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Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

nytimes.com

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Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#881

Post by CJefferson »

capybaraStorm wrote: post #795
mountainriver wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow go read the stories of the parents who dealt with this and think about who you are defending

Whether their stories about what they dealt with are true or not, they have incredible incentive to make sure they present such dealings as worth a billion dollars. You can't put a price on human life, but if you could surely those children are worth a billion and more, so they just took the money from Jones (the nearest lying person they hated) instead of the broke murderer. Bernhard Gaetz famously said (accurately)…

I think Jones hurt them more than the murderer.

People do have their children murdered, and it's terrible, but they often go on with their lives.

Because of Jones, these parents were harrassed for years, forced to move home and go into hiding. Yes, it wasn't Jones doing the harrassing directly, but he was the one accussing them of being actors for years.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#882

Post by akkad33 »

neom wrote: post #485
akkad33 wrote: post #459

Refuses to allow? This is like saying I dislike to like instead of saying I don't like. I would assume there is a different way of writing that.

"Refuse" is an action verb, "Dislike" is a stative verb. The infinitive phrase ("to allow") serves as a complement to the verb "refuse," forming a grammatically correct structure. refusare = deny.

I wasn't saying it was grammatically incorrect, just that it was a very bloated and roundabout expression instead of saying something simpler like "the court refuses the merger".

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#883

Post by JSteph22 »

Hikikomori wrote: post #100
4gotunameagain wrote: post #94

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.

You think the current president is influencing this court case?

People posting in this thread seem to think a Trump DOJ appointed trustee would act in a way that benefits Alex Jones.

Infowars has a large following and has been very supportive of Trump while being critical of Biden. The rationale for the motivation to act politically in both directions is certainly there.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#884

Post by patmcc »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #860
patmcc wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>You're oversimplifying this. If someone owes you $1B and they owe me $2B, and they've got an asset worth $500M, I can't just pledge $2B of bad debt to buy the asset. The only fair way is to sell it for $500M in actual cash. Then it gets divied up accordingly. Except what if all the creditors prefer that outcome to the "more cash" outcome? If the way it would get divvied up is $499m to you and $1m to me, vs $350m to…

If literally every creditor agreed, maybe so. But I don't think that is the case even among the subset of creditors that is the families. If there are banks involved I'm sure they aren't interested in getting less money.

The two groups of families are the only two creditors. The Connecticut families are owed ~$1bil, the Texas families are owed ~$50mil. Nobody else is getting any money.

The bid that was accepted would give the Texas families more than they would have gotten from the other bid, because the Connecticut families were willing to give it to them, because they valued stripping Jones of his platform higher than the cash.

The only people worse off are the people who submitted the losing bid (Alex Jones' cronies). The creditors, and the estate, were not. And they're the ones the bankruptcy Trustee has the highest duty to.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#885

Post by iancmceachern »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #6

This is probably the correct decision. Alex Jones's vitamin company offered 2x more cash, and in the case of a bankruptcy, cash completely trumps any notion of "giving up debt." Especially when the debt being settled is astronomically large and you are giving up a very small portion of it ($7 million out of $1.5 billion). The other creditors are far better off getting more cash, and those $7 million of claims are wor…

Side question, because this is the first I'm hearing of him selling vitamins.

Can his vitamins possibly be good? Who would buy these over day, centrum or Costco gummy vitamins.

This is weird to me.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#886

Post by intended »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #722
freejazz wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? That's exactly what they did.

Did you read the article? Jones was arguing that the families shouldn't be able to do that but the article doesn't say anything about whether he won that argument and the only reason it specifies for why the judge rejected the sale is this: > 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 f…

Once secret bids are known, and the auction is conducted again, usually the party with the biggest pockets then just wades in and takes it.

Once the price is known, several parties tend to walk away.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#887

Post by dang »

uv-depression wrote: post #778
_zgx0 wrote: post #506

The amount of folks here supporting Alex Jones is completely shocking to me. He built a business out of attacking and re-victimizing parents whose children were murdered. He's scum of the earth. That business was taken away from him, and folks think that's too much? What the actual fuck.

You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.

This is a common claim, but it only ever seems to be made by people with a strong ideological commitment who are mad that the opposing commitment isn't banned on the site. In other words, the complaint is that we don't moderate HN based on ideology. Since to do that would contradict HN's reason for existing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), I'm not inclined to start.

The irony is that people with the opposing ideological passion—the ones you refer to as techno-libertarian pseudo-intellectual fascists—make exactly the same complaint that you do, just with the ideological bit flipped. They think that HN is (let me see...) full of uber sensitive, far left ideologues [1], not only socialists but delusional anti-socials [2], full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark [3]. Virtually every leftist post is upvoted [4], anything that can be remotely considered right wing is automatically flagged and/or downvoted [5], and only the most extreme progressive positions can be posted here, because I have destroyed this site! [6]

It's not really ironic, because these perceptions are only opposed to each other on the surface—just one bit is flipped, as I said. The underlying mechanisms have to be the same.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42160087

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330143

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41846634

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41851430

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799361

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42076694

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#888

Post by pclmulqdq »

patmcc wrote: post #884
wakawaka28 wrote: post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If literally every creditor agreed, maybe so. But I don't think that is the case even among the subset of creditors that is the families. If there are banks involved I'm sure they aren't interested in getting less money.

The two groups of families are the only two creditors. The Connecticut families are owed ~$1bil, the Texas families are owed ~$50mil. Nobody else is getting any money. The bid that was accepted would give the Texas families more than they would have gotten from the other bid, because the Connecticut families were willing to give it to them, because they valued stripping Jones of his platform higher than the cash. The…

> Nobody else is getting any money.

It is impossible to infer this simply from the size of the debt. Debts have seniority ordering which dictates who gets paid first, just like liquidation preferences in startups.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#889

Post by dang »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #815
uv-depression wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're surprised? In any vaguely political thread HN is pretty much just a more well-spoken 4chan. Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content, which along with its techno-libertarian origins makes it the perfect breeding ground for fascists and pseudo-intellectualism.

> Moderation here is entirely based on tone, not content My least favorite thing about reading HN, by far. Glad someone else said it.

I don't want to pick on you personally (so I apologize if it feels that way), but I also don't want to leave this unresponded to when we've had to ask you so many times to stop breaking the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40910766).

I think most HN readers are glad that we ask users not to personally attack others (questioning whether they can read, calling them morons and rubes, telling them to grow up, that they should be ashamed, are out of touch with reality, and so on), —or that we ask commenters not to post that women are asking for too much, that European capital rightfully belongs to the United States, and so on.

Is that "moderation based entirely on tone, not content"? I don't think so; I think that distinction is unsupportable. But whether it is or not, it's clear that we can't have people attacking each other like this, and I'm pretty confident that the community agrees.

Re: Bankruptcy judge rejects sale of Infowars to The Onion

#890

Post by johnnyanmac »

redeux wrote: post #819
johnnyanmac wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law is almost inherently poliical. Politics was in the equation the moment Jones decided to pretend a tragic school shooting was fake news.

So where is justice in this equation then?

The plantiffs getting compensated is the "justice". The courts ruled wrongdoing and the consequence is some sort of payout.
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