A developer who genuinely cares about the quality of the game, interacts positively with the community around it, and makes decisions that demonstrate his caring for the game and the community. Specifically, decisions that often leave revenue on the table, particularly in the short term but arguably in the long term as well.

That sort of caring is largely impossible for private equity, and it's really hard to successfully fake.

We humans are hardwired to hate that idea, we always want an understandable story with distinct causes and effects... So much so that we will often invent one, even for things we "know" are random, like: "Okay, now the next one will almost certainly be heads, because..."

Is it the financialization of everything? Is that we reached peak growth and profit increases are only possibly through extreme optimization? Is it financial inequality?

I was just wondering if it's just me feeling like everything is on a highway to terrible.

- Prices in my city, just this year, have felt like they've jumped 10 or 15 percent.

- I've been working in tech for a decade now and for the first time a new company simply refused to negotiate salary.

- I feel financially worse off than 5 years ago making a third of what I make now.

- Housing prices have exploded. I worry I will never own a home.

- Denmark has started deleting public holidays to save our social welfare state.

- Health care is the worst it's ever been. You can not get basic health diagnostics for most things in Denmark without screaming.

- Europe has a literal war at our doorstep.

- Public transit prices have jumped in the last year.

- Good quality grocery stores have closed and been replaced with discount chains. The quality of the produce is terrible.

- Democracy feels increasingly shittier and hijacked by two extremist poles of very-online meme-thought.

- Gen Z is looking like the most garbage generation of the last two centuries with more mental illness than any generation in history.

- Everything has become a political lightning rod.

I feel exploited by invisible forces I can't see or touch or name. I feel as if I have no mastery over my own life. I no longer know why I continue to contribute to a society that does not give anything back to me for my labor and exploits the best years of my life for taxes that do not improve my lot in life.

Can someone tell me everything is going to get better?

Yes but only after it will get much worse.

Have you ever met a millennial?

t. 1992 cusper

I feel like we (the younger generations) are all sitting here holding our breath in this stasis, waiting for that generation to die, and hoping those portfolios somehow get magically spread across the population. I don't know what mechanism is available to do that spread, but if it doesn't happen, where will all that locked up wealth go?

I'm not at all Gen Z (late Gen X), but you can't put all of that on them. They've had many formative years during a lot of the points you've listed.

> Can someone tell me everything is going to get better?

That's never guaranteed. You can only control what you take in, how you cognitively frame it, and how you react to it.

Here in the US, there are what seem to be related issues. Opinions about what is wrong and why differ. It can seem that we don't address the issues or what is wrong, for example, it can appear that the media believes that making clear the issues and faults are too deep for the audience of the media. For example, so far I've yet to see good engineering style graphs of even the basic measures from the economy, health, education, happiness, etc. In simple terms, the birth rate is so low we are going extinct -- some graphs over time might provide some insight. To avoid going extinct should be worth some graphs of related data?

Here is one guess: Some people want more government involvement, activity, services, ..., at the national level. Involved are money and power, money collected from taxes and/or borrowed and then spent and the people spending the money getting power. Then for the money the guess is that the spending is too inefficient, that is, too often wasted. For the power, it can stop what might be solutions. So, with the waste, we are throwing away our efforts, and with the power we are blocked from better approaches.

For this view, the US has some old images, from history, the movies, some parts of education, and even from some of recent history: So, the old images are from, say, the movie The Big Sky from the 1830s of 20 or so men and one Native Indian woman leaving Saint Louis on the Mississippi River (major US river from the north east going south and dumping into the Gulf of Mexico) and the Missouri River (from the northwest of the US close to the Pacific Ocean and flowing ~2000 miles to the Mississippi) to trade with the Blackfoot tribe to give them woven blankets, guns, tools and get beaver pelts.

The whole effort was lawless, that is, no government, laws, police, political power, regulations. So there was fighting, killing. No medical care, so there was suffering. There were lots of injuries from struggles with the river. It was all highly risky with lots of struggles and losses but in the end successful.

