kacey's recent activity
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Comment on Can we bury enough wood to slow climate change? in ~enviro
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Comment on Can we bury enough wood to slow climate change? in ~enviro
kacey Link ParentIMO it depends on your definition of good! We're pumping up oil dramatically faster than it can be formed in the Earth's crust (some Reddit armchair scientists guestimate that we're chugging oil...There’s really no good sequestration solution huh?
IMO it depends on your definition of good! We're pumping up oil dramatically faster than it can be formed in the Earth's crust (some Reddit armchair scientists guestimate that we're chugging oil several million times faster than nature can replenish it), and ultimately, it's formed by the same process that we're trying to exploit here: photosynthesis. The fact that we could potentially outpace the Earth's ability to sequester carbon the old fashioned way is rather good to me, imo, and it means that -- assuming modern human civilization doesn't collapse in the next couple hundred years -- there's a chance that our great-great-great-great-great-great grand children can live on a planet without a collapsing biosphere! Genuinely, it feels good to me that we can a see a way out of this, even if it'll take a dramatic amount of effort over several generations. All the more reason to start now :3
If your definition of good is that it solves all of our problems with a wave of a magical wand, I mean, fair enough. Carbon sequestration requires at least as much energy as is released through hydrocarbon combustion, so imo it was thermodynamically doomed to failure: if it were ever economically feasible, we'd be converting trees into oil and undercutting saudi arabian oil production. They tried to do that with algae a couple decades ago and failed miserably, even!
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Comment on Can we bury enough wood to slow climate change? in ~enviro
kacey Link ParentIt takes a fair amount of energy in fairly old plants to create pulp for paper (see the Kraft process for details), where the majority of that energy + emissions are spent in boilers and...It takes a fair amount of energy in fairly old plants to create pulp for paper (see the Kraft process for details), where the majority of that energy + emissions are spent in boilers and regenerators for the various chemical processes needed to purify wood into paper. Very little of that is necessary when using recycled feedstock, so a comparison of recycling vs. vaulting would need to consider whether the offset carbon emissions from the former are greater than the direct gains from the latter.
I'd lean towards no, if only because shipping paper around for this purpose is likely a lot more trouble than growing trees and burying them nearby. But I haven't done the math.
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Comment on Subsync is a stellar program that should have an active maintainer in ~tech
kacey (edited )LinkMy time's a little limited, but I'll be able to contribute to open source projects again soon-ish. From looking at the repo, a reasonably quick contribution could be containerizing the build...My time's a little limited, but I'll be able to contribute to open source projects again soon-ish. From looking at the repo, a reasonably quick contribution could be containerizing the build system + cleaning it up a little. Doing so while preserving my sanity would probably mean focusing on generating binaries for Linux alone, which seems modestly doable in 2025 (Windows and macOS seem to provide support for launching them, with varying degrees of pain).
^ would that be helpful, do you figure? I've never used subsync before, so I don't know if -- for example -- the target userbase wouldn't be able to jump through the necessary hoops to get that working.
(edit) For context, the architecture doc is a decent overview of what the project is. In effect, it's an early ML voice recognition library (pocketsphinx) bolted onto a subtitle reader which attempts to heuristically line them up. Not really rocket science these days either. Tbh a ground up rewrite might be faster than saving the existing project, but it'd lose the name recognition.
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Comment on EA is reportedly about to be sold in a record-setting $50 billion buyout to an investor group that includes private equity and Saudi Arabia in ~games
kacey Link ParentUnderstood, but I’m having difficulty understanding how what you’ve described is materially different than what I said. The PE firm holding that debt seems very unlikely to dip into their other...What happens to you, as a Toys R Us employee, is that you wake up and you are no longer a Toys R Us employee. You are a KKR Employee. KRR is in, amongst other liabilities, $5b in debt.
