How did they do that? How do you lose access to your own website?
They sold it a while ago
ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
81–90 of 186 posts
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!"
No, what insulates them from fiduciary responsibility is the fact that there is no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. I’ll say that again: members and/or managers of an LLC, and officers and directors of a corporation owe no fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to make them money. The fiduciary duties owed under US law are as follows: 1) the duty to be informed; 2) the duty not to usurp corporate oppor…
This is true in some states, like Texas; but not in Delaware where Disney is incorporated and where directors and officers owe fiduciary duties of care and loyalty to both the corporation and the shareholders.
(Not legal advice. I'm not licensed in either state.)
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#83538 was fun while it lasted. The podcasts were also a good listen. Things got worse after Disney had their first round of layoffs. Their problem was they weren't profitable outside the presidential election years when interest peaked in the general public. 3 out of 4 years only diehard election polling wonks tuned in.
In theory corporate ownership was supposed to be the solution to that problem. Deep pockets to buffer through the lean years and maximally exploit the profitable content when the harvest arrives.
In practice, of course, corporate bean counting doesn't work on that latency scale. There's always a middle manager seeing fat that can be trimmed today, harvest be damned. But the financial argument was sound.
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#84Was 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 vaguely the opposite. They were the only major prediction site that thought Trump had any significant chance of winning.
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, what insulates them from fiduciary responsibility is the fact that there is no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. I’ll say that again: members and/or managers of an LLC, and officers and directors of a corporation owe no fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to make them money. The fiduciary duties owed under US law are as follows: 1) the duty to be informed; 2) the duty not to usurp corporate oppor…
This is true in some states, like Texas; but not in Delaware where Disney is incorporated and where directors and officers owe fiduciary duties of care and loyalty to both the corporation and the shareholders. (Not legal advice. I'm not licensed in either state.)
You are correct to note that there are two fiduciary duties: the duty of care, and the duty of loyalty. However, you are incorrect to imply I stated the law incorrectly.
The duty of care is otherwise known as the duty to be informed. And the duty of loyalty is otherwise known as the duty not to usurp corporate opportunities. I stated the law in Delaware, which is consistent with the law on the rest of the United States on these points.
You and I simply use two different sets of words to describe the only two fiduciary duties of an officer.
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#86Was 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.
> pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong That this is the narrative that survived the election is one of the greatest indictments for our society's ability to engage in critical thinking. The day before the election, the Huffington Post published a hit piece criticising Nate for overrating Trump's odds and inspiring panic. Huffpost predicted a 98.2% chance of Clinton winning, NYT predicted 85…
Whenever people knock them for mis-calling a race, the thing I always refer to (or would, if ABC hadn't burned the site down) is their "Check Our Work" page, which sorts all of their predictions across politics, sports, etc., bucketed by the odds they gave, and then showed the percentage of all outcomes that were accurately predicted. It was remarkably accurate -- i.e., races where a candidate was given 65% odds were indeed won by that candidate approximately 65% of the time. This was true from the surefire 95% odds (which did fail about 5% of the time) down to the 5% longshots (which pulled an upset about 5% of the time).
Here's the last archived version of the page:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#87This is another sad step towards denying that there's a science to conducting and interpreting scientifically accurate polls, presumably in the run up for the unfair elections we're holding now and this November.
The first time I noticed this trend was during one of the W elections. The exit polls for the whole country were spot on except in some republican controlled districts in swing states. In all the districts with a discrepancy, the polls showed a much stronger democratic turnout than the vote tallies. All the districts in question had electronic voting without paper trails.
I guess some combination of those factors makes exit polls unreliable. /s
That pattern has repeated for most presidential elections since about 2004, and always indicate systematic tampering that caused official vote tallies to favor republicans more than the exit polls did. The effect is only seen in places where the officials were republican, where the difference was likely to matter and where recounts were impossible.
I'll miss 538. Here's an epitaph:
> Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -1984 by George Orwell.
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#88[flagged]
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Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#89[flagged]
He doesn’t have the faintest idea how to turn the keys.
Re: ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
#90But why?
I'm surprised this is news - or perhaps just surprised that there was still some of 538 around ...? ABC officially sunset 538 over a year ago (and laid off most/all of the staff).
The new development is that the old articles from when the site was active have been taken offline. Normally you would leave old content online even if you're no longer making more.