Easy to imagine practices where the primary owner is going to retire and looking for an out.
Maybe they find a buyer in a doctor, maybe they don't, but PE provides them an exit that keeps the practice operating in the community.
Many people don't really run businesses efficiently. There was an interesting video I saw recently where a sole doctor practice made a few changes to their workflow that allowed them to hire more doctors and handle 2x as many people - I would expect a PE firm would pursue similar changes that help increase the number of people they can service, increasing competitiveness and lowering prices in the long run.
I don't know how these tradeoffs interact with patient care, but I wouldn't inherently expect PE to be worse at this than any other operating model.
Lots of other efficiencies to look at. Tons of them are directly bad for the patient (capturing more of the surplus is an efficiency that businesses generally go hard at).
Ultimately, I think the issue is when people making decisions are able to treat the impact as an abstraction.
> Many people don't really run businesses efficiently.
In many cases that's a good thing, depending on what we mean by efficient. Lots of people run businesses in ways that make less money than they could, and often that's good.
> I don't know how these tradeoffs interact with patient care, but I wouldn't inherently expect PE to be worse at this than any other operating model.
Doesn't the evidence suggest it is indeed often worse?
A structure to run business efficiently using practiced methods is always a good thing. However from what little I have understood, the goal of Private Equity is to maximize the dollar value on their investment. Somehow they have settled with the playbook that running a business even profitably isn't the best idea. Instead its much more profitable to take over the struggling business at good price, squeeze everything possible from the assets (thats where PE seem to be investing their expertise unfortunately) over duration of time. Update the books in a manner that it saves money on taxes and carry forwards the loss, making money in the process.
My favorite is to sell the building(s) to their private real estate company and lease back. Then IPO the company and keep the rent coming on a 25 year lease.
>> Maybe they find a buyer in a doctor, maybe they don't, but PE provides them an exit that keeps the practice operating in the community.
If the practice is to continue, there must still be practitioners working there. Id prefer they buy out the one retiring, but the retiree can sell to whoever they want.
Why do you need to sell a private practice? There’s no brand to sell, it’s just you and that will be gone.
PE is scourge in this space. They’ve probably taken over every dental office already and now they push unnecessary procedures and whatever your insurance will bear just because.
Most private practices are small groups, not individuals. It absolutely sucks to have to find a new doctor who’s a good fit for you, when you’ve been seeing the same person for years or even decades. Usually when your doctor retires you rely on them to make a recommendation for a replacement. Usually that’s another partner in their same practice. At the very least, you (historically) expect them to sell the practice to someone they think is a worthy successor. Patients are fairly sticky.
And many of these PE sales require the selling partner to stay on for at least a year or two to ease the patients through the transition and so the patients get used to the changes before the doctor actually retires. That way, sticking around after the doctor retires doesn’t feel like such an upheaval.
If there is truly nothing as you say, there is nothing for PE to buy, and no problem. If there is nothing to sell of value, what stops new dentists from seamlessly opening an office?
Maybe in your neck of the woods vets operate out of the trunk of their cars, but all the ones I've ever engaged had offices, expensive medical equipment, an office building, and trained staff.
Are you proving for some arbitrary definition of == that isn't what we commonly consider the definition? How is it logically coherent? You mean only in the sense that you say it is and you haven't provided any rules to disprove it?
No the definition of == is the regular definition; it's just a deductive reasoning statement. Since the first part of the statement is never true, it doesn't matter what the second part of it says. Of course, like he said, that makes the statement have no value.
This is known as a “vacuously true” statement in formal logic. Let me write it out more in more detail and you’ll hopefully see why it’s consistent.
In logic, a proposition is some statement that can be true or false. So, let A be the proposition that 1 equals 3, and B be the proposition that 3 equals 3.
Now the poster is making a third proposition. If A, then B.
A is clearly not true. So in classical logic, B can be anything and “If A then B” is still true.
For example let B be the proposition that I am Elvis Presley (I’m not). So now we have “If one equals 3 then I am Elvis Presley”. This is clearly true. I’m not Elvis Presley, but that doesn’t matter because we’re not saying anything about what happens when one doesn’t equal 3.
Now, let’s try let B be the proposition that I am Sean Hunter (I actually am). So now we have “If one equals 3 then I am Sean Hunter”. This is clearly still true because we still are only making a claim about what happens when one equals three.
By the way, this isn’t any kind of inherent contradiction or problem, it is just a possibly counterintuitive part of how classical logic works.
You see this type of statement (“If <x>, then <something ridiculous>”) being made a lot when people are exaggerating for effect, for example by Mr Bumble in “Oliver Twist”
> 'That is no excuse,' replied Mr. Brownlow. 'You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.' … 'If the law supposes that,' said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, 'the law is a ass--a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor’
Nothing to do with special hacks with operators. The reason it's useless because the precondition is never true. "If my aunt had two wheels and a handlebar then she'd be a bicycle"
Is the same problem with a non maths flavour.
E.g. “If it’s raining, the sidewalk is wet.” That statement holds if it’s not raining or the sidewalk is wet.
This is a common occurrence in mathematics, where someone might not be able to unconditionally prove Y, but they can under the condition X. Later, another mathematician might build on this by proving X, thereby transitively proving Y. (Or conversely, they might unconditionally disprove Y, thereby disproving X.)
Many hard problems are answered this way.
For example, Fermat’s Last Theorem was proven assuming the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil Conjecture, then Wiles proved the conjecture.
Thousands of theorems rely on the the unproven Reinmann Hypothesis, which is why it’s so interesting to mathematicians.
But if your precondition is “stupid,” your proof is stupid.
It's like giving people excessive discretion. Then if you're someone they don't like (eg. a black person if you're racist), then you deal out a maximalist punishment. If they're someone you do like, you let them off and tell them not to do it again.
