Slashdot Mirror
Liquid Audio: Better off dead?
mgeneral writes "It seems so for the shareholders.
Liquid Audio, had only $150,000 in revenue but managed to lose $5.6 million last quarter. Its main asset: A pile of cash. In fact, so much cash, that if they close the doors, they could pay back the shareholders more per share than the current stockprice...and thats exactly what some investors want them to do." We've run stories on Liquid Audio before...
Why would someone want streaming stereo technology that only works in the bathtub?
Good riddance, maybe someone will take the money and invest in something useful like mars colonization, maybe?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Just having a big pile of cash is a wast. Why don't they just invest in something? At least they'd make a profit of that....
Seems to me time for Liquid Audio to die. There is no point throwing good money after bad and the shareholders can then invest in something new (if they aren't too scared off the Stockmarket ;-)
But then turkeys don't vote for Christmas and I'm sure that managers won't vote to sack themselves...
www.locarecords.com
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
It would be refreshing to see the directors of a company admit that they have no idea how they can make any money and return whatever their investors ponied up. The shareholders own the company, and if there's not even a glimmer of hope of the company ever being profitable (with Liquid I'm not sure that there ever was, but that's a separate issue) then the best thing is to admit defeat, cut your losses while there's still anything to cut, and close your doors.
Now there's a dotcom the other way around!
Now, if they decide to stop and give back the money, will they release the code as GPL?
This is by no means a rare situation for publicly traded companies to be in when they have a nasty burn rate.
If the company stays in business, they will soon be worth less, so having a cheap stock price is completely reasonable.
The problem is the people that paid more for the stock refuse to admit the company has a stupid business model and won't give up till the cash is completely gone - which is also very common (the entire dot-com industry for example).
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
So, umm... Why did they invest in the company in the first place?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
a company that has the chance to close its doors and distribute a profit, or try to merge with another company and become yet another hybrid company that will be quickly forgotten. I would think that the obvious choice would be to just dissolve the company and take the profit. They really don't offer anything unique to the market that is worth building a business on.
Battle brewing at Liquid Audio over pile of cash
By David A. Sylvester
Mercury News
It has all the drama of the proxy battles of the 1980s -- angry shareholders, defensive management, accusations on both sides.
Except that what's at stake is exceptionally small. Liquid Audio, a Redwood City digital distribution company, had only $150,000 in revenue but managed to lose $5.6 million last quarter. Its main asset: A pile of cash. Its stock price Friday was $2.40.
Liquid Audio could pay off its current liabilities and still have $77.3 million left over, or $3.41 a share, largely from the proceeds from its IPO in 1999.
The dispute is over what to do with that cash. Three large shareholders want the management to stop spending money, shut the company down and distribute what's left. The argument is that the business isn't going to work because there are too many competitors who do what Liquid Audio does but do it for free.
``These are corporate raiders,'' responds Gerald Kearby, CEO and co-founder of Liquid Audio. ``In short, they bought $1 for 70 cents and now they say they ought to have their $1 back. They're not representing the interests of all the shareholders.''
Kearby and the board have proposed a merger with the larger, private Alliance Entertainment, a company that provides the behind-the-scenes distribution of CDs, DVDs and VHS tapes for major e-tailers, such as Amazon.com. The deal would give Alliance 74 percent control of Liquid Audio. In addition, Liquid Audio proposes to buy back about half of the shares outstanding at $3 a share. Depending on how many shareholders accept the offer, they could receive $1.50 a share and retain a portion of Alliance stock.
``It's a lousy deal,'' says James Mitarotonda, an investor and chief executive of MM Companies, which holds 6.9 percent of Liquid Audio's stock. ``Their business model doesn't work. They have so many competitors who are now free. Nobody needs Liquid Audio.''
Another dissident shareholder -- Steel Partners -- has offered to pay $2.75 a share to all shareholders. In letters to the Liquid Audio directors, Josh Schechter, a partner in Steel Partners, accused the company's management of ensuring their jobs more than protecting the value of the shareholders.
``In this day of massive corporate fraud and corporate governance that only serves to entrench bad management, it is now more imperative than ever that the Board act appropriately and demonstrate its duty of loyalty and care to shareholders,'' he wrote in June.
