators think #I believe him

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somuchyoudontknow · 11 months

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CAA is omnipresent?

A wonderful friend has dug up some interesting information that I am about to share about CAA.

Jan 2023: The move cements the separation of their assets from the pan-European Wild Bunch AG film group, which was created in 2015 out of the merger of their original French company Wild Bunch and Germany’s Senator Film and is now majority-owned by German entrepreneur Lars Windhorst. This means Wild Bunch AG no longer owns its 20% stake in the independent standalone international sales company Maraval and Chioua and their 15-strong team launched in 2019 under the banner of Wild Bunch International (WBI). The company is now been majority owned by Maraval and Chioua and its staff, with CAA also holding a 20% stake. The pair are in the process of securing a new name but the public dropping of the Wild Bunch moniker marks a decisive move for them and their team as they continue to build the new company.

DEADLINE: Wild Bunch International has existed as a standalone company since 2019. Why have you decided only now to split from the iconic brand name you created in 2002 but no longer own? BRAHIM CHIOUA: When we created Wild Bunch International in 2019, Wild Bunch took a 20% stake in exchange for allowing us to use the Wild Bunch brand in our name under a signed three-year agreement. We had a second commercial cooperation deal for the same period under which Wild Bunch International continued to sell and manage Wild Bunch’s international catalogue for a fee, and also had access to the group’s back-office services, for which we paid a fee. This deal came to an end in November 2022 with a get-out clause for both parties. We opted to buyout Wild Bunch’s equity share.

DEADLINE: You have always worked closely with CAA. How does this move impact your relationship with the agency?

MARAVAL: CAA has been an historical partner and they allowed us to start the new company three years ago. Our relationship is probably one we are the most proud of because this goes beyond a simple business relationship. Together with Roeg Sutherland’s team, we built a unique business model of synergies and connection in term of promotion, financing , talent representation that benefit the talent and the producers we are working with such as Alice Diop, Nadine Labaki, Claire Denis, Rebecca Zlotowski, Ladj Ly, Jacques Audiard or Gaspar Noé for example.

DEADLINE: As well as continuing to work on international sales, the new company seems more directly involved in producing... MARAVAL: International sales is no longer our only activity. We’re much more involved as active co-producing partners whether it’s through Le Collectif 64 or Wild West. It’s not like in the past when a company such as Fidelité would come to us with a film, and we would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Now, we participate in the development, financing and packaging of projects. Changes in the industry meant we had to reformat ourselves. We don’t have to sell the films produced by Getaway Films, Wild West or Le Collectif 64 because with those companies we’re wearing a co-producer hat with an active role. We need to find the best solution for each film, which won’t necessarily involve us selling it internationally on a territory basis.

Source:

It's interesting that WBI separated from WB AG in November 2022.

In the end of March 2023 they revealed their new name Goodfellas

February 2023: Still WBI has boarded sales on Amelia's children

November 2021: Former NBCUniversal Vice Chairman and CAA Co-Founder Ron Meyer Named CEO of Wild Bunch

So, CAA has 20% stake at Goodfellas (former WBI), their partner WB AG is run by a former CAA co-founder Ron Meyer. Another ex-CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz is one of Jinx partners. Omnipresent CAA

More about WB AG:

It looks like transatlantic cooperation, that's why pairing up an American actor and a European actress makes sense to attract not only domestic but also an international audience. As we know Chris is not well-known in Europe, if he wants more international fame and financing for the Kelly project from a non-US company, this pr rl might be a good chance for him.

Industry people have been informed about WBI and WB AG deal since 2019, Seb and Aly, Chris and Lily, and now Chris and Alba appeared in 2020. Actresses are from Europe.

The industry is changing due to many factors. Chris is trying to survive like many actors. He doesn't have his Marvel role too. It's a new start for him, he needs to build a solid foundation. Industry-wise, he is not RDJ or DJ, he doesn't have a pull to make people go to watch his movies as a lead, he needs pr.

Chris' case is also different because of Amelia's children and his 2 movies. And we don't know about Jinx marketing plans.

#chris evans pr #chris-evans #alba-baptista #CAA #jinx

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intoloopin · 6 months

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LOOPIN, THE GROUP.

First announced as 'Boy Of The Week Project' in late 2016, promised to eventually become an extension of Blockberry Creative's LOONA mostly housed under New Wave Music, BBC's novice partner company, LOOPiN was for a long time a myth: with no official records of the reported 24 trainees set to compete under 'Boy Of The Week', a mix of korean and international young men and teenagers, it's impossible to know how and when exactly LOOPiN came to be. Off the pre-pre-debut official recruiting, only seven met debut – them being Beomseok, Taesong, Minwoo, Seungsoo, Haruki, Dylan (with a one year delay compared to all others) and Haegon. Remaining members O.z, Hanjae and J.J joined the final lineup under undisclosed circumstances.

Once officially formed, LOOPiN had an almost siamese start as their sister group: debuting two to three members, one in every week of the month starting from mid 2018, then conjoining them under a unit until all 10 members had been formerly introduced to the public, officially becoming LOOPiN on August 2019.

