Instead we’re being spied on but seemingly police can’t solve any of the crime affecting most people’s day to day lives.

The value of a company does include the value of future returns. The standard model is net present value. In theory, if the market is valuing those future returns correctly, a PE fund would probably just do the value maximisation through investment and genuine business rationalisation, and skip the financial engineering phase of the cycle. I believe this is actually what most PE managers would prefer to do. They generally don’t actually want to burn their efforts for a short term fake valuation boost. They are still people after all. It just seems to be what the market wants them to do, and they prefer money.

> the market is pretty bad at valuing companies

The market has always been bad, but probably more randomly bad, historically. Different people had their own finger-in-the-air methodologies and an estimated market value of a company had a lot more random noise around it.

The issue is now that ~every large institutional investor is valuing companies in the same wrong way, which creates opportunities for, essentially, an arbitrage between reality and their dumb models which these types of PE funds are exploiting.

It also creates systemic risk to the financial system. When everyone is making the same mistake, “independent” market participants aren’t really independent. This is in essence what any bubble is, but usually isolated to people misreading the fundamentals of a particular sector. If the techniques behind financialisation are themselves a bubble, however, we could be in for one hell of a pop if the market realises. Like when the market realised they’d been valuing subprime mortgage books wrong in 2008.

Aren’t you curious how a modern solar panel works so well with no moving parts?

It’s like when Etsy turned into a Made in China marketplace. MIC is fine, but if I’m going to Etsy it’s because I wanted something else.

My view is companies don't have a conscience, and any expectation that they are going to independently act with moral righteousness is unrealistic. Any perceived conscience is either for marketing (green/pinkwashing), or the sum of the morals of their owners multiplied by their willingness to exert any moral authority over the company.

Besides, if you try to imagine a company having an independent conscience, what even would that conscience be based in? I'm vegetarian and think it's immoral to eat meat, but obviously I'd be insane to expect companies to divest from meat based on my peculiar moral position.

In most cases, people do not exert any moral authority over anything they own. Do you actively select your pension investments based on your morality and vote in the shareholder meetings? If you do, I'm genuinely pleased and happy that someone is. But the reality is most people don't give their investments any thought beyond "line goes up", so companies end up acting as ROI maximisers.

So: the main way we enforce morality on companies is ultimately the government. If you want companies to act morally, you set the rules such that an ROI depends on following our democratically agreed set of regulations. Maybe that even harms economic growth but we still consider it worth it (which is typically how we think in Europe, but look at our economies are doing!). However, the company and its investors are still acting as ROI maximisers.

IFF a company is truly, honest to god, less valuable than the sum of its parts, then it (or the subset that would have more value to someone else) SHOULD be dismantled, and those resources sold and reallocated to more productive use. You probably make these sorts of decisions in the capacity of your own personal finances without even thinking about it.

On the other hand (and what I believe is likely happening is) if cynical financial engineering is allowing you to turn a useful company that's valued poorly by the market into a useless company that's is paradoxically highly valued by the market, in the short term, and that keeps happening over and over again, then the tools used to calculate the market value are wrong.

This is illustrated by how PE commonly trashes trusted brands. A brand doesn't show up in your EBITDA. If you trash a brand quickly enough by cutting costs and quality, some institutional sucker will buy the company because they haven't clocked that the current EBITDA is elevated due to asymmetry in how quickly the costs come off and how quickly the revenue falls off after burning the brand.

They've simply valued the company wrong.

In principle, I don't think there's anything wrong with this. All investment expects a ROI over some time horizon. Public companies do the same thing. Anyone who founds a start-up is doing it too. The only real distinguishing feature of PE is how successful they have become at aggressively optimising for market value.

The issue is that the sale value at the end of the cycle can be massively influenced by cynical financial engineering. This seems to me to be more of an issue with how every institutional investor apparently now prices companies purely on reductive metrics like EBITDA x the industry standard multiple.

The cause of the rot is widespread over-confidence in dumb financialization models shaping the system.

(Or, since it's HN: if your machine learning model is training well, but misaligned with real life: do you blame AdamW?)

I love AWS at the infrastructure level, but their PaaS tends to be meh, and their end-user directed stuff is usually atrocious.

Obviously you want to be aware of what else is on the market, and use the right tool for the job -- but equally if you have a directly competing product, you'd prefer your org's telemetry and suggestions are directed towards improving your own software rather than your competitors'.

I'm sure there's some bean-counter calculus involving recruitment, PR, demonstration of capabilities, they were going to be doing training flights anyway so why not do a few in public, etc. but they're more rationalisations rather than reasons.

I hope it stays that way too. A world where we take everything away unless it fits into the 5 year ROI spreadsheet sounds dreadful. In any case there'll a long tail of nth-order outcomes that we can't simply reduce down to a risk-reward calculation.

There's probably some deep reason why humans just have a drive to show off their awesome stuff.

We already have more than 10k Starlink satellites, and there’s almost no outcry about that outside of astronomers, who are justified in their concerns… but politically irrelevant.

Plus, you can technically launch a satellite from almost anywhere if you’re not picky about the orbit, so you just need to find a single country willing to give you a logistically viable launch site. There are no international laws that would prevent, e.g., India launching 1 million satellites.

There are now quite a few politicians running on a platform of banning data centre construction projects.

China-owned brands are now often better and more premium than their Western counterparts across the entire spectrum. Give me Anker over Belkin any day. There are a few areas where the West still leads - Chinese software tends to be buggier and less polished, luxury apparel isn't at the same standard - but that lead is diminishing rapidly. Customer service could still do with some improvement: it's usually much slower and less professional, but the trade-off is it's not uncommon to end up talking to an actual engineer who can investigate and solve the problem rather than just follow a script, even at a huge company.

The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder.

Grok also does quite well at code reviews in my experience because it’s not so aggressively ”aligned”.

The reason for the EV nudging is it's a chicken and egg problem. The government doesn't want to run a national charging network themselves for obvious reasons, but private investors don't want to build it out either until it can make money.

So they've been trying to fix it from both sides, both by incentivising EV ownership and encouraging EV charging infrastructure. They're also trying to make charging at home easier, even if you don't have a driveway, by installing those little channels you can run the cable through.

Yes, the government are putting their finger on the scale in favour of EVs. Nobody's pretending they aren't. If combustion taxes were as high as they need to be to account for the externalities, the economy would collapse, but we need to get off ICEs for myriad reasons. Seems like they're doing a pretty good job overall and the main problem is just our high electricity price.

For comparison, a full time "virtual assistant" with fluent English from the Philippines costs upwards of $700/month nowadays.

What's making it even more difficult to tell now is people who use AI a lot seem to be actively picking up some of its vocab and writing style quirks.

Significantly reduce the frequency of small to medium-scale conflicts, in exchange for an inevitable, possibly apocalyptic nuclear conflict at some point. Maybe not this year, maybe not for centuries, but one day, someone will press the button.