Both Schechter and Mitarotonda accuse the management of primarily thinking of themselves. Kearby acknowledges that he and co-founder Robert Flynn will receive $1.5 million each over three years as part of a management contract with Alliance.
Kearby calls the money ``not an excessive amount.''
The whole fight will be decided Sept. 26 when the shareholders vote on the merger. Mitarotonda is proposing a new slate of board candidates and wants to replace the current board as well as Kearby and Flynn.
But Kearby vows to fight. Once merged with Alliance, Liquid Audio can distribute not just digital audio but also products like CDs, DVDs and videotapes. As such it will become a new hybrid company.
``This is a very, very exciting transaction for us,'' said Kearby. ``It builds a new kind of company.''
There are two extremes to shareholders. Some want to play fair and simply have a stable investment that pays some dividends regularly.
:) another type of investor needs to prevail. One that realises they are a Fucked Company, and that the shareholders are better off getting their money back. (Even if it means they need to then start the investment procedure over again with their regained capital.) Unfortunatly, investors in general arent the best at educating themselves about the tech stocks they own, as history has shown.
Then there are the buy-sell-buy-sell-buy-sell idiots who just want to Make Money Fast and try to get rich quick.
For real sense to prevail (LA's assets are, uh, liquefied
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.-John von Neumann
The real problem is the fact that some of the shareholders are asking to be paid quite a bit more for their stock than they invested in it. Seems fair right?
Wrong.
Even though this company has enough money to do that, it's not their legal responsibility to make sure that the stock holders turn a profit, hell, it's not even their legal responsibility to turn a profit. Effectively if they give away all the money there is no company left. The company is entering into a merger that should hopefully bring stock values up, which will benefit investors in the long run. These people are just being overly aggressive towards the company, and trying to avoid the risk which is inherent in the stocks and bonds game.
Liquid Audio is infamous in Japan - it was one of the first two companies to be listed on the new Tokyo Stock Exchange "Mothers" board for venture companies; unfortunately, the relaxed listing rules allowed Japanese gangsters to get a foot in the door.
Eventually, what happened was one of the company directors was kidnapped by the CEO(?), a rather interesting personage who was missing a chunk off one of his little fingers... for those of you familiar with Japan, that should immediately ring alarm bells
These days, they're called Cyber Music Entertainment. Their stock price peaked at around 1,590,000 yen in September 2000; these days, they trade at around 10,000 yen
Most of the comments I've seen so far have been along the lines of "They should just give the extra money to ..." or "Invest it in...!". Incorrect - the fact of the matter is that many, many businesses have been, and still are in the exact same position. The only way to *keep* shareholders is to show you have enough money to still give them a return on their investment even if the company goes belly up. There are three trains of thought on this: 1) make up fake revenues, a la Enron, WorldCom, etc. 2) go flat broke up forget about the people who trusted you to make then richer, or 3) ensure that the people with a vested interest in your company has a reason to stay on board. Liquid Audio (for all their faults) should be commended for their commitment to the stakeholders, even at a loss to the company - its seems to be such a rare thing with all the business improprieties on CNN. Money is the name of the game, and whether you like it or not, making investors happy is the nature of the beast.
They had $150,000 in revenue?! That's insane. What did they do, rent out part of the office?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Liquid Audio has never had a big footprint. It needs to either fold or radically reinvent the purpose of the company.
We need to move away from the Dilbertesque model of a company loosing money while it's growing but never having a plan for afterward. Unless Liquid Audio has some magic plan to emerge from its cocoon a beautiful profitable company, it will just burn money indefinitely. This cannot be good for anyone. That money should be invested in a more realistic venture.
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Especially they use a proprietary format. When I buy music, I wanna listen to it other than on the computer. Otherwise, might as well buy the real CD or logon Kazaa.
And their selection is narrow. Marketing is not enough. So they're unheard to customers, unwise to computer geeks, and unliked to shareholders. It's time to give up and move on.
Oh yea...and the so called "resurrection" of Napster is as hopeful as the Atari or NeXT.
would be to change the business concept of this company and turn it into an investment company, which invests in new bubbles, and cashes in time.