As LOONA had The Loonaverse, LOOPiN's cosmic horror, highly nonlinear concept, named as The Looploore, stayed heavily with them up until New Wave Music's split with Blockberry Creative and complete buyout of their exclusive contracts in October 2022. Beomseok was the only original member that refused to renew and left the group, as well as celebrity life, on March 2023, quickly being replaced by Gyujin.

Known for being a highly self produced act with all members deeply involved in the creation of the group's visual, musical and storytelling aspects, as well as for having the most unlucky and polemic starts to almost every year, LOOPiN keeps on kicking high and ranking as one of the most prolific and eye catching groups in K-Pop now – a merit that seems to be far from being taken away from them anytime soon.

LOOPiN, THE MEMBERS.

PARK TAESONG.

With a history of being mocked for his kindness and taunted for his need to please, Park Taesong has been from day one the weakling in the eyes of every single one of his teammates, and he's been fighting a never ending war to not let them mold him into something he's not – into one of them. Even when his high tendency to anxiously spiral and his chronic fear of his own frail health get temporarily in the way, Taesong is always choosing to try to stay calm, stay sane, stay by his own side – but he still might prefer to give up on himself before he gives up on LOOPiN.

He's gentle, cowardly, optimistic, controling.

GIVEN NAME: Park Taesong. OTHER ALIASES: Taeng (nickname). BIRTHDATE: 02.15.97. PROFESSION: Idol. GROUP POSITIONS: main vocalist, leader (2019 - early 2022). ETHNICITY: Korean. NATIONALITY: South Korean. FACE CLAIM: Seo Dongsung.

BANG MINWOO.

Bang Minwoo believes he's known hunger more intimately than anyone else around him, and for that, he is brutal. With a relationship with music that borders on obsession, he's given up body and soul for his art and will spare nothing to keep LOOPiN going – or so he wants the world to believe. Truth is, there is a caring, deeply empathic nature in Minwoo that he's been trying to ignore for years, and it's dormant now, but not gone. Ever since he began being confronted by past actions and his own secret history, Minwoo hasn't been able to sit with himself at peace and sleep.

He's dedicated, irritable, reliable, obsessive.

GIVEN NAME: Bang Minwoo. OTHER ALIASES: Noah Bang (english name). BIRTHDATE: 07.08.97. PROFESSION: Idol-songwriter, music producer. GROUP POSITIONS: leader (early 2022-), main rapper, vocalist, dancer, group producer. ETHNICITY: Korean. NATIONALITY: South Korean (Guryong natural). FACE CLAIM: Lee Changyoon.

NA SEUNGSOO.

Na Seungsoo has always marched to the beat of his own drum, in a rhythm that hardly makes sense to anyone else. The never serious, untalented with academics youngest child of a lineage of successful doctors, Seungsoo took a gamble with the entertainment industry and believes himself to have won big. But where his stage act is a success, his interpersonal relationships suffer – quick to love and even quicker to hate, practically a stranger to forgiveness of even the smallest off offences, Seungsoo can't help but hurt everyone he tries to guide to what he considers to be safety.

He's romantic, intrusive, enthusiastic, impulsive.

GIVEN NAME: Na Seungsoo. OTHER ALIASES: Sonny Na (english name). BIRTHDATE: 10.19.97. PROFESSION: Idol, music producer, choreographer. GROUP POSITIONS: lead vocalist, lead dancer, group producer. ETHNICITY: Korean. NATIONALITY: South Korean (Busan natural). FACE CLAIM: Kang Hyunggu.

FUKUNAGA HARUKI.

Coming from one of Japan's longest artistic driven families, a direct descendant of a long line of dancers, painters and classic musicians, Fukunaga Haruki was always expected to conquer the world. Now standing as a KArts drop out with an addition to highs and lows first, successful Idol second, Haruki can't see himself as anything but a projectile that failed on the launch path. He might be LOOPiN's most well known face, but that hasn't come without a price – as the keeper of secrets that can bring his entire company to ruin, he has to be compensated. But after years of pretending, his luck seems to have run out and the silent act has grown tired.

He's passionate, evasive, resourceful, mercurial.

GIVEN NAME: Fukunaga Haruki. BIRTHDATE: 09.22.98. PROFESSION: Idol, dancer, model. GROUP POSITIONS: main dancer, vocalist, visual, face of the group. ETHNICITY: Japanese. NATIONALITY: Japanese. FACE CLAIM: Takahashi Fumiya.

DYLAN HWANG / HWANG CHIHOON.

An only child born from a dreamy teenage affair in South Korea, Dylan Hwang was raised by his single mother and his grandparents in Santa Monica, California, unknowing of the identity of his father, unknowing of what to do with himself. Picking up his mom's long lost dream of living trought music, Chihoon started auditioning to entertainment companies in hopes to find some sort of enlightenment in fame, got a break of spirit instead – it seems that as long as he's got an eye open, he'll keep on being a quiet witness and attender of the worst the world has to offer.

He's selfless, repressed, attentive, paranoid.