Understood, but I’m having difficulty understanding how what you’ve described is materially different than what I said. The PE firm holding that debt seems very unlikely to dip into their other investments in order to prop up a failing business, so although the debt is “legally” owned by them, in practice it seems like it’s on the purchased company to pay off that debt. Hence the conception that they own the debt, since they need to pay it off.
I feel like I’m still having a disconnect. I think we’re disagreeing on legal/financial definitions vs impacts on day to day operations?
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Comment on EA is reportedly about to be sold in a record-setting $50 billion buyout to an investor group that includes private equity and Saudi Arabia in ~games
kacey Link Parent(putting this in a separate response, because I didn’t get to it in my previous post) Ah, perhaps I’m misunderstanding something. My perspective is that, as an employee of Toys R Us, my company is...This is a common misconception, but it's not how it works. Let's say firm A buys firm B with an LBO. It does not "saddle" firm B with debt, or pay the debt with "firm B's money". Firm B does not exist anymore. Only Firm A exists - Firm A has assets, some of which were previously known as Firm B. Firm A has debt. Firm A has cash flows.
Firm A pays the interest on Firm A's debt with Firm A's money - that money may come from the assets previously known as Firm B, but money is fungible - whether you consider the debt used to buy Firm B alongside the revenue from the assets that use to belong to Firm B together is just an organizational detail.
(putting this in a separate response, because I didn’t get to it in my previous post)
Ah, perhaps I’m misunderstanding something. My perspective is that, as an employee of Toys R Us, my company is doing OK but is on a slow decline. On a random Tuesday morning, with no changes to anything material for operating the business, the business is now in $5 billion dollars of debt.
Is that not how a leveraged buyout works?
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Comment on EA is reportedly about to be sold in a record-setting $50 billion buyout to an investor group that includes private equity and Saudi Arabia in ~games
kacey (edited )Link ParentAs noted, we have a difference of agreement on what numbers matter here. The people who lost out with actual, spendable dollars were the investors. KKR and Bain might lose some future work, maybe....What is disingenous? PE firms should be viewed at the portfolio level, and that was their portfolio loss, at least per bloomberg numbers.
As noted, we have a difference of agreement on what numbers matter here. The people who lost out with actual, spendable dollars were the investors. KKR and Bain might lose some future work, maybe. Reframing this as a loss on the private equity firm’s part is the point of contention.
You can argue that's true of all employee relationships. The flip side of the coin is that when the firm wins massively, the LPs make the lion's share of the gain. And again, the LPs are essentially the GP's clients. The GP fucking up over and over again is a good way to make sure you don't have any more LPs.
My argument is that making a business out of bankrupting other businesses is amoral and foolish, on a grand economic scale, since you are depriving those affected employees of pensions and income. The cherry on top is that the managers of these firms are also able to walk away, from any job, with millions of dollars.
I don't see what that has to do with my analogy?
Roughly, you were critiquing my perspective that investment firms which walk away with a few dozen million dollars while allowing their investors holding the bill was a success for the investment firm. You aimed to defend this critique by saying my argument is analogous to an employee at a bank issuing bad loans being a successful endeavour, since the employee is paid; which seems ridiculous, therefore making my argument seem ridiculous. I retorted by pointing out that we’ve already seen banks issue bad loans, which was seen as a success — the subprime mortgage crisis — and everyone thought it was a brilliant state of affairs until the bubble burst.
Similarly, we’re currently grinding up a series of businesses and sieving out the entrails for anything valuable. The market currently thinks that this is a brilliant state of affairs, presumably because it can continue forever since there are an unlimited number of businesses to gut.
18% sounds reasonable. It is a risk, and typically occurs with businesses on the down turn, since otherwise the previous owners would not sell. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing.
That is 18% on top of the background rate of 2%. Getting acquired by a private equity firm increases your odds of going bankrupt by 900%. That sounds like an extraordinarily bad deal for the people who stand to lose materially from the situation, ie. the employees, but we can agree to disagree.