Now whether a specific company should close their doors is always a difficult to question, but if it is a reasonable alternative the board is required to consider it.
They bought a company (shares) at what seemed to be a good deal.
The company isn't making money, their good deal isn't that good.
They can't sell their shares at the value they think they're worth (stock price) they want to liquidate the company (book value)
Someone thinks the company is worth buying, they are offering to buy it for more then the stock price.
Sounds like a bunch of whiney shareholders who may or may not be the majority who don't quite understand how this stock market thingie works.
Yep, it is indeed a lousy deal for everyone but Mitarotonda and MM companies, formerly known as musicmaker.com. Remember them? They were shut down a couple of years ago around the time that Mitarotonda and his company (BGC) took control. I doubt he's thinking of anything but lining his own pockets and acquiring a large portion of that money stockpile in order to take over and shut down yet another company.
They are offering $3.00 per share in the buyout, less than the cash holdings of the company. They are effectively offering to buy a pile of cash for less than 90 cents on the dollar. The investors are saying "We'll just take the full $3.41, thanks." The management supports the buyout perhaps because of a sentimental attachment to the company, or perhaps because of golden parachutes they may (disclamer: I do not know this) be getting out of the 41 cents.
The sotck holders, quite literally, ownn the company. When you buy shares of stock you are buying a share of ownership of the company. Now most people never own many shares of a single company, much less than 1% and so their vote never really counts (they don't go to the shareholder meetings or anything). However usually there are a few investors with sizable chunks of stock. Sometimes they are company employees/founders/CEOs, but often not. Now the shareholders can hold a meeting and take a vote on what thye want done, majority rule, and it WILL be done since they own the company. Many companies never have to worry about this because someone like the founder and CEO will retain a 51% stock share and therefore have sole control, but that is not the case with Liquid. If the majority of shareholders vote to sell off all assets and liquidate the company, that is just what will happen.
Why shouldn't they?
Because it's more important to keep people employed than to further enrich Wall Street gamblers.
is this obvious to everyone but the management? com'mon people, wake up and smell the coffee. your business model is shit. but hey, you won't, and we'll see your company on *uckedcompany.com by 2nd quarter 03 at latest.
social responsibility, right? such bullshit.
Without going into the legal details and financial aspects, what are the technical leverages that Liquid Audio claims to offer vs. free competitors such as Ogg Vorbis.
Thanks.
social responsibility, right? such bullshit.
Thanks for clarifying that looking out for dedicated employees and being socially responsible is "such bullshit." It's like those damned do-gooders who get mad when tobacco companies advertise to kids, isn't it? Don't they realize that getting kids hooked on cigarettes, even if many die from cancer, is a small price to pay in order to enrich investors in RJ Reynolds? Damn social responsibility.
Shareholders own the company. They have the right to tell it to do whatever the fuck they want it to do. If that means shutting down and divesting itself of all cash to send back to the shareholders then thats simply what the company has to do. It has nothing to do with them not knowing anything about the stock market. It is not unheard of for a company to shut down before it burns thru its capital if the management is smart enough to realize there's no chance in hell of making any money. It sounds like YOU are the one who knows nothing about the stock market.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Let's see -
The CEO is making $ 500K per year.
Another co-founder is also making $500K per year.
All of this on revenue of $600 K per year.
And they say that shutting it down would ''...not represent[] the interests of all the shareholders.''
Do the words "bloated" come to mind ?
How about nervey ?
How about stupid ?
In my opinion much of the dot-com money was "value-subtracting," in that they took good money and did stupid things. Enough people did this that it poisoned the ability of real businesses to make real money, because the marketplace was conditioned to assume that things that cost money actually should be free.
I cannot think of a much better example of a value-subtracting business than Liquid Audio.
Shut it down.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Glad you resorted to profanity, makes you seem intelligent.
A few points.
The article doesn't explain if a majority of shareholders want to liquidate or not.
Book value is not cash on hand, there may be illiquid assets, or debts that would reduce cash.
The company is only worth what someone will pay for it. They bought, by their own admission, a dead end business.