GIVEN NAME: Hwang Chihoon. OTHER ALIASES: Dylan Hwang (english name). BIRTHDATE: 03.17.99. PROFESSION: Idol, singer-songwriter. GROUP POSITIONS: lead vocalist, songwriter, concept co-director (2023-). ETHNICITY: Korean. NATIONALITY: Korean-American. FACE CLAIM: Lee Changmin.

WU ZHIMING / OH JIMIN.

Born chinese, raised with an iron fist in Seoul, O.z has felt essentially split from a young age. Absorbing a stoicism from his executive father he still can't let go off, Zhiming can only be unapologetically himself trough his genre defying, highly unpopular music. He became an Idol out of spite, set to hate it, but found a new side of himself trought his stage persona and the A list world he's set in – one that the black and white sense of morality he's cultivated trought life makes O.z an odd man out on. It seems Zhiming doesn't ever get the comfort of being able to pick the good side of fame.

He's truthful, blunt, confident, contrarian.

GIVEN NAME: Wu Zhiming. OTHER ALIASES: O.z (stage name); Oh Jimin (korean name). BIRTHDATE: 03.08.99. PROFESSIONS: Idol, DJ, music producer. GROUP POSITIONS: main rapper, group producer. ETHNICITY: Chinese. NATIONALITY: South Korean. FACE CLAIM: Zhang Linghe.

WOO GYUJIN.

A once commercial kid on the rise, Woo Gyujin vanished from the spotlight in his tween years and came back with a brand new face, brand new body and a fully developed voice, an adult with a solid base built over the buried skeletons that were once in his closet. His inherited need for a long, quiet life of stability keeps crashing with his want to be famous and seen. Now integrated into a group filled with chaos addicts and missing pieces, mess might crawl its way into his new life and doom Gyujin once again if he doesn't do something to help close the open wounds of his bandmates.

He's adaptable, incitive, assertive, unstable.

GIVEN NAME: Woo Gyujin. BIRTHDATE: 01.11.99. PROFESSION: Idol, actor (formerly). GROUP POSITIONS: main vocalist, songwriter. ETHNICITY: Korean. NATIONALITY: South Korean. FACE CLAIM: Bae Jooyoung.

LEE HANJAE.

An extremely quiet child and an even more dismissible teenager, Lee Hanjae wouldn't dare to dream of the spotlight until it came offered to him in a once in a life opportunity. With an ease to art in it's many shapes budded for years while being the target of ill driven mismanagement, Hanjae is the new face being pushed, and to his own bewilderment, the public embraces him as an actor in a way that's foreign. Thriving on a new career path while his members seen close to reaching rock bottom, Hanjae can't make a single move – he's too afraid of what he might do if he ever let's himself reach for what he wants.

He's thoughtful, insecure, reserved, selfish.

GIVEN NAME: Lee Hanjae. BIRTHDATE: 04.02.00. PROFESSION: Idol, choreographer, actor. GROUP POSITIONS: main dancer, lead rapper. ETHNICITY: Korean. NATIONALITY: South Korean (Incheon natural). FACE CLAIM: Oh Seongmin.

XU JIAHANG.

The youngest son of a blockbuster movie director and Miss Chinese International 1989, J.J had fame promised to him as a birthright. Spoiled rotten in his early years, the world took no time beating him off his pedestal while making him look cruelty deep in the eyes once he became a teenager, making Jiahang develop a need to hide every inch of himself, turn into a doll to keep – no more. Fully aware of his worth once again, he wants in back into spotlight and the fun of adoration, and there's something not quite right about his ambition – it's a factor of deep change. But each step up the ladder only enhances the promise of a nasty fall.

He's loyal, cunning, understanding, overachiever.

GIVEN NAME: Xu Jiahang. OTHER ALIASES: J.J (stage name); Jason Xu (english name); Jay (nickname). BIRTHDATE: 12.10.00. PROFESSION: Idol, model. GROUP POSITIONS: sub rapper, sub vocalist, visual. ETHNICITY: Chinese. NATIONALITY: Chinese (Beijing natural, Hong Kong and Manila adapt). FACE CLAIM: Xue Bayi.

KIM HAEGON.

Kim Haegon is a time bomb shaped kid trapped inside the body of not quite enough famous, just turned legal adult. Terrified of abandonment even if it's a feeling too well known, Haegon attracts and keeps cruel company, all to avoid being alone with himself. Recently and forcedly divorced off all the relationships that kept him grounded to his childlike ways, Haegon wants maturity, and he wants it now – to be good in someone's eye, he's ready to beg and kill. The road to emotional recovery is a long one, and Haegon doesn't yet know how far his feet alone can take him.

He's intuitive, dependent, devoted, desperate.

GIVEN NAME: Kim Haegon. BIRTHDATE: 03.22.01. PROFESSION: Idol. POSITIONS: lead vocalist, lead dancer. ETHNICITY: Korean. NATIONALITY: South Korean (Seoul natural.) FACE CLAIM: Park Jihoon.

#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] hound on a hunt ⠀⸻ profiles .#fake kpop group #fictional idol community #kpop au #kpop fanfic #kpop oc #typos will be corrected tomorrow! ignore them for now!

