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The old school press people before the 80s would be horrified at this.

All this proves is when the press was deregulated to allow one person to own all the media they can afford brought us were we are now.


No. The 'old school' hated 538 and polling wonks in general. Back in the 2000s there was a huge push back because this blog guy had numbers going against whatever narrative they were trying spin.

I feel like it proves the opposite. A small entity was able to become a valued source of information, a big entity bought it, but then was unable to do anything with it, since being a “big” media seller does not matter due to the accessibility of the internet.

If I am not mistaken, isn't doing this an insult to China ?

Do me they could have put the items in a sealed maybe 'lead' box and examine them later.


The Chinese government would be stupid to not do the exact same thing when departing the US. They aren't stupid, and they aren't going to wage war on the basis of some discarded lapel pins.

> WebGPU not available in this browser

Looks like this is for Linux and Windows, on NetBSD I get this issue :(


I got this in Firefox on Linux, just had to enable WebGPU in about:config (`dom.webgpu.enabled` = true).

Did not know that existed, I enabled it but no luck. Must be a NetBSD thing based upon this new message:

> WebGPU is not yet available in Release or late Beta builds.


If you are using brave (which i assume also applies to chrome) , there is a menu at brave://flags , you can enable unsafe web GPU from there

Good example of what Private Equity did and doing to many industries. I also notice once a PE Firm takes over a Company, kiss quality good bye.

They mentioned Eye Wear is next, I think the author can guess where that is going. No reason to doubt the same will happen to that industry too.


I think he means "eyeware is next" in the sense that it's the industry he'll be covering next. Pretty much every brand and every layer of the eyewear industry has been owned by Luxxotica for a long time.

It seems like not my preferred Serengeti or my recent work gift of Maui Jim.

To save folks the search, these both sell ~$300 sunglasses.

They show action shots of people wearing them kayaking or at the beach but I'd be so worried about dropping them in the river or scratching the lenses with sand that I'd never take them those places. $300 is more than I paid for my kayak, LOL. Probably more expensive than entire sets of clothes I might wear while doing those activities, or at least right around the same price.


seems like a good business model to watch where PE is moving in. Start investing in quality designs while PE drives quality down, then sweep in and be the "quality amongst trash" brand.

I feel the same, but I do wonder sometimes if that’s true. Are there PE firms out there quietly operating great businesses that they’ve acquired? If not, why not? Surely in the long run that’s a better ROI, and private capital should be able to take a longer view, right?

For every one public headline failure there are hundreds of profitable executions that never get mentioned.

I think the general rule is more like they expect only 1 in 4 to work out, but that 1 works out good enough for the rest.

Depends on the firm but even when we say 1 out of 4 it is not the case that the other 3 are wild failures.

> profitable executions

I can't tell if that's good or bad /s


> Surely in the long run…

And that's the rub. PE is all about short term ROI at any price. Their business model doesn't take product superiority or brand loyalty into account. If a widget can be made cheaper, you do it, damn the collateral damage.


In reality that absolutely is part of the equation though.

Maybe your equation. Not theirs.

You would be surprised most of PE is not the evil enterprise it is characterized as.

What do we think of Apollo Global Management?

OK, but that doesn't answer why? Why is PE about short term ROI at any price? Is it really true that the maximum long-term ROI is by doing it this way? I'm skeptical, and people's intuitions based on their observations isn't very useful.

Maybe this is like the toupee fallacy, and we only pay attention to the ones with this kind of strip mining approach, and we don't see the majority where they run the businesses to maximize ROI in the long run?


The longer term of continuing to buy businesses, load them with debt, strip them of value, and move on to the next, promises much better ROI than focussing on a single business.

True but people also forget Microsoft invested a lot of $ into Apple to keep it going. M/S did that so they could point to Apple as a competitor during their anti-trust trials.

That investment gave Jobs time to turn Apple around, otherwise it would be gone.


Upgraded yesterday, no issues on the T430 amd64

>It's not like one needs to say blames here, as if it's just an accusation and there could be another cause for that

The US started the Oil Embargo and AFAIK it is still on-goimg. Cuba is running out of fuel. To me 2+2=4, so I say blame can be placed on the US :)


I believe the person you're replying to is criticizing the choice of title, by noting that the phrase "blames" is suggestive that there might be other causes, when there clearly is not (which they agree with you about).

The point is the headline makes it this subjective accusation for Cuba, rather than, you know, a cause and effect thing.

> Home burns down, residents blame a fire


What is really need is a really huge tax on these data centers for power and water consumption. The amounts collected are passed to residential consumers based upon their bill.

Where I use to work, you got 4 hours per week to work on your on thing, but that ended when covid hit and the company started feeling some financial pain.

The is the thing and it happens in every Country. If a bill fails to pass it or none like it should be brought up for 5 years.

I know doing that would be crazy, but Companies keep trying and trying until it is passed.

Tin Foil hat time: It almost looks like it is a way to funnel Political Contributions (bribes) to the politicians. The politicians fail the bill because they felt they did not get enough Contributions :)


> If a bill fails to pass it or none like it should be brought up for 5 years.

The republicans would bring up a bill for everything they don’t like and ceremonially vote it down which would make it inaccessible to the next round of democratic leadership.


[flagged]


A rose by any other name… :)

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