There were more such movies about the US, people on their own, risking everything, fighting, struggling, having failures, in the end being successful. There was Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers (had a bicycle shop), etc.

To the present, there were two guys at Stanford University in a project for indexing the contents of libraries. They thought of indexing the Web sites on the Internet and were offered ~$1 million for their work and Web site. They turned down the $1 million, started a company, and had success. It was all risky. It's now worth ~$1 trillion, called Google. Other successes, risky, one or a few founders, include Microsoft, Walmart, FedEx, Facebook, Amazon, Burger King, McDonald's. One guy, sole, solo founder, used some old Dell computers, an early version of Microsoft's Windows and Web software ASP.NET, built a romantic matchmaking service, grew it, ..., and sold out for ~$550 million.

Mostly these successes are examples of significant increases in economic productivity, that is, how much utility get from each hour of work. Personal computers? Killed off the typewriters with just astounding increases in productivity; same for email; Zoom, .... In cars, using digital electronics to get fuel mixture and spark timing a lot better resulted in the engines lasting much longer -- if looked carefully into what was going on with the old carburetors and breaker point ignitions and the huge ways they were wrong (unburned gasoline diluted the engine oil and, thus, wore out the main engine parts) can understand. Tires -- progress in the synthetic rubber chemistry made the tires last much longer, maybe 5 times as long.

The theme is, as in the movie, leave individuals with a minimum of taxes and government power and let them try and take the risks. The victories can generate massive increases in productivity, wealth, and a better life.

Heck, I like music, A. Vivaldi, J. Bach, ..., S. Barber. Used to be, had to go to live performances. Then we got audio tapes, vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, and the Internet. So, now just from a few keystrokes I can get terrific performances of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, Bach's Chaconne, ... Barber's Adagio for Strings.

Those are some of the ideas that have floated around. Money and power: The idea that just these two are the main causes of all of society's problems is tough to accept. But, for the problems in Denmark, maybe these two should get some attention.

With all the significant increases in economic productivity that has not benefited the average American. We can see historically that as productivity has increased, the wealth of individuals has decreased. We like to think of utopia where increased productivity means we would all get to work less and have more but that isn't how capitalism works. We have made everything significantly more efficient and continue to do so but who is benefiting? For most people things are getting worse because that is actually more efficient.

> leave individuals with a minimum of taxes and government power and let them try and take the risks.

Living in a country with a good social safety net is pretty helpful for risk taking. It's a lot easier to quit your job and start a business when you don't have to worry about losing health care and potentially dying or going bankrupt.

So, $1 trillion companies versus some guy with $400K a year from 15 well run convenience stores, .... We have a lot of both.

> With all the significant increases in economic productivity that has not benefited the average American.

Maybe not in comparative terms, i.e., maybe the distribution curve for wealth has not changed much.

But in absolute terms, some of what I listed are huge benefits for "the average American":

Nearly no one in the US would want a 1950 Ford, forced to use a typewriter instead of a word processor on a computer, news papers on paper instead of the Internet, no mobile phone or Zoom, 1950s health care, lath and plaster instead of drywall, oak flooring instead of vinyl (cheaper and more durable), microwave ovens, synthetic yarn in cloth and clothing, in general, as in the famous movie, no "plastics", railroads and busses instead of airplanes, no summer air conditioning, no gasoline powered lawn mowers, no calculator aps or pocket calculators instead of adding machines, no computers instead of punched cards, car tires that wear out in 20,000 miles instead of 100,000 miles, elevator operators instead of electrically controlled elevators, etc. ....

My parents owned different homes their entire lives. I make significantly more than they ever did and don't and could never afford my own childhood home. My children are even worse off than that.

Maybe some news source would publish a graph over time of the ratio of house prices to, say, prices of gasoline, ground beef, carrots, a wool blanket, a car, a refrigerator, etc.

We are very short on news that has credible information, gets to causes, presents like STEM field information, etc.

If it wasn't for government safety regulations that 1950's Ford might actually be safer than what would be produced now without them.

