The UI is hilariously bad. I’m playing a NY Times podcast and say “Alexa, pause.” Two minutes later, I say “Alexa, play” and it starts playing some random news clip from ABC News.
Yes, and additionally the Copilot 360 user interface is a mess, processing time is slow, and the quality of results is poor. Using the Chat GPT or Claude interface produces much quicker/better results.
In my org, I customize meetings based on the specific report, their function, and their needs. With some reports, I meet with weekly, others biweekly, some monthly, some as needed. We adjust as needed based on turbulence, new projects, approaching deadlines, etc. It’s a very effective model.
I strongly disagree. As a simple example, just this week I was looking for ice breaker questions for a work team event. I started with Google and was wading through a myriad of pages stuffed with ads and noise. I happened to have Claude open for an unrelated work experiment and thought to ask Claude for ice breaker questions. It provided 10 good questions and I selected the first two. It’s just a matter of time until we retrain our brains to first use LLMs before Google and then Google’s usage is going to drop like a rock. LLMs for many use cases is simply better, providing better results with far less noise.
That's pretty much the ideal use case for LLMs, as a tool for creative brainstorming where the question of accuracy is irrelevant. I've used them like that frequently for help in writing/worldbuilding.
But I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of Google searches are looking for factual information of some kind. I can see LLMs as an interface on top of search, but not replacing it.
Yes, and doing a startup involves risk. If you fail, you’ll lose time and likely money. I’m now 10+ years behind on my retirement savings. I’ll likely need to work until 70-75.
Can anyone provide a single case of where a private equity majority owned business thrived, expanded, or at least maintained market share for at least three years? It seems private equity focuses on extracting every bit of value from a business, as quickly as possible, and then walking away via asset divestiture and bankruptcy.
> Can anyone provide a single case of where a private equity majority owned business thrived, expanded, or at least maintained market share for at least three years?
Most PE-owned companies do well. Do a paper search for median employment N years afterwards [1], net indebtedness 5+ years post, et cetera.
The problem is outcomes are negatively correlated with transaction size, so the more noticeable a deal the more likely it goes wrong. (There are also a few pirates in suits who go shockingly unpunished. But judging the cohort by them would be like judging tech by Chamath.)
Yes and no. The hospital in my hometown is owned by PE. The situation is bad but they still exist, and are still the only hospital without driving half an hour to 'the big city'.
I haven't been in that loop since before covid, but last I heard they were running at a loss for years because they couldn't keep staff. The conditions (and pay) were abhorrent. They also really, really liked to buy entire practices from the most experienced doctors. The practice got absorbed and died quietly while the doctor would very understandably retire early or move far away.
So, yes, they've maintained market share. But only by virtue of being a natural monopoly.
> are still the only hospital without driving half an hour to 'the big city'.
By design.
Look up Certificates of Need. They are an application a prospective new hospital needs before breaking ground, to make sure an area isn’t “overserved” by hospitals (i.e. protecting profits).
Certificates of Need were lobbied for by … drumroll … hospital owners.
In my state this mechanism is being used to block expansion of inpatient mental health care services (in particular, we need many more beds for people recovering from TBI because they are drastically underserved). For the past 4 years the two biggest hospitals in the state have blocked all new hospitals simply because they can, and naturally they don't care to give up a slice of their pie.
I used to work for a company that was acquired by a PE firm (now known as Revenera). The software I supported got more expensive, the sales folks more aggressive on the "license compliance shakedown" games, and new features and bugfixes highly de-prioritized.
Sales were already going down and they responded by raising prices every time to make up for the lost revenue. The market itself was shrinking less than market share being lost.
Another product line I was less involved in pivoted direction and I guess is still doing OK.
OnSemi had TPG as a majority shareholder for like 5 years and did very well out of it. Initially TPG ruthlessly focused on costs but eventually that allowed OnSemi to go on an acquisition spree, picking up LSI’s fabs in Gresham and another company I can’t remember.
I’m struggling to understand how the standard PE model works, particularly the debt component. PE firms seem to target mediocre businesses, load them with debt, and then harvest returns and eventually the assets. Why would a bank loan money for such an arrangement, given how often these businesses end up in bankruptcy (Toys R Us as an example)? Is the debt collateralized and bundled with better performing debt or sold off to an unwitting buyer?
