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Private equity bought America's essential services

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Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#441

Post by bell-cot »

cyberax wrote: post #396
alexpotato wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By year 3 they start the squeeze, layoffs, asset selloffs (stripping), and lowering quality, raising prices. That is where the real teeth of wolf are shown. To play devil's advocate: Doesn't this also open the market to new entrants? e.g. young person looking to start a HVAC company in the old days couldn't compete with the established firm that already had contracts and the local market wasn't big enough for two p…

A lot of markets can't support more than a couple of competitors. And in many cases, you can't easily open a new company because of upfront expenses. E.g.: an emergency room.

When it's an essential service for "everyone", and the economics make healthy competition unworkable, the traditional solutions have been municipal ownership and publicly regulated utilities. Those include Fire Departments, Water & Sewer Dept's, Electric & Gas companies, ...

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#442

Post by tartuffe78 »

djoldman wrote: post #430

What's rarely addressed in these articles is the question: if the product/service is so bad relative to the cost, where's the competition? Specifically in this article about fire trucks, they say that margins have tripled... ok, why isn't anyone jumping on that?

I imagine it's not trivial to start a fire truck company.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#443

Post by alexpotato »

bell-cot wrote: post #441
cyberax wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of markets can't support more than a couple of competitors. And in many cases, you can't easily open a new company because of upfront expenses. E.g.: an emergency room.

When it's an essential service for "everyone", and the economics make healthy competition unworkable, the traditional solutions have been municipal ownership and publicly regulated utilities. Those include Fire Departments, Water & Sewer Dept's, Electric & Gas companies, ...

> Those include Fire Departments

I remember watching a discussion about privatizing the local fire department aka the town pays a private company to run the fire department.

Opposition folks use the line:

"You used to have a shield on your building that denoted you had paid for fire coverage. The old fire departments would drive past the unshielded buildings while fighting the fires."

(this is, of course, no longer the case but love to mention this discussion when ever privatization comes up)

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#444

Post by triceratops »

protonbob wrote: post #345
piva00 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lowered the chances, and in case of getting sick it also massively lowered the chances of getting the worst side-effects, exactly like any other vaccine does. It's a shame that even highly educated populations do not understand a basic fact of immunology.

Yeah what a shame. I never claimed that it didn't lower the chances of side effects. This is what was claimed. "You become a dead end to the virus." — Fauci, 2021 This was the reality "[Vaccines against respiratory viruses produce] decidedly suboptimal protection." — Fauci, Cell Host & Microbe journal article, 2023 "The durability of protection against infection and hence transmission was relatively limited." — Fauci…

I would've been ok with not forcing healthy people to get vaccinated, if they agreed to not seek treatment in case they got Covid.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#445

Post by balderdash »

itake wrote: post #369
balderdash wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would you think a public traded company behaves any better than a privately owned one?

My understanding is people don't like the PE / LBO with a single investor, because it loads the company with debt that it pays back via cutting quality and service offerings. My assumption is publicly traded company would have access to better financing terms and a diverse set of investors with less "hunger" the financial shenanigans the PE investors have.

Totally agree - but I guess I was getting at is that largest mfg. per the article is a a public company, and the number two is private equity, would we think that there would be a meaningfully different dynamic if they both were public?

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#446

Post by triceratops »

protonbob wrote: post #201
nekusar wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How does one solve pensions? I was thinking that Covid and widespread antivaxxer mentality would have. But no. This will be the latest ladder-pull by the boomers and silents to extract the last bit of wealth from all the younger generations. And this will impoverish gen-x and all younger generations even more so than we already are.

[flagged]

As someone else already said, lying requires intent. People can be wrong about things.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#447

Post by gopher_space »

Melatonic wrote: post #397
yardie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the tools we use was bought by PE last summer. When it was time to renew our support contract had tripled in price. I use it across 10 projects so our costs went from $200k to $500k. I let our account manager know this was unacceptable but even his hands were tied. Cancelled those contracts and let them know we were retooling with a competing tool and opensource to fill those gaps. The impression I got was we…

Seems like their might be an opportunity to start a private equity that buys extracted software businesses for pennies on the dollar and then revive those businesses with actually valuable (to the customer) practices Or maybe by then nobody trusts the name of the original company and it's just useless

Sharp fast-movers poached the extracted software business' last remaining reliable clients and clueful devs while you typed that post. It is now worth its weight in Herman Millers.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#448

Post by bigbadfeline »

spyckie2 wrote: post #118

The irony is that PEs exist largely because of pension funds. So to sum it up (not so nicely) we are transferring value from our current standard of living to pay for retirement checks for our old folks. Pensions fund a significant part of PE and they do so because they need around a 7% return in order to look solvent. If they do not have the higher PE returns, they basically go out if cash in 10 years and everyone w…

> But sadly it’s not some evil dudes at the top doing this transfer, the market force behind it is because we promised old people way too aggressive paychecks when they retired.

You seem to be quite confused about pensions, not only "old people" have pensions. Actually the vast majority of contributions to pensions funds come from people who aren't old at all and are actively employed.

> If they do not have the higher PE returns, they basically go out if cash in 10 years and everyone would scream bloody murder.

Where would they "scream"? On the internet? And who'd hear them? The answer is nobody in any PE cares about anyone screaming.

PE's operations have nothing to do with screaming old people, that viewpoint simply avoids the real issues and replaces them with red herring age baiting.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#449

Post by protonbob »

triceratops wrote: post #444
protonbob wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what a shame. I never claimed that it didn't lower the chances of side effects. This is what was claimed. "You become a dead end to the virus." — Fauci, 2021 This was the reality "[Vaccines against respiratory viruses produce] decidedly suboptimal protection." — Fauci, Cell Host & Microbe journal article, 2023 "The durability of protection against infection and hence transmission was relatively limited." — Fauci…

I would've been ok with not forcing healthy people to get vaccinated, if they agreed to not seek treatment in case they got Covid.

Natural immunity was just as strong as getting vaccinated though despite what you might have been told.

"All of the included studies found at least statistical equivalence between the protection of full vaccination and natural immunity; and three studies found superiority of natural immunity" --Shenai, Rahme & Noorchashm — Cureus / PubMed, October 2021

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#450

Post by protonbob »

emj wrote: post #437
protonbob wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what a shame. I never claimed that it didn't lower the chances of side effects. This is what was claimed. "You become a dead end to the virus." — Fauci, 2021 This was the reality "[Vaccines against respiratory viruses produce] decidedly suboptimal protection." — Fauci, Cell Host & Microbe journal article, 2023 "The durability of protection against infection and hence transmission was relatively limited." — Fauci…

There are so many things that went wrong during the pandemic. You were not lied to, that means someone has intent. The lesson was not that vaccines are bad imho. I do not live in the US, so I just find it tiresome to listen to you guys blaming everything on people. There was no right way.

Vaccines for respiratory illnesses are bad. Even Fauci admitted so. Why do you assume good intent from the United States government when the FDA is bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies.There was so much money to be made on specifically covid vaccines. I am not anti vax in general.
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