I'm torn. On the one hand, this is not too uncommon of a problem to run into. On the other, poor practices from coworkers are not going to go away thanks to a language filter.
So, the question will come down to which causes more grief, people abusing this convention, or people that overly use the language features that combat it? It is the standard optimization question between poor practices and enforcement that you have in any question of enforcement.
I would be delighted if we could get some empirical data on this.
Vision is hilarious as it is more than just a solution looking for a problem. It was also desperately avoiding the current market that exists for it. Anything but games, it seemed.
I am curious at what age hand preference develops. And can you exert any influence on that development?
In particular, I would expect the influences to be somewhat counter intuitive. With things like having to use the left hand to hold a caregiver's hand in early walking preferencing the right for accessory use. At infant ages, it would be neat to see if preference of holding a baby on a side influences things.
I’m a leftie from a 50% leftie family. Apparently I showed my left handedness as a baby when grasping for things and hardly used my right hand.
My mother was also a leftie, but in her generation she was forced to write with her right hand. The net result being she could write equally well with both hands. When I learnt this I tried to copy it.
Right, I know that dexterity in a hand is largely a teachable thing.
And, similarly, I don't think this is unique to hands. It is just that most people don't know what their "dominant" foot or eye are. (I'm now curious to know about dominant ears. That is almost certainly a thing?)
My question is largely one of curiosity to know when the dominance fully sets in.
The introduction of this article makes reference to a couple of papers (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16827-y ) that handedness is observable in utero but cautions small sample sizes for these studies.
Right, my question was more meant for how well established that is. And if it is open to influence. My searches made it look like it was not positive that handedness was fixed until a bit later. Still before formal schooling, but not necessarily in babies.
The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative.
I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be.
But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software projects than any other company? They are still largely an ads company, no?
I mean, ads is 73% of revenue. Of the rest, ~60% is Cloud, ~35% is hardware and subscriptions and app store fees.
So, sure, lots of spots for software there. But still nothing that would make me think of them as a software company. Or, worse, a lot of software that I don't have a strongly favorable view on. :D
If GCP was its own company it would almost be a Fortune 50 company on its own. Youtube would be a Fortune 100 company. That seems a lot more successful than most software companies.
Question is if it got there purely on the merits of the software? Marketing and general infrastructure build out were far more influential in their rise.
Again, I am not meaning this as a knock on their strategy. It is valid and is producing real results. I just don't think their unified IDE is a meaningful contributor to it. The equivalent of boots on the ground is far more of a contributor there.
I had similar complaints about AWS back in the day. It wasn't a lack of ML offering in AWS that made Amazon Photos less useful than Google's photo offering. Despite what some internal folks would say.
Google has chosen to invest all across the stack in numerous ways. Why do they have 180k people working for them? Because they design their own racks, build their own machines, built their own network, designed their own databases, built their own scheduler, created their own build system, and yes invested in developer tools. I don't know what the coefficients are for each one, but you can go find plenty of older software companies that only try a handful of these and skimp on the rest.
I don't believe any of those companies have as many billion dollar successes as Google. They aren't the only company to do this, but they certainly do it at an unprecedented scale.
Are we disagreeing? My point, at large, is that they are able to spend more money on all things than most are. At the level that they spend, it will be easy to build a narrative that makes any particular spend look vital. It would also be easy to build a narrative to show any particular spend is a waste.
My contention would be that none of those narratives is a lie. But none would be that useful on their own, either.
Do they have more success in software products than other companies, though? Most of the software many of us know from them, were acquisitions. They still do heavy acquisitions. Notable that they have double the acquisitions of Amazon. They are on par with IBM. A colossal amount of money spent to make things happen.
So, again, are they that much more successful at software than other companies? They have more hilarious flops than any other company.
Don't get me wrong. I still use some of the stuff. I don't hate them. I don't even think they are particularly bad at things. I just don't think they are any more successful than other software companies. Specifically at the software side of it.