We have a total lack of competent leadership across all institutions -- political, commercial and social -- increasing extremism and authoritarianism from every political faction, and cynical short-term thinking from every economic institution. Everything is drowning in mediocrity and pessimism, and society is increasingly dysfunctional in every aspect. Extremists keep proposing authoritarian political solutions, but I see their proposals only as even worse iterations of the problem. What can we do about it, apart from admitting defeat and going off-grid in the mountains?

Just how these things work.

Tax law favors debt too much.

Over the decades, people turned away from God and those values to chase new ones: money first, pleasure first, self/ego first, atheism, subjectivism, Marxism. These by themselves, if increasing enough, guarantee massive amounts of suffering for people. Whereas, the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians only does good for people when you increase it. Society made their choice.

As in Romans 1, God handed us over to our depraved minds and sins to let us feel the full consequences of selfish, godless, subjective societies. Everything has gotten worse. The solution is to repent and turn back to what God gave that worked before. Then, gradually improve ourselves in any weak areas. Wr must bake righteous values back into our families, businesses, and government. Inward change creates positive, outward results.

The book of Job was written specifically to denounce the idea that morality means that you'll prosper.

Let’s compare two sets of things on a basic level.

1. You know God will judge what good or evil you did at the end of your life. You factor that into your decisions.

2. You think we’re an accident, nothing matters, people are just over animals, actually just chemical reactions, universe itself disappears in enough time, nothing matters in the long term unless you say so, and no accountability for any horrible thing you did.

Which is more likely to lead to righteous behavior? Which is more likely to lead to destructive behavior?

Next set are Christ’s basic commandments vs the world’s:

1. Love and obey God first. That means truth, justice, avoiding self-destructive behavior, family, and good work ethic. From there, love others as you would yourself in all your interactions with them.

2. Do whatever you want to whoever you want. It might be limited by whatever is popular at the time which will change. The Devil has most media focusing on individualism over family, squeezing max profit out of everything, and chasing pleasures with reckless abandon.

Which of these logically creates more good? Which leads to more damage?

I think we could stop there. The consequences of just those differences in believes are tremendous. Those in set 2 are currently doing the most damage in all areas of life. They include people who identify as Christian but don’t live like it. Lip service.

Whereas, my first-hand experience with hundreds of people following Christ and Biblical teaching is that it’s working. Their problems often come from sin, not obedience.

I'm an atheist, and I do my best to live those virtues because it's just the right thing to do, and because it feels better than the alternatives. I don't think I'm exceptional in not needing a final judgement to make me want to be kind, honest, work for justice, live with integrity, etc.

Much respect to my theist brothers and sisters, and please consider that your atheist brothers and sisters are worthy of respect as well.

And humorously, the latter of each of GP's respective points map pretty well to the destructive effects of what Nietzsche most feared of what he sensed was impending nihilism. Tho the difference, among many, is that "belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable".

A sovereign ruler who is just necessarily has to enforce the law. That sinning against a perfect, loving, and good being would be punished severely shouldn’t shock you. It would happen in human, legal systems and likely your own house.

The beauty is God’s mercy outweighs His wrath. The wages of sin are death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. He took the punishment for us so we can just turn away from sin and back to God. Then, He never lets us go. You do have to put your God first, though.

There were also predictions about what would happen if we followed Christ and His model vs other models centered on selfish gain. The other side denied the Biblical truth saying we’d have a better America with godlessness, capitalism, and/or communism. We’ve had time to see where those philosophies would take us. What happened?

God’s Word came true quite literally in many ways while the godless’ predictions were wrong with damaging results. So, the rational choice between multiple worldviews is to think the one that works and has correct predictions is true (or better). And then commit to Christ and repent.

Now, let’s tie that directly into Red Lobster:

1. Christ-like business over worldly greed would have the new owners not sell the real estate the business depended on.

2. Jethro and Paul said to pick leaders of great character and wisdom who aren’t sellouts. They’d have managed it better.

3. Humility in the service sector means constantly listening to customers to adapt to their needs since we put others first. Red Lobster would’ve changed with the times in some way which might have worked out (or not).

