731–740 of 1001 posts
I really don't understand how a judgement this large can be reasonable in a case where nobody has had his house burned down. A billion dollars is ten billion crowns, that's 10 000 million crowns, or around 5 000 apartments. I don't understand how 5 000 apartments can be a judgement handed out to an individual over something he says. It doesn't really matter what he says, when it's this kind of huge amounts. One can't…
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but in the bankruptcy setting, this would demonstrate that the trustee didn't get as much as they could.
Does it? If it's public knowledge that Alice would pay $200 and Bob would pay $100 then Alice wouldn't actually bid $200, she'd bid $101 and still win, the same result as that type of auction. If nobody knows what Alice would bid except Alice then it's even worse, because Bob thinks he could win at $60 and would rather pay $60 than $100 and Alice correctly predicts that Bob is going to do that and then wins by biddin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why, so the outgoing government which lost the public vote can make the decision instead of the president elect ? Disclaimer, I think Trump is a buffoon, but I also think this kind of thinking is backwards.
President elect shouldn’t control the courts but whatever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the bids are secret and the highest bidder pays what they bid then bidders have the incentive to try to bid strategically, i.e. less than what they'd be willing to pay as long as they think that's more than anyone else would be willing to pay. Plus, if there is someone who thinks it's worth way more than anyone else, they could just place a modest bid and then if they lose buy it from the winner for $1 more than w…
Yeah but in the bankruptcy setting, this would demonstrate that the trustee didn't get as much as they could.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only federal crimes can be pardoned by the president. Everything here is state-level. The next president can't touch any of it.
They've already suspended his sentencing indefinitely due to the election win.
Justice departments don't go after presidents or president-elects in order to prevent a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the remedy in that case.
This policy is entirely unrelated to presidential pardon power.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, couldn’t this same argument be made in reverse? If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer, which suggest sealed bids are most appropriate to maximize the value. Auctions can’t be fairly judged in hindsight, generally speaking.
> If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer [..] Isn't that what you want to happen? All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer. What am I missing?
Here in Canada, when the market is hot there are lots of auctions withe multiple buyers competing for a house. In my market (Southern Ontario), it is almost always a sealed bid situation, and winning buyers often outbid their rivals by tens of thousands of dollars.
The agents around here are fond of a process engineered to maximize the bids: If there are multiple bids that are all reasonable, they will tell the lowballs to go home, while telling those remaining how many bids are in, and offering everyone a chance to "sweeten up" before a final decision is made.
I personally would never buy a home through such a process, which tells you that I absolutely would love to sell my home in exactly this fashion should the market be hot whenever that happens.
Now that being said, I cannot say for certain whether the frenzy of shouting bids while staring your opponents in the eye will produce more money or the sealed bids will produce more money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> auction failed to maximize the amount of money I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
It is quite wild and frankly just shocking. The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale. What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a we…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, couldn’t this same argument be made in reverse? If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer, which suggest sealed bids are most appropriate to maximize the value. Auctions can’t be fairly judged in hindsight, generally speaking.
> If the bids were open, the competing parties could simply go $1 above the highest offer [..] Isn't that what you want to happen? All the auctions I've ever participated have repeated this very process until none of the buyers are prepared to raise their bid, at which point it appears the seller has got the highest price anyone will offer. What am I missing?
But some people might think, due to human nature, that one auction or the other gets higher prices. Maybe an open bid auction gets lower bids, because interested people start lower knowing they can bid again, then back out when they see there's a lot of competition. Maybe sealed-bid auctions work better for large organisations, as getting board approval and CFO sign-off on a multi-million-dollar expenditure takes a few days. Or maybe an open bid auction gets bidders het up and excited because they're in second place and surely no matter what you've bid, you'd always bid 5% more to win - right?
None of which is backed by theory, but if it feels true to the judge - who's to say?
IMHO the main value of buying infowars, to The Onion, was the publicity and headlines. Those are harvested now. If the auction was repeated I can't imagine The Onion upping their bid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate. So long as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it an…
> main reasoning by the judge seemed to be that a single round sealed bid process is unlikely to maximize the sale price which on it's surface seems pretty accurate Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price? Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all , The Onion should app…
So it sounds like the judge specifically had issues with the use of sealed bids.
Am I missing something or does this NYT article not actually say what the judge based his decision on? That would be an important piece of information to have when deciding whether the decision was good or not.
This is the legal pretext, which appears about 2/3 of the way through the article: > Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.