Think for a large tech company, they did a really good job with success in software. For exammple, they were probably the first large tech company to realize AI was actually working, and made it their focus:
And yeah, they did/do a lot through acquistions, but seems like most major companies screw up acquistions. Google has it's fair share of failed acquistions, but especially in the earlier half of the company's lifespan, they really did some great one: Youtube, Google docs, Nest...
maybe am biased, but have always thought Google in general does do it better than most tech companies. think it's their focus on the love of interesting ideas vs the love of money (although, that changes more and more as the company ages)
My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house. Again, I don't mean it as a knock against them, necessarily.
AI is an odd example. For one, a lot of the research there is from acquisitions. Somewhat feeding back to my first point. They also were seen as tripping up on a lot of the current AI race, no?
Referring to DeepMind in the UK? Ah yes, that’s definitely through acquisition.
But even though their AI models aren’t the absolute leaders in every field, all their models are near the top, across the board. Yeah, their recognition of this current dominant trend before any other major company has given them a big advantage in the number of fields they’ve applied AI to. For example, by putting their full weight behind DeepMind early on, they had a bunch of models before anyone else dealing with topics from protein folding to playing games. Think for them, this might be the right strategy. Explore as much in AI as you can, and figure out the ways it is truly revolutionary. Don’t focus so much on creating products that will make money today or even in near future. Take the long view… hmm, actually, a good example of this is Waymo, it seemed stalled out a few years ago, but is the clearly the best self-driving cars currently out there and finally growing market share.
Also, it was their researchers who kicked off the LLM race with their seminal paper on transformers in 2017 (yeah, they should have released an LLM first, but think they have made up for it since then).
Yeah, am trying not to be overly enthusiastic, but still, despite a couple of big mistakes in AI, they seem to have made mostly correct calls for the past ~10 years. It’s an impressive track record at least to me.
Similarly, I'm not trying to be overly damning. And again, I don't think what they are doing is necessarily a bad strategy. I just don't think of them when I think of good software practices, sadly. If anything, I think the opposite. In that there are few things more unstable than trying to take on a dependency of something they have done.
Do they largely make this work for them internally? Seems so, yes. But taking on any sort of dependency to Google is something you can only do if you can keep up with their very large developer base.
> My point on the acquisitions was that a surprising amount of their successful software was not made in house.
First, that's just not true. Their biggest products by revenue (search/adwords) and biggest stock value driver (AI/Gemini/Datacenters) are clearly in-house creations.
But even then, the two biggest "acquisitions" you're probably thinking of are YouTube and Android, acquired in 2006 and 2005 respectively. What fraction of the software base of those products do you think has survived the intervening two decades? To be blunt: most of the software being shipped out of those groups is being authored by engineers who couldn't even read when the ancestral code existed outside of Google.
Honestly the "acquisition" thing is just a cope meme promulgated by Apple stans, as it were. It's not a serious point.
I mean... First, I don't think acquisitions are automatically a bad thing. And I was largely riffing on the list the post I responded to started. Youtube, Google Docs, and Nest were all acquisitions. As noted, we can add Android.
Do these also take a lot of effort to keep going? Absolutely! But that doesn't change that they acquire a ton. They just acquired Wiz this year.
I do question a lot of the focus on a unified IDE when it comes to this strategy. It is not surprising that there is a specific "discontinued google acquisitions" page in wikipedia with that in mind.
The thing to remember about Google and software is that consumers don't see the vast majority of the software it produces and uses, from the distributed filesystem colossus (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...) to an enormous number of other internal projects just as complicated as that.
It's user-facing stuff may or may not be great--and the consumer level flops are legendary--but that is only the tip of the software iceberg.
Certainly fair. But they have tried some amusingly ambitious projects that make it pretty easy to raise eyebrows. Stadia alone is enough to make me nervous on any efforts they announce that are ambitious.
Stadia was pretty technically awesome, and also a rounding error on Google's overall engineering budget.
