That is a brutal response from Match and IAC. Their statement also mentions that two separate banks were part of the valuation. I'd be curious what their proof is. A couple fun phrases from the statement:
Honestly, this makes me lose any respect I might have had for them - while the lawsuit seems odd, resorting to ad hominem attacks is extremely unprofessional, and especially so in a PR statement. Civility and basic courtesy is not copyrighted, use it in your public statements.
If I were a judge, I'd only have a slightly more negative or skeptical attitude towards IAC/Match as a result of that PR statement, at best. I'm not buying the wisdom yet. Anyone have something more convincing? Or am I wrong about most judge's mindsets? Don't judges 'see through' PR? Isn't their job about facts, not being influenced by rhetoric? Are our judges crap? BTW, this is one reason why AI ought to assist judges, lawyers and court cases more and more because of how emotion gets in the way of otherwise clear thinking which can be critical when people's lives are in the balance.
But, based on your statement, we safely assume you're not a judge or even a legal professional?
So without alternative argument from other legal professionals it is safe to assume that the legal professionals who crafted the statement, do so for it's effectiveness in achieving their goal, which is winning this suit and not for PR or convincing you personally.
Can you give an example of how AI might help judges/lawyers/etc discern facts and avoid the influence of rhetoric?
Isn't it a bigger issue that even if people agree on the facts, the law can be mushy with concepts like "reasonable" such that two people can reasonably disagree on what is reasonable given the same facts?
I have no idea why this is downvoted, I think this is pretty profound.
AI, or even sentiment analysis, could easily filter non-factual posturing from statements of objective fact. Of course, people can filter it too, you never see this type of crap slip in to an academic journal.
I think if an AI auto-highlighted social-judgements it could revolutionize how a lot of things are read (a news article, HN, etc)
I will say (and this is meta), I'm more than happy to take a hit every now and then for the sake of how comments work here because after my experience on other tech news sites' comment sections (e.g. Ars Technica, sorry to name names) which are full of emotional hysteria, mob mentality, and upvote whoring, I've come to see that HN has by far the most quality Internet comment culture anywhere - I've never seen it on the Internet before in my 20 years. So I don't mind, let's keep commenting when and where we think we have something useful to say, and thinking freely and openly in a way that's pretty strongly protected by the excellent guidelines established here at HN.
I don't know, if in fact the plaintiffs are being silly (losing lots of money can make people do silly things), I don't mind. I like when organizations are willing to call out bullshit. Whether or not it actually is bullshit is for the court to decide, but clearly match group believes it is.
Remember that judges read a whole lot of boring legalese every day. They enjoy it when it is slightly less boring.
Moreover, the a lot of that legalese is generated directly or indirectly by the propensity of chancers with lawyers launching frivolous suits. So if I was a judge, I would be quite happy to read a nice explanation of how silly the plaintiff is being.
Unrelated thought, but I couldn't help but think that it would be nice if we could hold government officials, like...well...the president of the United States, to the same standards.
Some of the best HN has to offer in terms of interesting and thought provoking discussion is on generic tangents, and so long as the discussion remains civil and contained to those threads concerning it I see no reason to discourage it for being discussed.
I know how unsatisfying this is going to sound, but: this is a point on which we just have to pull rank. It's our job to foster the kind of site where signal/noise ratio doesn't completely suck, and many years of experience have taught us that generic tangents lead to low-quality discussions that grow like weeds.
I don't think I agree with you, but I want to make sure I understand what you're saying before I go down that route here. What exactly do you mean by a "generic tangent"? You originally said "political", but now you say "low-quality"? Are political discussions inherently low quality, or is low-quality in this context in addition to it being political in nature?
Do you think tedious or blatantly illiterate comments get as many flags as vaguely tangential or vaguely controversial comments?
(I really think there are lots of comments that are "blatantly illiterate", in that they respond to a meaning that is just obviously not in the parent. I guess that only kind of breaks the assume good faith guideline, as they are missing the meaning rather than mischaracterizing it.)
The point of the question is whether the userbase has been trained to respond aggressively to only a subset of low signal comments.
I'm not sure about tedious—there's an awful lot of tediousness in internet forum comments—but we certainly see many flags on blatantly unsubstantive posts.
My comment is directly related to the parent comment. I would hope HN moderators are not in the business of dismissing comments they do not agree with as 'generic tangents', but hey, it's your site I guess.
If it's only related via something generic then it's a generic tangent.
FWIW: when you deal with the quantity of this stuff that we do, "agree with" doesn't enter into it. It's not even in the same solar system. No one could sustain the cognitive load of having to agree or disagree with that many things.
I think you're right. Being civil doesn't pay dividends unless most other people are civil too too, and if incivility is punished. Neither of those things are true, generally, right now, so being civil just makes you look weak.
Nah, not really. Real morality maybe. But there are environments where "doing the right thing" will simply fuck you. (I guess you could argue if you were _really_ really strong, you could do the right thing and survive. But that's almost tautological. The point is, the environment you're in may force you to make the choice of "do things you would rather not" or "fail".)
Or, more concisely, hate the game, not the player.
I will agree "strength" is probably not the right descriptor there. I almost didn't play it because I wasn't entirely sure.
I'm not perfect, far from it, but I try to fail graciously before I choose to stray from doing the right thing.
