I believe the poster has $450K in cash, in addition to the real-estate holdings, and that is already more money than they know what to do with. I don't know if it makes sense to mortgage "the base" to add more cash to that pile.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted; companies in other sectors (e.g. oil) get involved in US politics regularly.

But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly. (IANAL, but I suspect there are legal impediments as well). Taking a political stand, or providing support for one side, might force big tech companies to resolve the ambiguity as to whether they're media companies or not.

EDIT: Actually maybe there is nothing stopping tech companies from choosing a side; apparently media companies do make political contribitions: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/08/news-corps-million-...

EDIT 2: I can see I've accidentally opened a can of worms about biased coverage and editorials; but my usage of "support" was intended as overt and consistent involvement in political campaigning, generally through donations. And to my surprise, that does occur.

> But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly

Sorry, but are we in the same country?

There is extreme precedent, media companies have been political for their entire history. They're pretty tame today for what it's worth, William Randolph Hearst started a war to sell newspapers.

> But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly.

Newspapers routinely make political endorsements, that is overt.

> But there's little precedent for media companies to take action in US politics overtly.

Isn't this pretty much one half of their business, the other being advertising?

Demanding a "deeper, more consistent, and prolonged commitment than in the past" from people whose profession you've already made more difficult is pretty galling.

It may be the case that their careers were going to get more difficult anyway; nevertheless, Ek is in fact one of the main drivers and beneficiaries.

While I don't deny that the Spotify CEO is the best person to send a message like that, I have to ask myself what life was like for musicians before Spotify (or any other low-paying streaming service).

30 Seconds to Mars made a documentary about the album they recorded in 2008 and the lawsuit they had to deal with at their record label (which had been recently purchased by a larger company that had zero music / talent experience). Their contracts seem to put them almost $1 million in debt to the record label for each album, despite the fact that they sell (err sold?) multi millions and they do worldwide tours.

Sure, Spotify's CEO is a strange vessel to make more demands on musical talent, but he's also in a position to know how his customers want to consume their music and what gets them engaged in his product. I would take it for what it is and no more.

Exactly this. Bandcamp's straightforward, egalitarian deal is exactly what any artist below the superstar level needs.

Put your stuff out, set your price, handle your own publicity, Bandcamp takes their cut. That's it.

Musicians are apparently an exception to the HN crowd creed that entrepreneurs should negotiate hard to get the best deal possible.

Violate an Open Source license and all hell is brought down, but Pirating music is just fine. HN has some weird ethics.

I don't think "weird" is the right term for an ethical system that is more concerned with the rights of those who are perceived as underdogs or disadvantaged than with the rights of those who are perceived as excessively successful or fortunate. The "Robin Hood" folktale is a good 600 years old, and no remotely comparable tale in which the titular character is unsympathetic ever caught on. A tendency towards "restorative justice", bringing those up high down and raising up those below seems close to being a natural state for humanity; if anything, the belief that some abstract discourse about property and contract law means that we ought to cheer for a state in which person A has orders of magnitude more power and treasure than person B to continue is the weird one.

The idea software developers and the companies they work for are the underdogs compared to musicians and the music industry is just bizarre. The tech giants could buy the whole music industry and it would be a blip on a spreadsheet.

> The tech giants could buy the whole music industry and it would be a blip on a spreadsheet.

For scale, the global music industry has about $20 billion in annual revenue, Google alone has about 8× that.

Absolutely. The music industry has a high profile but there's comparatively little money in it. And because music, like all entertaimnent markets, is winner-take-all, most people who work in the music biz scrape by on wages that are dwarfed by the average tech salary.

That's the context in which generally well-off tech folks champion piracy and ridicule musicians who have the audacity to question tech industry exploitation.

But are the well-off tech folks the same ones who would defend open source licenses?

Let's see. I'm comparatively well-off by the standards of most working musicians. I'm an aggressive Open Source advocate. So... yes?

And yet you will certainly not find me championing piracy. I don't see what you're trying to get at.

The post I originally responded to talked about the existence of a demographic that reacts with offense to open-source licenses being violated but is indifferent towards or even advocates for music piracy, and contended that their ethics is "weird". To me, weirdness implies being uncommon, but to the extent that this demographic exists, I do not think that the ethical principles they are applying are uncommon at all: as they see it, the typical GPL violation case is perceived to involve a faceless megacorp benefitting off of the work of one or multiple hobbyist programmers scraping by while making their labour available for free, while music royalties are perceived to primarily benefit very affluent label executives and industry association lawyers. Conditional on this belief, a very commonly held ethical system says it's bad to steal from the former but good to steal from the latter. If the objection is merely that the belief is wrong, though, you can't say that the problem is that some "weird" ethics is involved.

