throwlogon

I believe the poster has $450K in cash, in addition to the real-estate holdings, and that is already more money than they know what to do with. I don't know if it makes sense to mortgage "the base" to add more cash to that pile.

Demanding a "deeper, more consistent, and prolonged commitment than in the past" from people whose profession you've already made more difficult is pretty galling.

It may be the case that their careers were going to get more difficult anyway; nevertheless, Ek is in fact one of the main drivers and beneficiaries.

If the alternative is artists not being paid enough to make a living, then one side has to push until the other side loses. The work is being given away so cheaply by tech companies trying to commoditize their complements that there isn't enough money to support both the creators and the distributors. Why should the creators lose by default?

> [T]he other party has every right to tell them No Deal.

Sure, but that's different than "You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music." Of course you can, and you can do so long-term provided that new tech companies appear as existing ones fail.

Exactly this. Bandcamp's straightforward, egalitarian deal is exactly what any artist below the superstar level needs.

Put your stuff out, set your price, handle your own publicity, Bandcamp takes their cut. That's it.

> You can't charge tech companies more than they themselves are making from the music.

Sure you can. Tech companies are constantly losing money at the margins, by paying out more than they take in for a wide variety of things.

It's sustainable as long as tech companies can find financing, or fund one part of their business from another part, which seems fairly long-term.

EDIT: I know I'm gonna lose karma on this, but I'm right. There's no shortage of tech companies with negative revenue, or negative revenue in certain business units, and that money isn't disappearing, it's being paid to counterparties in business deals.

There's some symmetry to the way the Internet Archive assumes consent to reproduce other people's content, and people assuming consent to take advantage of the Internet Archive's mirroring. I don't know if this is in line with the Internet Archive's terms-of-service, or the law.

In this case they'd be getting stuck with a pretty big bandwidth hit.

I don't know, the "it's just" part kind of indicates that the real probability of things remaining correlated were not what LTCM thought they were, to the point where they couldn't afford to stay in the position long enough for things to snap back. I don't buy that as "always winning".

The coin flips are in fact what I was alluding to. I guess we disagree as to whether what LTCM was betting on were a form of coin flips.

> Instead you [the bank] go to an anonymous arb firm, for $1m in bonds, and you say, "okay we're going to sell you the bond that is actually ours, you will sell it back to us, here is your fee, now we can sell this bond back to the client and wash the fact that it is ours."

How does the bank make money doing this? Routing the sale of this bond through the "anonymous arb firm" doesn't do anything to the price. If the bank's competitor is selling their bond at 1.00, the bank could directly offer their bond at 0.99 without getting "anonymous arb firm" involved. If the bank routes the trade through the "anonymous arb firm"... what difference does that make? If it shows up on the market at 1.01, the bank still has to give the client the 1.00 bond first, and if it shows up on the market at 0.99, the bank could have just done that itself.