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[Shadowlord]

Hasn't every marvel universe except the MCU been destroyed by now?

[mainiac]

But it turned out to largely be a front for a fascist evil organization hydra, and eventually the whole thing was dismantled, except for a few splinter groups of actually good guys

I dont know if I would say "largely".  I had the impression that most of shield was legit, they just didn't know how to figure out which bits were hydra so they had to wipe the slate clean.

[SquatchHammer]

Spoiler: The Obvious Solution (click to show/hide)

FIFY

[Shadowlord]

Solar energy company SunEdison Inc (SUNE.N) is preparing to file for bankruptcy as early as the evening of April 17, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, nine months after its market value had reached $10 billion.

A SunEdison spokesman declined to comment.

Such a move would represent a fall from grace for the former darling of Wall Street and the renewable energy sector, whose rapid, debt-fueled expansion with solar and wind energy plants around the world proved unsustainable. The company's market value as of Friday was $117 million.

The source cautioned that the timing of the bankruptcy filing had not been finalized and asked not to be identified because the plans were not public.

SunEdison, which had debt of about $12 billion as of Sept. 30, said in a filing on Friday that it was in talks for potential debtor-in-possession financing with some of its first and second-lien lenders.

The company said it needed about $310 million to stay in business, estimating a cash shortfall of $260 million by mid-June. SunEdison said it expected to secure the financing by pledging assets.

In the filing, the company said challenges to its business started developing in the middle of last year, when it pursued acquiring Vivint Solar Inc (VSLR.N) and it worked on an initial public offering for TerraForm Global (GLBL.O), a so-called "yieldco" company it created to hold renewable energy assets.

TerraForm Global and SunEdison's other yieldco, TerraForm Power (TERP.O), hired financial and legal advisors to help them prepare and develop contingency plans in case SunEdison files for bankruptcy, a spokesman for the yieldcos said on Friday.

The companies rely on SunEdison to make interest payments for them and for back office functions. They have no employees of their own.

[...]

(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli in New York; Additional reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Ted Kerr)

1. $12 BILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT!? Who came up with that plan? $12 billion is a fucking huge number to have to pay any amount of interest on.

2. How do the yieldcos have a spokesman but no employees, and hire advisors, and who is doing the hiring if they have no employees? Do they hire someone from their parent company as a contractor temporarily to do that stuff? And who makes the arrangements, and how do they do that when they aren't an employee -- *head explodes*

[Culise]

Solar energy company SunEdison Inc (SUNE.N) is preparing to file for bankruptcy as early as the evening of April 17, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, nine months after its market value had reached $10 billion.

A SunEdison spokesman declined to comment.

Such a move would represent a fall from grace for the former darling of Wall Street and the renewable energy sector, whose rapid, debt-fueled expansion with solar and wind energy plants around the world proved unsustainable. The company's market value as of Friday was $117 million.

The source cautioned that the timing of the bankruptcy filing had not been finalized and asked not to be identified because the plans were not public.

SunEdison, which had debt of about $12 billion as of Sept. 30, said in a filing on Friday that it was in talks for potential debtor-in-possession financing with some of its first and second-lien lenders.

The company said it needed about $310 million to stay in business, estimating a cash shortfall of $260 million by mid-June. SunEdison said it expected to secure the financing by pledging assets.

In the filing, the company said challenges to its business started developing in the middle of last year, when it pursued acquiring Vivint Solar Inc (VSLR.N) and it worked on an initial public offering for TerraForm Global (GLBL.O), a so-called "yieldco" company it created to hold renewable energy assets.

TerraForm Global and SunEdison's other yieldco, TerraForm Power (TERP.O), hired financial and legal advisors to help them prepare and develop contingency plans in case SunEdison files for bankruptcy, a spokesman for the yieldcos said on Friday.

The companies rely on SunEdison to make interest payments for them and for back office functions. They have no employees of their own.

