691–700 of 754 posts
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Oh thanks, that's really interesting. It makes more sense if there's a physical box involved -- I don't remember ever getting physical boxes for preinstalled software, but it makes sense that way.
I do. Up until 2005ish, Office install CDs and the code would be in the box with the PC. You needed them if you wanted to install optional features (or reinstall). Stores rarely did the full install.
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The irony is even though Dollar Tree prices are honest because they all are the same $1.25 (excluding the new “More Choices” $3-5 items) they’re still ripping you off. I always shop on a per-unit basis e.g. dollars per pound or cents per ounce, since that’s how I actually eat food. I need a certain amount of calories and a certain quantity of food to survive, and the less I pay per unit, the lower overall cost. On a…
SO what do you buy for food and where do you buy it? With your focus on calories per dollar, do you also get supplements? Which ones and where? Why are you so focused on this?
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There is a difference. ROI on payday loans for lenders is typically very high and their main issue is usually regulation that limits the volume they can transact. ROI on dollar stores is very low because the margin is low, costs are high, and inventory turns is relatively low. For example, Dollar General's inventory turns are half Walmart, that means that to continue operating they need to charge higher prices (the m…
> Low margins aren't an indicator of anything. They are a component of financial return in addition to capital. One does not make sense without the other. In high frequency trading, they are making 1/100000th of a percent on a trade, that is a very high return business if you can do this millions of times a day. Similarly, if I run a housebuilder then I need a 20% margin because I am going to be turning over my inven…
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Private equity has rarely done good for investors too. 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 sh…
Are you referring to Private Equity (as in MBOs/LBOs) or Venture Capital? None of what you're stating is rooted in reality or data. Source: https://www.bain.com/globalassets/noindex/2025/bain-report_g... > - The overwhelming majority of PEs lose money. What? No. Read the report: "Buyout funds continue to outperform public markets in all regions across time horizons longer than five years" > - Annualized return of PE…
For VC we know there is an edge, but that edge belongs predominantly to the top 4.
I'm concluding that investors thinking that giving their money to a PE fund hoping to have anywhere near the diversification and returns of a simple global market ETF are in for a rude awakening.
Of course you profited nicely, it's who puts the money in the private fund that won't have any chance of beating a very simple global ETF buying your businesses.
And gains in those highly unregulated and illiquid markets (that have insane fees) are what they are: virtual.
In any case I ain't reading a 68 page report, and have no patience for yet another pointless pitch about PE, everything there was to say about PE can be found in this very simple summary by Ben Felix:
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I worked in retail for a few years. A very large part of my job was simply keeping physical paper price tags in sync with the database. Minimum wage employees in a back office manually keying in UPCs, etc. The claim is extremely accurate in my experience. Expecting physical reality to synchronously conform to a policy in an information system is pretty silly.
You have it backwards. Building a flexible system and constantly changing pricing database without regard to how to physically update prices in the store is the silly thing. And when the mismatch tends to be in the stores favor, then maybe it isn’t silly but malicious.
If corporate had to wait until every store signaled "all clear" on paper tags, most retail businesses would go bankrupt in record time. The margins are not fat enough to run things this slowly.
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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…
I was really waiting for this to be a Windows bloatware where Linux laptops are cheaper since there's no unnecessary Microsoft license at all. So you are principled in not wanting to use Office, but unprincipled enough to go ahead and use Windows?? That's a bold position on HN. Linux or death!!!!
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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…
but you re-installed Windows which is the definition of bloatware and malware.
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There's a lot of old laws that special case alcohol in the US; mostly artifacts of prohibition and temperance movements.
Can't buy alcohol before noon on Sunday is one of my faves.
(That being said, even though I think it's a silly rule, it just seems to exist to annoy alcoholics who can't plan ahead. I'm not an alcoholic, and I rarely consume alcohol before noon, so I just laugh at people who whine about this law.)
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It would help people to consider your point if you made even a modest attempt to explain and justify what you mean.
Dollar General and their ilk are behemoths compared to the shops that might have served these areas before they rolled in. It's possible they're the only game in town because they engaged in dumping or other dirty/illegal tactics to drive out established businesses. I'm not an expert on the topic, but I don't think it's a reach to think that they might have engineered this situation.