• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: November 19th, 2023

help-circle


  • The world trade center was required to be insured against terrorism by the banks in the leasing deal. That was an obvious requirement for the banks to include because of the recent (at the time…) 1993 world trade center bombing.

    Larry Silverstein got the insurance so recently before the attack because he signed a lease that included the insurance provisions, and he signed that lease in July 2001 because negotiations for the deal took from January 2001 until July 2001. Prior to that, the Port Authority was having trouble keeping the occupancy of the building high, and they thought private management of the building would increase tax revenue, and give them money for other projects. The plan for privatization began in the 1990s, and coincided with other revitalization efforts in the area, some managed by the Port Authority, and others stemming from the city government.

    I think in context there’s nothing surprising involved here, and the timeline of the attack was driven by different things than the timeline of the leasing deal. In other words, this is a coincidence.



  • It’s a cycle I can describe, but cannot understand. A business has some minor decline in sales, or profits, or whatever. Private equity firms convince one group of people this is the biggest disaster, and the company is ruined forever, hardly worth anything. Simultaneously, they convince a second group of people that the company has a strong business model, and will recover soon.

    The second group lends the company a ton of money to buy itself from the first group of people, for the private equity firm. Now, the private equity firm tries to make a temporary spike in value, pay themselves large dividends, and sell the (now actually, fundamentally broken) company for as much as they can.

    The original shareholders lose. The employees of the business lose. The banks (or their insurance company) lose. Private equity wins.

    My lack of understanding is, if I were a bank, I would spot this scam either the first, or second time it happens. Next time Mitt Romney came to ask me for ten billion dollars, I would tell him to pound sand. How has it taken actual professional bankers hundreds of times to (still not) see the cycle?

    Likewise, the insurance companies backing some of these loans must know they’ve lost billions on this. Why haven’t they done anything?



  • TFA was perfect, it had mystery, and mystery, and mystery, and even nostalgia too!

    It was only when TLJ explained some of those mysteries that suddenly all the pieces that looked like they weren’t from the same puzzle, and some of them weren’t puzzle pieces at all, and a few of the pieces were obviously colored with crayons by a confused child… That’s when it suddenly fell apart through no fault of anyone other than Rian Johnson.


    I’m pretty sure I’ve never been satisfied by the reveal of a single JJ Abrahms mystery, ever. I don’t understand how he has such a career of failing upwards.



  • I’m not in this business, but I have purchased prints from a print farm before. There are already at least 4 large, high quality printing companies that offer to print any model in any material. I think most of the competition is now on speed and price. There are also many smaller printers I have purchased from. Most offer ~10 products, have them already printed, and sell those items to fulfill a specific need. As far as I can tell, those smaller printers either design their own models, or paid for models that are not readily available. Once model files are available, the general purpose printing companies can deliver the same part.

    Unless you have ideas for models no one has made before, and you want to try to profit as much as possible off those, I don’t see the upside to a small print farm.