The personal perils of Poison pills

The USA tends to allow more things in business than we do in New Zealand or Australia. For example, our laws on food are strict, and strictly enforced. Similarly the legislation and Commerce Commission hold companies to account for their behaviour.

In the USA they are a bit more laissez-faire.  Food is under regulated and under enforced. Also, each State of the US regulates it’s companies differently, and so companies have gravitated to Delaware as a nice place to be regulated from. The regulations are friendly, and the judges and lawyers are efficient.

But in the US consumers have teeth, and cozy legal deals can come unstuck.

Two pension funds are suing Yahoo for rejecting Microsoft, an looking to create a class action:

“The plaintiffs asked a Delaware Chancery Court to block the Yahoo board from completing any such transaction with those companies, to force it to reconsider Microsoft’s offer, and to block it from implementing defensive measures that would render the company unattractive to potential buyers.

This is serious. When a company is in play – under offer – the Directors have a fiduciary duty to maximise the return to the shareholders. That means playing hard to get may work in the short term, but you’d damn well better cut a deal if it is as lucrative as the one on offer.

The ramifications of not doing so include jail time. Being a Director is a serious thing, and a board with an offer on the table should quickly form a committee of all the external directors to consider the offer, and take the action that will see best dollar return to shareholders – even if it means destruction of the business.

Rather than accept the offer, Yahoo’s board rejected the offer and installed a poison pill – to make it harder for Microsoft to buy. This has lowered the value to shareholders of Yahoo (although as I and others commented on Rod’s blog, poison pills are a relatively empty threat), opening those Directors up to liability from shareholders that saw potential money disappear.

The winners here will be the lawyers. The losers will be Yahoo shareholders if the deal does not go ahead, and Microsoft shareholders if the deal does go ahead. That leaves plenty of shorting opportunities on these two lousy companies.

Ticketmaster has auctions. sort of.

Here is one for Westlife.

ticketmaster

A lost opportunity for Trade Me perhaps, but ticketing is a tough market to get into as it is all about tying up the suppliers of the tickets.

However, given that, Trade Me (or whomever) still has the ability to enter the market by offering the same service at a cheaper price – so long as they can bring something else to the table. Trade Me could bring traffic, and they and others can bring website usability.

That’s right – that auction didn’t actually work for me. Perhaps I needed to be logged in, perhaps it does not work on Safari, but in either case a result other than a page reload would have been useful. Simple stuff really.

There is also no indication of how many tickets are being offered, whether there are other seats on offer or whether the winning bidder for a seat in a particular range pays their bid price or the lowest winning bid price for that range.

some work to do.

Hope: Si Se Puede Cambiar

Like Bill Clinton, from Hope Arkansas, Barack Obama is bringing positivity to his first campaign for president. This video is stunning.

Si Se Puede Cambiar is the US Spanish translation of Obama’s “Yes We Can Change”. I you have not seen Obama in action, then here’s a 2 minute snipet:

Below the fold are the big New Hampshire speech and the other big music video.

I do enjoy the speechifying, but am thankful that NZ still practices politics that are about policies more than imagery.

Continue reading “Hope: Si Se Puede Cambiar”

Judgment Day is here: negative housing equity

SST reports on several stories of negative equity situations happening in Auckland.

That’s when the value of a house is less than the money owed to the bank.

“One home had mortgages to ASB for $723,000 and Finance Assist for $150,000. It sold for $535,000.
…

“The mortgage was to Property Finance Securities (in receivership) for $1.363m. After much encouragement from the auctioneer it sold to a dapper gentleman in a pinstriped suit for $780,000.

When negative equity occurs  the financially logical, if not exactly ethical, thing for owners to do is to walk away from the mortgage (and perhaps declare bankruptcy). The banks force the house into a foreclosure auction and walk away with less money than they are owed.

It’s called judgment day.

The day when all the “it’s too good to be true” stories finally become exposed for the confidence trick that they are

The day when the leveraged speculators that got in late into the real estate boom move from being paper millionaires to paupers playing with worthless paper

The  day when the media turns against the industry, the editorial and advertising pages dedicated to real estate shrink and the commentary begins to have a sharp edge
The day when we all recall how it was in 1987, and how housing prices took years and years to recover

The day when the bubble is exposed as it bursts

The day when dapper gentlemen in pin striped suits start to become interested in picking up a bargain or two.

The day when I start to become mildly, oh so mildly,  interested in real estate.

Blog post aggregation is pretty harmless but doomed

The gaystars site is actually pretty straight – it is full of RSS excerpts from blogs similar to this one. It also does not have any ads, nor does it have any obvious “contact me”

I wondered at first whether it was part of some elaborate scam to prey on the homophobia of Z-list bloggers. Perhaps a  email to the gay stars site from an annoyed blogger would start an interesting chain of events, cumulating in requests for increasing amounts of money. Clever, but not true as there is no way to contact the people behind it.

Instead my current hypothesis is that they are building up Google credibility and then will switch to being a real gay pr0n site, complete with paid links to other pr0n sites. Clever.

But aside from the title and whatever nefarious scam is behind it, what they are doing is similar to what plenty of other’s are doing.  Indeed WordPress themselves gather up posts by tag/category and present them as a package to Google.