"Ambitious" engineering means something very different inside of Google. Example: Spanner. Infra Spanner is correctly described as a "generational achievement". Very few people outside of Google have any idea that it exists, or what it does, and that's fine.
Stadia was yet another platform that Google tried to make and failed. Yes, it was a rounding error in their budget, but that is largely the point!
They have become a financing company that is looking for where to spend money to make money. That they are spending a lot of money on developers will only last as long as that makes them money.
Again, this is not, necessarily, bad. I just don't trust them to make a software product that will survive outside of their garden.
Google is an ads company with a large amount of infrastructure to back it up.
Sure, the money is mostly in ads, but serving searches, AI, youtube, and all the rest at the scale Google does it requires a technical tour-de-force. Does Google do it better than everyone? Absolutely not. But it does it better than many.
Certainly it isn't the _only_ way to do it--other companies also manage to do it. But not all that many at the same scale. It's an existence proof that you can.
Most of what they do really really well, though, is accomplished by massive amounts of spending. That isn't a knock on it.
Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.
There are things people do in Borg that when ported to our own public cloud kills entire regions. Sure you get limited choice but things work at global scale without thought
For the example of an account, moving to double entry accounting is probably the correct move. With an external reconciliation process to take action if they don't match.
But, that "external" part is what trips up a lot of people. Few things are confined to only exist within the database. Such that sometimes you can't do locks that accurately portray what we can order outside of the computer system. Think legal clawbacks and the like.
Fair. It would help if the examples didn't always fallback to processes that should have reconciliation procedures to cover when they differ. Double entry accounting combined with the necessary follow on processes can't be "coded away."
Which is to say that I am definitely indexing on the idea that you would try and get a query language to encode processes being the problem, here.
I contest this. There is no correct "step from" in this. There is a post-hoc explanation for why a lot of things work. And there is some benefit in regularity. But most of this is, as stated, post hoc.
Consider, how do you read "f=ma", or "e=mc^2"? Why don't those follow the same rules? They use the same symbols as our alphabets, after all?
Or consider "do re mi" is pronounced differently from "do re me". And, amusingly, most people will not read those correctly. This doesn't rob the names of the notes as meaningless. Nor does it mean that they are not taught correctly. But you learn to interact with the symbols. Not merely transcribe them between representations.
"Reading is almost phonetic" is a largely meaningless phrase. There are some orthographies that are more regular than others. But, indeed, the very confusion people love to talk about with English only works if it is phonetic, but ambiguous.
And just solving for one form of ambiguity does not, necessarily, help. Consider contronyms. Words that are literally their own opposites.
I'm convinced the main thing lost in getting kids to read, is that too many mistake interaction with the words as automatic. It isn't. Taking apart a word symbol by symbol and putting it back together in a different form is the entire point of teaching how to read. And if you don't teach kids to do that with words, are you surprised when they can't do it with equations?
I think you misunderstand. In a largely phonetic language, almost everyone learns to read in one school semester, after which it's a fully solved problem - no spelling bees or anything. Peculiarly, you don't need spelling bees either when learning English later. ("Contronyms" and "words" are orthogonal to reading as they apply to spoken language too (and it's very much automatic).)
I think you don't understand the various orthographies.
Again, you base the claim that English is not phonetic based on confusions in how different phonemes are represented using the 26 symbols of our alphabet. A thing that is defined as symbols representing phonemes. You could also have a syllabary or a logography. The syllabary would still be phonetic, of course. A logographic writing system is truly not phonetic. Think emoji.
And, of course, I'm summarizing very very briefly.
Of course, you don't have to believe me; you could also read about the orthographic depth of English vs other languages on Wikipedia or something. "In shallow orthographies, the spelling-sound correspondence is direct: from the rules of pronunciation, one is able to pronounce the word correctly.[1] That is to say, shallow (transparent) orthographies, also called phonemic orthographies, have a one-to-one relationship between its graphemes and phonemes, and the spelling of words is very consistent. Examples include Japanese kana, Hindi, Lao (since 1975), Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, Georgian, Latin, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, and Welsh. [--] English is unusual because it combines deep orthography, with multiple possible sounds for many letters.[2] This makes it among the most difficult languages in the world to learn to read." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
From the intro of the page you link: "The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence."