Many companies trade below their available cash on hand, this is normal for many companies. Being able to exploit their non cash assets later may provide a greater return rather then shutting down now.
Microsoft's cash pile is growing (at an obscene rate I might add)
Liquid Audio's is shrinking at an even more obscene rate.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Thanks for clarifying that looking out for dedicated employees and being socially responsible is "such bullshit." It's like those damned do-gooders who get mad when tobacco companies advertise to kids, isn't it? Don't they realize that getting kids hooked on cigarettes, even if many die from cancer, is a small price to pay in order to enrich investors in RJ Reynolds? Damn social responsibility.
The real question when it comes to the 'do-gooders' getting mad at the tobacco companies is why aren't they also going after the companies advertising alcohol in the same places, with the same target audience? The simple fact is that they're being oppurtunistic. The tobacco companies make more money and are more consolidated, and are easier to target because fewer people smoke than drink. Tobacco gets heavier taxes and smoking gets banned from more and more places while alcohol kills more people and becomes less restricted (after all, they can advertise hard alcohol on TV again).
Stockholders that buy into a company that isn't likely to turn a profit are in the same position as people that work in bars and expect not to be exposed to cigarette smoke. Intelligent people don't do it, the rest bitch about it when they do it.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
> 'In this day of massive corporate fraud and corporate governance that only serves to entrench
> bad management, it is now more imperative than ever that the Board act appropriately and
> demonstrate its duty of loyalty and care to shareholders,' [Josh Schechter, a partner in
> Steel Partners] wrote in June."
"When honor is lost, it is relief to die; Death is but a sure retreat from infamy.
Your duty to Lord Josh is clear, Gerald-san -- take your key to Heaven and Hell
and open the path to honor. That is the way of the samurai; that is the way of bushido."
..."it seemed like a good idea at the time!"
It's just like a corrupt CEO or politician. They're better off dead! Shit, at least you can make some diamonds out of them. Personally, I'd rather a phat ass diamond earring made out of a corrupt bastard. I'll be rocking that mofo like Chris Tucker in Money Talks.. :)
Is it just me or are these guys trying to design a faster bicycle when cars have already been invented?
If the RIAA can't even challenge P2P what makes Liquid Audio think THEY can??!!
Sell baby SELL!
eTrade SUCKS
LA was interesting long ago. Then MS got involved with them. They stopped porting to anything except MS where they cannot compete due to MS's dominence. They have no long term vision. Let them die.
With all the cash holdings, you don't have to ask why they called themselves "Liquid."
Because it's more important to keep people employed than to further enrich Wall Street gamblers.
It's also important to keep people employed gainfully, and grow the market (add jobs), by using resources as efficiently as you can. If you throw a thousand people out of work at one company when you dissolve it, but then take the money and invest it so that fifteen hundred people have jobs, are you still a bad guy?
Get off my launchpad!
Interesting format. Too bad they came into the market at just about the worst possible time -- right when everyone else was either releasing a new audio codec or shuffling for position to be the leader in the pack.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
A corporation is owned by the shareholders and operated for their benefit. The board is has no other obligations except to operate legally.
And that, BTW, is how it should be.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
Liquid Audio = Another proprietary audio format, and this one doesn't even have a big company like MSFT backing it... don't let the door hit ya, guys.
Liquid Audio has USD 81 mn in cash and equivalents as at 30 June 2002. We should see significant financial income in the Income Statement for the period, but there is only USD 318,000 "Interest and Other Income (net)", which is about 0.4% of USD 81 mn, a funny little return on the cash reserves of the company, even at today's interest rates.
So it looks like the boss is not doing a good job even of money management.
On the other hand, it looks like Liquid Audio IS preparing to give back USD 30 mn cash to its shareholders - their merger agreement with Alliance Entertainment has been amended (15 July 2002) to include this cash return. Check out: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020814/140345_1.html
Liquid Audio being liquidated?
Your average professional company management is a little more desperate than that.
By the way, I know Stelios and so this is not really the BS you think it is...
This is exactly what the Blender Foundation is doing with Blender 3D. They're raising funds to buy the Blender sources in order to publish them under the GPL.
