Another recent video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvahiVBvn9A
We are not that at all. But then again for rich it pretty much is, just not 100% yet
This point about "private equity" being a boogeyman is such a tired take, the vast majority of equity of companies are held privately, and the vulture PE firms do exist but are not as prevalent as people make it seem online. It's a meme that many people seem to have latched on when the vast majority of PE firms and companies work perfectly fine, buying a company, growing it, then selling it for a profit.
Aside, why not link the original video instead of a reddit post?
the vast majority of equity of companies are held privately
vulture PE firms do exist but are not as prevalent as people make it seem online. It's a meme that many people seem to have latched on when the vast majority of PE firms and companies work perfectly fine
If you're seeing it in the media, of course it's confirmation bias. Do you think it makes a good headline to say that a firm bought a company, grew it over 5 years, then sold it? Yet that's what happens in the majority of cases. Those in the media are the exceptions that prove the rule.
It's a huge mistake to narrow down the problems of private equity firms (PEFs) to the dissolution of the companies they buy.
> Do you think it makes a good headline to say that a firm bought a company, grew it over 5 years, then sold it?
How is that different from what the video said? They buy all the hardware, grow the price of it by the mere fact of buying it up, hoard it, and then they sell it back to you at even higher prices as cloud services.
They make a profit but you are robbed. It's the strategy of scalping which has been going on in the GPU market for quite some time, but now it's used by corporations on an industrial scale.
The problem is precisely in the normal operation of PEFs, or rather, in the regulations that allow them to operate that way.
"AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.
You can say they're fools if you want - you might even be right! But pretending like hundreds (thousands?) of board members across the world are conspiring to build a buyer's cartel (monopsony?) in order to starve out the PC Gaming market of all things is just myopic.
I hope I'm not too vitriolic, especially if the guy in the video is here -- I certainly share a lot of politics with him, and absolutely share his priors regarding PE. I just think it's extremely clear that this particular subreddit has "lost the plot" as the ~~kids~~ mid-30s nerds say. If anyone's not familiar, I highly recommend a perusal through the top posts of the past week/month...
Also not particularly enjoying this new ragey vibe Steve has going but I guess it must be getting clicks because each video seems to have it turned up another notch
What a silly criticism.
Trickle down economics is from the 80s and people are still just starting to wake up to it.
PE has been around a while, but has also intentionally been hiding itself in your "shadows" because it knows its behavior is antisocial.
> enjoying this new ragey vibe Steve has going but I guess it must be getting clicks
Or you know maybe it's because he is front row watching as greedy fucks are destroying his passion that he also turned into his livelihood.
Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.
Tangent but corporate landlords in my experience are so much better than mom and pops.
You could make an offer on 40+ houses and will likely never be in a 'bidding war' with a big PE firm or a company backed by one.
PE is a boogeyman used by politicians to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the problem is the policies they themselves have implemented in pretty much every community in the western world (making building new stuff defacto illegal).
A "market" is just a set of regulations, there can be infinitely many such sets and thus infinitely many different "markets".
Do you think each of these "markets" is perfect and cannot be criticized because the "existence of markets" is beyond criticism?
Firstly, institutional investors own ~3% of single-family homes in the US , even in hot markets, they rarely exceed 10%. The lack of supply is outweighs the private equity problem.
GPUs are manufactured goods where production scales with demand. When AI investment inevitably contracts, that fab capacity will redirect to consumer products. I don't know where this idea comes from that NVIDIA is conspiring with these companies to never sell consumers GPUs. It only takes so many GPUs to build out a streaming service, would they just stop making GPUs entirely? It doesn't make any sense if you think about it for more than 2 seconds.
Now it's the only thing that seems to be "surfaced" and "boosted" in any of the infosilos like reddit/youtube/etc.
I'm not against progress, obviously make things better, but the perspective is important.
I think a better metric would be what percent of purchases are made by institutional investors. This is because pricing is based on sales, not on the overall stock including properties that have been sat on for a long time. Have you looked at that metric?
One heuristic that points in the direction of this being meaningful is that a lot of SFHs seem to be owned by old people who have lived there for a long time.
I agree that the comparison is stupid though since computer hardware is much easier to scale with demand. If anything this may show that hardware manufacturers are betting that this demand spike is temporary and they aren’t yet willing to ramp up production since they could end up sitting on unsold inventory after the bubble pops.
46k up votes for this shit, Jesus Christ everyone's insane these days man
I wouldn't limit this to PE, although they are feeding on cheap dollars too, but the general trend of big capital out competing mom and pop for future resources. We're all short on real goods (need to buy food, shelter, ram, etc... in the future) and big capital is putting the squeeze on our short position by bidding up real resources with cheap dollars. Regular folks cover at a loss, or we go bust, and that's the gamble we're being put in.
Fuck the internet. Expect an informational dark age where anybody with half a brain cloisters away into closed communities to protect themselves from idiocy and infocontagion. There's literally no use speaking to drooling idiots, who should simply be held in the utmost contempt.
HN has been hit with lots of runoff from these reddit-dwelling mouthbreathers lately and it's turned this place into a downvote machine for any comment not towing the populist anti-intellectual party line.
ultrablack•1h ago