> Banks are lending to private equity firms to fund purchases of businesses.
Yes some businesses are SaaS but here's the real problem: Many businesses' sole purpose is _leveraged buy-outs_ which really is the devil in disguise.
It goes like this: A VC specialising in veterinary clinics finds a nice, privately owned town clinic with regular customers and "fair" prices, approach the owners saying "we love the clinic you've built! We'll buy your clinic for $2,500,000! You've really earned your exit!".
So now the VC lends the money from the bank, buys the clinic, and here's the important part: _they push the debt onto the clinic's books_. So all of a sudden the nice town clinic has $2,500,000 in debt, raise prices accordingly, ~~burn out personnel~~ slim operations accordingly, and any surplus that doesn't go to interest and amortization goes straight to the VC.
> The ad’s central message—that US allies should pay their fair share—remains a core principle of Trump’s foreign policy today. His longstanding skepticism of NATO, confrontations with international leaders, and demands for more financial contributions from allied nations all stem from the ideas he publicly expressed in 1987.
Interesting, and black magic as far as I'm concerned. How does that algorithm translate onto the Rubik's cube (which I evidently never learned to solve)?
We're missing a piece of middleware technology. Imagine a network like Reddit or IMDB that:
a) offers posting under anonymity,
b) allows users to associate with exactly one physical passport,
c) has no knowledge of who an account belongs to,
d) allows for filtering on content by passport-authenticated users.
Unless The People do something, it's probably going to be much more than four years. I think the administration, whoever that is, is far from brain dead, even if their puppets may be.
I think you're making your route to market overly complicated by calling it autonomous. Just call it what it is – a drone with a AI navigation system. As long as a person commands it and monitors it (and thus _is responsible_), there's no reason to call it autonomous.
I know a large retailer that sells electric screw drivers for €19 a piece. I also know from the chinese manufacturer's backwaters that it's deliberately designed to last for 12 minutes. That's roughly two years in the hand of an average non-professional, who will probably go back and buy another since it was so cheap.
These tools don't have a second-hand market. The expensive built-to-last ones do.
> FTA: This same counterintuitive relationship between efficiency and outcome occurs in machine learning.
The "examples abound, in politics, economics, health, science, and many other fields" isn't a relationship between efficiency and outcome, but rather measuring and efficiency, or measuring and outcome. I think a better analogy is Heissenberg's uncertainty principle – the more you measure the more you (negatively) affect the environment you're measuring.
I always thought that the idea behind antitrust laws was that if an entity reaches total market dominance and uses that dominance to keep other out of the game, the entity should be split into competing entities.
What I'm seeing however is nothing more than toothless, political pointing sticks.
Both IBM, Microsoft and Google have clearly at some point obtained total domination of their markets. Consequently they've all found themselves at the antitrust chopping blocks, however these companies have become so important to the economy that actual verdicts are reduced to a "carry on, just don't exert your dominance too much".
Yes some businesses are SaaS but here's the real problem: Many businesses' sole purpose is _leveraged buy-outs_ which really is the devil in disguise.
It goes like this: A VC specialising in veterinary clinics finds a nice, privately owned town clinic with regular customers and "fair" prices, approach the owners saying "we love the clinic you've built! We'll buy your clinic for $2,500,000! You've really earned your exit!".
So now the VC lends the money from the bank, buys the clinic, and here's the important part: _they push the debt onto the clinic's books_. So all of a sudden the nice town clinic has $2,500,000 in debt, raise prices accordingly, ~~burn out personnel~~ slim operations accordingly, and any surplus that doesn't go to interest and amortization goes straight to the VC.
Debt and collateral on the veterinary clinics.
Risk free revenue to the VC.