I wouldn’t be surprised if states like Idaho and Florida that don’t have functioning public health departments start having TB outbreaks to go with their measles outbreaks once the CDC is decimated and can’t provide a backstop anymore.
Something I've learned from 404 media is journalism actually has a fine business model. People are willing to pay for good journalism.
The problem is (much like the rest of the economy) what passes for news media is incredibly top heavy and bloated with managers, executives, and shareholders who suck up money without providing any value.
For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors hired for nepotism reasons. The NYT is full of people like that who do nothing but trot out right wing editorials supporting whatever war the US is involved in[4] or attacking people who think the world can be a better place[3]. I used to pay for The Atlantic but for every Ed Yong writing amazing science articles there's a right wing editor like Jeffrey Goldberg[1] sucking up money and shitting out right wing propaganda[2].
This article[0]from 404 said it well.
>Then I went to work for VICE, and made working at VICE part of my identity. I wanted the company to succeed so badly because I believed in what we were doing and I believed in the institution. I worked zillions of hours of unpaid overtime, took on side projects, canceled vacations to do work, worked on vacations, and made incredibly hard decisions, thinking that, if I did my job well enough, the company would succeed and we would get to keep doing what we were doing. I spent the vast majority of that time doing work that made money for an over-bloated apparatus that existed to make a bunch of middle managers and executives large salaries and bonuses and to benefit a founder who is now retroactively denigrating our work in an attempt to cling to whatever relevancy he can find by catering to conspiracy theorists and the right.
I hope journalists leave the old right wing media like the NYT and Washington Post and start their own things focusing on journalism. I gladly pay for that.
> For every journalist there are 15 managers and editors
Really? I don't believe this at all. I have not seen a properly edited published piece online in over a decade, and it continues to get worse. From obvious spelling errors and sentence fragments to full blown loss of coherent thoughts. The obviousness of multiple contributors' work being mashed together with the same information being repeated multiple times within the piece clearly shows that no editor is looking over the work at all. No editor worth their salt would allow that kind of work.
Right, English is just a plain bad way to tell a computer to do something. The signal to noise ratio is too low and references are too ambiguous.
You see this with the ridiculous "prompt engineering" crap that has sprung up where people are slowly reinventing programming languages but completely unspecified. Something that could be specified in 4 lines of godforesaken YAML ends up taking 40000 words of very bizarre English and using enough energy to roast a whole pig.
I looked into this "ClearChoice" company and unsurprisingly it's private equity owned through a chain of sketchy intermediaries.
If you're having any sort of medical or other work done make sure the company is not PE owned or affiliated. The best way to check that I've found is to look for press releases.
In this case there's a press release from 2020[0] about "The Aspen Group" acquiring ClearChoice. The Aspen Group then is owned by PE firms[1] and is already being sued in multiple states for deceptive practices that hurt patients.
There might be one case somewhere that could be found where a firm that technically counts as PE isn't shady but in general the very idea of private equity is shady so it follows that all the PE firms would be shady also.
The point of PE isn't to run sustainable businesses that provide quality products and services for customers while treating their employees well. The point is to rapidly suck all the value out of businesses by loading them up with debt, breaking laws, mistreating customers, and exploiting employees. What happens to the carcass of the business or to the customers and employees whose lives have been destroyed doesn't matter to them.
>The point of PE isn't to run sustainable businesses that provide quality products and services for customers while treating their employees well. The point is to rapidly suck all the value out of businesses by loading them up with debt, breaking laws, mistreating customers, and exploiting employees. What happens to the carcass of the business or to the customers and employees whose lives have been destroyed doesn't matter to them.
This is an overly-broad statement. Private equity just means... equity that's private (ie. not on public markets). SpaceX is technically private equity. SoftBank's Vision Fund is private equity. There might be problems with those companies/funds, but "rapidly suck all the value out of businesses by loading them up with debt" is not one of them.
The implication, which is well understood, is that the "equity" in "private equity" exists in the form of investments in other companies by the PE business. No reasonable person would agree that ownership of one's own business counts as "private equity."