Microsoft Market Cap ~ $284BN
Microsoft Cash&Marketable Securities on Balance Sheet ~ $38BN
You figure it out.
I'm the best IRC client ever.
All I am saying is that leaving the high corporate position (i.e. doing the right thing) is much easier for Stelios than these desperate "managers" in Liquid Audio. That is how and why he could do it and most other managers do not.
Even if you're profitable, stockholders will only be happy if you're growing. (And growing fast)
I'm sure MS's cash flow is positive. In fact, I'm sure MS could take a LOT of market hits before its cashflow ever goes negative. While MS can sometimes be a little slow to adapt (Internet, for example), unlike the RIAA, they DO know how to adapt to a changing market and adapt well. Even if the market is close to saturation and MS's growth slows to a standstill, I don't see them hitting a money-losing situation for years, even of Linux continues its near-explosive growth in market share.
But it's possibly for a company to grow 20% in a year and STILL get slammed by stockholders. (Lucent was in this boat - 20% growth just wasn't good enough when Nortel, JDSU, Corning, and all the other guys in the optical industry grew 30-40%. Ignore the fact that a year after that optical networking crashed and now almost all of the aforementioned companies are in dire straits.)
LA is completely different... They have negative cash flow and no hope for it to ever go positive. They should quite while they're ahead.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I mean, dotcom companies can be funny, but 1,590,000 yen is $20,670 CDN, or about $13,022 US per share. LNUX didn't go that high. It seems a little funny.
10,000 yen is about $130 CDN, or about $82 US per share. At that price they must be doing something right, right?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Yeah, imagine the owners of a business wanting to make a profit on that business. We all know its real purpose is to provide fun jobs.
The real question when it comes to the 'do-gooders' getting mad at the tobacco companies is why aren't they also going after the companies advertising alcohol in the same places, with the same target audience?
A simple explanation: Alcohol is not addictive (except to a small percentage who are alcoholic). Think how many kids you knew that took up drinking before turning 18. Do they all need to have multiple drinks per day now? Do they have to go outside their office building to drink every hour or so?
Tobacco gets heavier taxes and smoking gets banned from more and more places while alcohol kills more people
I can't believe that alcohol kills more people. There are some spectacular deaths when a drunk driver causes a major auto accident, but consider how many people die of lung cancer, emphysema, strokes, and heart disease from smoking.
Liquid Audio has offered for a long time what the major labels want to do with music on the 'net. The codec sounds alright, they have a flexible DRM scheme, it's not too terribly difficult to recover a license, etc. But consumers do not want what they are offering, because they do not want a restricted format. You would think the major labels would take a lesson from this.
I'm glad you buy into the whole "if you use profanity you must be stupid" line of thinking. It proves YOU are the one truly lacking in intelligence.
Considering the market for online music sales, it is highly unlikely that continuing as an operating concern will lead to greater returns in the future. It would be best for the company to give back the money now while it is still possible to do so.
I am also in full favor of smarter investors taking advantage of their idioitically stubborn counterparts who may not see the wisdom in closing up shop now.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
As I said in another post above, Liquid Audio has already decided on a USD 30 mn cash payback to its shareholders. Management's inadequate ownership of the company is probably why.
This is an extreme case, but this problem is not unusual. Publically-held companies are always jumping through hoops to make their stockholders happy, and more often than not that means doing things that actually work against the long term growth of the company. Or, in this case, the short term growth!
This is the same thing that happened to MusicMaker.com and the MM Investment group, the people calling for the return of the money are the people that made MusicMaker.com close it's doors. The money they had left from closing MusicMaker.com went into Liquid Audio for a repeat of the business model.
.com, by picking the bones.
I can say this for them, they did finally find a way to make some money from a
As a note, I used to be a MusicMaker.com employee but left many months before it closed it's doors.
>>Tobacco gets heavier taxes and smoking gets banned from more and more places while alcohol kills more people
>I can't believe that alcohol kills more people. There are some spectacular deaths when a drunk driver causes a major auto accident, but consider how many people die of lung cancer, emphysema, strokes, and heart disease from smoking.