Policy like this is just corruption. It allows some people to exercise more rights than others, at the expense of the commons.
The fact you're using this as an example of public review being a good thing shows how fucked up the process is.
You're cheering for the prevention of building new housing in the most valuable, most useful part of the town. I bet it would have kept all the same retail and restaurants in the bottom too, so there would have been zero downside for anyone who actually uses the street.
Instead a bunch of people with no stake except an aesthetic preference blocked it. How on earth is that a good thing?
If you don't own the land and can't demonstrate a direct, severe impact to you and yours from the actions of someone else, you shouldn't have a say.
"More traffic" is not sufficient. I can actually sort of believe shade from an apartment building could count, but the impression I get is that is rarely a good-faith argument (and in any case it should only severely affect a few people in any new development, so you could easily justify just compensating them in some way rather than outright blocking a development.
People don't feel like they are well-represented by either party.
They may like some republican stances (say, reduced regulations and welfare spending), but despise others (Trump, wars, anti-renewable). Meanwhile they might like some democrat stances (Inclusivity, environment), but not others (high spending, rent controls, etc).
So you're stuck between a rock and a hard place where there's no good way to express your desires. I can totally understand not wanting to vote in such an environment, and disliking the government no matter what. You can't get your specific views represented because everything has been collapsed into two broad camps that average out - and as lots of research shows, no one is truly average.
I believe so. AIs are shockingly good at a lot of domains, but there's still a lot of pretty basic stuff they don't really "understand" at a conceptual level and (currently) they can't learn to get better at them.
(obviously it might take years for me to get good enough at something, or if you set the "arbitrary" task as something ridiculous, but lets work in good faith here and think of something the average human could do after learning about it)
If we progress to the point where an LLM instance can meaningfully learn to get better at something overtime without retraining, then I will accept that is basically AGI. Right now, they still seem to be pretty boxed into their training, even if you can prompt them to act differently.
Merged companies are more able to compete. Combining duplicate corporate structures let them save on costs, etc.
It's not a strictly bad thing - iirc spirit? Airlines? Wanted to merge with someone, got denied, and went bankrupt anyway, depriving people of any competition at all.
Companies that have massive startup costs (Automakers, Airlines) are harder to replace. This is a failure of the system we are in. Seems like the free market cannot properly evaluate value when all the cash is going into nonsense like Bitcoin, NFT and now a lot of the AI.
Allegiant is an old Airline that has had a lot of problems. Breeze is new but both are starting super small and are not planning to really cover Spirits extended network anytime soon. The result of Spirit dying is alot of that prior investment in second tier cities/airports is just gone for the forseeable future. The potential value that could have generated will now not come to pass.
>Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.
The problem that is occuring in my opinion is that Spirit is a symptom of a greater problem. The "K shaped" economy is not only segregating groups of people into haves and have nots, its extending into regions of the country. Losing major airlines access is the precursor to entire regions declining, and ultimately dying completly. If the AI robot world comes to fruition maybe many humans just have no economic value at all.
To be fair, Spirit suffered from multiple reasons and a merger with Frontier may have just delayed the inevitable.
Note: I was very emotionally invested in Spirit because they made possible many fascinating trips that wouldn't have happened so my take may be biased. I can only think of a handful of companies that clearly positively impacted my life and Spirit was one of them.
1. Post COVID, the structural costs went up: pilots, flight attendants, suppliers demanded more money. Spirit paid decently well, had decent benefits from what I heard. When you are Spirit...to attract good people you gotta pay. It really showed in their operations, they had 0 crashes during their 34 years and had notable excellence in their maintenace operations. People thought they flew rickety junk planes. The reality was that they had a stellar run.
2. Pratt & Whitney GTF issues: Spirit actually had quite a young Airbus only fleet. Great for lowering costs through fuel/maintenance savings, customers enjoy the newest best planes...the downside is that if a major issue comes out, it could spread across the entire fleet. Thats exatly what happened: They leased brand new planes and then a serious engine issue occured that forced grounding of many new planes for 1+years....while they are still paying the leases on those planes.
3. The bigger competitors are really just credit card companies that fly planes as a hobby on the side. That gave them the financial ability to siphon off customers by introducing a barebones tier. Spirit customers aren't really the type to play the credit card points game so they couldn't copy what the big guys do and despite travel increasing after COVID, people decided to pay a bit more to not have the barebones experience.
4. Spirit was in the process of revamping their entire offering to better compete. More simple tiers with things baked in and less extreme customization that they used to offer. Makes sense: 9$ fares were gone for good so maybe they could compete as a solid basic tier. They did not move fast enough to turn things around. Its a bummer because it looks like they had an interesting plan after the second bankruptcy but we never got to see it fully play out.
5. The final nail in the coffin: The Iran war took out any remaining breathing room. They were just coming out of their second bankruptcy. I personally feel they had a viable plan to try and turn things around but the Trump admin just let them die without really trying. From my understanding(and I could be wrong) Trump pulled some nonsense where he wanted like 90% of the airline for peanuts, they would support ICE transport operations etc. The owners of the debt obviously said no and that was the end of that. Great job losing 17k employees their livelihood. Since this is a tenure based industry, many end up starting from scratch at another airline. A emergency merger or something would have had better consequences for the employees. Will be interesting to see how this affects the midterms since Spirit was based in Dania Beach, FL (Miami area)
The idea behind a Frontier + Spirit merger makes sense. The airlines combining together can cover a greater network, Spirit was getting rid of its poor leases through bankruptcy and maybe they could have been a major airline in the low end. The argument against is that Frontier is not doing too well either so should you really combine bad + bad?
Look, I'm not entirely convinced AI will be as revolutionary as some believe but it's still pretty clear it's able to provide capabilities we've never had before.
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