So, sure, if you want to discuss about how English orthography is deep, go for it. I won't even really disagree. Quite the contrary.
The opening claim was that it wasn't phonetic, though. That is a different thing.
It is funny seeing Japanese as the first example in your quote, as it has both a phonetic syllabary (two, actually) and a non-phonetic logography. That is, you literally have to learn to read a non-phonetic orthography in order to read Japanese!
Probably I missed the exact names, I guess I should have used "deep" vs "shallow", instead of "phonetic" vs "not phonetic". The problem is that there are so many rules that it looks like each word has a special rule.
I agree that Spanish also have subtle rules, we have some unusual cases here in Buenos Aires, in es-ar-bue the last "d" in "ciudad" is very faint and we say the "ll" almost like a English "sh" instead or an English "lee".
The other day I was joking with my wife, and I told her that to make the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin:
v -> f
w -> v
ei -> ia [in English, something like "ee ah"]
ie -> ii [in English, something like "ee ee"]
eu -> oi [in English, something like "oh ee"]
sch -> sh [loaned from English, perhaps "y" in pure Spanish but it's confusing]
I probably missed a few cases (like the g), and the pronunciation would not be perfect, but probably close enough to be inteligible by a friendly listener.
I can't imagine how to do a similar table in English, at least a table that enters in a napkin. Let's start with the infamous case of "yesterday" does it sound like "today" or "Friday"? How is the rule? Can you classify all the words in this table https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordfinder/classic/ends/all/... ?
Exactly. Apologies if I made it sound like you didn't have a point. I have a pet peeve against the folks that think we don't have a phonetic alphabet. A combination of words that is largely nonsensical. Alphabets are pretty much definitionally phonetic.
This got particularly bad when we realized that our kid's school was not teaching phonetics, but that the special tutor we hired was running a basic phonetics routine. And that that is really just 44 flashcards for them to work through.
To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly. Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.
All of that is to say, I'm glad you found the discussion interesting! Apologies if my pet peeve came on too strong. :D
I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?
> To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly.
We are also cheating with "ñ" :)
> Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm probably collapsing "ch", "sh", "tsch", "x" and a few more shushy sounds.
I'm ignoring the difference of the German "b" and "w".
I somewhat intentionally forgot "ä", "ö", "ü". (We have an "ü", but the use is very different, it's related to the weird cases of the "g" in Spanish.)
I missed "ß", but that's easy to add to the napkin.
> I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?
Using the "Dora the Explorer" encoding method, I pronounce
today -> too-deh-ee
Friday -> frah-ee-dee (a surprising "ah" in "fri", but a mute "a" in "day")
yesterday -> it depends if you are talking or singing :)
Anyway, my English pronunciation is so bad that I never would confuse "then" and "than", but it looks like it's a common error in some native speakers.
Ah, I think I see. You actually pronounce the "y" in those words? I'm not familiar with any dialects where that is common. I could see it, though. In general, I would expect the pronunciation for all of those is the same. They are all words with the root "day".
I see /təˈdeɪ/ on that page. Per their https://dictionary.cambridge.org/help/phonetics.html page, the eɪ is how they encode what the other site uses ā for. That is, the "ɪ" is not a separate syllable from the "e".
In Western alphabetic languages other than French, English, and Portuguese, not being able to spell the word is virtually identical to not knowing how to say the word.
People who spell words wrong in Spanish are either on the one hand mixing up "k" and "que," "b" and "v," maybe screwing up "c" with "k," "s" and "que" or forgetting the accent placement rules; or on the other hand they've literally heard and said the word incorrectly all their lives.
Also, even the misspellings in Spanish will 99.9% result in perfect pronunciation. The accent rules are just about where you're allowed to omit it, or when you add it to a one-syllable word and it doesn't actually indicate an accent. The error you're most likely to make is to put one in when it is unnecessary.