(edit) also, note that these are the sentences which initiated this thread:
To start with, people present cases like the buyout of Toys R US as some kind of success for the PE firms - they sucked out the value of the company like "a vampire", it is often characterized. That's just wrong, though. It was a tremendous failure for everyone involved.
The goal is to help illustrate my perspective that, indeed, private equity firms using leveraged buyouts are extraordinarily harmful to everyone (except the PE firm), and to a lesser extent, to illustrate that the Toys R Us bankruptcy was not a tremendous failure for everyone.
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Comment on EA is reportedly about to be sold in a record-setting $50 billion buyout to an investor group that includes private equity and Saudi Arabia in ~games
kacey Link ParentI think this is a disingenuous way to view things: However I didn’t call you out on it, since I figured the numbers that article quoted were a little fuzzy (which they were). Also, as the Axios...This seems like a disengenious way to view things.
I think this is a disingenuous way to view things:
So they made a... net loss of 830m? If only vampires were so generous, we would use them as blood donors.
However I didn’t call you out on it, since I figured the numbers that article quoted were a little fuzzy (which they were). Also, as the Axios article points out, PE firms should be judged at the portfolio level. Presumably failures of this magnitude aren’t typical, but they’re representative of how the managers never lose, since they aren’t gambling with their own money. I also don’t think there’s a reasonable equivalence between saying that the PE firm has to stop operating, since they’re idiots, and ETFs/pension funds losing a billion dollars, either.
It would be like a bank that makes a terrible loan, but you call it a success for the bank, because the person who executed the loan was an employee and therefore paid a fixed salary.
I’m probably mischaracterizing this, but didn’t the entire US economy implode a decade or two ago because banks were successfully laundering bad loans? And that was seen as wildly successful until the bubble burst?
Pretty much. Investment firms are certainly not omniscient, and they make plenty of mistakes! But there is a massive selection bias going on with news about LBOs.
Fair enough! I trawled around for a couple minutes in Google Scholar, and found this letter (augh) that agreed with my biases, indicating that leveraged buyouts increase the likelihood of bankruptcy by 18%. Maybe you could link some research you’ve run into indicating that this is a poor characterization?
(I’ll send another reply in a bit about the LBO paragraph at the end)
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Comment on EA is reportedly about to be sold in a record-setting $50 billion buyout to an investor group that includes private equity and Saudi Arabia in ~games
kacey Link ParentHey, just commenting on the leveraged buyout of Toys R Us — KKK and Bain probably made a small (mere couple dozen million dollars) out of the whole affair by offloading the debt burden to their...Hey, just commenting on the leveraged buyout of Toys R Us — KKK and Bain probably made a small (mere couple dozen million dollars) out of the whole affair by offloading the debt burden to their limited partners (Axios). So it wasn’t a tremendous failure, it was the system working as intended. I’m not a financial analyst, but it makes sense that they’d never allow themselves to lose money.
Assuming the equity check was split evenly among the three sponsors — Bain Capital, KKR and Vornado — it would work out to around $433 million each. Bain has an abnormally high GP commit of 10%, so that means Bain partners paid out around $43 million. But the fund received around $61 million in management and advisory fees related to the deal, which puts it in the black. LPs, of course, were wiped clean. KKR's relevant fund had a 57.5% offset for such fees but a smaller GP commit, so it too brought back more than it sent out. Some alignment of interests.
Overall: imo, the negative sentiment towards private equity and leveraged buyouts is that they seem to disproportionately put businesses into bankruptcy. So either those firms are idiots, and are losing money left, right, and centre, and should be hated for being foolish and destroying everything around them — or they’re pure evil, and are gutting everything around them for profit while letting the withered husks die off.
I don’t see many examples of private equity swooping in to save a struggling business, handing them a reasonable amount of debt to “encourage the entrepreneurial spirit”, and then guiding them with their supreme wisdom to a more profitable and better future. Generally they bite in, deep, and start sucking.