> PE firms seem to target mediocre businesses, load them with debt, and then harvest returns and eventually the assets
Private equity no longer necessarily involves large amounts of debt, i.e. LBOs. Most managers have an economic effect they deploy to bring efficiency to an industry. The first popular one was deconglomeratisation. Then capital structure management. Digitisation and supply chain management followed. In each phase, they delivered then overcorrected.
Hospitals initially started on the scale side. The thesis was that the biggest cost centre is administration, so if you linked together the administration of many hospitals you could reduce costs compared to private practices. This initially panned out. But hospitals are natural monopolies; those initial theses were rapidly corrupted.
> given how often these businesses end up in bankruptcy
Private-equity backed companies tend to be more resilient, not less [1].
It is a mix of tax loopholes. They can load up on debt, pull cash out. The big scam is share buybacks, they use the loans to by up their own stock. That was illegal from the 30a-80s, the Regan administration legalized it and it's been a race to the bottom. The other part is banks create money at multiples of their deposits. Fractional reserve lending. This creating money and then charging interest that isn't created is the root of this mess. They system worked well when there was fresh land and slaves to grab. It has continued w industrial growth. But now we are running out of oil to pump and other resources are starting to become scarce. This whole private equity is becoming a shackle on our economic system, almost 24% of the economy is controlled by private equity, and a chunk of that is carry forward profits which aren't taxed until withdrawn. They get to sell not pay capital gains and go into the next one. Good luck trying that yourself.
Buy the company, saddle it with the debt used to acquire it, take all its real estate and transfer it to a separate company, make the company rent from the company that owns the real estate at inflated prices. If its something like a software company you convert its software to a rental model and keep jacking up the price so that now an annual subscription costs the same as the perpetual license price from three years ago with 25 years of maintenance. Sure, you just lost 98% of your customers, but really, you just need one or two customers that can't leave you to keep it running in perpetuity. In the case of a retail store, though, you just run the store into the ground over the next year or two and now your real estate division is the #1 creditor of the retail chain and gets first pick of the liquidation and it now owns the real estate, which it then sells for 10x its real value to a developer who will bribe the local approval board to turn the area that is zoned commercial only due to flood risk is now overpriced homes or condos. When everything floods the victims that bought houses or condos will have to move elsewhere.
Or, your PE firm is actually owned by a foreign country and they don't care about profit as their long term goal is wrecking your country's economy.
There are different playbooks, but one is to take a declining business and cut unprofitable parts until it becomes (at least temporarily) profitable. The debt has a higher interest rate that reflects the risk of the strategy not being successful (hence being called junk bonds).
Even in the case of bankruptcy though, the bondholders may still come out OK. Toys R Us actually made about 5 billion in debt payments in the years it was privately owned, and it took about 5 billion in debt as part of the buyout. The bondholders may not have gotten the return they were expecting, but they mostly got their principal back.
All of that said, the real problem as I see it with PE is that it's just so exploitative. The only thing that matters is the investor's money. For example, one very common strategy after a buyout is to cut quality in various forms. People may have a positive quality impression of a store or a brand, and then keep buying it even after the PE company cuts quality. It takes them a while to realize that the product they're buying is not what it once was, and so the PE firm is making money by tricking people into buying bad products.
The hospital case is just an extreme example of this where the cuts in quality lead to people getting sick and dying.
"it depends" - but there are several components at play:
PE benefited greatly from a long-term decline in interest rates. The amount of debt a company can service at a given profitability is directly related to the current prevailing interest. So as long as interest rates drifted down, PE firms could buy, load with debt to be paid out as dividend, and sell again, sometimes to the next PE buyer.
Secondly, banks will not hold this debt directly on their books, but either sell bonds directly (the low interest environment led to some life insurers and other long term investors to buy pretty risky corporate debt) or repackage them with (hopefully) uncorrelated debt to obtain better ratings (price).
There's an argument that the success of PE funds had everything to do with them being a macro bet on falling interest rates.
Doesn't that have more to do with Michael Milken pioneering junk bonds, which then vastly expanded the available credit?
As in: The fact that the 80s had comparatively high interest rates doesn't matter to the argument, as the necessary infrastructure to issue and trade high yield corporate debt quickly didn't exist - so in some sense effective interest rates dropped from infty to something, enabling the entire LBO model.