My apologies if it came across differently; but I'm well aware what a regular orthography is.
I do have a bit of a pet peeve on the stance that English doesn't have a phonetic orthography. It absolutely does. To teach kids otherwise is a massive disservice to the kids.
It is easy to think that all of the exceptions to how things work in English are problematic. The catch, of course, is that many of them are specifically used as fun games to play with the words.
To me, it is the equivalent of planned city centers versus organic variants. Reality is almost certainly that both can work. And there will be preference of folks between the two.
Say you take out a mortgage, then rent the house to a series of meth dealers to extract the rent while devaluing the property, and then default: you're still personally on the hook for any post-foreclosure deficiency judgment. One issue with LBOs is that, after extracting cash and fees, PE funds have various ways to extinguish liabilities that individuals don't, both by shielding the PE fund from debts and the use of bankruptcy and restructuring of the acquired company to discharge liabilities, including those from litigation.
There are various proposals to deal with this, but the most effective are probably imposing joint and several liability on certain kinds of litigation (breaking the "investor veil" and allowing rights of action against PE funds for the actions of their portcos) and limiting business judgment rule protection for directors and senior managers who approve LBO sales that are reasonably foreseeable to end in bankruptcy, which creates personal liability for fiduciaries. In other words, align the financial and personal interests of the individuals and companies involved with those of the acquired entity.
>both by shielding the PE fund from debts and the use of bankruptcy and restructuring of the acquired company to discharge liabilities, including those from litigation.
Who's extending credit to these companies? Individuals can do something similar by declaring bankruptcy. I think banks can be considered sophisticated enough that if they got hosed on a LBO deal, that it's hard to feel sympathy for them.
The people doing the lending can still make a profit. They get their interest payments and have a secured debt against the company. I.e. If interest and repayments until time of bankruptcy + liquidation of assets at bankruptcy is more than you'd get investing elsewhere at lower risk it's still a good investment. It's the other stakeholders (employees/community/unsecured debtors) that lose out.
I mean, if I'm allowed to just make up silly hypotheticals, I can easily justify anything.
Say I raise money for a friend to buy a house and they proceed to rent it out to meth dealers. The friend is the one on the hook for the loans, of course; but would I not be on the hook for at least a reputation hit such that I can't do that again? Or do we think folks can get away with that sort of poor judgement forever?
In that sort of hypothetical the Mortgage bank is likely to take one look at your friend, see you with all the money for the down payment, and decide that you need to at least cosign the loan (if not be solely responsible). You would be on the hook for the reputation (and credit score) hit and certainly still paying off the rest of the loan or face foreclosure and possibly a criminal lawsuit for fraud.
Which yeah, leaves a lot of questions for why this is legal for an LBO. Where's the "credit score" hit on these PE firms doing LBOs? How is it that these investors are allowed to be their own mortgage bank, not require themselves to cosign the very loan they are providing the down payment equity for, and not be liable for damages such as bankruptcy of the entity they put on the hook for the loan?
If you give the friend the money as a gift, you have nothing to do with it, right? if you give it to him as a loan to inflate his assets and don't disclose that then you are committing a Federal crime.
I didn't give any money in that hypothetical. Rather, I convinced a lot of other people to give them the loan. That is, largely, exactly what fundraising is. You convince other people to give money to someone or something.
If people are regularly doing this at my request, and it is constantly going to someone that just burns the money, how are people still taking my requests?
Yes. That doesn't change my question, here. You can arrange to bootstrap another company. It could go bust in a way that you are not on the hook for any money, but you should be on the hook for the things you did. That is the entirety of my point.
The hypotheticals being pushed on this thread have a foregone conclusion that the arranging party is completely free of any hit.
The hypotheticals seem to be in line with reality though. This business model works because the people who make money are the ones who are in control of whether to do it. Liquidating a large company in bankruptcy can get a lot of the money back for the investors while leaving a smoking ruin where it used to be generating economic value.
