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Comment by anonymousiam | Hacker News Reader

I never like it when writers use the word "lose" to describe money not earned. Yeah, MGM is not earning as much as it could because of this attack. They are under pressure to settle with the attackers. Articles like this can increase that pressure. I'm glad that they aren't settling, and I'm certain that they will survive this attack.

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It's a loss of income. This is a common use of the word.

Well, it's a loss of projected income, which in many ways is not real.

It is just plain normal language to refer to a loss as a comparison against a current trajectory or current state. It is reasonable to assume that the reader/listener knows that the future cannot be predicted exactly, because this is generally true. This is why it isn't said explicitly.

It would be silly to correct someone who said "I just accepted a $120,000/yr job" with "you don't really know for sure, you could get fired or die". The colloquial presumption is that the rate of future income cited is dependent on a steady trajectory without confounding variables.

It's real enough that companies regularly borrow against it, which is about as real as anything is with money.

It's not even that, it's revenue.

> MGM Resorts International could be losing between $4.2 million and $8.4 million in daily revenue

Revenue is a measure of income. Unless speaking about specific types of revenue or specific types of income, they are synonymous.

Accounts don't think revenue and income are synomymous: income is revenue minus expenses. Now if you were to say that profit and income are synonymous, that I might be okay with.

Revenue minus expenses is "net income". "income" is ambiguous.

OK. I believe it.

> it's a loss of projected income, which in many ways is not real

About as real as money.

It's more real than not.

If your salary was cut 20% next year, would you think you were not losing money because you had not yet earned it?

I have a contract that requires my employer to pay up.

Not the same think as avoiding shopping somewhere.

There's an implied "losing $X [in comparison to expected revenue]" every time they say it.

It's a reasonable perspective from accounting and, in my mind, a reasonable shorthand. For a more literal version of losing, people would be saying misplacing or stealing.

You're getting a lot of comments to the contrary, but I agree with you.

There is a difference between losing money (like someone is actually stealing the money) and not getting money you were hoping/expecting to get. In this context it can even be a little bit confusing since there are criminals involved that could actually be stealing money.

Language has lots of ambiguities and despite this being a common way of describing this situation, I don't like it. Some people don't like the word "moist" either and that's just fine. It's an opinion.

Money not earned is equivalent to money lost in this case. It will affect their quarterly results the same way.

Huh? Google says MGM Resorts opex for 2022 11.6B or 31M/day, net income 1.4B or 3.8M/day.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to say they are, in fact, losing 8.4M/day to opex.

The revenue may be going down, but that doesn't mean they have to operate at a loss (they could always cut their variable expenses to match the cut in revenue). It would be more accurate, but not as click-baity, to describe it as "MGM getting up to $8.4M less revenue a day".

A slightly more misleading use of "losing money" is for example when movie or music companies claim they are "losing" billions of dollars to piracy, when there is no reason to believe that every pirated copy would instead be purchased at full price, if only piracy were eliminated.

There's lots of instances where I'd agree, but this one seems like a tried and true business with years of revenue to gauge how much they are in fact "losing" on average.

I also wonder how much pressure it puts on MGM - who are no doubt very much aware of the loss (every major outage I've been on eventually comes down to how much did this cost us - whether it's money, customer attrition, customer trust etc) vs how much pressure it puts on executives following along to maybe pay attention to their IT and security teams. Pipe dream.

> I never like it when writers use the word "lose" to describe money not earned.

What the difference between not earning $8M and earning $8M and losing it?

Bank account looks pretty similar.

If your employer gives you 2 weeks notice of employment termination, did you lose your job?

After all, it only applies to future payroll periods.

Yes you lost your job, and will not receive money in the future. Money from a job is in exchange for services rendered to company. It's reasonable to say you can't lose something you haven't yet received, but it is also normal to say they're losing money given they had an incredibly high likelihood of actually receiving it.

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