Month: March 2024

“Vice’s bankruptcy filings paint a fascinating narrative of a company cratering under wide-scale industry disruption. It’s a business without a consumer revenue stream that depends too heavily on advertising and partnership deals. Vice “relied on external funding, raising both debt and equity capital to fuel its rapid growth and to fund expenses in certain parts of the business,” wrote Frank A. Pometti, a consultant hired as the chief restructuring officer of Vice Media, in a May 2023 declaration filing. “Although these fund-raising efforts helped to finance Vice’s growth, they ultimately led to the company being burdened by a highly leveraged and unusually complex capital structure.”

With the Feb. 22 disclosure that Vice is getting out of the news business, all that remains is Vice TV, a joint venture of A&E and Vice, the ad agency Virtue and Vice Studios. The question is whether Fortress has a vision other than reducing overall spend as it tries to bring in revenue from a number of stand-alone businesses”

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/vice-media-shane-smith-1235837714/

“Every one of them decided, as transparently as possible in this case, that the text of the Constitution would have forced them to do something they did not want to do or did not think was a good idea, and so they would not do it. The justices did not want to throw Trump off the ballot, and so they didn’t. Not only that, but in order to head off the unlikely scenario of Congress trying to disqualify Trump after the election, they said that Congress must specifically disqualify individual insurrectionists, despite such a requirement having no basis in the text. Even if you agree with the majority that this was a wise decision politically, it cannot be justified as an “originalist” one; it was invented out of whole cloth”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/supreme-court-trump-v-anderson-fourteenth-amendment-originalism/677636/

“materials have expanded from the once radical vegan leather to include a whole bowl’s worth of fruit and vegetable-based alternatives, from apple to grape, pineapple, banana, even cactus. You only need to look at the continuing rise of brands like Veja – whose vegan leather sneakers have become ubiquitous among climate-conscious suburbanites – to see why bigger brands are worried.

But amid all these competing claims, it can be hard to know which of these new products are actually better for the planet, versus which just sound better. “Vegan leather” and “fruit leathers” are just plastics – for a fact that led the Portuguese government to ban the term in 2022”

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/sustainable-zero-carbon-sneakers

“So she gave the filmmakers access to her journals, videos, and records of her time with Strangis, plus she encouraged her family and former employees to speak with him. At the start of filming, she agreed to record a phone call with Strangis, whom she hadn’t had much contact with for a year. Smith ended up using that footage to start and end the series. She was kind to Strangis on the call, she says, in order to keep him talking — he wasn’t aware he was being taped. They laughed a little. She hated how it made her look — like she was sharing a joke with her abuser or like they were still in cahoots. When she saw the series for the first time — a week or two before its release — she was immediately furious”

https://www.grubstreet.com/2024/01/bad-vegan-sarma-melngailis-second-act.html