"The thing that private equity does is just unload assets and monetize assets. And so they effectively paid for the purchase of Red Lobster by selling the real estate,"
They did the same thing with Sears and many others.They short sell the company, buy it, sell anything valuable and destroy it.
The fact is, retail cannot compete risk-wise with institutions. Thanks to Quantitative Easing and low interest rates, money, by itself, has very little value. To make lending money "valuable", you have to leverage it at ratio that the average retail investor can't afford risk-wise. Only edge fund that can afford to risk it all can do that. More so, 2008 proven that the government was willing to bail out institutions, something not available to retail.
Most aren't trying to. The manager in an investment fund probably has all the money he needs to enjoy life. He doesn't care about the performance of his fund, so long as clients stay on board.
And the funny thing is, that makes his fund far more driven by the whims of the public than retail investors. So many stories about funds staying away from the dot-com bubble end with "the fund had to close, because of clients pulling out their money".
Half the reason Warren Buffett is hailed as genius is because his shareholders can't pull out their money easily.
As someone said, they don't need to outperform. They only need to perform enough to survive and pull management fees, which are risk free for the managers.
I think the downvotes come from people who don't like to believe this is true. But it is true, at least the part about retail investors being unable to compete. Sure there are occasional ones who win the lottery, but in general large institutions can afford to devote their attention full time to finding out what to invest in, get lower rates for leverage, and probably also use inside info more often than is discovered.
Same, I know one of the current devs browses HN and commented a couple of months ago that there was still a contingent of devs on the team who want to keep old.reddit.com alive - not sure how long for though!
I'll miss AskHistorians. But thanks to Reddit having already weaned me from mobile usage, I'm psychologically ready to detach from yet another community.
> Reddit having already weaned me from mobile usage
That too. I'd like to thank whoever was responsible for Reddit's mobile redesign, because they cured my Reddit addiction. I can't count how many hours I've saved by not using their obnoxious, spammy new mobile UI.
For me, it is the API restriction that did it - Reddit is Fun was a stellar Android application, killing it ended my mobile usage. Everyone seemed aware it was going to be one of the effects of API restrictions - Reddit seems to have thought it was all right...
> I can't use anything of the newer interface without pulling my hairs.
Good luck with the "current" new design. The one that superseded old.reddit.com and got pretty decent is now on new.reddit.com, and the steaming pile of bull dung that is the current reddit.com if you're unlucky enough to get it forced upon you. And of course notifications on new.reddit.com will link to the bull dung version.
This one UI might survive for a while as Microsoft doesn't have anything else to fill that role, and with conversation AI becomming a thing, this can of UI have their use.
It's indeed impressive. Stable diffusion is progressing so fast. That being said, I find myself picking more and more cues that an images is AI-generated. There is a feel to it. It's not different than the best movie CGI. As Christopher Nolan pointed-out, no matter how good it is, it's not the real deal.
I would argue that it's not only Google that got worse, the whole web got worse. I wish for a search engine that would exclude any website that is overleaded with ads. The side effect would be better quality content.
