Tag Archives: gaming

NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System

by Rita7799phdn Posted on November 1, 2016

Mother Jones

A few weeks ago the New York Times got hold of the first page of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return. It showed a net operating loss of $916 million, which Trump was able to use to offset his income over the next 20 years, thus avoiding millions of dollars in income taxes. But while solving one mystery, it opened another: Just exactly how did Trump manage to declare such a big loss? Several theories made the rounds, but the Times now thinks it has the answer, thanks to a cache of “newly obtained documents.” Here’s the nutshell version of the Times’ explanation:

Trump was a terrible businessman and lost a huge amount of money on his casino operations in the early 90s.
As part of his bankruptcy negotiations in 1991, he persuaded banks to forgive hundred of millions of dollars in loans.
Forgiven loans count as “Cancellation of Debt” income, which should have offset his huge operating losses. But somehow they didn’t. Why?
The Times says it was because Trump used a legally dubious “equity-for-debt” swap. Basically, he swapped the bonds he couldn’t pay for new bonds that he classified as equity shares in the casino partnership.

The Times makes a good case that Trump’s own tax lawyers told him this plan was extremely risky (see the excerpt from the official tax opinion on the right) and would most likely be disallowed by the IRS. But we don’t know if it was. The trail stops cold in 1995.

If I’m reading this right, the basic story is that Trump gave his banks “New Bonds” in place of their old bonds and classified the new bonds as equity shares in the casino partnership. Trump then valued the equity as equal to the old debt, thus showing no net loan forgiveness and therefore no COD income. This despite the fact that, in reality, the equity was close to worthless.

So Trump then had $916 million in operating losses, but no debt forgiveness to offset it. “Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations,” says the Times, “this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.”

At this point, the question of how Trump gamed the tax system is mostly a matter of academic interest. Still, I’ve written about this before, and figured I should follow up with the latest theory. And this is it.

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NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System

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Trump Campaign CEO Once Worked for a World of Warcraft Marketplace

by KeeshaWhitworth Posted on September 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Stephen Bannon brought quite the varied resume to his new gig as CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At various points, Bannon has worked as an investment banker, earned money off Seinfeld royalties, overseen a biosphere, directed films, and run an alt-right news site. But one of the stranger blips on his career path came in the mid-aughts, when Bannon joined and eventually ran a company that made its name and fortune as an online marketplace to sell virtual gold to World of Warcraft players and other online gamers.

World of Warcraft was the most successful of a genre of games termed Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs or MMOs) that sprang up in the late 1990s and 2000s. For a monthly fee, people could play these games (which also included EverQuest and installments of the Final Fantasy series) as characters in open-ended fantasy or science fiction worlds. Over time, players upgraded their characters’ status and abilities by going on quests to gain online currency (often gold) along with weapons and other items.

These games required huge time investments to boost characters and attain the best items. A few crafty entrepreneurs realized that time-crunched players might be willing to trade real-world cash for online currency, and they set up so-called gold farms, paying people to acquire currency and goods in the games that would then be sold to other players through an outside system.

One of the first major businesses in the “real-money trading” market was Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), founded in 2001 by former child actor Brock Pierce. (You may remember Pierce from the 1996 film First Kid, playing the eponymous White House child opposite Sinbad.) As detailed in a 2008 feature in Wired, Pierce set up an online shop that allowed players to purchase in-game goods, much of it coming from gold farms in China, where people were paid to play the game and rake up loot. According to Fortune, at its peak, IGE earned tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars per year.

As Wired reported, IGE brought Bannon on board in the mid-2000s. Bannon’s “mission was to land venture capital.” That mission paid off for IGE. In 2006, Bannon’s former employer, Goldman Sachs, invested $60 million in the company, and Bannon took a seat on the company’s board.