And since then, with the exception of the recent hiccup, the long term trend in interest rates has been downward?
> Doesn't that have more to do with Michael Milken pioneering junk bonds
Capital was uniquely available in the 1980s. But Milken was a symptom, not the cause. The booming American economy provided the fuel, but digitisation turbocharged the engine: issuing, pricing and trading securities, in particular bonds, became easier very quickly. (This is why your stereotypical trader from the 80s has an accent and is uncouth. They replaced blue-blooded bankers who had run bonds, calculating prices and yields by hand using tables.)
Put another way, America is “unusually good at creating tradeable claims on the profits and revenues that its economy generates” [2]. Computers amplified that strength and prompted massive opportunities in reshaping the economy.
> with the exception of the recent hiccup, the long term trend in interest rates has been downward
Yes, this is a function of increasing stability and time horizons [1]. That said, the relevant frame is a fund lifespan, usually 5 to 10 years. (Unless you’re Warren Buffett.) In those intervals, the long-term signal is dwarfed by short-term noise.
I haven't checked in depth, but ... while the Fed funds rate has oscillated a bit ("noise") the curve for 10- or 30-year t-bills or mortgages is much smoother, and newly issued junk bonds will track those more than the Fed funds rate.
And I'd be surprised if in the period between 1980 and 2021 you could find a 10 year interval that didn't exhibit significantly lower rates at the end than at the beginning, and only a select few 5-year periods.
You seem to have the viewpoint that this had nothing to do with the historical performance of PE funds?
> this had nothing to do with the historical performance of PE funds
It had a strong effect. But it’s far from dominating. Compounding PE’s performance woes are that fundraising is easier when the economy is strong. That is why there has been a tendency of the largest LBOs happening just before a downturn; the last cycle’s was Twitter.
It’s hard to believe how many visitors to HN are climate science deniers. This is equivalent to claiming the earth is flat, denying the value of vaccines, or arguing that we didn’t really land on the moon.
It's probably because "+1" and "yup" comments are discouraged, so the people that immediately feel like they have something to add are the ones that think the article is not telling the whole story. At least, that's my guess. I would expect that a representative poll (https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll might be a starting point) would show an overwhelming majority of readers/commenters does think global warming is real and caused by human emissions.
With measured change in C02 the past 60 years[0], how can we expect the system to behave the same? In my lifetime I will breathe air with C02 levels of 480ppm. Throw in the high sea temperatures [1][2] if you would like some bonus content.
Idk what it means for us on the ground. 90% of the doomerisms haven't gone anywhere - but this is worth keeping an eye on. Who knows, maybe in 3 more generations we'll hit 800ppm C02 and experience cognitive decline[3] before we have to worry about the climate system getting funky :)
There's a strong contrarian trait here, for sure. Also, if you look at the usernames in these situations it's often one or two people replying to literally everyone.
I think at this point we have little choice but to live in denial. I’ve lived in South Texas my entire life, but this summer was the most brutal one I’ve ever seen. Hit new highs in actual temperature and heat index of course, but it was just the months-long unrelenting nature of it that hurt my soul. I’ve never seen so many dead trees and so many dead animals on the street. My co-workers well failed as did many of his neighbors.
What am I supposed to do about any of that? How am I supposed to believe in the future if this is still the early days of climate change with who knows what new horrors to come in a decade or two?
And so we go on because what else can we do? Mostly I’m just glad I never wanted to have children because I can’t imagine what it is like for them as they grow up and realize what awaits them.
A large proportion of HN's audience is comprised of get-rich-quick techbros (and wannabe get-rich-quick techbros) for whom anti-intellectualism is a favorite pastime and "fuck you, got mine" is the golden rule.
I’m not a physicist much less an astrophysicist and so take what I’m about to say with a hefty grain of salt. But I wonder if this new approach can also explain observations of distant galaxies. Distant galaxies either redshift because they’re moving away faster over time due to dark energy or redshift because their mass is changing. Can this new theory help explain why older galaxies might lose increasing mass over time?
Are you thinking of thermal radiation? And what does losing mass have to do with cooling down?
We observe redshift in the spectrum. Hydrogen emits radiation in very specific frequencies, which are redshifted. This cannot be explained by losing mass, heat or energy.