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phoenixyfriend · 9 months

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Ko-Fi prompt from @dirigibird:

I've been looking at investment options but I don't want to be messing around too much with the stock market, and a co-worker suggested exchange traded funds. Would love to know your opinions!

LEGALLY NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: I am not a licensed financial advisor, and it is illegal for me to advise anyone on investment in securities like stocks. My commentary here is merely opinion, not financial advice, and I urge you to not make any decisions with regards to securities investments based on my opinions, or without consulting a licensed advisor. I am also going to be talking this all over from an American POV, which means some of these things may not apply elsewhere.

So instead of letting you know what to pick or how to organize your securities, I'm going to go through the definitions of what various investment funds are, how they compare functionally, and maybe rant about how I disagree with the stock market on a fundamental ethical level if I have word count left over.

If you want more information, and are okay with jargon, I'd suggest hitting up investopedia. That is where I will be double-checking most of my information for this one.

I also encourage folks who know more about the stock market specifically to jump in! I like to think I'm good at research and explaining things, but I'm still liable to make mistakes.

Mutual Funds: A mutual fund is a pool of money and resources from multiple individuals (often vast numbers of people, actually) being put together and managed as a group by investment specialists. The primary appeal of these is that the money is professionally managed, but not personally so; it gives smaller investors access to professional money managers that they would not have access to on their own, at cheaper rates than if they tried to hire one for just their own assets. The secondary appeal is that, due to the sheer number of people, and thus capital, that is being invested at once, the money can be invested in a wide variety of industries, and is generally more stable than investing in just one company or industry. Low risk, low reward, but overall at least mostly reliable. Retirement plans are often invested in mutual funds by employer choice, through companies like Fidelity or John Hancock.

Hedge Funds: A hedge fund is a high risk, high reward mutual fund. Investors are generally wealthy, and have the room and safety to lose large amounts of money on an investment that has no promise of success, especially since money cannot be withdrawn at will, but must remain in the fund for a period of time following investment. It gets its name from "hedging your bets," as part of the strategy is to invest in the opposition of the fund's focus in order to ensure that there is a backup plan to salvage at least some money if the main plan backfires. Other strategies are also on the riskier side, often planning to take advantage of ongoing events like buyouts, mergers, incumbent bankruptcy, and shorting stocks (that's the one that caused the gamestop incident).

Private Equity: Private equity is... a nightmare that got its own incredibly good Hasan Minhaj episode of Patriot Act, so if you've got 20 minutes, an interest in comedically-delivered, easily-digestible, Real Information, and an internet connection, take a watch of that one. (If it's not available on YouTube in your country, it's originally from Netflix, or you can probably access it by VPN.) Private equity companies are effectively hedge funds that purchase entire companies, rebuild them in one way or another, and then sell them at (hopefully) a profit. Very often, the companies purchased by private equity are very negatively impacted, especially if the private equity group is a Vulture Fund. Sometimes, it's by taking it apart to sell off; sometimes it's by just bleeding it for cash until there's nothing left. Sometimes, it's taking over a hospital and overcharging the patients while also abusing the staff! (Glaucomflecken has a lot of videos on the topic of private equity in the medical industry, check him out.)

Venture Capital: In contrast to private equity, which purchases more mature companies, venture capital is focused on startups, or small businesses that have growth potential. These are the kinds of hedge funds that are like a whole group that you'd see some random tv character calling an Angel Investor (they're not actually the same thing, but they overlap by a lot). I'd hesitantly call these less ethically dubious than private equity, but I'm still suspicious.

And finally, to answer your question on what ETFs are and how they fit into the above.

Exchange Traded Funds: ETFs are... sort of like a mutual fund. Sort of. You are, to some extent, pooling your money... ish.

An ETF is like a stock that is made out of partial stocks. So instead of paying $100 for stock A, and not getting stocks B/C/D that all cost the same, you buy $100 of the ETF, which is $25 each of stocks A/B/C/D. You are getting a quarter of a unit of stock, which isn't normally an option, but because you are purchasing through an ETF that officially already bought those Whole stocks, you can now purchase the partial stocks through them.

They buy the whole stocks, then they resell you mixes of those stocks. They still officially own the whole stocks themselves, but you now own parts of the stocks. Basically, you own "stock" in a company that owns stock in other companies, and in that process you own partial stocks in those other companies.

I'm going to re-explain this using fruit.

Imagine you can buy apples, oranges, melons, grapes, etc. You can also buy fruit cups. You can only buy the individual fruits in big batches or you can pool your money with a few other people, hand it to a chef. The chef will decide which fruits look like they'll taste the best by lunch time, buy a bunch of those fruit pallets with your combined money, and plan out the best possible fruit salad for you to share with a bunch of people once lunch rolls around.

You could also buy a fruit cup. You don't have a lot of control over what's already in the fruit cup, but there are a few different mixes available--that one has strawberries, but that one over there uses kiwi, and the other one that way has pineapple--and you can pick which mix you want. It's a pretty small fruit cup, and it's predesigned, but you can choose the one you want without having to pool money with everyone else. You just first have to let someone else design the fruit cups you choose from, and you don't know which ones are probably going to survive the best to lunch time unless you ask a chef (which defeats the purpose of buying a fruit cup instead of pooling your money, and asking the chef costs money).