4. Proverbs focused on equitable or profitable arrangements. Jesus said to count the cost before you commit to a plan. The Bible often says to seek counsel. These would preclude all you can eat shrimp every day.

In short, Biblical morals would’ve prevented every aspect of this situation. Whereas, godless, unloving capitalism… all those together… naturally leads to things like this. If you will benefit from, but never be held accountable for, destroying the chain… why not make a fortune destroying it?

it's spot-on if you just want to feel good about yourself though. you start off with a whopper of a false dichotomy and strawman, and don't improve from there.

It turns out that Allah and Vishnu are both quite popular. And none of it supported by actual evidence. We can do better. God's plan is never to reveal that God makes any sense, just random whims. The immoral false prophets get rich and influence millions. So, gotta wait until you die to find out? Maybe. But the Abrahamic bible is so full of misinterpreted BS as to be unusable.

I'd suggest that if they want more Americans to live the values preached by Jesus, they should try starting with themselves. I don't know how many people they have turned into Atheists with this behavior, but I can say for sure they did for me, and I suspect they have alienated many others as well.

Tho really any belief system that becomes so institutionalized will inevitably attract flies and become debased over time. However one could cheekily remark that by virtue of its message and who it spoke to, early Christianity was inherently debased, and certaintly ignoble.

As I look at the Word, we see Jesus Christ promised that anyone who repents and believes in Him would receive eternal life by how good He was, not our own works. It’s a gift of grace. From there, John 15 shows real believers who are in the vine bear the fruit. We’re all steadily changed over time (sanctification) to be more like Him. So, we’ll all have faults.

Even in God’s Word, we see all kinds of sin in the churches. They have fake leaders, people about money, sexual immorality, ego, and James says they starve the poor. Yet, apostles call them “saints” because Jesus bought their future. Instead of discarding them, the apostles keep exhorting them to improve to become who they need to be. Anyone that confessed and made an effort would make it.

Whereas, we can’t let any excuse… ourselves or others… separate us from Christ. Apostasy leads to a worse fate than non-belief if one never returns. John says Christ will never let anyone snatch His real sheep out of His hand. He’ll forgive anyone that returns. I encourage you to return to your first love and find a Biblical church (eg GiveThemLife.com has help).

Get that fixed and then maybe I’ll listen.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201109005141/http://www.godand...

In another article, America was rated as the most Christian with the most missionaries. Yet, it’s had hardly any wars motivated by religion. They’re usually about the selfish motivations of non-Christian worldviews.

Whereas, Communists have killed tens of millions of people, cultural Marxism is spreading in universities, and that should worry people. You might want to cite liberal beliefs and atheism as top killers in future comments.

Most people leaving the church today do so because of how hateful and toxic the modern US church has become over the recent decades. If you don't like Christians leaving the church for Marxism, you shouldn't have let Marxism be the only ideology loving thy neighbors while the church was too busy chasing the delusions of white supremacy and Christian Nationalism.

TVs: I get a much nicer TV now for the same amount what I paid for a crappier one in 2012

Smartphones: very powerful and do a lot of things better (eg. camera, connectivity)

Entertainment: Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Prime, ... you can pick 1-2 of those, binge all you want and then rotate. Costs < 30$/mo

Travel options: Ok, even in 2014, there were very good travel options. But I see a lot more options these days (direct flights from SF, more obscure locations on the travel map etc)

Cars: I bought a new car in 2021 (previous one was 2010). New one is cheaper and has some nicer features (rear view & other cameras, various warning signals)

The vast majority of these things are not all that important to most people, not like prices of groceries, household goods, clothing, energy, childcare costs, transport costs..etc.

I don't care that cars have nicer features now, if buying a new car is most of my annual wages pre-tax. I don't care that I can fly to more interesting destinations from SF when I can't afford to go to urgent care without having to switch to rice and beans for a week. I do on the other hand care when my grocery bills double unless I spent multiple hours a week collecting coupons and driving around to find sales. I care when I have to wake up in the morning shivering because I can't afford to keep the heat at even close to a comfortable temperature.