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Comment on JK Rowling dismisses Emma Watson as 'ignorant' over trans rights row in ~lgbt
kacey Link ParentGod, I hadn’t heard of that. That’s so depressing. Thank you for noting it, as — like you say — it’s important to be aware of.God, I hadn’t heard of that. That’s so depressing. Thank you for noting it, as — like you say — it’s important to be aware of.
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Comment on JK Rowling dismisses Emma Watson as 'ignorant' over trans rights row in ~lgbt
kacey Link ParentAgreed up until here; TIL that I am not people. This is at least a comforting response, however, since it hopefully means that blocking all of these actors/novelists will keep my news feed clear....People always feel betrayed and hurt when they find out the creator or a major celebrity involved with some beloved franchise is an awful person, because it sours otherwise fond memories.
Agreed up until here; TIL that I am not people. This is at least a comforting response, however, since it hopefully means that blocking all of these actors/novelists will keep my news feed clear.
I’d also underline that JK Rowling being a transphobic stain on the soiled undergarments of humanity is nowhere near a new phenomenon. If this were the first, second, or thirtieth time she’d come out swinging, I might be inclined to agree that publicizing her awful takes is necessary. But in 2025?
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Comment on JK Rowling dismisses Emma Watson as 'ignorant' over trans rights row in ~lgbt
kacey Link ParentTo be clear: I’m not arguing that Emma Watson’s take is bad. It’s this part specifically that I have a problem with: It’s troublesome to me that platforms like that even exist. This site is a...To be clear: I’m not arguing that Emma Watson’s take is bad. It’s this part specifically that I have a problem with:
People care because these two both have massive platforms.
It’s troublesome to me that platforms like that even exist. This site is a rarity for me — I keep to the corners of many different social groups (online or otherwise), but I normally don’t care to participate or follow in any large gatherings. The idea that folks will willingly find, associate with, and then closely follow some random person baffles me.
Saying this as a person that grew up as a Harry Potter fan, I could not give less of a crap what any of these people have to say. And — again, I’m not disagreeing with you on anything, I’m just reiterating because it feels that my initial take (“it’s weird that people care what these two feuding weirdos have to say”) was reframed a smidge to sound anti-trans rights — it is very troublesome to me that anyone got to the point in their life where JK Rowling’s opinion on anything other than jellybean flavours matters in the slightest.
To phrase this as a stronger point, so it’s harder to reframe: I truly believe the world would be a more equitable, stable, and fuller place if everyone blocked every single celebrity from their lives, which I am about to attempt to do with the tildes tag filter.
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Comment on JK Rowling dismisses Emma Watson as 'ignorant' over trans rights row in ~lgbt
kacey LinkThe terrifying part about all this, imo, is that anyone gives a single iota about what any of these people have to say. This is some random book nerd and a person who reads words off a page for a...The terrifying part about all this, imo, is that anyone gives a single iota about what any of these people have to say. This is some random book nerd and a person who reads words off a page for a living, expressing their opinion on subjects they have no credentials to discuss. They’re having a public feud, and somehow, that is seen as newsworthy. Whereas two random people screaming at each other about, I don’t know, how long it’s acceptable to leave one’s Christmas lights up is merely annoying.
Genuinely I have no idea how society functions given that “this” is what directs peoples’ political opinions.
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Comment on The neo-Victorian neo-nazi lesbian BDSM cult that made video games in ~humanities.history
kacey Link ParentI can definitely understand the corporate hate, as I too share it, but they’ve kinda failed to prevent those topics from being discussed definitionally if that’s your concern ? That’s why the...I can definitely understand the corporate hate, as I too share it, but they’ve kinda failed to prevent those topics from being discussed definitionally if that’s your concern ? That’s why the slang exists — to get around the filter, and to continue discussing said content regardless.
