peezd

Your first paragraph is precisely it, at least from my experience living in Eastern Europe for a few years in the 2000s.

There is some variety, but a very common model in Private Equity is to acquire an asset (a company), and fund that acquisition through either equity or debt.

The ability to purchase often comes in through either Private fund investments or via Debt.

* Private funds are most often drawdown funds (Private equity funds, VC Funds, Real Estate Funds, etc.). These are managed funds not available on public markets, typically require a substantial commitment of funds, and generally in return these investors can expect a significant return on their capital.

* Debt was a very popular way to finance these purchases as well when interests rate were lower, and you expect to sell the asset/company before the debt comes due. Basically cheap money made this feasible/possible.

The expectations are typically 5-10 years for both of these funding models; with private funds, they expect to run for X years, long enough to acquire the assets, clean them up, and resell them at a profit. For debt, the expectation was to sell before the debt came due, along the same timeline.

So that's the backdrop.

The primary concern here is around investments in tech and SaaS companies impacting both models. SaaS has contracted quite a bit with pressure from AI and valuations are lower.

The article is focused on the debt financed path; PE hasn't been able to sell companies as quickly as they would like or at a price they would like, so they are sitting on the books. And for companies purchased using a combination or private funds, they have companies they can't unload for the price they would like. The funds that are in this state where they cannot sell remaining portfolio companies without realizing losses are called zombie funds.

Yeah, it's rarely not fixed, and a lot was tied to the historic expectation of the investment being at most ~5-7 years.

Closely related, you can read about the PE Zombie funds that cover a lot of this debt.

Yeah, I'm still on a 2021 M1 Pro and the only real complaint is that the battery has weakened somewhat, but still fine. and if I really cared I would probably figure out what to do to get firefox from being such a constant drain.

Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.

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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.

The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.

Netflix has done a good job demonstrating customers will complain but won't cancel, so not super surprised by this.

Nope, at least not on the platform I'm on. Just get the popup when accessing media when there is an update and can automate it or schedule for evening, but no way to automatically update it.

Looking at the history it was awarded to organizations a decent number of times in the past, (even up to Nihon Hidankyo in 2024 which focuses on impact from Nagasaki/Hiroshima and anti-atomic weapon advocacy)....

which to your point does seem to make more sense than singling out an individual.

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

But the contribution limit on the traditional IRA is much lower though.

This is prevalent among the big ski consolidators (Vail Resorts, Alterra) year over year.

Yeah was about to post this, this reads that it's the PERM program so just about the path to getting a Greencard, different from H1B1s, etc.

They either didn't kiss the right ass or pay the right bribe within the current administration I imagine.

One of my first DVD experiences was the original Blade film, and it had an alternate ending available to play.

That blew my mind and was an awesome experience. In the age of dial-up internet it wasn't like you could find and / or watch that online.

Comes down to your level of empathy I guess.

I think there's a basic floor for how we should treat other people, regardless of the circumstances. Things like access to food and water, shelter, etc.

I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it, but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.

It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides.

Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .

this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.

It's been somewhat established that having a wiped or basic phone is in itself sus and reason for them to investigate you further.

I mean the EV is a good choice, but the bigger impact here is that everything gets more expensive due to the increase in costs of shipping, refining, producing, and heating/cooling...

Which often aren't as visible as paying $82.00 to fill up your ICE vehicle, but add up to much more of an impact.

well said, thanks for sharing your perspective.

It definitely varies a ton.

I've observed more that H1B's keep employee mobility lower, so employees on H1Bs tended to be paid less due to the natural bumps that come out of switching jobs every few years, especially going from an associate to senior/staff level where often the company throws a small raise with promotions that don't keep up with market rates.

One other factor that I experienced is when I was in senior leadership we absolutely tracked 'flight risk' that factored in to retention programs for top talent, and H1Bs were by the nature of it viewed as lower flight risks so less likely to fall into these programs.

There are already categories like this if you jump away from tech.

Our friendly neighborhood Ski resort oligarchies leverage the J-1 Visa program to bring in international students to work at the resorts over paying more to hire local workers for example. They also leverage the company store model by putting them in dorms and charging them accordingly for housing.

Absolutely; I'd check out AI Engineering by Chip Huyen to get a fundamental understanding of the space and do a couple of side projects in the area to get familiar and be able to speak to the nuances of working with LLMs, and that will be enough to start working to transition and apply for relevant roles.

Yeah I came here to post that, such a nonsensical statement

Truth.

lol I ran a sizeable team around 2020 and I had to educate a couple of our new hires straight from college that they actually needed to check their work email, after they missed important HR related stuff and they had just completely not realized it was an avenue for company communication, with an assumption that everything was available on our heavily used slack.

Exec branch has the authority to direct the U.S. Board on Geographic Names as it's under the US Dept of the Interior.

That does mean the U.S. Gov't / federal depts have to use the recommendation from the board I believe as they control the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), and it cascades from there.

So technically yes. That being said, I think Trump had the Board undo some of the changes the board enacted under Biden so it will likely just flow back.

All the handlers around him that are plundering and stealing and doing all the heinous shit. Trump is insanely easy to manipulate.

Yeah, it seems like such an easy value add (especially since they gate it on gemini subs) to make Gemini do a great job in the google productivity apps, but they are generally pretty awful.

Claude with MCP access to the google workplace APIs consistently does a better job with any manipulation of google docs

We have a similar situation here in Colorado, with our single provider continually raising rates (with one of the reasons being better mitigation; from what I can tell that means just running ads constantly talking about how great they are), while also saying they can't do mitigation other than just cutting the power off when it is windy.

Meanwhile they maintain margins that most any public company would be incredibly jealous about.

Sure it's not black and white but the positioning is tiresome.

They are too big to fail at this point.

Yep, exactly this.

Protecting Workers, I'd add a couple more; it's not smart to be fully dependent on a trading partner or partners for critical and essential products, such as food, tariffs can help ensure you maintain domestic industry. Also helping to control dumping by an aggressive trade partner to ensure a domestic industry isn't destroyed.