outop

If I was your long lost friend I probably wouldn't pay the $10 upfront.

I'm not passionate about commodity futures trading. I don't care about it at all. But when I work on software which traders will use, I understand that there are specific conventions about how the numbers are displayed and that they need to be understood and used.

They hired rockstars because back then, all the rockstars wanted to work for them. The only focus of their hiring process was how to reject the 'B' candidates. They knew they would get enough 'A's applying that they couldn't avoid hiring a bunch.

For most companies, including Google as a more mature company, the dynamics are different. You might be quite happy to hire candidates who weren't top of their class but who are going to be easy to work with and get stuff done. And you want to make very sure you don't either reject or turn off the (maybe small number of) outstanding performers who want to work for you.

Google IMHO completely fail at the latter these days. A solid A student who knows how to present themself and really wants to work at Google will be hired. A genius with an unconventional educational background probably won't be.

> So far, the US has been able to scratch that itch because it’s been the same government that has been predictably the same for nearly 250 years.

This is an exaggeration. There have been at least 3 drastic shocks to the United States currency in that time. The secession of the southern states, who adopted their own currency. Leaving the silver standard for the gold standard. And devaluing the dollar then leaving the gold standard unilaterally in the 1970s.

If it was called 'Liverpool Road' you would be more justified in expecting it to lead to Liverpool.

I don't think you know how London districts work at all.

It is also widely referred to as 'Streatham High Street'.

The upper chamber of British parliament is made up of lords.

If spontaneity is overrated then why participate in a simulacrum of spontaneity?

This app doesn't suggest that you do longer term things to support your partner and make their life easier. It proposes that you fake being in a honeymoon stage by eg leaving cute little notes.

Some people want to dedicate a lot of their work time and energy to LARPing Tony Stark. Other people just want to deliver the value the company needs, get paid, and pursue their other goals outside of their job.

You are being quite patronising. I have two children.

Not sure if you are disagreeing with my comment but I don't see any contradiction. You are showing your wife that you are thinking about her and that you care about her wellbeing. The fact that there's a time lag between the moment you think about her and the moment she gets the message, isn't an issue.

Waking up on time is an end in itself. The point is not to show that you have made an effort.

For some other things that we might try to do, the point is to make an effort.

The EU rules are essentially that if you give them information for a particular purpose, they can only use it for that purpose and no other. So they obviously want to break this.

Doubtless if you use this you're training a model that understands what kind of interactions romantic partners find meaningful and sentimental.

> Being spontaneous requires energy. A lot of people lack energy but still loves their partner.

The point is that you have a limited amount of energy, but you chose to dedicate some of it to something your partner would like.

Optimising by reducing the amount of energy you use to do that defeats the purpose.

What "other problems in that relationship" do you think they might have?

Doing little surprises for someone, texting them to wish them a good day, etc, is a form of signalling. People like it because they know that you are thinking about them randomly, and that you care how they're doing. If you're simply using an app reminder to do stuff in order to grind relationship points, it has a completely different meaning.

If you allow complex coefficients then the distribution is rotationally symmetric in the complex plane. So a root is no more likely to be in the real line than in any other line through the origin. There would be vanishingly few polynomials with largest root real.

A fan wouldn't cool down a dry plastic handle. Fans cool you down because you are wet and the air flow makes the water on you evaporate a bit quicker.

Loitering, prostitution, vagrancy.

> What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street?

In other words: people who are not from New York come to the city. They falsely believe it to be a dangerous place compared to where they're from. They walk around fearfully, unable to escape their mindset. Now they would like this fear they experienced to be reflected in crime statistics.

One of the worst and most tendentious numerical arguments I have ever seen.

Wouldn't it be fair to distinguish between the baseline probability of any death, and the baseline probability of a death that could plausibly be suspicious, such as gunshot suicide?

Regulating weights and measures is a basic function of government since Babylonian times.