It feels more like saying “lol” (because people sucked at typing), “hello” (popularized by the invention of the telephone), “ (๑ > ᴗ < ๑)” (kaomoji were made possible due to the extended character sets afforded by non-ASCII character encodings), etc. A lot of language changes are prompted by corporate actions via technology; I dunno, it still gives me the ick when people get up in arms about how kids talk to each other.
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Comment on The neo-Victorian neo-nazi lesbian BDSM cult that made video games in ~humanities.history
kacey Link ParentHuh. As a counterpoint, it just reads as slang to me; something the youth do to differentiate their language from the olds. Doesn’t really matter whether they’re using different words because...Huh. As a counterpoint, it just reads as slang to me; something the youth do to differentiate their language from the olds. Doesn’t really matter whether they’re using different words because YouTube told them to, or their parents.
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Comment on NET Dollar by Cloudflare in ~finance
kacey Link ParentGotcha; I wasn’t aware that NetCoin was being built on a proof of stake chain. I think at least one person in this thread was concerned about the environmental impacts of using a blockchain, and...Gotcha; I wasn’t aware that NetCoin was being built on a proof of stake chain.
I think at least one person in this thread was concerned about the environmental impacts of using a blockchain, and that a database would be a lot less complex. If it’s not a proof of work blockchain, it’s already just a weird, but still fairly efficient, database. So that set of concerns seems addressed.
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Comment on NET Dollar by Cloudflare in ~finance
kacey Link ParentQuick Q from the peanut gallery: if we have a fixed number of validators and want a cryptographically secure ledger, why not publish a distributed merkle tree instead? The only advantage block...Quick Q from the peanut gallery: if we have a fixed number of validators and want a cryptographically secure ledger, why not publish a distributed merkle tree instead? The only advantage block chains have over them is under adversarial, distributed consensus problems, but eliminating the “adversarial” part means you don’t need to grind out hashes and you get a better result.
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Comment on Are touchscreens in cars dangerous? in ~transport
kacey Link ParentYup. Our streets can get a bit narrow too, and the Teslas seem to crowd me off the road more (although I’m likely just biased to them overall). That’s a good call out; and yeah, plenty of...Does it typically try to stay in the center of the lane (thereby crowding you)?
Yup. Our streets can get a bit narrow too, and the Teslas seem to crowd me off the road more (although I’m likely just biased to them overall).
I have wondered about how good tesla/waymo are about opting to break laws when it’s the human thing to do.
That’s a good call out; and yeah, plenty of motorists have kindly stepped over the line — when it’s safe to do so — to give me some more leeway. I try to return the courtesy and give priority to cars when travelling down alleyways; I can tuck in between obstructions better than they can.
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Comment on Are touchscreens in cars dangerous? in ~transport
kacey Link ParentI’ve been wondering why, near exclusively, Teslas try to run me over while cycling around the city. Now I know not to blame the driver; they’re probably just fiddling with their phones. It’s the...I’ve been wondering why, near exclusively, Teslas try to run me over while cycling around the city. Now I know not to blame the driver; they’re probably just fiddling with their phones. It’s the Autopilot I should be annoyed at!
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Comment on AI content warning label in ~creative
kacey LinkA nutrition label-esque system might be interesting? It looks like Twilio attempted one a couple years ago, but that’s not gone anywhere. It might be interesting to see it as applied to artwork? I...A nutrition label-esque system might be interesting? It looks like Twilio attempted one a couple years ago, but that’s not gone anywhere. It might be interesting to see it as applied to artwork? I don’t particularly mind if works have some amount of AI generation in them, but others’ tolerance levels differ dramatically. Could be a nice way to strike a balance.
Fair enough! I would disagree, if only because I have no idea what day to day life will be like in the many dozens of years (if not centuries) that it'll take to try to restore our biosphere. My statement was moreso that modern human civilization is necessary for this to happen, not excluding that there are many other necessary components as well (e.g. as you note, political will).