Here's the deal: smoking gets banned because you are damaging other people's health when you are enjoying your legally acceptable cigar. Right now there's nothing illegal about smoking tobacco per se, but the Guv'ment is trying to prevent other people getting sick because of your secondary smoke.
On the other hand, alcohol isn't illegal to consume, either (unless you're a minor, of course), but it is against the law to drive while under the influence of alcohol. I guess people don't care much if I get all liquored up, get in my car, and drive off a bridge... hey, it's evolution in action, right? But people DO care if I crash right into a minivan full of soccer moms and kids.
So what's the difference? People have _known_ forever that drinking gets you stupid, irrational, and causes you to see people of the other sex as being hotter than they actually are. But people didn't know that smoking could kill you, and not only you, but the people around you; meanwhile, the tobacco companies have done their utmost to hide that kind of information from the consumers.
Besides, I agree with fmaxwell: alcohol in small to normal quantities is not addictive. Tobacco is. There's the difference.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Now, if they decide to stop and give back the money, will they release the code as GPL?
If I remember correctly, the Liquid Audio codec was an implementation of the MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AAC codec developed by Fraunhofer. Unlike the company that makes RTLinux, I don't think Fraunhofer will easily cough up a license to use its patents for software licensed under the GNU GPL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
lets be honest directors want to drag this out till there isn't one sent left
As they want to suck out their cut from every cent spent.
People have cottoned on to the fact that web businesses are just thin-air scams, even if the people involved are still conning themselves.
That would be the day.
There is some indication that talent is overrated.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
My God, people, don't you realize the ace in the hole this company has? 90% of the dotcom's out there would kill for the hard capital this company has. In fact, it's the entire reason the .com bust happened-- All these companmies were venture capitaled to the hilt without any real assets of there own. When they hit the wall, they hurt their investors... Bad. Hell, after umpteen years of existance Amazon.com has only recently posted in the black. And don't think Bezos wasn't sweating bullets every day until that point, because if confindence for one minute faded in his ability, he was so far in the debt hole not even confidence could escape. Not your debt or my debt, but high millions debt. And that's not counting how he had to deal with his workforce (damn near 80% temps-- Hire em, fire em, hire em fire em...) to finally get above water. But for Liquid Audio to actually have assets... Unless the their problems were seriously irrecoverable, that's a major advantage to just piss away. I guess it's all about money now as opposed to long term success. Why not.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
A simple explanation: Alcohol is not addictive (except to a small percentage who are alcoholic). Think how many kids you knew that took up drinking before turning 18. Do they all need to have multiple drinks per day now? Do they have to go outside their office building to drink every hour or so?
I think you meant to say 'Alcohol is not AS addictive'. There's also quite a difference between the most common levels of alcoholism and the far extreem of 'needs a drink to get up in the morning and go to sleep at nite'. Everyone I knew as a teenager (myself included) took up drinking well before 18. Most of them didn't know what to do if they had idle time and were sober (and most of them used drugs eventually, which may have been better or worse depending on the drugs). Of course, I don't know most of them any longer, either, as most of them dropped out of school and I disassociated myself from many of them in order to keep myself from having problems with drugs & alcohol.
I can't believe that alcohol kills more people. There are some spectacular deaths when a drunk driver causes a major auto accident, but consider how many people die of lung cancer, emphysema, strokes, and heart disease from smoking.
Over half of all deaths (in the US) for people over 45 are from heart failure and cancer. Heart failure can be linked to smoking, drinking, eating habits, stress, or other causes. Cancer can be linked the same way, though the particular form of cancer is the best indicator (liver/stomach cancer is most common for alcoholics, lung/throat/oral cancer is most common for tobacco users, either one can have other causes as well, and medical ethics prevent scientific studies to prove the correlation as a causal effect).
The leading cause of death for people under 45 is accidents and adverse effects resulting from the accidents. Of all the causes of death due to accidents, the leading cause is motor vehicle accidents.