That's the ETF. The ETF is the fruit cup.

The upside is that you can now just track the prices of your fruit cup, instead of tracking the prices of four different fruits, and so if the price of one fruit drops, you can just... let the other three buoy it.

Of course, in the real world, there are more than just four stocks involved in an ETF. This part of the Investopedia article lists a few examples, and they're usually themed and involve anywhere from 30 (DOW Jones) to thousands (Russell) of shares by stock type, or by commodity/industry. So with the ETF, you can invest in an entire industry, like technology, and just keep track of that single "stock" in the industry game.

They do cost less in brokerage/management fees than regular mutual funds, and they have a slightly lower liquidity (slower to cash out). There also exist actively managed ETFs, which are basically mutual funds for ETFs. You are paying the chef to buy you premade fruit cups.

(Prompt me on ko-fi!)

#economics #stock market #etfs #etf #mutual funds #hedge funds #venture capital #private equity #capitalism #phoenix talks #ko fi #ko fi prompts #economics prompts

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thepassionthatunitesusall · 10 months

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Gonna try and summarize what I've seen about the women's hockey news:

Billie Jean King Enterprises and the Mark Walter Group have purchased the PHF

This is NOT a merger between the PWHPA and the PHF

Jeff Marek is classifying this as "a buyout"

All PHF contracts for the upcoming season have been voided

PHF and PWHPA athletes will play under one roof

#hockey #women's hockey #pwhpa #phf

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metamatar · 8 months

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i wanted to fact check my grandfather on some hindutva story he was peddling on the family whatsapp group and went on the ndtv website reflexively and... they're now publishing soros wants to cause regime change by targetting adani type screeds lol (x) the buyout of all media channels is really complete not even one is anti modi

#misery posting

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insipid-drivel · 1 year

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Y2K’s Forgotten Heroes And The Looming Threat of 2038

I feel like sharing some information about the 90′s to people here. Particularly about Y2K, aka Internet Armageddon That Didn’t Happen In 2000 Thanks To People You Haven’t Heard Of Like My Mom.

My mom, among her teammates and people tasked with similar roles to her, never get any recognition for the work they did in keeping computers across the globe functioning in 2000. She was a project manager among a group of overstressed, underappreciated people that worked at a company called Intel that are responsible for preventing a global societal collapse in 1999. Y2K being allowed to happen the way people thought it would (and really, it was going to be worse than even Intel could forecast and they still don’t know how bad it would’ve been) would’ve undoubtedly destroyed the fabric of the internet in 1999 and 2000, and therefore, no social media platforms like this Hellsite right here. She’s actually on tumblr and has been following the Muskrat’s destruction of Twitter with mute, techie horror.

In the years leading up to 2000, the world was panicking on its tenderhooks due to the looming crisis that was Y2K. For those of you that are either too young to remember or just didn’t know about it, Y2K was a big deal. A planet-alteringly big deal. A “We don’t know how much would’ve crashed and burned in our world’s society and economy if we’d ignored it,” big deal. tl;dr: All computer software around the world wasn’t programmed to have their internal clocks transfer to January 1st, 2000. Instead, what was going to happen was every functioning computer in the world running Intel software - on New Years Eve, 1999 - would change calendars to January 1st, 1900.

This was a catastrophic prospect for everyone impacted by the computer age. People receiving social security benefits and paying off formal loans with interest rates would suddenly receive benefits and payment rates documented in 1900. NORAD, the international weather-tracking service kids use to track Santa on Christmas Eve and that warns people of natural disasters like hurricanes, would have gone dark with no timestamps to indicate major shifts in weather. Entire governments would lose all digital contact with one another. The WHO and CDC would go dark. Hospital networks would’ve gone down. The Stock Market would’ve gone to shit. No one in the world would’ve been immune. If Japan suffered a massive, horrific famine due directly to the 1929 crash of the US Stock Market before the Internet, imagine what would’ve happened if the very screens that displayed the global stock market records to major metropolitan cities around the world just... stopped working in 2000. Went dark. Blue-screened. An entire system built upon split-second trades, bids, buyouts, and reports for trade around the world would’ve shut down for a lot longer than just a split second.

By the time it was almost the year 2000, the Internet as we knew it was like a gigantic, invisible, planet-sized Rube Goldberg machine that a comparatively microscopic group of people were tasked with repairing before it could fail in ways they couldn’t foretell, without being able to live-test any of their solutions. It was “Fuck it, we’re doing it live!” to the extreme. Most of the programmers that had built the infrastructure for the Internet and computer technology as we recognize it, all the way back in the 60′s, were retired, dead, no longer working in those sectors, or simply hadn’t kept up with changes in the technology and couldn’t be brought up to speed to help in time. Even the highest echelons of the management at Intel itself didn’t really consider Y2K to be a big concern, except for my mom’s department. I still have lingering anxiety and trauma from hearing the sound of a woman’s voice shouting with panic and anger, because she was the one literally shouting into her phone to “Nah, we’ll be fine,” Luddite tech giants that NO, NOTHING WAS FINE AND EVERYTHING WAS GOING TO BE VERY BAD from the time I was born in 1992 to January 1st, 2000.