So SpaceX doesn't count at all. SoftBank, being a VC-like business aimed at speculation on new businesses rather than sacking and looting existing ones, is debatable.
No. That is not how language works. "Money laundering" does not mean putting paper bills into a washing machine. "Private equity" firms are a specific business structure besides the literal meaning.
"Money laundering is the process of illegally concealing the origin of money obtained from illicit activities such as [...]"
Seems like I'm using the terms properly, and you're trying to inject extra connotations. What you're doing with '"Private equity" firms are a specific business structure besides the literal meaning' is basically the same as loudly proclaiming "all cyclists are assholes" and then walking it back with 'No. That is not how language works. "cyclists" does not mean people riding bikes. When I use "cyclists" I don't actually mean all cyclists, only the bad ones.'
Everyone at the table understood what was meant by "private equity", the term has entered common parlance. Pulling out the dictionary just makes the "whoosh" sound even louder.
So you'd be fine with statements like "cyclists are assholes", or maybe even "undocumented migrants are assholes"? After all, in both cases you could argue that you're not meant to take those groups literally, only the bad elements within those groups. This is even a pretty common refrain by some. ie. "oh I don't hate all migrants, just the ones that's causing trouble". Where do you draw the line between "it's fine to seemingly bash an entire group of people because everyone knows you're not literally bashing the entire group" and "false rhetoric"?
Some are good but then think about it this way, most of them look forward to leveraging debt. Which easily puts them in a position, (with for ex. the current high interest rate environment), in which they are trapped.
And ^ above we're just talking about the ones that seek long-term investment. The ones that look for a quick flip in 6-10 years? Hard to trust them
While I have no particular love of private equity firms, Buffett didn't actually say that in that video.
The closest thing he said was that he had seen a number of proposals from private equity funds where the returns were not calculated in a way he would consider honest.
Something people may not realize is that the fish that swim upstream to spawn and then die become food for more than just fat bears.
The carcasses also fertilize the land surrounding the river. The trees take up the fertilizer and are more successful than they would otherwise be[0]
This is a virtuous cycle as the trees provide shade to the salmon eggs and the tree parts that fall into the river provide habitat for insects that the young fish eat[1].
And don't forget states with those policies are losing OB/GYNs and other medical professionals rapidly[0] so even if you don't care about abortion your medical care or the medical care of the women you love is going to be shit (even by US standards) if you get stuck there.
Women are dying not only because they have pregnancies that should be terminated due to nonviability but also because doctors are afraid of treating them while they're pregnant[1].
Any company with a shred of care for their female employees and the families of their male employess should be leaving those states.
This is something I think people are missing but which is really important.
AWS is flailing now and pissing off all the competent workers. Those who have the skill will leave for newer gen cloud companies without the baggage like Fly or Tailscale or even Oxide. Or they'll start their own thing.
So do you really want your whole company's compute environment running on infrastructure managed by burnt out and low skilled people?
This might be the start of the migrations from the first generation infrastructure focused cloud services to the new more application focused services.
I gotta say don't sleep on this article thinking it's just another article about IPv6 adoption stats.
There's a lot of interesting thought in the second half about what the Internet fundamentally is and where it's going. The author argues that the use of TLS and SNI has fundamentally changed the internet from a number based routing network to a network based on DNS names and SNI where the numbers involved don't really matter anymore.
> Where is this heading in the longer term? We are pushing everything out of the network and over to applications. Transmission infrastructure is becoming an abundant commodity. Network sharing technology (multiplexing) is decreasingly relevant. We have so much network and computing resources that we no longer have to bring consumers to service delivery points. Instead, we are bringing services towards consumers and using the content frameworks to replicate servers and services With so much computing and storage the application is becoming the service, rather than just a window to a remotely operated service.
I'd still love to have a dedicated IP address associated to the house so I didn't need a contract to dish up a blog & photos for my 3 friends. I'm sure P2P would make it much harder to extract money from people.
