551–560 of 754 posts
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Why is car a luxury? A clunker car worth $2000 will still work fine for years with minor maintenance that can be done by yourself. Oh, yeah. Cities. Cars are expensive when you live in a 100 sq. ft. box. Perhaps that's what is causing problems?
A competently planned city makes car ownership unnecessary.
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign. https://www.…
I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop.
Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not possible, because all the laptops had Office pre-installed. I told him i did not care and wanted to buy the laptop for the adverstised price.
After 15 minutes of discussion, some manager came frustrated what the problem was. I pointed to the price tag and told him i wanted to buy the laptop for that price exactly and if that was possible. It was, but it would require uninstalling Office, which took them another 15 minutes.
So i waited for another 15 minutes so they could remove Office. Back at home i powered on the laptop, popped in a usb disk and removed every partition that its harddisk ever had and started a nice fresh install without any bloatware.
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I'm not sure why private equity is singled out here, when every time a public company does a bad (eg. Boeing), people crow about how public companies only care about juicing next quarter's earnings.
Private equity is far worse. It means 100% ownership by a group of sociopaths who are executing on a plan to extract as much cash as possible quickly with no other goals at all. At least public companies have some diversity in ownership and agenda.
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It's a single-member LLC. The person doing the labor and the person who owns the company are the same person and whether they pay themselves the money as wages or dividends is not really the issue. A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a smal…
> It's a single-member LLC Maybe exempt pass-throughs?
You're using or. That means you don't need a low revenue number. You could use $10B because nearly all of the relevant companies would already be in on the basis of the number of employees regardless, so all you need is to catch the few outliers that manage to be major companies without hitting the employee threshold.
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What are you arguing then? That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing? Hard to argue this is 'good for society!' > VC returns as an asset class (outside of a handful of firms) have underperformed in the past 20 years. I don't even count it here. > PE as an…
> That a growing asset class that increases prices, destroys communities because of lack of ties, and shifts wealth from builders to owners that doesn't outperform public markets in aggregate is a good thing? You added a bunch of stuff in front which isn’t substantiated as being an effect of private equity or unique to it. Most complaints about PE tend to boil down to complaints about, in the extreme, private ownersh…
The PE complaints are mostly unsophisticated from 'the community' but actually have a very reasonable underpinning - as discussed above.
Finally for builders - this is great. Probably the single best application - but again, cost benefit I'm pretty sure it's not only economic drag, but social drag as well.
Again - the asset class has expanded massively. It's due a reckoning - curious how many firms are actually solvent were they required to sell their holdings in market.
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign. https://www.…
Dollar stores are private equity with a checkout lane. In 2025, Dollar Tree sold Family Dollar to a group of private-equity firms: Brigade Capital Management, Macellum Capital Management and Arkhouse Management Co. https://corporate.dollartree.com/news-media/press-releases/d... It’s a business model cosplaying as poverty relief while quietly siphoning money from the people least able to lose it. They already run on a…
Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors?
With the boom of popularity of ETFs in the last decades it has been increasingly hard for active fund managers to justify their costs by investing on public markets where benchmarks are visible and public.
Thus they removed themselves from the benchmark entirely and moved to private equity where there's no benchmark and returns are very hard to gauge.
Analysis shows that:
- The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money.
- Annualized return of PE in UK has been 2.1%, this doesn't even match parking money in short-term bonds.
- PE performance is extremely murky, as their gains are virtual and whether you exit profitably is heavily dependent on your timing
- The entire sector is ripe with corruption and little regulatory oversight. PEs keep ballooning their holdings valuations by essentially trading companies among themselves. So fund A sells Acme to to fund B at twice the valuation, and will return the favour by buying Foobar at inflated valuation. This all obviously requires access to cheap credit. Many startups are approached by PEs that have already lined up to sell the startup to another PE after few years guaranteeing everybody (from founders to all the PE managers) nice profits, up to the last sucker stuck with the bill.
The only ones that have profited out of PE, beyond the managers working there, are those that invested in the PE itself, meaning buying shares of the fund itself.
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> Is there some code of conduct for public companies but not private ones? No but there’s a difference between private companies and PE owned companies. PE model is very different from regular private companies, and it often involves extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself. And as far as public companies go, shareholders will have to say something about the operation of the company if you star…
But doesn't extracting maximum profits at the expense of the company itself mean front loading profits - i.e. long-term worse outcomes? How does a PE company make money from that - unless who they sell it to is not saavu enough to realize it?
> Red Baron frozen pizzas, listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50. This very rarely happens in MA, because when it does the store has to give you the item for $10 off, including if that makes it free. And they have to post a sign at the register explaining the law, which means when you're invoking it all you need to do is point at the sign. https://www.…
Once i had a very amusing discusson with a store that sold laptops. I wanted to purchase a laptop at the advertised price. The sales person told me i was in luck, because all their laptops came preinstalled with Microsoft Office for a little extra money. I told him politely i did not want to buy Microsoft Office, even for such little extra money. I just wanted the laptop. Semi-flabbergasted he told me this was not po…
There are of course exceptions; I can recall not long ago for example buying a pound of Himalayan sea salt for a dollar. That was a solid deal, and I haven’t seen it since.
But generally speaking, if you want to save money, don’t go to Dollar Tree.
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> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors? If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability. And while I'm increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings Call Earnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we'd never get otherwise - inf…
I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom. How to fi…