Hmm I don't think you and I share the same definitions of "most people" then, or "important" for that matter. Just to give 2 examples:

>85% of US adult population uses smartphone. The way smartphone revolution has occurred and the big role they play in our lives (entertainment, communication, public services, finances) in just 15-16 years since its invention is truly astonishing.

>90% US households have a car. ~40K Americans die every year in car road accidents. Improving car safety is literally a matter of life and death and numbers prove[1] that we are doing better over time.

[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

That kinda works— Until a small handful of corporations gain enough power that there is not really any meaningful competition anymore, and they can effectively engage in price-gouging with monopoly power. Which has now happened, apparently, in most industries. …Hence everything getting worse.

…I think there was an article I read some time back that explained it really well. But I can't seem to find it, so these links will have to do. The Guardian/Youtube ones might seem clickbaity, but that man was also Clinton's Secretary of Labor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/compan...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monop...

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-...

https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-l...

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862

Ticketmaster, Facebook, grocery prices, even the Boeing 737 mess— I suppose a lot of these problems do basically come down to a company or an oligopoly getting so powerful that nobody can hold it accountable anymore.

We are slowly in the midst of going through a black plague of sorts when it comes to the % change in population that is occurring, except we will be left with an elderly population instead of a dynamic healthy and young population.

But what ends up often happening is data-driven myopia. You see some statistic that doesn't seem optimal and you end up optimizing for that instead of figuring out how it fits into the big picture.

Restaurants, at the end of the day boil down to food. You serve food. People either like the food or they don't. How many customers you get is a function of how much people like the food, how competitive the pricing on the food is, and the market you're in.

Red lobster at the end of the day suffered from people not wanting to pay what they were charging for low quality, uninspiring seafood dishes.

People nowadays are struggling more (spare me the CPI data, hedonics and other basket adjustments mean the situation for most people is quite a bit worse than it was a few years ago) and there needs to be a value prop for dining out.

Some cannot be.

The executives who sits in their office are not going to be able to smell and taste or care about the food.

To expand on this a little, restaurants serve food in a building brought to your table by people. If the building/table/environment is dirty or just uncomfortable people don't want to be in it. If the people preparing and serving the food are doing a bad job people won't want them doing it. If a restaurant drops the quality of the food, environment, or personnel they are going to lose business.

As you say it's the value proposition. I go to a restaurant because I want to just pick a food, eat it, and leave. The "hard" parts of cooking and cleaning are someone else's job. All restaurant patrons are willing to pay some premium over the cost of the raw ingredients to save their time and effort. But as the experience gets worse that value proposition starts to erode.

For me and I imagine many people the experience doesn't need to be mind blowing. It just needs to be not shitty.

Glad to be of assistance my friend.

AHA! IT'S YOU!

You're the person who has encouraged this bizarre behavior where waitstaff come to pull away my plate the second they think I'm done. No! Leave it unless it's completely empty, I've asked you to take it, or the next course is about to arrive.

For a 1000+ page exposition on why this is such a fatal flaw see James C. Scott's 1990s tome "Seeing Like a State" which addresses precisely this issue with receipts brought from fields ranging from agriculture, urban planning, politics, family naming systems, and more across at least 4 or 5 continents and a century.

It's an essential non-partisan read that manages to piss everyone off by being a peon to left anarchism in many ways while saying "actually yes Hayek was right about sensitivity to local conditions" and "actually the NHS and NWS are good and sometimes centralized planning isn't the worst solution".

I've not seen any direct link between them but I feel like you can draw a very firm line between it and Piketty's Capital and Ideology. You might think "wait isn't Piketty the guy who's completely data driven and publishes stupidly large amounts of xlsx files as appendices" and you'd be right except in his second book he's leaning far more heavily on sociology and just using financial data (much imputed from tax records) as support for sociological arguments that align very closely in many respects.