New Zealand shows a little how it should work, as does Auctions.
WordPress’s NZ Business tag shows how it should not work.

Such is life on the web these days – content is spread everywhere, and originators have little hope of knowing who is reading it, which is the way it should be.

The blogosphere is fun because we can all build on each other’s content and comments, and get more insights as a result. Sites that grab entire blog posts are not part of that conversation, but are parasitically feeding off the  blogosphere’s energy. I contend that it is pretty harmless though, and may even contribute to the overall influence of a content provider. I would baulk at someone successfully grabbing my content and making money out of it through spammy ads. (The first is easy, but the second – making money – would require an actual audience)

At the end of it all, original content, through bloggers, news sites,  comments or whatever is what counts, and people that harvest content from others will eventually be confronted with Google judgment day and rendered into irrelevance.

Sayōnara Kiri te Kanawa

Yes it is obvious that Kiri is in a different league to Hayley Westenra, but for Kiri to say:

“They are the new fakes for the new generation coming through but they can only perform with a microphone and they’ve basically never have any formal training.

and

“I’ve had a 40-year career but these people, two or three years and they’re gone,”

is just obnoxious and well out of touch.  The article also attributes Kiri as saying:

“Westenra was singing successfully but would never be in her world and she would never be in Westenra’s.”

That’s true, but unnecessarily harsh and unsporting; un-Kiwi even.

Sorry Kiri – I’ll never buy another one of your CD’s. Indeed I’ll probably delete your music from my iPod, and cerainly skip through it if I don’t. Meanwhile Hayley’s music is much easier to listen to, and is getting a lot more airtime than yours.  Why do you think that is?

Lance is not a Gay Star – Blog spam

yup. I get a bunch of links to this blog from something called Gay Stars, which has the domain name AdultSexBox.com.

I have no idea why. I’m not gay, (I’m clearly not good looking enough as I haven’t been hit on by a guy for years) and sadly I’m not an adult sex star (umm – what other kind is there?).

But regardless My RSS feeds are grabbed and plonked  onto their sex site.
Here’s an example: AOL Australia launches. Whatever 

Here’s where it ends up – it’s actually safe for work.

gay stars

I’m under the category “Lance”, whom I imagine is the handle of some Gay Sex Star:

gay stars

Now – whoever it is that is grabbing my RSS feeds, this is doing nothing whatsoever for my appeal to the fairer sex, nor for my seemingly eternal quest for a lovely smart small and somewhat crazy woman to fall in love with. So please. Enough.

Fairfax & Trade Me results

Not bad – strong profit growth of 40% versus last year, with Trade Me and Digital leading the way.

Trade Me showed $32m in EBIT, which is for the 6 month period to December 2007. That, apparently, puts them at tracking to hit the $60m required to complete the $50m earn out to March 2008. (That from the Dom Post – but if they really know then they have inside info., which they can’t, so they are guessing)

Actually it could be tight, and it all depends on how well Trade Me did in the 3 months to June 2007, and how well they do in the three months to March 2008. Basically revenue and profit in a rapid growth company move up month by month, and, while a mid year snap shot showed the right run rate, it isn’t over.

If the April-June 2007 period was not so good, then the Jan-March 2008 period needs to be extra good to compensate so that the whole year meets target. (It’s so much easier to predict things in the Nickel game)

Now January is a slack month downunder, but then things pick up – so it will be an interesting run to the end for Trade Me folk.

Arcgk. I really cannot comment any more, though I’ve sadly been out of it for a while. Good luck guys.

Lights on or off – Safety versus Environment

Does the safety of turning your lights on during the day outweigh the cost?

According to Hamish Piercy – no.

Apparently lights on increases fuel consumption by 2%, which is a huge number. (Frankly I dispute it, and want to see the evidence)

and Hamish’s research says that:

“However, on closer examination he said there were many factors that complicated this such as ambient light conditions, the effect of glare, the brightness of the lights and potential masking of other road users.

and

“It is apparent that those supporting the use of DRL’s predominately refer to studies carried out in countries at lower latitudes which have significantly lower ambient light levels.
“Studies carried out in countries recording higher ambient light levels throughout the whole year were less supportive of DRL’s and did not appear to be in favour of their mandatory use.”

So  it is darker in Scandinavia that NZ/Australia, so lights-on works better. Again – I’d prefer to see how those studies were carried out downunder, and so forth.

This certainly is going to raise a few eyebrows in the Safety community –  is it better to be slightly more safe or to emit 2% less CO2?

Surveillance society

When will they ever learn – police officers these days should expect to be on video at any time. Indeed I feel it would be a better thing all-round if police were required to continuously record their activities on video.

World Press Photo winners

via NZHerald, some stunning photography from the winners of the world press photo competition.

Sadly, both the NZHerald, and the world press photo site (which has better size and range of shots), use flash to display the photos, preventing the photos from being displayed by others. It’s all about copyright, which seems retrograde to me – the winners copyright could be purchased and made available to all.

That said – do check out the world press photo link – stunning.

world press photo

world press photoworld press photo