Life choices: A story about Buffett, Precision Castparts, Symantec, non-GAAP, and goodwill

"I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

“We are our choices.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

Today's newsletter is about life choices.

It's also about Warren Buffett, and Precision Castparts, and Symantec, and non-GAAP and goodwill.

I was working on some final lectures for my course at Wharton and reviewing previous professors' lectures. In a section about management decision making I ran across a discussion of "but for" causation claims in litigation. In cases where a plaintiff, to sustain a claim, must plead actual cause, such factual or actual cause has traditionally been governed by the "but-for" test:

“The traditional way to prove that one event was a factual cause of another is to show that the latter would not have occurred ‘but for’ the former.” Paroline v. United States, 572 U.S. 434, 449–50 (2014). As the Supreme Court has instructed, “[t]his ancient and simple ‘but for’ common law causation test … supplies the ‘default’ or ‘background’ rule against which Congress is normally presumed to have legislated when creating its own new causes of action.” Comcast Corp. v. Nat’l Ass’n of African Am.-Owned Media, 140 S. Ct. 1009, 1014 (2020).[1]