I'm a full on stardew addict. I was waiting for a game to rekindle the feeling I had playing the original harvest moon on snes. natsume just made a ton of crap sequals focused on making it all 3d.

concernedape, distilled the snes version down to what made it fun and built it up fron there. it scratched the itch better than any of natsume's sequals ever could.

The other thing that happens is you point out a really good game and then someone will say, yeah but that's not a good game because of the art style or it's too similar to something else etc. Everyone can always come up with a quality reason why a game didn't sell. Someone has a reason not to like every game ever made. The problem with that is you can come up with the same complaints for well reviewed games. Often the review will say something like : this has been done before, or that style is a little annoying, but.. it's a great game.

Final nail in the coffin of this theory for me is having talked to many game review editors and having worked with a few, they will often tell you that they don't always expect to shape opinion as much as parrot it back. As one person used to tell me, most people read our reviews to validate their purchase or get our take on what they are playing.

And then to your challenge. Good games that didn't succeed. How about Midnight Suns, Lock's Quest, Space Marine, Company of Heroes II, Maquette.. that's just off the top of my head. If I thought about it I could make a really long list of game you've never hear of. This is probably the same for everything: music, novels, etc.

They make extremely niche RPGs that routinely rate >90% in positive reviews on Steam and they've never had an actual hit. Pretty much the definition of cult classics.

System Shock 2

Psychonauts

Shenmue

Okami

Conkers bad fur day

You're making the assumption that the way to win is to GO ALL IN.

When in reality whether you're making AAA games or a small indie digital artist like Darius Kazemi... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw (Went to high school with him. Amazing guy. His senior project in the electronics lab was a teddy bear that could detect seizures.)

You are just buying lottery tickets.

Luck. Word of mouth. Anyway, things you can't control (and can barely influence) as a developer/publisher. So, we face the notion that, perhaps, if we want people to take the risk of creating and sustaining a business for reasons other than simple profit (say, to provide a needed or pleasant service), the proposition might need to be better than, "Succeed or die (sometimes literally)." Because none of it's a sure thing, and it can't be, but sane people generally aren't going to bet their life or livelihood on a risky venture (assuming that irrational passion is a form of insanity).

Product + Marketing + Timing + Luck = Maybe Successful

The thing is, there's no VP of Timing. There's also no VP of Luck. These factors are ignored because there's no one to champion them. Yet they are very real.

Unsuccessful Product !== Bad Product or Bad Marketing

If the olives in the salad don't taste as good or there are fewer breadsticks or the lighting makes it feel more relaxed or the greeters have more time or the menu gets shorter or the desserts arrive quicker or the pasta is less salty, that's because someone involved in that decision decided it was worth paying more for or not worth paying what they were currently paying, taking into account what factors will make people change their mind about eating there. There isn't just a random dude who sits in a room somewhere and says "let's make the food worse" based on his own whim.

If the food gets worse and it just doesn't have that same vibe anymore and you don't want to go there next time, it's because an expert in marketing or restaurant management or food design made an error in their judgement about what they could cut, what they should improve, and what they needed to keep the same. That, or the change which turned you off attracted more customers or more desirable customers who have different preferences to you.

Your restaurant changed because its corporate policy changed. But the capital structure is totally relevant in understanding why that changed.

Other end goals than making people happy by serving good quality shrimps for a reasonable price? Obviously they do.

Other end goals than making money? Of course they don't. But neither did Ray Kroc, who was extremely upfront about how McDonald's is a business whose strategy is to acquire real estate, funded by burger sales. Neither do the Waltons, who aggressively cut margins on all their products and compete to drive other retailers out of business. (Neither does General Mills, who used to own Red Lobster, nor Darden Restaurants, the public spin-off that owned Olive Garden and Red Lobster, nor Starboard Value, the activist investor that pushed for Red Lobster to be sold.) None of these companies exists because of a high-minded commitment to customer service, or fair play, or delicious food.

If turning a viable restaurant chain into a chain that no one wants to go to and then selling it is an attractive business proposition for private equity, than it should be for McDonald's and Walmart too. Unless you can point to some specific causal connection between the ownership structure and the decision about whether or not a restaurant should serve stuff that people actually want to eat?