The legality of real-money trading as an industry was never clear; it ran the risk of violating the terms of service of various games. With IGE facing a massive class-action lawsuit led by a World of Warcraft player, the company sold off its online marketplace to a former competitor and rebranded as Affinity Media, which retained a string of community message boards related to MMOs. According to Wired, in June 2007, Affinity’s board pushed out Pierce and made Bannon CEO, a role he would hold until he took over at Breitbart News in 2012. Bannon may have applied his web knowledge gained from his time at IGE and Affinity to Breitbart News, which he transformed into the preeminent destination for the internet-savvy, meme-centric alt-right—in part by stoking the anger behind Gamergate, which saw harassment of female gamers by their male peers.

As for Pierce, he’s now moved on to Bitcoin. His bio at Blockchain Capital says that he’s “a member of Clinton Global Initiative.”

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Trump Campaign CEO Once Worked for a World of Warcraft Marketplace

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Watch Anita Sarkeesian Explain Gamergate’s “Attacks on Women” and Convince Colbert He’s a Feminist

by Gregory2612 Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist critic at the center of the Gamergate controversy, appeared on The Colbert Report last night to explain the sexual harassment issues rampant in the gaming world and why women aren’t going to just accept a “separate but equal” community.

“Women are perceived as threatening because we are asking for games to be more inclusive,” Sarkeesian said. “We are asking for games to acknowledge that we exist and that we love games.”

But as recent disturbing events have shown, many gamers are not pleased with Sarkeesian’s work and have been launching extremely violent messages against her and her supporters via social media. Earlier this month, Sarkeesian was forced to cancel a speaking engagement after an anonymous email threatened to stage the “deadliest mass shooting in American history” if she spoke.

Speaking to Colbert on Wednesday, she went on to reject the defense that Gamergate is actually about ethics in video game journalism.

“That is sort of a compelling way to reframe the fact that this is actually an attack on women,” she said.”Ethics in journalism is not what’s happening in any way. It’s actually men going after women in really hostile, aggressive ways. That’s what Gamergate is about. it’s about terrorizing women for being involved in this industry.”

For more a deeper dive into the Gamergate controversy, check out our excellent explainer.

Correction: A previous version of this story erroneously quoted Sarkeesian in the headline. This has since been corrected.

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Watch Anita Sarkeesian Explain Gamergate’s “Attacks on Women” and Convince Colbert He’s a Feminist

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These Complex, Beautiful Board Game Pieces Are 5,000 Years Old

by y3kyabkl Posted on August 16, 2013

The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games, but newly discovered pieces may be even older. Photo: The British Museum

If you think that board games with fancy pieces and weird dice and other complex features are a relatively modern invention, archaeologists would like to have a word with you. Over the years, field research has unveiled the complexity of ancient gaming. Today, Discovery News is reporting on what may be some of the oldest gaming pieces ever found:

Found in a burial at Başur Höyük, a 820- by 492-foot mound near Siirt in southeast Turkey, the elaborate pieces consist of 49 small stones sculpted in different shapes and painted in green, red, blue, black and white.

“Some depict pigs, dogs and pyramids, others feature round and bullet shapes. We also found dice as well as three circular tokens made of white shell and topped with a black round stone,” Haluk Sağlamtimur of Ege University in İzmir, Turkey, told Discovery News.

The pieces date to around 5,000 years ago, they say, and were dug up in two sites, one in Syria and one in Iraq. The region is known as the Fertile Crescent and is traditionally thought to be one of the birthplaces of modern agricultural human societies. Discovery has a whole photo gallery showcasing the pieces.

The pieces are old, really old. But there’s another game, the Royal Game of Ur, that’s about contemporary—it dates from around 4,800 years ago in southern Iraq. And then there’s an Egyptian game, Senet, that is at least that old, if not older. Researchers think that basic board games may have been invented up to 11,000 years ago.

According to a story in Discovery News from last year, early board games were a status symbol:

“Many of the first board games appear to have been diplomatic gifts to signify status,” co-author Mark Hall told Discovery News. “We have early examples of quite splendid playing pieces belonging to elite, privileged people.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Playing Pandemic, the Board Game

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These Complex, Beautiful Board Game Pieces Are 5,000 Years Old

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