Any programs and companies relying upon Microsoft software, even Word and Excel, would have either suffered catastrophic errors, or ceased to function altogether, too. The team handling Y2K didn’t know how bad it could’ve actually gotten at the time, and they were still responsible for stopping it. To this day, my mom and the rest of the team members that worked with her can’t actually say how much of our technological lives would’ve been destroyed if they’d done nothing. The potential destruction was literally unfathomable. The global economy relied on computers and tech by the time Y2K became a major topic of concern to experts, much less casual everyday users.

This was before WiFi. This was before smartphones. HotSpots? The stuff of cyberpunk fantasies. This was before most cell phones had a text feature; you carried your cell phone and a pager separately, and if you thought character limits on Twitter were bad? lol. Ever had to make a collect call in a phone booth? Do you have any idea how badly we’d freak each other out over the thought of the germs on those things? If you couldn’t afford a collect call, which cost for every minute you were talking, you had to get creative and learn to say who you were and where you were to someone in the, “Caller, at the tone, please state only your name, beep” 3-second window of free time you got to contact someone.

You could’ve been stuck in a bad neighborhood at 3am. Taxis didn’t pick up hitchhikers like they do in New York, and you could screw off if you didn’t have cash on you; credit cards were mostly used at malls and supermarkets, and retail workers from the 90′s to this day still have the question “Credit or debit?” burned into their souls. You needed coins as well as bills and credit cards. It was still common to pay for groceries with a paper check, because you carried a checkbook around with you everywhere as an adult. There was no RideShare service with anyone but a serial killer, because yeah, serial killers loved targeting stranded pedestrians back then and that’s why nobody hitchhikes anymore. Homicidal freaks like The Green River Killer (Gary Ridgway) and BTK (Dennis Rader) were still at large and unidentified. It was thanks to revolutions in tech and computers that they were caught at all; BTK having been busted thanks to metadata and TIME STAMPS on a floppy disk.

AOL was still one of the top ISPs and email services to the United States. You would receive installation CDs for AOL in children’s cereal boxes like prizes. Dial-up was still a normal part of life. Blockbuster was renting out Nintendo 64 games along with VHS movies. DVD players were revolutionary. Barnes & Noble and Borders were still competing. The FBI still warned you at the start of a movie that piracy was illegal while almost every VHS had a “record” setting you could use with impunity. Amazon was primarily an online bookstore. J.K. Rowling was just some closeted TERF that just published her first weird, popular British fairytale about some kid that went to a school for wizards where goblins were real but black people weren’t. You could get a copy at the Scholastic Book Faire if your school library didn’t have it. MySpace wasn’t a thing. YouTube didn’t exist. Cell phones were big and sturdy enough to be used as a lethal weapon. AskJeeves was one of the most popular search engines because, fuck it, Jeeves was a dapper butler and asking him questions was fun. A phone call could disconnect you from the internet unless you paid for multiple lines. DSL was seen as the newest, hottest, next-gen concept. The World Trade Center was still standing and present in the generic backdrops of nearly every daytime or New York-based news or talk show. Mr. Rogers, Bill Nye, and Bob Ross were amazing children on PBS between episodes of Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street while people were shell-shocked over Princess Diana’s death. Pluto was still classified as a planet. Wishbone was a Jack Russel Terrier that reenacted famous literary adventures.

Germany was being cajoled into reunifying after Mr. Gorbachev agreed to take the wall down. Namibia was a new country and no longer part of South Africa. We were losing our minds over photos from the brand new Hubble Space Telescope. Yugoslavia existed. Czechoslovakia was splitting. We were learning to call the USSR “Russia” again. Yemen was being unified. The Human Genome Project had just been announced. The Cold War was finally over!

Meanwhile, my mom worked as a project manager at Intel specifically tasked with replacing and/or reprogramming any and all Intel computer software with extended time stamps past 1999, for the entire technological world. You’re here, right now, reading this very post in part thanks to her and her team’s exhaustive years of work to change and update the entire world’s software. If it required anything from Intel to function or had to co-function with Intel, it was part of my mom’s job to beat the literal countdown to January 1st, 2000.

If she and her team failed, it was lights out. She was bouncing me on her knee while fielding calls from everywhere from Silicon Valley, California, to London, England, to Beirut, Lebanon, to Tokyo, Japan. My every day around her was nothing but tech-talk when it was actually in English. Those incredibly intelligent, clever, gifted men and women from around the world spared not a single second for themselves when it came to their singular, united focus on stopping Y2K from bringing the entire global economy and communications to their knees.

My mom didn’t take maternity leave with my baby brother in 1998; she telecommuted instead in order to keep working. When she would go on business trips almost every week, she would bring me back plush toys of dolls in clean-room Intel Bunny Suits instead of stuffed animals. Stopping Y2K was too important.

