It's very easy to do things like this when pesky things like property rights or environmental laws or labor protections don't get in the way.
In the U.S. and EU, if the government takes your land, they have to reimburse you for it, and you can fight them every step of the way. In China, the government can take your land and if you complain, you can spend the rest of your life in a labor camp.
That's simply not true. People are compensated generously for land that is seized. I have friends that have had it happen, and you get a lot more money than if you were to sell the property - so it's a bit like winning the lottery. The amount of room for appeal is dictated by the nature of the seizure and the government "level". (ie if it's a national interest project you have little recourse, but if it's the city government then it's likely different)
Not true at all. Costco uses the industry-standard Net 60 for supplier payment.
Companies have to be fairly large to be Costco suppliers. What suppliers lose in margin they more than make up for in scale. It's better to sell 10 million at 5% margin than 1 million at 10% margin.
And they don't require a % of supplier's business revenue as that would be illegal in the U.S. Most of the products found at Costco are generally found at other retailers, just in smaller packages or as different SKUs.
I think that presumes that an LLM is capable of "unblocking a tricky C# problem" that a group of humans cannot with research. LLMs don't understand the code they output; they just regurgitate code that's already in their training set (the proof is in the pudding; see the many posts on HN about these LLM coding assistants outputting copyrighted code token for token).
So if the tricky C# problem isn't already in their data set, the output of the LLM is, at best, random crap. Even the worst human effort would exceed the output of the LLM, and that is the average case for any "tricky" problem. LLMs are fundamentally only useful on the most common types of problems that are can better be addressed by using frameworks, plugins, or APIs.
(And on that note: every programmer I've met who says that LLM coding agents 10x'd their output is the type of programmer that would have been PIP'd or fired 10 years ago for incompetence. We used to call them "code monkeys" for obvious reasons. Junior programmers think that LLM coding agents are awesome because they don't have the experience or skill to understand just how bad the output of LLM coding agents is, and the few that survive in the industry long enough to become senior programmers will laugh at their younger selves at how much of an unmaintainable mess they made vibe coding.)
AI and voice recognition were using "machine learning" for several decades, which is basically just brute force statistics.
ML voice recognition is still far superior to AI-based voice recognition. At its best, Gemini is still less accurate at parsing speech than Dragon Naturally Speaking circa 2000.
Because most businesses take out loans for legitimate reasons. Banks usually charged PE owned companies significantly higher rates for their loans to address the risk(used to work at a PE owned company and we paid 4x prevailing market rate) so PE firms go to great lengths to hide their ownership.
It seems like a lot of lenders should be sued for irresponsible investing then. How much interest can you charge when you get so little of the actual capital back? Is it 100% or more?
Like with VC investing, lenders don't always need every pitch to end up a home run. In the case of business lending something like 90+% of loans get paid off. For PE-owned businesses, just over half get paid off, which justifies the risk on the half that don't, but since this risk is far greater than with normal loans the interest rate is higher for PE-owned businesses. It's just basic finance. It doesn't require caricatures, just a knowledge of how this stuff works.
Lenders are also not all banks, and in the case of PE-owned businesses, most lenders are not banks (but would be characterized as financial institutions), because most banks simply won't lend to PE-owned businesses, having been burned in the past. For some PE firms, business flow is highly dependent on finding new lenders to finance their debt-financed purchases because their old lenders won't lend to them anymore.
PE firms aren't the caricatures that HN thinks they are. They're worse. You want to know why small town America can't afford to go to their small town doctor or dentist or veterinarian anymore? (Hint: the PE firms bought most of the small practices.) Want to know why it costs 10x as much to send grandma to the retirement home or hopsice? (Hint: PE firms bought nearly all of the retirement homes and hospices.) Want to know why insurance keeps rising by double-digits every year despite a corresponding lack of insurance payouts? (Hint: PE firms either own or are now major investors in most insurance companies). Want to know why dozens of major PE-owned retailers survived COVID but then died despite being cash-flow positive on an EBITDA basis? (Hint: the "I" in EBITDA from the PE debt financing overwhelmed everything else.)
Banks are not taking huge losses because a huge fraction of loans to PE work out.
Imagine believing PEs are just constantly scamming banks out of their money. Yeah sure.
