I believe that's what a write down generally reflects: The asset is now worth less than its previous book value. Resale value isn't the most accurate way to look at it, but it generally works for explaining it: If I bought a tool for 100€, I'd book it as 100€ worth of tools. If I wanted to sell it again after using it for a while, I'd get less than those 100€ back for it, so I'd write down that difference as a loss. With buying / depreciating / selling companies instead of tools, things become more complex, but the basic idea still holds: If the whole of the company's value goes down, you write down the difference too. So unless these guys bought it for five times its value, they'll have paid less for it than they originally got.

Ah, yes. That's correct, sorry I misunderstood you. Yeah that's pretty lame that it doesn't work on desktop. I remember wanting to use that several times.

It's always been "states rights" to enrich rulers at the expense of everyone else.

Pretty confident that's the intention of that name

Well if they're collating data, not that difficult to add a new table for gun ownership.

Arguably we should be imposing 25% DST on digital products to counter the 25% tariff on aluminium and steel and then 10% on everything else. The US started it by imposing blanket tariffs in spite of our free trade agreement.

The genre itself has become neutered, too. A lot of anime series have the usual "anime elements" and a couple custom ideas. And similar style, too glossy for my taste. OK, what I think is old and boring libertarian stuff, I'll still spell it out. The reason people are having such problems is because groups and businesses are de facto legally enshrined in their fields, it's almost like feudal Europe's system of privileges and treaties. At some point I thought this is good, I hope no evil god decided to fulfill my wish. There's no movement, and a faction (like Disney with Star Wars) that buys a place (a brand) can make any garbage, and people will still try to find the depth in it and justify it (that complaint has been made about Star Wars prequels, but no, they are full of garbage AND have consistent arcs, goals and ideas, which is why they revitalized the Expanded Universe for almost a decade, despite Lucas-<companies> having sort of an internal social collapse in year 2005 right after Revenge of the Sith being premiered ; I love the prequels, despite all the pretense and cringe, but their verbal parts are almost fillers, their cinematographic language and matching music are flawless, the dialogue just disrupts it all while not adding much, - I think Lucas should have been more decisive, a bit like Tartakovsky with the Clone Wars cartoon, just more serious, because non-verbal doesn't equal stupid). OK, my thought wandered away. Why were the legal means they use to keep such positions created? To make the economy nicer to the majority, to writers, to actors, to producers. Do they still fulfill that role? When keeping monopolies, even producing garbage or, lately, AI slop, - no. Do we know a solution? Not yet, because pressing for deregulation means the opponent doing a judo movement and using that energy for deregulating the way everything becomes worse. Is that solution in minimizing and rebuilding the system? I believe still yes, nothing is perfect, so everything should be easy to quickly replace, because errors and mistakes plaguing future generations will inevitably continue to be made. The laws of the 60s were simple enough for that in most countries. The current laws are not. So the general direction to be taken is still libertarian. Is this text useful? Of course not. I just think that in the feudal Europe metaphor I'd want to be a Hussite or a Cossack or at worst a Venetian trader.

Back in the day I just assumed everyone was lying. Or trying to get people worked up, and we called them trolls. Learning how to ignore the trolls, and not having trust for strangers on the internet, coupled with the ability to basically not care what random people said is a lost art. Somehow people forgot to give other the people this memo, including the "you don't fucking join social networks as your self". Anonymity makes this all work. Eternal September newbies just didn't get it.