And you know what happened? Nothing. 2000 rolled around, and the first thing to start were conspiracy theories that Y2K had been made up, or that Y2K itself had been its own conspiracy theory to trick users into buying new computers and software. In fact, the people responsible for preventing Y2K turned an impending global disaster into what is now known as “the first challenge of the 21st century successfully met.“

And yet, to this very day, the real people responsible for fixing everything before it had a chance to break go unmentioned and unrecognized. They never received fanfare or thanks, but scrutiny and skepticism instead. Can you imagine doing a job so well and so efficiently that the entire modern world either ignored you, or even got pissed at you because things didn’t fall apart? Their children - me included - grew up steeped in the understanding and fear that if we tried to demand more attention from them, we were stopping them from saving the world as we knew it.

So, as you finish reading this, I ask you to go out there and learn about “The 2038 Problem”. While it’s being handled differently thanks to the precedent my mom and her fellow badass, dedicated teammates set, it still has to be handled in time, just like Y2K. The original team may have been left to disappear into obscurity, so the very least we can do is thank the hard-working people that are toiling away as we speak to keep the lights on again in 2038.

#long post #y2k #the 90's #90's things #the 2038 problem #2038 #millennials #computer history #internet history #modern history #tech news #tumblr stories #intel #microsoft

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munamania · 9 months

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ok everyone i watched lemonade mouth and do revenge tonight. i wanted to share my notes from lemonade mouth or at least the highlights. (edit from later jk i posted nearly every thought soooo sorry) not much to say abt the other one it was okay. lemonade mouth is my baby though

wen is such a hater

queer as hell movie

i like that this movie doesnt talk down to its audience it's still silly but it treats each character like a full person and it's earnest

flashes into their lives to get to their destiny to meet. i heart storytelling

TURBO BLAST.

'use your voice' ok dyke. sounds like jo maskin

'this is the underground (in all caps)' oh this is so rife with queer pleasures

principal brennigan.... what does this say abt society.....

this is so like gay club queer joy i know a place moment fates colliding queer utopia

music is everything adn everything is love btw

none of the girls are in competition for any of the guys and in fact are arguably queer coded. i mean overall obv the group is

showing the power of queer joy

like MUNA

random little commercial jingle was so catchy

people that have known and paid attention to each other forever and challenge each other to be their best selves through their very existence soulmatism. olivia and wen btw

WEN IS SUCH A HATER LOSER

dynamic lighting <333

'just because you cant see the agony doesnt mean it isnt there' ok gayass

'i could start a revolution' broccoli close up. hilarious theyre just fuckin around

naomi scott brings a comfortable bisexuality to her characters. me when im just saying shit

SOMEBODY.im gonna kill myself.

HAYLEY BG VOCALS OKKKKKKKKK

'or cher' get his ass mo

stella is a true action forward activist im obsessed with her. she and hazel callahan bottoms should team up and rig the school with bombs

lemonade mouth is such a sincere true inside joke for a band name they are all so lovely. theyre my losers club

Determinate. Get determined! Revolution

bridgit mendler egot when

'i like when you smile' theyre just giddy weirdo soulmates

taking away pride?????????? (lemonade)

corporate buyouts. capitalist ownership and what that entails

control

wen who cant deal with change whos living in honor of his mother's memory and his sense of idealistic family and those rigid definitions and olivias odd broken family and beautiful unconventional relationship with her grandmother and opened up raw vulnerability that she tries to protect but exudes in her songwriting largely inspired around and by him

adult babies. ok

FAGGOT BRENNIGAN!!!!! sorry

idk if this is a strange observation but it's relieving that it's not a huge deal for the boys to go in the girl's bathroom to be supportive and lovely to their friend

lemonade. symbol of hope revolution pride also fruity

i used to live and breathe for mo's little bass shimmy

disability representation ayo

mo's back vocals okayyyyyyy also the little dance!!!!

distributing lemonade to the masses!!!!!! proletariat comrades!!!

why r they literally revolutionaries im screaming

'political tirade' 'complete'y disruptive' slayyy

'decisions i make are for the good of this school' ok fascist

flagging

Dante's pizzeria -> HELL!?!

'maybe... we do matter' 'of course we do' ok yippee gay people <3

shes so gone... i just felt so understood

naomi has such a beautiful voice. the naomis should combine naomi scott produced her own shit it would be sooooo cool

olivia being forced to accept her full grief for her mother

friends are everything btw

seeing things in the clouds... natural human inclination to find purpose in everything

'i wish my dad would ignore me' REAL. it's complicated

dad in prison - i feel like they didnt touch that sort of thing often on disney idk maybe sometimes

BRIDGIT IS THAT GIRL.

more than a band. love and community and god in other people

these are my bestest friends btw

'im not pretending to be what im not for anyone anymore' ok gayass

they are such DORKS <3

MO SLAYING EGREGIOUS CUNT IN ALL THE CHAOS

theyre all so linked together in fate and time

oh bridgit is about to slay so immensely shes amazing

bridgit mendler school of acting

gabe saporta ass outfit stella has on

THEYRE FIGHTING COPS WITH EACH OTHERRRRRRR

music center of the universe and love

theater kids <3

okay that hug made me cry

'that is the limpest wrist fist bump i have ever seen' - lydia (about charlie and his brother)

there was some coming out to your family in that hug

fucking good lighting

lemonade mouth school of acting

fucking up that guitar i cannot lie im obsessed w that performance of determinate at the end it makes me cry every time and also that guitar is soooooo

this guy is cooler than steve harrington yeah i still just have stupid beef with that stupid fandom

kiss on the cheek is so sweet <333

he brought her a kitten. he brought her a kitten. he brought her new life/a feeling of rebirth of coming into yourself and just living. not perfect but okay. they could do peeta and katniss who will follow you to your ruined home and plant a garden there. i threw my pen across the room and screamed over this btw.

