Wouldn't it be more clear to say that for hiring approach, now the unexpected burden of tagging on a new 100k fee works as a negative coloring (as it I think intends (ostensibly)) to these candidates then? How was the 100k already priced in?
"It just means that there’s a lot of low-quality stuff under the same label, which has made that label questionable, and if you want to sift through it you have to be ready to filter for quality yourself... At some level GA is trying to “democratize” geometry."
Hit me just now reading the case against GA linked in this thread, maybe the same way Munger remarks on Costco's counter-intuitive membership fee, the notation and systems of "real" math as we encounter them like you say in Wikipedia is the field's membership fee keeping out the riff-raff from overwhelming the gathering place and making the entire store burn down.
"But the point is to make the existing math more intuitive, not to discover new results. The fact that research mathematics is generally not concerned with making calculation and intuition easier to think about is, I think, a giant failure that it will eventually regret. There’s as much value in making things easy to use as there is in discovering them."
Is there a direct relation or something specific you were going to draw in mentioning the history of the Jews in England and the history and particularities of the City of London? That the Jews performed the interest loans on behalf of and/or within the City of London possibly or something like that?
Jews were historically associated with practices like moneylending largely due to the religious quirks I mentioned.
Go forward a few centuries and you have things like Shakespeare's moneylender from the Merchant of Venice, Shylock. This was no accident. It reveals both the reality of the time and attitudes towards Jews. This was such a powerful literary figure that the word "shylock" entered the lexicon.
Anyway here's another history [1]:
> The Jews came principally from Rouen - a great center of Jewish life in Northern France. It is well known that William brought them over as so called "feudal Jews" to be Royal serfs, the king's own chattels, providing him with financial services and income ...
> Though their principal function was to be money lenders, the London Jews did in reality they did follow a variety of other trades and callings
To this day, not one person in the spec reviews in whatever overseas OEM electronics or those split AC units (which are fantastic in one regard) reflects on persistent light in a room where people are sleeping? The worst is encountering AC units when arriving at a hotel that do not have a "display" button to turn off the 20C display in white LED. Are the actual people that make these and make those decisions just tougher or they're just ignorant?
Lately we had both our tenants in our other house (on the same lot) leave, my wife trapped two stray cats inside the house, one escaped, and we are trying to tame the one who stayed.
I moved the TV, XBOX, a $50 PC and almost all of my optical discs (but no books) over there because (1) I won't be so mad if a copy of Disney's Frozen gets pissed on (he's a tom), and (2) if it does the disc will be undamaged and at worst I can discard the package.
That room gets really dark and it doesn't have a switch controlling an overhead light so turning off a floor lamp and then sneaking out the door without creating an opening for the cat to escape (though he's much more inclined to hide than run) leaves me quite happy for the little LEDs and stuff that create just enough light to get from the couch to the door.
Other end goals than making people happy by serving good quality shrimps for a reasonable price? Obviously they do.
Other end goals than making money? Of course they don't. But neither did Ray Kroc, who was extremely upfront about how McDonald's is a business whose strategy is to acquire real estate, funded by burger sales. Neither do the Waltons, who aggressively cut margins on all their products and compete to drive other retailers out of business. (Neither does General Mills, who used to own Red Lobster, nor Darden Restaurants, the public spin-off that owned Olive Garden and Red Lobster, nor Starboard Value, the activist investor that pushed for Red Lobster to be sold.) None of these companies exists because of a high-minded commitment to customer service, or fair play, or delicious food.
If turning a viable restaurant chain into a chain that no one wants to go to and then selling it is an attractive business proposition for private equity, than it should be for McDonald's and Walmart too. Unless you can point to some specific causal connection between the ownership structure and the decision about whether or not a restaurant should serve stuff that people actually want to eat?
The example of McDonald's acquiring value through real estate, funded by the business, is pretty poingnant, considering the PE firm here did the exact opposite: sold all the valuable real estate and rented it back from the buyer under crippling rent payments, funded by the business.
Why did the PE firm do that when McDonald's didn't?
Because the PE firm had partners who bought the underlying real estate for themselves.
I'm sure that there are PE firms that really do try to make businesses successful and profitable, but the vast majority are in it to sell off anything of value and dump all the ensuing debt into a company that will shortly go bankrupt.
If you own a company, and a PE firm buys one of your clients, that should be a hint to require prepayment for everything they ask for after that. They will leave you holding the bag as a creditor.
Your first point: this would obviously be serious fraud. I'm not sure if you have any evidence of this in this particular case or is you are alleging this is standard practice by PE funds?
Your second point: why would someone lend money to a company which was going to go bankrupt? If PE firms always made the companies they controlled bankrupt, no one would lend to them.
Your third point: if someone buys a company from you, how does it make you a creditor of the bought company?
It’s not fraud if the sales are advertised and fair… even if they’re not widely publicized. But that was just spitballing.
For 2), people loan to the PE firm because they extract all the value for themselves. Their creditors get paid. People who loan to PE-controlled firms don’t seem terribly wise to me, but maybe they can model them like junk bonds.
For 3), if the firm buys one of your clients, be cautious.