Open source of the kind that gets violated (copyleft) is generally putting the user first, rather than the developer. So in tht sense, the main beneficiary of the license – the user – is indeed the underdog.

> I haven't see people get up in arms about violations of non-copyleft licenses

Oh? Then you didn't see me going off about the "Commons Clause" bullcrap.

For what it's worth, I'm a former member of the Board of Directors and V.P. Legal Affairs of the Apache Software Foundation, and I'm a music industry person who worked in a recording studio for 6 years before transitioning to tech.

It is philosophically consistent to defend attribution-based Open Source licenses and musicians' right to negotiate hard. In both cases, the rights of the creator are prioritized.

Of course they should negotiate hard.

But if their terms are unacceptable and immovable, the other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

> [T]he other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

Sure, but that's different than "You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music." Of course you can, and you can do so long-term provided that new tech companies appear as existing ones fail.

You're welcome to try. You're welcome to think that's reasonable.

I enjoy watching news stories about new tech companies that die after making horrible deals and investors who lose their money after investing in them. People should know better than to accept loser deals like this.

If the alternative is artists not being paid enough to make a living, then one side has to push until the other side loses. The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies trying to commoditize their complements that there isn't enough money to support both the creators and the distributors. Why should the creators lose by default?

> The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies

I disagree with your characterization: The work is being given away by artists, who are welcome to accept the terms that tech companies offer them.

The artists are welcome to reconsider, renegotiate.

> Why should the creators lose by default?

The creators are offered terms by tech companies. They are welcome to turn down those terms, and seek better ones.

If they lack the power to negotiate a better deal, then I suggest forming a negotiating block of some kind.

The tech companies are welcome to think those negotiations are not favorable and not accept the terms.

Or possibly the artists should form their own new tech company (cf. Patreon, Band Camp)

It's not the job of tech companies to provide a living to artists. That's what your characterization implies, and it's just not the case.

There's some symmetry to the way the Internet Archive assumes consent to reproduce other people's content, and people assuming consent to take advantage of the Internet Archive's mirroring. I don't know if this is in line with the Internet Archive's terms-of-service, or the law.

In this case they'd be getting stuck with a pretty big bandwidth hit.

> Instead you [the bank] go to an anonymous arb firm, for $1m in bonds, and you say, "okay we're going to sell you the bond that is actually ours, you will sell it back to us, here is your fee, now we can sell this bond back to the client and wash the fact that it is ours."

How does the bank make money doing this? Routing the sale of this bond through the "anonymous arb firm" doesn't do anything to the price. If the bank's competitor is selling their bond at 1.00, the bank could directly offer their bond at 0.99 without getting "anonymous arb firm" involved. If the bank routes the trade through the "anonymous arb firm"... what difference does that make? If it shows up on the market at 1.01, the bank still has to give the client the 1.00 bond first, and if it shows up on the market at 0.99, the bank could have just done that itself.

What does "launder arbitrage" mean?

> If LTCM was given enough credit to stick it out, they would have made a killing.

Anyone making bets will eventually win big if there is no limit on credit, just by betting bigger and bigger until they catch a break.

But there's always a limit.

That's mischaracterizing what happened. They were always winning, but hugely over-leveraged (they practically dictated the terms of their credit), and couldn't weather a regime change (LB).

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but if you can't reduce the size of your position without losing your shirt, you're not really winning; and if staying in your position requires you to put up more money than you can raise, you've hit the limit I was referring to. No one can expect to keep finding money to support their trades until they turn profitable.

EDIT: Maybe you mean that they didn't try to make a larger bet after they got in trouble? But whether they needed to make a bigger bet or whether their existing bet was already too big, it's still the same issue; the only way to avoid liquidation is to expand the use of credit, which hits a limit at some point.

I interpreted your comment as an allusion to the probablistic fact that, given an infinite bankroll, you can exceed any profit, in time, betting on coin flips.

I tried to point out that LTCM had a very reliable and profitable trade on the basis anomalies they identified, which, combined with their imprimatur and aggressiveness, enabled the leverage that enabled them to dig their own grave (they ended up with nearly the same leverage as Lehman).

