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Private equity bought America's essential services

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Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#451

Post by protonbob »

piva00 wrote: post #370
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 don't live in the USA, so whatever was claimed is not universal.

Not massively lowering the chances is universal.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#452

Post by ryukoposting »

iboisvert wrote: post #375
ryukoposting wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many jobs... millions upon millions ...no. It doesn't even matter what the rest of the words in the question are. Just no, lol. > They need to be paid out somehow. No they don't. Lots of pensions, especially the not-gilded ones, go bankrupt. In fact, that's precisely what happens to pensions of companies that are acquired by PE. The company gets stripped for parts, it goes bankrupt, and PBGC covers a fraction of th…

> bloated pensions I find this characterization offensive. Who is to judge if the defined benefit pension if a primary school teacher or fireman, for example, is bloated? It's part of the negotiated pay package, nothing more or less.

My mom's a teacher. She would get a pension if the state could actually fund its pension program, which it can't now, and certainly won't when she retires in a few years. The government ones tend to actually have, yknow, morals and stuff.

Nothing personal here. It's possible for some pensions to suck and not others. It's also possible for a pension to suck and its beneficiaries to not suck.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#453

Post by protonbob »

triceratops wrote: post #446
protonbob wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

We already know that the CDC literally lied about masks not being helpful in the early pandemic in order to protect mask supplies for healthcare workers. We also know that Fauci lied about Gain-of-Function research.

"The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology" -- Fauci, under oath to Congress, May 2021.

NIH's Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak contradicted this in writing five months later, confirming funded experiments had produced findings that met the gain-of-function threshold.

-- https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/nih-eco-health-allian...

If we know that there were deliberate lies were said about certain aspects of the covid pandemic, why should we assume good intent otherwise, especially from a U.S government that is jhighly influenced by well funded lobbyists?

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#454

Post by gosub100 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #439
gosub100 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of off topic but I like HN and comments like yours for educating me about subjects I would otherwise know nothing about. Thank you

Please read a book about these things. HN commentary on any form of trending issue (of which PE acquisition is right now in various other social media) tends to be more about the commenter's own value judgement than any form of disciplined analysis. There are many case studies on LBOs and other forms of corporate turnarounds and you won't have social media pageantry affecting your thoughts. Private Equity/Capital IMO…

Have you seen the stories / studies about how crowd sourced knowledge can be very accurate when taken in aggregate? I don't know the name for it, but if 1000 people guess how many peanuts are in a barrel, their errors cancel out and the average is quite close to the actual value. That's how I ingest social media comments.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#455

Post by Karrot_Kream »

gosub100 wrote: post #454
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please read a book about these things. HN commentary on any form of trending issue (of which PE acquisition is right now in various other social media) tends to be more about the commenter's own value judgement than any form of disciplined analysis. There are many case studies on LBOs and other forms of corporate turnarounds and you won't have social media pageantry affecting your thoughts. Private Equity/Capital IMO…

Have you seen the stories / studies about how crowd sourced knowledge can be very accurate when taken in aggregate? I don't know the name for it, but if 1000 people guess how many peanuts are in a barrel, their errors cancel out and the average is quite close to the actual value. That's how I ingest social media comments.

Wisdom of the Crowds has been shown to be overly idealized and not particularly effective unless aggressively controlled for independence of opinions. Basically, if you tend to hang out on similar social platforms you won't actually be able to fight bias.

Some papers about this:

* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12216932/

* https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1008636108

I specifically find conversations about private equity to be highly polarized by community which is why I think it's a better idea to learn from first principles and then engage in the Internet commentariat.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#456

Post by triceratops »

protonbob wrote: post #449
triceratops wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well then you don't need treatment for Covid, right? Stay natural.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#457

Post by alchemism »

protonbob wrote: post #449
triceratops wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cull the human herd because Bob is too much of an individual to participate. An ironic solution.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#458

Post by cyberax »

alexpotato wrote: post #443
bell-cot wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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

But this very thing happened not that far in the past: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39516346

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#459

Post by BirAdam »

All of the oldest folks I knew were wrong about many things, but they were right to say that morality must be at the center of all public discourse. Pensions were part of the contract of employment for many old companies. As those companies became more interested in ever higher rates of return without offering higher value to customers, the companies became fragile. Becoming fragile, they were eventually broken. Then the pensions are unfunded by no fault of the employees.

A company doesn’t have to make billions per quarter to be solvent, it only needs to beat inflation. Beyond that, the people running the company should have some basic human decency. If they don’t, we as consumers, employees, founders, whatever can and should cease doing business with them.

Re: Private equity bought America's essential services

#460

Post by somelamer567 »

slibhb wrote: post #416
spyckie2 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery is profitable. People only stopped doing it when it was perceived as immoral. Lots of things are profitable but immoral. People will do crazy immoral and illegal stuff for money, but we outlaw and slander the more abusive stuff, like monopolies and such. If it wasn't pensions that were funding PE, I'm sure PEs would get a lot more criticism and would not be allowed to do what they do.

The idea that slavery is a free lunch that is only banned on moral grounds is wrong. Slavery is bad economics. If you want your economy to grow, paying workers is not bad. Economic growth isn't zero sum.

Capitalists are selfish, and have short planning horizons. For a capitalist, slavery is absolutely rational. The only reason why they don't do it today is because it's illegal.
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