19,171 persons died in 1999 from alcohol-induced causes, which excludes homicides, accidents, and other causes indirectly related to alcohol use, and also excludes fetal alcohol syndrome. 19,102 persons died of drug-induced causes, which includes poisoning from medically prescribed drugs as well as dependent and nondependent use of drugs, but does not include accidents, homicides, or other causes indirectly related to drug use, or newborn deaths related to mother's drug use. 28,874 persons died from firearm injuries, which includes firearms-related suicide and homicide. Tobacco and related diseases are not ranked, because all causes of death termed 'tobacco-related' can be caused by other things, including (but not limited to) industrial pollution (respiratory disorders) and alcohol consumption (cardiovascular disease). Tobacco use leads to lower life-expectancy and higher risk of several types of diseases and forms of cancer, but this is based on the fact that these types of deaths are more common among smokers, and in any particular instance it is almost impossible to determine whether smoking was indeed the cause of the problem, or if it simply lead to a weakening of the system which made the disease more likely to occur (HIV is very similar in this respect, though the presence of HIV is detectable).
The three leading causes of death for 15-24 year olds are automobile crashes, homicides, and suicides. Alcohol is considered a leading factor in all 3. Almost 1/4 of all fatal traffic accidents are alcohol related (on a side note, in 1/5th to 1/4th of all automobile collisions the driver was using a cell phone without a hands-free device while driving). In single-vehicle fatal crashes on weekend nites, 66% of the drivers over 25 were intoxicated, 56% of the drivers under 25 were intoxicated.
Another nice little statistic I noticed was that there are no recorded deaths from marijuana, though studies for the (adverse) health effects of marijuana are usually cited as problematic at best, due to the high rates of tobacco and alcohol use amongst users of marijuana.
As far as the claim that tobacco is more addictive than alcohol, it's completely possible, although the reason is probably not due to physical properties of either alcohol or tobacco. It's far more likely that people see direct effects of alcoholism (hangovers which are the result of withdrawal from alcohol, the varied effects of the body's rejection of alcohol when over-consumption occurs (including vomiting and blackouts), and the normal effects of both consumption and over-consumption of alcohol including impaired judgment and motor skills) which make it easier for them to drink less often and even stop drinking altogether (in other words seeing the immediate effects of drinking makes it easier to break the psychological addiction). Whereas with tobacco the most common short-term adverse effects such as irratability and tension caused by withdrawal from tobacco (which in most moderate users occurs approximately 1 hour after use) are commonly linked in the smoker's mind with not smoking rather than with the tobacco itself. Consuming more alcohol will get rid of most hangover affects as well, but the affects of drinking usually stop most people from doing so (and the hangover is more closely associated with the alcohol consumption by the user than withdrawal effects of tobacco are associated with the tobacco). Hangovers also require higher levels of consumption than the withdrawal effects of tobacco, and usually take longer to set in (because alcohol takes longer to pass through the system). Withdrawal effects of tobacco seem to be most closely related to drugs like cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines, where the most commonly reported symptoms of early withdrawal are cravings for more of the drug and changes in emotional state. Most people also feel that they are 'back to normal' much more quickly after they stop drinking than after they stop smoking.
The most common reason that people I know cite for continuing to use tobacco is 'it keeps them from killing someone', in other words, they associate not smoking with the withdrawal effect, although many also state that their first experiences with smoking caused a noticable relaxed state. Of course, most of the people I know that continue to smoke were also exposed to second-hand smoke from their parent(s) most of their lives before they started smoking. Most of the people I know that have successfully (at least to date) stopped smoking replaced the addiction with another form of addiction, whether it be constant snacking, increased intake of caffeine (possibly an even more addictive substance than either alcohol or tobacco) or something more healthy (one person in particular spends an excessive amount of time in the gym on a daily basis).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
If they go out of business you're screwed...
Things in the industry are that bad.
Doesn't help that a lot of their customers (KPNQwest, Worldcom) are going under.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The management of a company is typically NOT on the board. Even the founders with big equity stakes often don't get a seat on board. What the board should do is oust the CEO and if they can't, they should fire the dissenting opinions on the board and reform and dissolve the company.