Your first point: this would obviously be serious fraud. I'm not sure if you have any evidence of this in this particular case or is you are alleging this is standard practice by PE funds?

Your second point: why would someone lend money to a company which was going to go bankrupt? If PE firms always made the companies they controlled bankrupt, no one would lend to them.

Your third point: if someone buys a company from you, how does it make you a creditor of the bought company?

Other end goals than what?

Other end goals than making people happy by serving good quality shrimps for a reasonable price? Obviously they do.

Other end goals than making money? Of course they don't. But neither did Ray Kroc, who was extremely upfront about how McDonald's is a business whose strategy is to acquire real estate, funded by burger sales. Neither do the Waltons, who aggressively cut margins on all their products and compete to drive other retailers out of business. (Neither does General Mills, who used to own Red Lobster, nor Darden Restaurants, the public spin-off that owned Olive Garden and Red Lobster, nor Starboard Value, the activist investor that pushed for Red Lobster to be sold.) None of these companies exists because of a high-minded commitment to customer service, or fair play, or delicious food.

If turning a viable restaurant chain into a chain that no one wants to go to and then selling it is an attractive business proposition for private equity, than it should be for McDonald's and Walmart too. Unless you can point to some specific causal connection between the ownership structure and the decision about whether or not a restaurant should serve stuff that people actually want to eat?

You've replied with the same trivial urban myths that are endlessly repeated about private equity.

You've compared the incentives of private equity and a small business owner. Do you think that Red Lobster was previously a small business?

Why can't you answer the question on the different incentives that apply to different owners of large businesses? If a private equity fund can make a profit by buying a successful business, discouraging all its customers and then "selling the corpse", why can't other owners do the same thing?

Why does the company having a large amount of debt change the decision a restaurant chain's management makes between selling cheap and good food, or cheap and bad food, or expensive and bad food, or expensive and good food?

Literally everything that you've said about this has been handwaving and rumours. Explain the decisions based on where the money comes from and where it has to go to, if you can (you clearly can't).

You citing Nabisco as the best example of what you believe is comical since it's from 40 years ago (and famously fraudulent).

You've just repeated and rephrased the claim that I challenged without providing any evidence or argument at all. Your actual answer to both questions is "because I believe this".

Can you explain how the math works that PE owners make money from discouraging people from going to a restaurant, and other owners don't have the same incentives?

I don't see the relevance of this. No one eats at Red Lobster thinking "this is the exact dinner experience that billionaires would design for themselves".

Walmart is a family owned business. Do you think that the Walton family buy groceries and home furnishings there? McDonald's is a public company. Do you think that its CEO and the fund managers who hold the biggest stakes in it regularly eat there?

What makes you think that PE equity owners have any different incentives to any other chain restaurant owners to cut costs and improve margins??

Why would you think that private equity owners would ever make things worse to improve margins without giving careful consideration to whether or not the changes will make people less likely to spend money at their restaurants??

I think this is naive. When (for example) a private equity fund buys a casual dining chain, they will go through how the business is run in painstaking detail and try to understand exactly what makes the experience 'work' and what changes are possible or advisable.

If the olives in the salad don't taste as good or there are fewer breadsticks or the lighting makes it feel more relaxed or the greeters have more time or the menu gets shorter or the desserts arrive quicker or the pasta is less salty, that's because someone involved in that decision decided it was worth paying more for or not worth paying what they were currently paying, taking into account what factors will make people change their mind about eating there. There isn't just a random dude who sits in a room somewhere and says "let's make the food worse" based on his own whim.

If the food gets worse and it just doesn't have that same vibe anymore and you don't want to go there next time, it's because an expert in marketing or restaurant management or food design made an error in their judgement about what they could cut, what they should improve, and what they needed to keep the same. That, or the change which turned you off attracted more customers or more desirable customers who have different preferences to you.

Your restaurant changed because its corporate policy changed. But the capital structure is totally relevant in understanding why that changed.