Its just that people have this carricature of PE in their head plus we are on HN where there are a huge fraction of Dunning-Krugers when it comes to topics about economy. Thats why you get these internally inconsistent arguments
Banks aren't the primary lenders to PE firms, but yes, the general PE business model for debt-financed acquisitions is entirely premised on using the collateral of acquired businesses to take out loans to pay themselves "dividends" and then letting the business fall into bankruptcy. This has been covered in extensive detail by WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, and the NYT. Mark Levine has some good articles on this.
It's okay for you to admit that you don't understand how PE firms work. I've been on both sides; as their tax advisor and at a PE-owned company and I've got firsthand experience with it.
I only contest the claim that lenders are the dumbasses that keep on taking losses. It's nonsense.
Despite having been a tax advisors apparently you don't understand that. That is suprising. Kinda shows that your role doesn't necessarily translate into knowledge about how companies operate.
My claim is not that lenders are dumbasses that keep taking losses, that's your claim.
Lenders are not some homogeneous static group like you imagine them to be. There are many different kinds of lenders (including "creditors" that lend no money at all), and there are constantly new lenders coming into the market all the time, many of whom are not yet sophisticated enough to grasp the risks of lending to PE-owned companies.
My claim was that individual lenders either stop lending to PE firms outright or jack up the interest they charge to PE owned businesses once they have suffered PE-related losses of the kind I described above.
Lending is about risk management, and interest rate pricing is based on the estimated risk of a loan not being repaid. PE-owned companies are considered extremely high risk by most lenders due to the types of shenanigans PE firms pull on a regular basis. It can take over a decade for a PE firm to develop the reputation that would allow the companies it owns to get debt financing on terms anywhere close to what a non-PE-owned company can get. This is part of what killed Toys'R'Us; the interest it had to pay for its debt financing post-PE acquisition exceeded was materially greater than the interest it paid for the same amount of debt financing prior to the acquisition.
As a followup, Saks declared bankruptcy this week, after a sequence of events that began with their PE investors ladling up Saks with debt to pay themselves dividends, added more debt to acquire another company (which resulted in the PE firm getting paid management fees for the "successful" acquisition), and then spun out the debt-ridden conglomerate so it was no longer their problem. In this case, the financial institutions that funded the PE shenanigans mostly got paid off after Saks had to sell one of its most valuable, landmark locations a few weeks ago. The "lenders" that got screwed this time were their suppliers that provided them inventory on credit (like Chanel, etc). Many of them had already stopped providing new inventory to Saks due to the unpaid balances.
Look you keep putting words in my mouth in a quite rude fashion.
You make this situation confusing by basically arguing against a strawman. Where did I say lenders are a homogeneous group? Where did I say that lenders dont understand risks and interest rates? Im pushing back against the prevalent notion that PEs are somehow hoodwinking lenders into constantly taking losses. Its not happening. Thats it. Feel free to show me data that proves otherwise.
If you just want to do a monologue about PEs and their shenanigans then please by all means do so but dont do it as a reply to my comment. Thank you.
The HSRA may be an example of waste, but there is no documented fraud or abuse. In 11 years, zealous audits and investigations haven't found any signs of either.
Fun fact: the reason bar associations exist is because people got tired of the free market free-for-all that existed before bar associations.
Law, like medicine, isn't something you want some rando handling. The free market is not a magical panacea. Rules are created for a reason, and that reason is usually grounded in human suffering.
It's not market demand. The government is ordering the construction of solar and wind farms without regard to the market demand or to the citizens residing in the locations where the solar farms and wind farms are to be built.
That's the exact opposite of democracy and capitalism.
It's a rational way to deal with their energy needs, reduce pollution and their impact on the climate.
They have small gas and oil reserves if I remember. Unfortunately, if they were sitting on Venezuela or Russian style reserves or oil/gas the story might be different. But unlike Europe, the Chinese can see that being beholden to foreign states to keep the lights on is asking for trouble.
They seem to have avoided the ideology the big fossil fuel companies push in the west to make fossil vs green a political/class discussion, not a rational one. Rationally it makes most sense for a nation to generate their energy needs in a way they control with wind/solar/nuclear.
In the U.S. and EU, if the government takes your land, they have to reimburse you for it, and you can fight them every step of the way. In China, the government can take your land and if you complain, you can spend the rest of your life in a labor camp.
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