It comes down to board seats and votes and if they are like any other startup company the investors have a majority of the seats.
or they're fools. Money is only as good as those who wield it. $150K in and $5.6M out: the money is talking, and it's saying "These guys don't know how to treat me right, I'm going somewhere else". They should shut down immediately, and take what they can, or they aren't the greedy bastards they should be.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
It was probably just an accounting error.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
Maybe you took a loss buying those shares, or maybe somebody else took the loss and sold them to you for $2 a share. Either way, it just doesn't matter. What you care about now is turning your $20,000 into $30,000. The usual way for that to happen is wait for the company to grow. But if you know your share of the company's liquidation would be $30,000, you have every incentive to liquidate -- especially if the company is likely to burn through its assets, making your shares worthless.
All the $ will be used up with Lawyers fees fighting this, mark my words.
In general, prices of Japanese stocks are higher than what you'd see in the U.S. (at least; it sounds like Canada is similar), with fewer shares of stock per company. For instance, Yahoo Japan made news here two or three years ago when it hit 100 million yen (about US$950,000 at contemporary exchange rates) per share, but that was divided among just 10,000 or so shares IIRC.
Fuck Yes!
I worked for Liquid Audio for several years and can give a bit of insider perspective about why Liquid Audio failed.
.MP3 but with better sound quality and "enhanced" features (like album art, lyrics, etc.) All lies. What they really wanted was a pay-per-play, uncopyable, unmovable, system that sold complete albums or possibly "mix" albums at $30 a pop (that's not a typo, $30). LA realized this was impossible but did their best to play along.
.WAV files (for burning to CD or whatever). It also had built in copy-control and, nonexistant at that time, purchasing options so you could click a button in the player and have the track added to a shopping cart/purchased outright (it was scriptable using Perl, VB, or whatever).
.WAV, and it was easier that what the'd been doing.
LA was founded by a guy called Gerry Kerby a music indistry vetran (Grateful Dead, etc.) that had the necessary personality, savvy, etc. to weasel lots of money out of VC firms (like Hummer-Windblad). He managed to convince them that online music distribution would be huge (true, but not in the way he concieved) and that Liquid Audio would be there first (also true, LA was one of the very fist companies selling music online). So he got his money, hired some engineers, and started designing his system. Then he started talking to the Big 5 record labels.
It was my understanding that initially, they were enthusiastic and were interested in something similar to
Meanwhile development continued on the LA system which was rapidly developing into a heavy-duty high-quality streaming music system (it blew away Real and pretty much everything else until Windows Media v4). It was based on AAC and Dolby Digital, widely recogniced for their audio fidelity and included a primitive watermarking system (the only one available at the time) and the player had the ability to convert compressed tracks to
All of these features made it very attractive to COMMERCIAL music vendors (ad jingles and such) who wanted a better way to distribute their music rather than mailing people CDs. The watermarking allowed them to protect their music for illegal use, etc. It was a good fit and the system worked well. Early on, the commercial vendors using LA started making money (not hard at $200 a track). Their customers liked the system, didn't mind that it was proprietary because they could convert to
Liquid Audio was well on it's way to becoming a leader in commercial music distribution. However, this was not part of the Grad Vision of Gerry Kearby and the board because they wanted to build a huge, billion dollar business and they just weren't going to do that with the modest money they could make on commercial music.
So they ditched the commercial music side and desperately tried to woo the Big 5 labels. LA simply refused to recognize that THE MUSIC CARTEL IS NOT INTERESTED IN ONLINE MUSIC IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM. Period. They (rightly) see music downloads, particularly single song downloads at any reasonable price (less that $5), as a threat to their CD album sales. In order to adopt an online system LA had to convince the labels that it would make them MORE money. This was perhaps only possible with pay-per-play and LA knew consumers would NEVER adopt a pay-for-play system (witness the success for Divx).
So LA was doomed. Their model can't succeed because it depends on Big 5 support in a BIG way, which isn't going to happen. Don't kid yourself, Pressplay, etc. are also going to fail miserably.
The managment is well aware of this. The only senior exec who tried to point this out (the CFO) was fired for stating the obvious. Management is looking to bleed the company dry (lots of "friends" working at Liquid Audio) and get out with golden parachutes. The proposed merger is a desperate attempt to fend off the (justifiably upset) shareholders.