I worked on a team with OG LTCM and Lehman MBS quants, and they had some very interesting stories parallel to the standard narratives you hear about these events.

The coin flips are in fact what I was alluding to. I guess we disagree as to whether what LTCM was betting on were a form of coin flips.

Seeing that he worked with some LTCM quants, I would imagine he knows more about the situation than you do. The kinds of ineffiencies LTCM were exploiting made sense, it's just during times of stress the historical correlations between pairs start to break.

But, hey, I'd bet on coin flips all day long if I was given favorable odds.

I don't know, the "it's just" part kind of indicates that the real probability of things remaining correlated were not what LTCM thought they were, to the point where they couldn't afford to stay in the position long enough for things to snap back. I don't buy that as "always winning".

No, he's right. The problem with taking huge spread positions is that mark-to-market p&l can be volatile and illogical, and if you can't recapitalize, you won't be able to hang on until the spread goes your way.

> They were always winning

Give me a break.

A burnt-down courthouse is less of a threat to civil liberties than actual paramilitaries literally grabbing people off of the streets. We're better off when vandals are the bad guys, rather than state security.

EDIT: I'm not sure why I took your false dichotomy at face value in the first place. A burnt-down courthouse and an informal military occupation aren't the only two options; but even if they were, the former is preferable.

I disagree. A mob burning down a courthouse isn't a minor thing: it's a clear symbolic statement that the justice system is illegitimate, the law has no power, and mob rule should be established. If I were confident that everyone would peacefully disperse and things would return to normal, I'd be all in favor of letting it burn, but I'd expect to just see more arson.

As the person above you has said, it's a false dichotomy. We can both respect people's civil liberties and prevent federal buildings from burning down.

He's saying that if those were the only choices he'd prefer those buildings burning down over the suspension of civil liberties. But they are not the only choices, we can protect both. It's not easy, but it's worth it.

I'm not sure we can. What ideas do you have in mind? The obvious strategy would be for local leaders to show up in person to express sympathy and solidarity with the cause, but that's been tried and doesn't seem to have changed anything.

I've seen some people float "do everything the mob demands so they won't have to follow through on their threats", but I hope we can agree that doing that would itself constitute mob rule.

The presence of federal agents and the police who are defending the court house is not illegal, it's their job. That helps defend the building from arson.

However federal agents violating 1st and 4th amendment rights by teargassing peaceful protests and unlawfully detaining people that's what needs to stop.

I fail to see why people are defending that behavior. You can support the deployment of those federal agents while still being critical of their overreach.

I'm critical of their overreach, but my criticism is muted, because I see the mob they're fighting against as a larger threat to the freedom of Portland residents. The police abuses we've seen are limited in scope and severity; as anyone who remembers 1992 can tell you, mob violence is very capable of engulfing an entire city.

And because of that overreach the criticism of the arsonists and rioters is muted as well, because the protesters see the police abuses as a larger threat to the freedom of Portland residents. It's what their entire protest movement is based on in the first place.

Both sides abandoning the middle ground is the reason we're in such a divisive political time. If you can't come to the defense of arguments you agree with because they're voiced by people you disagree with then you're contributing to the divisiveness.

I don't believe I've abandoned any middle ground. I can come to the defense of those arguments. They just don't seem relevant to the urgent question of how to get rid of the mobs trying to burn down the courthouse. I'm sure we can agree that federal agents manning siege defenses every night isn't a workable long-term solution.

It certainly is not a workable solution, but given that the protests are about police abuses, perpetuating those abuses will only exacerbate the problem. The arguments might not seem relevant to you right now, but to the protesters they're fundamental to everything they stand for.

There is no easy fix for the problem, because any solution requires both the protesters and the police to come to the middle ground.

The police and federal agents need to show respect for the peaceful protests during the day and the protesters need to respect a reasonable curfew so police can do their work stopping rioters and arsonists at night.

Showing up in militarized uniforms and teargassing/shooting peaceful protestors doesn't bring us closer to that middle ground. Neither does destruction of property and defending rioters/arsonists.

> The police and federal agents need to show respect for the peaceful protests during the day and the protesters need to respect a reasonable curfew so police can do their work stopping rioters and arsonists at night.

That was the hard fix. I don't believe the feds will be able to solve it this time by doing what they did in LA in 1992.

And if we simply restore the status quo using a show of force then these riots will happen again and again.

Let's dispense with the residents per se because neither side cares about them, really. It's about power and institutions. The residents will vote soon enough anyway.