peezd

There is some variety, but a very common model in Private Equity is to acquire an asset (a company), and fund that acquisition through either equity or debt.

The ability to purchase often comes in through either Private fund investments or via Debt.

* Private funds are most often drawdown funds (Private equity funds, VC Funds, Real Estate Funds, etc.). These are managed funds not available on public markets, typically require a substantial commitment of funds, and generally in return these investors can expect a significant return on their capital.

* Debt was a very popular way to finance these purchases as well when interests rate were lower, and you expect to sell the asset/company before the debt comes due. Basically cheap money made this feasible/possible.

The expectations are typically 5-10 years for both of these funding models; with private funds, they expect to run for X years, long enough to acquire the assets, clean them up, and resell them at a profit. For debt, the expectation was to sell before the debt came due, along the same timeline.

So that's the backdrop.

The primary concern here is around investments in tech and SaaS companies impacting both models. SaaS has contracted quite a bit with pressure from AI and valuations are lower.

The article is focused on the debt financed path; PE hasn't been able to sell companies as quickly as they would like or at a price they would like, so they are sitting on the books. And for companies purchased using a combination or private funds, they have companies they can't unload for the price they would like. The funds that are in this state where they cannot sell remaining portfolio companies without realizing losses are called zombie funds.

Yeah, it's rarely not fixed, and a lot was tied to the historic expectation of the investment being at most ~5-7 years.

Closely related, you can read about the PE Zombie funds that cover a lot of this debt.

Yeah, I'm still on a 2021 M1 Pro and the only real complaint is that the battery has weakened somewhat, but still fine. and if I really cared I would probably figure out what to do to get firefox from being such a constant drain.

Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.

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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.

The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.

Netflix has done a good job demonstrating customers will complain but won't cancel, so not super surprised by this.

Nope, at least not on the platform I'm on. Just get the popup when accessing media when there is an update and can automate it or schedule for evening, but no way to automatically update it.

But the contribution limit on the traditional IRA is much lower though.

This is prevalent among the big ski consolidators (Vail Resorts, Alterra) year over year.

Yeah was about to post this, this reads that it's the PERM program so just about the path to getting a Greencard, different from H1B1s, etc.

They either didn't kiss the right ass or pay the right bribe within the current administration I imagine.

One of my first DVD experiences was the original Blade film, and it had an alternate ending available to play.

That blew my mind and was an awesome experience. In the age of dial-up internet it wasn't like you could find and / or watch that online.

Comes down to your level of empathy I guess.

I think there's a basic floor for how we should treat other people, regardless of the circumstances. Things like access to food and water, shelter, etc.

I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it, but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.

It's just a standard reintermediation play, inject yourself in the middle of a supply chain, and then once established squeeze the living shit out of both sides.

Also use exploitation of regulation (e.g. leveraging contractors via 1099s to access cheap labor and indemnification from liability) to your advantage .

this was the model of like 2/3 of the 'startups' in the 2010s.

It's been somewhat established that having a wiped or basic phone is in itself sus and reason for them to investigate you further.