Are they, though? There are certainly some cases where it has happened, but I don't think it has been established that that is the norm.
Naive searching on the term shows that they common in PE, and they do have a worse default rate at 20% over 2% otherwise. Certainly something to look at more closely. And I would be nervous being party to one. That said, 80% success is still better than what some companies are looking at otherwise.
It is a thorny question. The best way I can square the difference is that generally buying a house with debt is on the debtor and the house itself is collateral. The debtor can't pay back the loan the house is taken by the bank to be sold. Where as a PE leveraged by out the debtor is the target company. A company is different than real estate in that they are a legal entity that is now responsible to pay back a loan equal to their own value. The collateral is the business, but the business is now illiquid and has to sell of real assets and go bankrupt.
For example, Joanne's Fabrics was a profitable business with a fair amount of real estate. After PE bought them and was saddled with unreasonable debt they were in the red and had to sell all their stores. This removed useful and profitable business from the economy and sold off the assets in a fire sale. Where as me losing a house just means a bank now owns it and someone else can buy it. But if someone were to buy Joanne's they'd have to pay off the debt Joanne's owed for being bought and run into the ground
There is a long practice of having cosigners on home loans. This feels basically like that.
Which, granted, if you don't like the idea of establishing a company to take on loan responsibilities, I am not trying to offer a defense of that. Was a legit question of how you would structure it so that this is illegal, but home/auto loans are not.
A cosigner is different than what's happening in leveraged buy outs. A Cosigner is financially responsible if the debtor cannot pay back their portion of the loan. In a Leveraged buyout the purchaser does not take on financial liability for the debt, that is all placed on the company being purchased. This means that if the purchaser isn't even the cosigner in this scenario; the company being purchased is the sole entity responsible for repayment. So if GameStop goes through with this, but Ebay can't repay the debt than Ebay would suffer graver consequences than GameStop
But the biggest reason the purchaser does not have to cosign that loan is because in an LBO the purchaser is also essentially the mortgage bank for that loan. Should that be allowed?
Fair, but the nefarious scenarios people are talking about should at least be a major reputational hit for the people that did the fund raising. We are literally describing a ton of value getting destroyed. Someone is taking that hit.
It would be functionally the same as what you described if the parent company took on the debt, but that’s not how they do it. They make the purchased entity take on the debt. Hence why you often see mass layoffs in the company that was acquired soon after the deed was done. The company has so much debt it can barely function and the easiest way to pay some back is redirecting salaries at it.
Then once you realize why private equity firms do this, how their leaders have extreme monetary incentives to squeeze value out of companies in ways not limited to this, you realize why it’s insane how we have basically zero regulation on it.
Home owns are owned by people, not the home itself. If someone fails to pay a loan, their own credit score will be impacted
For these PE loans, its the new company that takes on the debt, not the buyer. Essentially any broke person can "afford" any trillion dollar company this way
Home loans are secured by the asset (the home). It's comparable to stock, but it's a less liquid asset.
Any broke person can afford a trillion dollar loan, if they can convince the bank that their house is worth 1.8 trillion dollars. But is that really possible?
Loan companies do due diligence so if GameStop is $A and eBay is worth $A + $B, then so long as $A/$B remains the same, the acquiring company owns two assets worth the full price of the loan.
It doesn't seem to be a scam to me. Am I missing something?
The difference is that when you buy a home the debt is in your name and you are required to pay it off. In a leveraged buy out wouldn't be to person taking out the loan, the debt is owned by the target of the purchase. If it were like a home loan and this deal goes south GameStop would go bankrupt and have to sell it's own assets to cover the losses. But in reality the debt from the deal would be owned by Ebay and if GameStop can't pay the loan back it'd force Ebay into bankruptcy and sell Ebay's assets. It's essentially a riskless move by GameStop and PE in general. Heads GameStop wins tails Ebay loses
There are other categories of real estate loans where the debt is against the property itself. The lender evaluates the property's income and expenses when underwriting the loan.