[...]

(Reporting by Jessica DiNapoli in New York; Additional reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Ted Kerr)

1. $12 BILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT!? Who came up with that plan? $12 billion is a fucking huge number to have to pay any amount of interest on.

2. How do the yieldcos have a spokesman but no employees, and hire advisors, and who is doing the hiring if they have no employees? Do they hire someone from their parent company as a contractor temporarily to do that stuff? And who makes the arrangements, and how do they do that when they aren't an employee -- *head explodes*

1. SunEdison is probably hoping their lenders are feeling a bit of desperation, I suspect, mixed with a bit of sunk costs fallacy.  It's like the old joke; if you owe the bank $100, that's your problem.  If you owe the bank $12 billion, that's the bank's problem. 

2. Yieldcos appear to be corporate constructs created purely for financial management of stable cash flows, basically serving as a money source (with regular dividends) to balance out more volatile activities like R&D which vary more wildly between source and sink.  I suspect that said financial advisors are the closest they have to employees. 

[mainiac]

1. $12 BILLION DOLLARS IN DEBT!? Who came up with that plan? $12 billion is a fucking huge number to have to pay any amount of interest on.

Not remotely.  If you have a good revenues stream with room for expansion then it makes sense to increase your debt burden and expand capacity.  If you can buy assets with a 5% return and borrow money at 4%, you'd be stupid to not expand.  This is like the fundamental idea behind all of capitalism.  It's capitalism, the idea that capital is going to flow towards profitable activities.  This is one of the big reasons why the american economy passed the rest of the world in the 20th century.  You have people who are willing to take risks on big investments in new technologies.  But it wouldn't be a risk if there wasn't a chance of failure.  Solar is an investment that can be established quicker then older energy sources like coal and natural gas.  This means that solar is exposed more quickly to a slump in energy prices.  It also means that solar profits more quickly from a rise in energy prices but we are going through a slump, not a rise.  That meant that these guys were in an exposed financial position.  And their creditors who lent them money in the complete knowledge of this exact risk wont get paid.  However the underlying assets remain quite valuable, just not making the sort of profits they expected.  As a result, they will be able to negotiate with their creditors to divvy up the future value of their existing solar power assets.

This is the market working great.  Investors made a calculated risk.  They got unlucky and will lose some but not all of their investment.  Investors in other firms made a different risk calculation and are doing better.  It's much better then for instance the rise of railroads in the US which were just as risky but also had fraud, collusion and bribing government officials in the mix.

[PTTG??]

Point of order, the US economy is not capitalist. For large businesses, risk is not actually real, as we saw in 2008. We should be glad we don't use real capitalism, because it's not a nice place to live.

[Flying Dice]

Yep, we've had a mixed economy to some degree basically forever.

It's just that for the past ~30 years the state-run portion has been heavily composed of measures to prop up the capitalists when they overreach and fail.

[mainiac]

Point of order, the US economy is not capitalist. For large businesses, risk is not actually real, as we saw in 2008. We should be glad we don't use real capitalism, because it's not a nice place to live.

It's nice that you feel that but it has bugger all to do with what I was saying.  I was saying that this specific case was an example of capitalism working the way it is supposed to.  The investors who made the wrong bet will lose but we wont have pointless destruction to go along with it and there is none of the fraud and moral hazard that you are talking about.

[Orange Wizard]

Point of order, the US economy is not capitalist. For large businesses, risk is not actually real, as we saw in 2008. We should be glad we don't use real capitalism, because it's not a nice place to live.