That said, I absolutely do recognize that that is a luxury that not everyone has given their situation. However, I do think that some use that to justify not having to do the right thing in cases where that isn't actually true, and that at least striving to always do right, but sometimes failing to do the right thing due to circumstances is a better approach in the long term versus minmaxing immediate returns because doing the right thing is inconvenient.
I think it depends a lot on the thing involved. If it's just, oh hey, there's a norm of being kind of an asshole, then, fine, maybe it's not ideal, but go with it if that's what you have to do to be effective. (And I think that's the situation we were talking about originally, w/r/t "civility" in language.)
On the other hand, if it's something like "hey we're gassing the jews" or "we're bombing schoolbusses full of children," then hopefully you're doing everything you can to fight against it (though, emperically, most of us will just go along).
It depends on context. As much as some people would hate to admit it, communication and messaging is one thing POTUS is far from stupid about.
On Twitter and TV, he speaks the way he does to maximize attention and media coverage. He has found that evading basic courtesy is an effective way to use those media to his advantage.
In the context of a court statement or other official correspondence, I doubt you'd see him use such colorful language (indeed, check official White House correspondence signed by Trump: he doesn't).
I doubt he gets re-elected, so I would put forth the assertion that being non-civil and acting like a jackass doesn't work long term. People get a good look at it and it isn't appealing when they can see it for what it is.
Well, and the DNC by choosing the by-the-numbers weakest major party candidate in the history of polling (with slower negatives than Trump, sure, but much more committed negatives.)
Russian interference couldn't have tipped the balance (assuming it even did) if it hadn't been within range in the first place.
1.5 years of wall-to-wall TV news coverage got him elected. Has the TV news started to cover something else? Not that I've noticed; they have to chase the ratings after all and Trump has been a godsend for them. So, yeah, Hillary will lose to him again.
Despite everything that was known before the election, he was elected. And he delivered on the major promises to his core supporters (Supreme Court, tax cuts, hard on immigration, rolling back regulations, etc).
Uber is a great tech example of the same phenomenon. Many people on HN who rail about Uber's dubious business practices still use their services because it's convenient or because it is the cheapest. They may dislike the business but they aren't voting with their wallets. Uber "gets away" with slimy practices because "ends justify the means"
Depends on who the Dems run against him. But remember that Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million voters, and that even though a lot of left-wingers stayed home in protest of the Clinton-Sanders thing, and so far he's done a wonderful job of galvanizing fence-sitters against him.
I worked for match group as a C-level executive and had a equity structure that was similar, but on a way smaller scale. They use outside firms and a methodology called baseball arbitration to come up with a FMV. Although I didn't like some of the decisions that impacted the value of my equity, I was always treated fairly.
Yeah, basically. If the founder disagrees with IAC's/Match's valuation, they can come up with their own valuation and the "independent" outside party picks the winner, with no modifications.
It's already been mentioned that this particular document was not for a judge, but if it had been it would probably depend on the judge.
Many judges treat legal writing as a form of literature, and like to use interesting or creative language instead of just sticking to a dry boring style. I'm sure such judges would not mind some colorful language in filings as long as it helps get the point across.
A good lawyer will know if they are dealing with such a judge and write their filings appropriately.
Here are some examples of judges deviating from dry boring writing.
Noble v. Bradford Marine, Inc., 789 F. Supp. 395 (S.D. Fla. 1992) [1]. The section titles in the opinion are "Hurling Chunks", "Like a Winged Monkey Flying Out of the Ashes...", "NOT!", and "A Schwing and a Miss".
Fisher v. Lowe, 122 Mich.App. 418, 333 N.W.2d 67 [2]. A tree was hit by a car, and the owner of the tree sued. Defendants won and plaintiff appealed. The appeals court wrote this opinion:
We thought that we would never see
A suit to compensate a tree.
A suit whose claim in tort is prest
Upon a mangled tree's behest;
A tree whose battered trunk was prest
Against a Chevy's crumpled crest;
A tree that faces each new day
With bark and limb in disarray;
A tree that may forever bear
A lasting need for tender care.
Flora lovers though we three,
We must uphold the court's decree.
Affirmed
When West [3], published a copy of this case they kept to the spirit of of the judge's writing, and their summary was:
A wayward Chevy struck a tree
Whose owner sued defendants three.
He sued car's owner, driver too,
And insurer for what was due
For his oak tree that now may bear
A lasting need for tender care.
The Oakland County Circuit Court, John N. O'Brien, J.,
set forth The judgment that defendants sought
And quickly an appeal was brought.
Court of Appeals, J.H. Gillis, J., Gave thought
and then had this to say:
1) There is no liability
Since No-Fault grants immunity;
2) No jurisdiction can be found
Where process service is unsound;
And thus the judgment, as it's termed,
Is due to be, and is,
Affirmed
[3] a publishing company that took copies of the public domain court opinions and added notes pointing out each important legal point in the cases, labeled those points from an extensive legal subject classification they maintained, and added indexes and cross references to the other cases in the same volume and in their prior volumes. This was in an era when everything was done with paper documents, not electronic.
People who grew up with electronic documents and networks might find it quite interesting to look into how legal research worked in, say 1970. They might expect it to be cumbersome, but it was actually quite reasonable, due to metadata companies like West and Shepard's [4].
> his merry band of plaintiffs
> but sour grapes alone do not a lawsuit make