Fair point, it's a corporation taking out the loan so there's nobody to go after if the company goes under the way there is if the value of your house tanks and you stop paying your mortgage. But doesn't the bank take that risk into account when deciding whether to issue the loan? Why should that be illegal?
The way I’m reading your question, it seems like you are looking for the law to follow philosophically consistent principles.
That is simply not the case and lawmakers can make any kind of law to shape the society how we wish. If leveraged buyouts are creating problems for the country, then it’s totally valid to make them illegal in certain cases.
The problem is that people can take loans without financial liability (not how home purchases work) and drive profitable businesses (which are good for the economy) into the ground (bad for the economy and society).
No one is worried about the bank making the loan in this situation. They are concerned that PE is buying up large parts of the economy using debt they aren't responsible for, which makes them irresponsible owners because they do not face consequences when the moves fail
> which makes them irresponsible owners because they do not face consequences when the moves fail
Again, isn't that entirely the bank's problem? They're responsible for the debt if the company can't pay it, right? I agree on the surface this seems like a bad deal for the bank, but what makes you think you know better than the bank so much so that they shouldn't even be allowed to take that risk?
Leaving aside that the new company is the buyer; the point remains that home and car loans are leveraged loans. With the main asset in the leverage being that which is being bought. Defaulting on that loan results in the assets going to the lender.
If a lender builds a pattern of lending to people that can't make the payments, that lender will take a hit. If we think that isn't happening, why? And how could we return us to that?
Or, back to my question, how would you structure a legal framework where some loans can be done this way, but others could not? (I can think of a few ways, largely curious if I have a blind spot here.)
In a home loan, the borrower buys a house and pledges that house as collateral. The debt is the buyer’s obligation. The house does not have to “pay the mortgage” by laying off the kitchen, selling the roof, or cutting maintenance. The borrower uses outside income to service the debt.
In an LBO, a private equity buyer often buys a company using a large amount of debt, but the debt is typically placed on the acquired company’s balance sheet or serviced from that company’s cash flows. In effect, the target company helps pay for its own acquisition. That is the key difference.
In a lot of LBO schemas, the acquirer loads the target with, abusing leverage to maximize its returns, but this leaves the company with very little margin errors, any hiccup in the economy, and Kabum! The company goes under, an once viable company closes its doors, employees lose their jobs and local economies suffer. Meanwhile, the PE entity walks with as much cash as it could extract from the acquired company and debt-free.
Some PEs also go one step ahead, make the acquired company borrow more money, not to invest in the business, or restructure debt, but to pay a dividend to them.
In other cases, PE companies acquire a controlling block and then use it to make the company sell their assets to them, to be immediatelly leased back to the company. Then, there is also the practice of extracting all kins of "monitoring fees", "advisory fees", "consulting fees", etc. for services that are vague and frequently of questionable value.
PE companies also frequently engage in overly agressive cost-cutting to manipulate the EBITDA in the short run to sell the company at a appreaciated valuation, but hurting the long term value creation potential of the company and the quality of their services.
For PE, sometimes even bankruptcy is a business strategy.
Technically the lender is the purchaser in the LBO which is also why this is so much the purchased company having to pay for its own purchase. Which seems to me like the easiest part to regulate: require third party lenders who can also audit the details of the loan terms and fees.
If you are talking smaller arrays, linear search with a sentinel value at the end is already tough to beat. The thing that sucks about that claim, is that "smaller" is such a nebulous qualifier that it is really hard to internalize.
Prior to the current generation Intel designs, Apple’s branch predictor tables were a good deal larger than Intel’s IIRC, so depending on benchmarking details it’s plausible that Apple Silicon was predicting every branch perfectly in the benchmark, while Intel had a more real-world mispredict rate. Perf counters would confirm.
So, the question will come down to which causes more grief, people abusing this convention, or people that overly use the language features that combat it? It is the standard optimization question between poor practices and enforcement that you have in any question of enforcement.
I would be delighted if we could get some empirical data on this.
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