It's like the Nordic model except the safety net is for banks and such rather than for people

[Reelya]

That's an inefficiency, too. There's a thing call fiscal multipliers, where economists estimate the effect on GDP of any change in government spending (whether a tax increase/tax decrease or spending increase/decrease). Obviously it's not perfect, but we can get a ballpark idea of each options effectiveness.

e.g. some possible tax changes have a high or low fiscal multiplier. The Bush Tax Cuts had a fiscal multiplier of ~0.30, meaning a $1 tax cut only stimulates another 30 cents in GDP. Whereas a Payroll Tax Cut had a fiscal multiplier of ~1.30. So, any rational person who wants to use tax cuts to stimulate growth should reject the Bush Tax Cuts and implement Payroll Tax Cuts. This is where you can skewer the bullshit of the "trickle down tax cuts" people: by choose tax breaks for billionaires instead of workers, you're deliberately slowing the economy down to favor the megarich's immediate bank balance.

In fact, the most stimulatory policy is food stamps (fiscal multiplier of 1.73 in 2008). Basically, pure economic rationalism, devoid of favoritism suggests that the only sane course of action if you care about the deficit / debt, is that you increase taxation on anything where fiscal multipliers are low, decrease taxation on anything where fiscal multipliers are high, increase spending on anything with a high fiscal multiplier, and decrease spending on anything with a low fiscal multiplier. You don't even have to argue that "feeding people is the right thing to do", the economics speaks for itself. Just keep doing that and things will sort themselves out. Yet politically, they do almost the opposite of this.

[Flying Dice]

Because it's never been about objectively sound economics, merely propping themselves up and offering a thin veil of justification for their actions. The only difference from divine right is that they call God by another name.

[Cruxador]

Also keep in mind that fiscal multipliers are estimates, and while they tend to be pretty accurate, it's definitely possible for them to have errors, and that makes them easier to discount. Suggesting that an estimate is biased in favor of an opposing political faction is pretty effective rhetoric with an only somewhat educated voter-base.

[Shadowlord]

So this happened:

A UC Berkeley student and son of a slain Iraqi diplomat was recently escorted off a flight after speaking on the phone in Arabic prior to takeoff.

Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a student of Near Eastern Studies at the selective university, was en route back to Oakland from Los Angeles where he'd attended an event that featured Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon when he called an uncle in Baghdad to discuss the event.

The conversation was conducted in Arabic, Makhzoomi told the Daily Californian. When he hung up, he said he noticed a woman staring at him.

As the aircraft sat at the gate, the woman got out of her seat, at which point the 26-year-old student realized she may have been reporting him to flight staff.

Shortly thereafter, he said he was pulled off the plane. At the gate, Makhzoomi was met by security officers, police dogs and Southwest staff.

"I was pulled out from the plane," Makhzoomi posted to Facebook. "Someone reported me and waiting for the FBI approval. #‎America‬"

The FBI arrived after his bag and person were searched. They questioned Makhzoomi about his family, the phone conversation with his uncle in Baghdad, and about what he knew about martyrism.

After the interrogation, Makhzoomi said he was informed Southwest would not fly him home and he was given a refund.

"I'm blacklisted on southwest," Makhzoomi wrote on Facebook.

In a statement obtained by InsideEdition.com, Southwest Airlines said their flight crew chose to investigate "potentially threatening comments" made onboard the plane.

"Based upon the reported comments and further discussion, our Flight Crew made the decision to deny boarding to this Customer. 

"We understand local law enforcement spoke with that Passenger at a later time.  To respect the privacy of those involved, our policy is to not publicly share specifics of the event, as we try to work with individual passengers to address concerns or feedback regarding their experience.  We regret any less than positive experience onboard our aircraft."

Makhzoomi, who said he's been a loyal Southwest customer for years and has flown the carrier some two dozen times in the past year or so, now wants an apology.

“I don’t want money,” he told SFGate.com. “I don’t care about that. The message of Islam is forgiveness. That’s all I want.”

Makhzoomi is an Iraqi refugee who left Iraq in 2002 after his father, an Iraqi diplomat, was killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

His family has since been granted asylum by the United States.

[Playergamer]

Daily Californian...as somebody with deep faculty ties to UC, I don't trust a single thing that scandal sheet puts out.