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ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

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Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

#61

Post by themafia »

jfengel wrote: post #46
brookst wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s basically a fuck you to the shareholders. Hey we’ve got this dead asset someone will pay for but we won’t sell because they were mean to us. Any exec who operates that way should be shown the door ASAP as they are likely doing similar emotional management of other aspects of the business.

ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.

> shareholders are Disney

Who's shareholders are the public.

> The shareholders aren't going to care

This is not a valid defense in court. You can't let "attitude of investors" override "sound financial decisionmaking."

Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

#62

Post by themafia »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #54
jfengel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.

Disney's 2025 profit was $12B: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...

So what amount of profits insulates you from lack of fiduciary responsibility?

"It's okay set millions of dollars on fire because we have billions in this pile over here!"

Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

#64

Post by slipheen »

themafia wrote: post #61
jfengel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.

> shareholders are Disney Who's shareholders are the public. > The shareholders aren't going to care This is not a valid defense in court. You can't let "attitude of investors" override "sound financial decisionmaking."

I'm not defending them or this behaviour but it sounds to me like they may think the message/threat this sends to silence future criticism from other people, outweighs the immediate sum.

(Internally I'm sure they could probably phrase it some other less negative way such as chance of people confusing the brand as still owned by them, etc) association

Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

#66

Post by hungryhobbit »

msie wrote: post #48
forlorn_mammoth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least they aren't inefficient, like governments are. Because as you can clearly see market forces always lead to optimal resource allocations.

Like the billions invested in AI???

Pretty sure forlorn_mammoth had an implied /s in their post.

Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

#67

Post by BobaFloutist »

triceratops wrote: post #33
softwaredoug wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People consistently have a hard time understanding that 30% probabilities happen all the time.

Surely not all the time.

I think given the number of things that can happen with ~30% probability, there's probably something significant happening with ~30% probability at basically all times.

Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

#69

Post by shipman05 »

chasd00 wrote: post #56

Was 538 ABC's property during the first Trump election? IIRC they took a pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong and never really recovered.

I remember that whole election starting off very poorly for Nate Silver.

After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders.

There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.

So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)

(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)

Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

#70

Post by bsder »

rurp wrote: post #53
htrp wrote: post #44

If they shut it down, then it's just a strategic decision. If Nate Silver buys it back (for pennies on the dollar) and then makes it successful, it's embarrassing and makes ABC look bad at business.

That's kind of already happened though. Nate and Galen have both launched Substack's covering much of what they did at 538. I've also seen at least 4-5 others working elsewhere doing the similar polling/politics/sports work. Maybe that was the logic on ABC's part but it's ridiculously wrong given how much clear market demand there is for the 538 people and content.

> That's kind of already happened though.

It's a world of difference to the political standing of the ABC Vice President between "Nate Silver launched something and made a gazillion dollars" vs "Nate Silver bought FiveThirtyEight back for a song and made a gazillion dollars" even if Nate Silver did the exact same thing. In the second case, the ABC Vice President gets fired because he signed off on the purchase.

This is why long copyright is such a terrible idea. With long copyright, there is every incentive to sit on IP and do nothing with it because of political losses. With short copyright, the incentive is to do something quick because the copyright will expire otherwise.

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