SHE MET MEL LEMONADE MOUTH

queer utopia

faghag pair

charlie = afycso, naomi scott ~ dianna agron, wen ryan ross pretty odd outfit

okay goodnight <3

#i was very high for most of this. i fucking adore this movie shes my girl forever and ever.#abby talks

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

Text

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.

Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.

And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61% in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.

These findings — from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms — provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how conversations on Twitter have changed since Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion deal for the company in late October. While the numbers are relatively small, researchers said the increases were atypically high.

The shift in speech is just the tip of a set of changes on the service under Mr. Musk. Accounts that Twitter used to regularly remove — such as those that identify as part of the Islamic State, which were banned after the U.S. government classified ISIS as a terror group — have come roaring back. Accounts associated with QAnon, a vast far-right conspiracy theory, have paid for and received verified status on Twitter, giving them a sheen of legitimacy.

These changes are alarming, researchers said, adding that they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.

“Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They have reacted accordingly.”

Mr. Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been vocal about being a “free speech absolutist” who believes in unfettered discussions online. He has moved swiftly to overhaul Twitter’s practices, allowing former President Donald J. Trump — who was barred for tweets that could incite violence — to return. Last week, Mr. Musk proposed a widespread amnesty for accounts that Twitter’s previous leadership had suspended. And on Tuesday, he ended enforcement of a policy against COVID misinformation.

But Mr. Musk has denied claims that hate speech has increased on Twitter under his watch. Last month, he tweeted a downward-trending graph that he said showed that “hate speech impressions” had dropped by a third since he took over. He did not provide underlying numbers or details of how he was measuring hate speech.

CHANGES AT ELON MUSK’S TWITTER

A swift overhaul. Elon Musk has moved quickly to revamp Twitter since he completed his $44 billion buyout of the social media company in October, warning of a bleak financial picture and a need for new products. Here’s a look at some of the changes so far:

• Going private. As part of Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, he is delisting the company’s stock and taking it out of the hands of public shareholders. Making Twitter a private company gives Mr. Musk some advantages, including not having to make quarterly financial disclosures. Private companies are also subject to less regulatory scrutiny.

• Layoffs. Just over a week after closing the deal, Mr. Musk eliminated nearly half of Twitter’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs. The layoffs hit many divisions across the company, including the engineering and machine learning units, the teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments.

• Verification subscriptions. Twitter began charging customers $7.99 a month to receive a coveted verification check mark on their profiles. But the subscription service was paused after some users exploited it to create havoc on the platform by pretending to be high-profile brands and sending disruptive tweets.

• Content moderation. Shortly after closing the deal to buy Twitter, Mr. Musk said that the company would form a content moderation council to decide what kinds of posts to keep up and what to take down. But advertisers have paused their spending on Twitter over fears that Mr. Musk will loosen content rules on the platform.

• Other possible changes. As Mr. Musk and his advisers look for ways to generate more revenue at the company, they are said to have discussed adding paid direct messages, which would let users send private messages to high-profile users. The company has also filed registration paperwork to pave the way for it to process payments.

On Thursday, Mr. Musk said the account of Kanye West, which was restricted for a spell in October because of an antisemitic tweet, would be suspended indefinitely after the rapper, known as Ye, tweeted an image of a swastika inside the Star of David. On Friday, Mr. Musk said Twitter would publish “hate speech impressions” every week and agreed with a tweet that said hate speech spiked last week because of Ye’s antisemitic posts.

Changes in Twitter’s content not only have societal implications but also affect the company’s bottom line. Advertisers, which provide about 90% of Twitter’s revenue, have reduced their spending on the platform as they wait to see how it will fare under Mr. Musk. Some have said they are concerned that the quality of discussions on the platform will suffer.

On Wednesday, Twitter sought to reassure advertisers about its commitment to online safety. “Brand safety is only possible when human safety is the top priority,” the company wrote in a blog post. “All of this remains true today.”

The appeal to advertisers coincided with a meeting between Mr. Musk and Thierry Breton, the digital chief of the European Union, in which they discussed content moderation and regulation, according to an E.U. spokesman. Mr. Breton has pressed Mr. Musk to comply with the Digital Services Act, a European law that requires social platforms to reduce online harm or face fines and other penalties.

Mr. Breton plans to visit Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters early next year to perform a “stress test” of its ability to moderate content and combat disinformation, the spokesman said.

On Twitter itself, researchers said the increase in hate speech, antisemitic posts and other troubling content had begun before Mr. Musk loosened the service’s content rules. That suggested that a further surge could be coming, they said.