This article is poorly written. It’s so desperate to be clever and edgy that it’s hard to get the facts out of it.
ChatGPT isn’t really a solution because the source is both low quality and has questionable motives. Going to any of the other good articles on the subject that have been linked in this comment section is much better.
While I’ve seen a plenty of silly reports from big bank analysts, they usually have the advantage of not coming across like complete idiots when saying things like this
> We assign a preliminary A+ rating to the notes, one notch below Meta’s issuer credit rating,
It’s hard to get away with that when the report is attributed to a company and person which don’t seem to exist, hosted on some randos substack. Wording like that works way better when it comes from a sender with an address ending with @bigbank.com
Of course, the latter parts of the post (Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability) do reveal pretty definitively that this is obviously not intended to be a serious report.
As for the content itself? The author tries really hard to turn a whole lot of nothing into something, and horribly misinterprets the GAAP in the process.
How does it not have anything to do with the quality of the writing? The writing is supposed to convey some facts, but it's too busy pushing narratives and layering on snark that it fails to convey real facts. Even in this comment section the people who applaud the article don't really understand what's happening because they soaked up so much of the narrative-pushing from the article.
this is the future of human-written articles - they will obligatory be written like this as 99% of article comments on HN these days is “oh, this is AI written.” :)
It is not the reader's fault if the article is unreadable in the first place.
Not to mention that asking help to explain a text is extremely common. I can read English, but I have never read a US supreme court ruling. There are much better ways for me to understand those rulings to me as a non-lawyer.
Many SCOTUS opinions, especially the major ones, are very readable! The justices and clerks are excellent writers.
The most publicly notable cases (on things like abortion, gerrymandering, gun control, etc.) aren’t so tied down in complex precedent or laws the average person is unfamiliar with.
Although, even some of those (like, for me, issues around Native American sovereignty or maritime law) are quite readable as well.
> I can read English, but I have never read a US supreme court ruling. There are much better ways for me to understand those rulings to me as a non-lawyer.
Having admitted to never having read a SCOTUS ruling, how can you then proclaim there are better ways for you to understand? How could you possibly make that assertion if you've never read a SCOTUS ruling?
> Having admitted to never having read a SCOTUS ruling, how can you then proclaim there are better ways for you to understand? How could you possibly make that assertion if you've never read a SCOTUS ruling?
A SCOTUS ruling is a primary source, and there's a pretty good universal rule that primary sources can be difficult to properly digest if you don't fully have the context of the source; for most people, reading a secondary source or a tertiary source will be a superior vehicle than the primary source for understanding. Although that said, some secondary and tertiary sources do end up being just utter garbage (a standard example is the university press release for any scientific paper--the actual merits of that paper is generally mangled to hell.)
The difficulty understanding this piece comes from lack of knowledge about finance and ratings, not from an inability to read. The blog assumes a large amount of financial knowledge which is not common among the HN audience.
It seems fairly understandable even without financial knowledge?
1. Facebook creates a shell company.
2. The shell company borrows billions of dollars, and builds a data center.
3. Facebook leases the data center.
4. The fact that it is technically only a four-year lease with only one possible tenant can conveniently be ignored, as Facebook assumes essentially all possible risks. The shell company could only possibly lose money if Facebook itself goes under, so the lenders can treat the loan as just as reliable as Facebook itself.
5. Because Facebook technically only has a four-year lease, it can pretend it doesn't actually control the shell company: after all, it can always just decide not to renew the lease. The fact that is assumes essentially all possible risks can conveniently be ignored, so Facebook can treat it as a separate entity and doesn't have to treat the debt as its own.
So the lenders are happy because there's no real risk to them, and Facebook is happy because they can pretend a $27B loan doesn't exist. It's a win-win, except for the part where they are lying to their shareholders about not taking on a $27B loan.
ChatGPT isn’t really a solution because the source is both low quality and has questionable motives. Going to any of the other good articles on the subject that have been linked in this comment section is much better.