Why did the PE firm do that when McDonald's didn't?

I'm sure that there are PE firms that really do try to make businesses successful and profitable, but the vast majority are in it to sell off anything of value and dump all the ensuing debt into a company that will shortly go bankrupt.

If you own a company, and a PE firm buys one of your clients, that should be a hint to require prepayment for everything they ask for after that. They will leave you holding the bag as a creditor.

Your second point: why would someone lend money to a company which was going to go bankrupt? If PE firms always made the companies they controlled bankrupt, no one would lend to them.

Your third point: if someone buys a company from you, how does it make you a creditor of the bought company?

For 2), people loan to the PE firm because they extract all the value for themselves. Their creditors get paid. People who loan to PE-controlled firms don’t seem terribly wise to me, but maybe they can model them like junk bonds.

For 3), if the firm buys one of your clients, be cautious.

Not directly, but only 1 step removed. The dude is saying "let's charge the same or more for cheaper, lower-quality food, to make a higher margin so our PE firm makes more money".

Evidently not really taking the factors into account. Would the limited partners eat there? More than once?

Walmart is a family owned business. Do you think that the Walton family buy groceries and home furnishings there? McDonald's is a public company. Do you think that its CEO and the fund managers who hold the biggest stakes in it regularly eat there?

Yes: https://financialpost.com/executive/mcdonalds-new-ceo-eats-a...

Why would you think that private equity owners would ever make things worse to improve margins without giving careful consideration to whether or not the changes will make people less likely to spend money at their restaurants??

PE is incentivised to squeeze the business and extract the value built up over time, to get large, quick returns, even if it destroys the business (they can sell the corpse after). A restaurant which delivers regular, single-digit restaurant margins indefinitely would be considered a PE investment failure.

So, the answer your 2nd question is also "because it's true". I'm happy to be convinced otherwise on either count, if you think differently.

Can you explain how the math works that PE owners make money from discouraging people from going to a restaurant, and other owners don't have the same incentives?

You've compared the incentives of private equity and a small business owner. Do you think that Red Lobster was previously a small business?

Why can't you answer the question on the different incentives that apply to different owners of large businesses? If a private equity fund can make a profit by buying a successful business, discouraging all its customers and then "selling the corpse", why can't other owners do the same thing?

Why does the company having a large amount of debt change the decision a restaurant chain's management makes between selling cheap and good food, or cheap and bad food, or expensive and bad food, or expensive and good food?

Literally everything that you've said about this has been handwaving and rumours. Explain the decisions based on where the money comes from and where it has to go to, if you can (you clearly can't).

You citing Nabisco as the best example of what you believe is comical since it's from 40 years ago (and famously fraudulent).

Add to that, the leveraged buyout mechanism that Red Lobster went through is famous for siphoning value off the target in the form of fees and other schemes, and then leaving the empty husk to die under crippling debt[1]. A clue here is that the 2nd paragraph of the article we're discussing is, "In mid-April, Bloomberg reported the debt-laden seafood chain...", and it sounded like they had trouble paying it in part because of the rent payments that started when the PE firm sold their real estate to pay for the buyout.

Can you explain why you think anything I've said so far is untrue? After all, we can't assume a PE LBO executor and a small business owner have the same incentives unless we have sufficiently convincing evidence to support that assumption.

0: https://www.indeed.com/hire/c/info/restaurant-profit-margins...

1: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/09/corporate-kl...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/costco-founder-kill-hotdog...

Or maybe it’s not the CEO he threatened, but a new one.

Thought leaders seem to know everything except when to keep their mouth shut for once. But I digress...

If firms are being punished for poor quality, then the system is working, even with enshittification becoming more commonplace. All of the Very Important Business People can sit around and scratch their heads about why the market seems to change on them when they screw up their offering, and they can consult overpriced business fortune tellers to reassure them that it was that pesky market's fault, but that doesn't change the outcome.

I'll miss Red Lobster's cheesy biscuits, but if they've dropped the ball on quality they had this coming to them.