I mean... you've spent how many articles talking shit about Disney and then complain they won't sell you back your baby that you sold to them.
Hard to get sympathy here.
Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
141–150 of 270 posts
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.
That's not remotely true. Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006. For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar…
I specifically said reputation. Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak. Disney certainly got their money’s worth out of those purchases. I’m not denying that. But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition.
I’ll grant you that “soon after” might have been a stretch for ESPN, but it’s obviously true for the others. Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company. The same is true with Marvel. Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase. You can maybe claim Disney has a good eye for finding companies on an upward trajectory, but these are all examples of Disney management’s failure to be a long-term steward of their acquisitions.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing
Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times. Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.
The set of people who are "basically all people in tech" has changed a lot since then for a variety of reasons; it's not surprising that any given political issue from a decade ago might not have the same resonance today.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#144I mean... you've spent how many articles talking shit about Disney and then complain they won't sell you back your baby that you sold to them. Hard to get sympathy here.
I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company.
No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.
(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#145> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on…
It's remarkably ironic that we are slowly returning to aristocracy.
Only it's worse this time. Say what you want about those French poofs and British lords: they were expected to do their duty on the battlefield.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Berkshire Hathaway has this attitude, with the proviso that the corporate management at the acquired firm must be competent, and the firm be profitable and protected by a "moat." It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO. It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.
For one thing See's Candy is fundamentally a value-added operation and GEICO is a positive cash flow financial structure which remains competitive by trying not to remove as much value from the customer as the next guy.
See's Candy is also what Charlie Munger considered their shift from distressed companies to high quality companies; its sentimental on a company level because it represented a real shift in investment philosophy.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#147Am I the only one who finds this whole blog post to be super unprofessional? I agree it's sad that the content is gone, but airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth (assuming you're not a whistleblower talking about illegal activity or something like that). I feel bad for Nate Silver, but business is business. I guess he had to learn that lesson the hard way.
I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one who agreed to sell his IP to a corporation and this is the kind of things corporations do with IP.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%. That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate. A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly bett…
This embodies what 538 and its defenders miss about 538's appeal: People didn't come to 538 for explanations on subtle points of statistical literacy (although those were provided). They came because, for whatever reason, they wanted to know who would win the election. People not trained in statistics treated like the scoreboard at a football game- it's always better to be winning, but score is a near perfect predict…
Speak for yourself. That's not why I read FiveThirtyEight.
The purpose of FiveThirtyEight was never to be an oracle for the average person. It was always a deliberately wonky site for a wonky audience. They were very clear about that in the articles they published and topics they covered.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#149Easy to go after Disney for this, but did Nate have to sell to ESPN to begin with? I've been burned too many times subscribing to services that go to shit because the owner wanted their payday. Let's stop (only) blaming the buyer.
He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.
Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN."
I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the…
The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.
What Viet Cong parallels? Whatever you mean, it can’t have been very visible to the audience, since clear Viet Cong sympathies would not have gone over well (at least not universally) in 1977-1983.