kacey's recent activity
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Comment on What’s a point that you think many people missed? in ~talk
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Comment on What’s a point that you think many people missed? in ~talk
kacey Link ParentSure! I'm just relaying what my interpretation of the statement is. To some people, the definition of "clean" is that all areas must be absent of "dirty", so being able to locate all the places...Sure! I'm just relaying what my interpretation of the statement is. To some people, the definition of "clean" is that all areas must be absent of "dirty", so being able to locate all the places the dirtiness is hiding is critical for their definition. If your definition doesn't include that (i.e. out of sight, out of mind), then we've successfully identified that you, me, and my interpretation of OP's position are all different. Which is OK!
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Comment on What’s a point that you think many people missed? in ~talk
kacey Link ParentI'm not the OP, but at a guess, it's that folks who've cleaned a bunch know where the really gnarly stuff is hiding? E.g. on the underside of your upper cabinets in the kitchen, caked on dust on...I'm not the OP, but at a guess, it's that folks who've cleaned a bunch know where the really gnarly stuff is hiding? E.g. on the underside of your upper cabinets in the kitchen, caked on dust on the top side of the trim around doors, behind toilets, etc.
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Comment on Seaweed farms boost long-term carbon storage by altering ocean chemistry in ~enviro
kacey LinkThat was quite an interesting read! Also, TIL that some varieties produce useful amounts of protein -- I'd always thought of seaweed as a convenient wrapper, or seasoning, not as a source of any...That was quite an interesting read! Also, TIL that some varieties produce useful amounts of protein -- I'd always thought of seaweed as a convenient wrapper, or seasoning, not as a source of any useful nutrition.
Every ecosystem and species is different, but it'd be interesting to know if adding a mussel farm changes the analysis at all. If not, that would be a fantastic way to double dip.
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Comment on Regarding travel agency exoticca.com in ~travel
kacey LinkI don't put much faith in BBB scores, but their complaints seem to indicate that getting refunds or handling cancellations is extremely difficult. At a glance, I'd guess that you're fine as long...I don't put much faith in BBB scores, but their complaints seem to indicate that getting refunds or handling cancellations is extremely difficult. At a glance, I'd guess that you're fine as long as you go on the trip, but as soon as you engage their customer support staff it'll be non-stop problems.
(I'm not a person that enjoys travel, however, so I can't comment on anything more than that ...)
edit: Oof, sniped by 0x29A. Anyways.
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Comment on Cheaper obesity medications could come to Canada this summer, as Health Canada reviews generics in ~health
kacey LinkHeard about this on Reddit, and it seems like pretty good news! Here's an article explaining the absurd error someone at Novo Nordisk made, for context.Heard about this on Reddit, and it seems like pretty good news! Here's an article explaining the absurd error someone at Novo Nordisk made, for context.
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Cheaper obesity medications could come to Canada this summer, as Health Canada reviews generics
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Comment on What are some stories of progressivism gone wrong in implementation? in ~society
kacey Link ParentAgreed. Not a fan of discussions which filter strongly for particular sides of highly contentious issues. If this thread were opening a dialogue (e.g. "what are your experiences...Agreed. Not a fan of discussions which filter strongly for particular sides of highly contentious issues. If this thread were opening a dialogue (e.g. "what are your experiences (positive/negative) with progressive policies"), then it'd encourage people of all walks of life to express their opinions. If it were a discussion thread on a particular post (e.g. "The New York Times says that DEI is bad for the economy"), then we could respond to the article's thesis and discuss it directly.
This feels like it's one stone's throw away from collapsing into a black hole of bad faith arguments and rage baiting. Framing is important in discourse.
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Comment on I feel that Destin (SmarterEveryDay on Youtube) is straying from the path in ~talk
kacey (edited )LinkRe. that in particular, I believe he mentions later (after some criticism) that he was just asking questions, and not defending creationism. Your call to what extent that reflects his intent at...Nature's Incredible ROTATING MOTOR where at 27:25 he hints at creationism.
Re. that in particular, I believe he mentions later (after some criticism) that he was just asking questions, and not defending creationism. Your call to what extent that reflects his intent at the time.
What's your opinion?
Since you're asking people's opinions: I think that, for many religious people, their faith in the paranormal is the water they're swimming in. Although it's plausible that his content has become more overt about proselytizing in the meantime, it's always going to be in the backdrop, either through unasked questions or focuses on particular subjects. C'est la vie -- it's the same for many people who are heavily invested in a subculture. I've never found it terribly annoying, but I'd acknowledge that there are absolutely moral arguments to be made about e.g. indoctrinating children, creating theocracies, suppressing competing beliefs, etc.
That said, imo the by far less defensible position is his unabashed support of the US military industrial complex. You don't get invited onto a nuclear submarine if anyone has even the slightest sense that you'll critique them, or their behaviour. Same as with all the military colabs he's done since then. I'm of the mindset that militaries are inevitable and necessary, but we should never be actively promoting them, or discussing them without underlining that wholesale murder is their explicit goal. It's a necessary evil, but (imo again) we should understand it as such, and keep that uncomfortable sensation close at hand for the next time a politician suggests bombing your country's problems away.
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Comment on Companies are crafting new ways to grow cocoa and chocolate alternatives in ~food
kacey Link ParentAll I know about plant cell culture is from the Plants in Jars Youtube channel -- but, same as you, the impression I get is that this is mostly useful for propagation. The link that Steeeve...All I know about plant cell culture is from the Plants in Jars Youtube channel -- but, same as you, the impression I get is that this is mostly useful for propagation. The link that Steeeve provided seems like the useful bit could be extracting secondary metabolites (e.g. theobromine), but afaik most of the flavour of chocolate occurs during the fermentation phase ... I've been following Planet A Foods for a while (between a couple of name changes), and the (successful?) approach they honed in on focus on that fermentation phase in particular.
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Comment on Request for help: Backing up NASA public databases in ~space
kacey Link ParentHave you tried Archiveteam? There's an IRC channel listed there. They aren't from the Internet Archive, but they have a bunch of tools (and volunteers) available to help mirror parts of the...Have you tried Archiveteam? There's an IRC channel listed there. They aren't from the Internet Archive, but they have a bunch of tools (and volunteers) available to help mirror parts of the Internet that are being shut down. E.g. they mirrored flickr a while back, I think, as well as the US government apparently.
(edit) for clarity's sake, they wrote a piece of software which volunteers use to help download dying sites in parallel. It's explicitly set up for situations like yours, so they'll hopefully be receptive and helpful!
(edit 2) Looks like someone beat me to this yesterday XD apologies.
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Comment on Can we bury enough wood to slow climate change? in ~enviro
kacey Link ParentFair 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...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).
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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.
Here's a wikipedia article in case you're interested in learning more. Relevant quote: