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Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing, now it's PCs
- ultrablack 10mo agoBuying memery is surely a future proof investment. It certainly was for my Amiga 500.
- shmerl 10mo agoIt's messed up and should be illegal in a normal functioning society. Another recent video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvahiVBvn9A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvahiVBvn9A
- redleggedfrog 10mo agoDead rich people don't own own anything, their heirs do. Keep that in mind.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 10mo agoAside, why not link the original video instead of a reddit post? 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.
- teroshan 10mo agoThe Reddit video is actually 3 different clips stitched together, the sources are in the Reddit OP.
- bbor 10mo agoAside, why not link the original video instead of a reddit post? It's a compilation, but regardless, Reddit seems about as "original" as any other platform. I'd certainly rather see Reddit links here than YouTube links, all else being equal! the vast majority of equity of companies are held privately That's an good intuition, but it turns out to be false globally (TIL!): "There are nearly 25x more PE- and VC-backed companies than public markets [globally], but the total capitalization of private equity and venture capital is just 12% of public equity markets." per https://www.harbourvest.com/insights-news/insights/cpm-how-does-the-size-of-private-markets-compare-to-public-markets/ https://www.harbourvest.com/insights-news/insights/cpm-how-d... 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 ...source? It's certainly possible that I'm suffering from confirmation bias, but "company goes through PE acquisition" headlines seem to be followed by "brand dissolved" headlines in way too many cases. Even if it's not a literal majority, the problem seems A) widespread, and B) behind many of the most harmful symptoms of the rot beneath the American(/global?) economy!
- satvikpendem 10mo agoMy mistake, I should have said vast majority of companies, not equity in companies, are privately held. 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.
- bigbadfeline 10mo ago>> "brand dissolved" headlines > If you're seeing it in the media, of course it's confirmation bias. 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.
- bbor 10mo agoThis is just patently absurd: "AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal. People are investing in AI because they believe the scientists' warnings that the Frame Problem[1] has been solved (or, in other words, "AGI is suddenly within reach"). 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...
- zahlman 10mo agoYou seem to have dropped the intended [1] link?
- bbor 10mo agoAh, indeed I did! It's a searchable term in general, but I'm particularly fond of this write-up: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/ yet again I am begging, weeping, pleading for markdown support on HN, my lord
- saagarjha 10mo agoIt is always amusing to me to watch people (gamers, in this case) slowly end up at “capitalism must be destroyed” when the market affects something they care about (PC parts becoming more expensive because of AI).
- bdcravens 10mo agoDevelopers too, as "vibe coding" takes hold, after a couple of decades of cheering on technology "disruption".
- ribosometronome 10mo agoI think you're conflating executive rhetoric for the markets with what the average developer at any company believes. Do you really think the average Uber dev cares any more than an Uber janitor about summoning taxis on demand?
- izacus 10mo agoWhy did you feel the need to write this quip? What do you add here and what was your point? Does it bother you if people express negative opinions about the things that affect them?
- saagarjha 10mo agoNo, I'm actually quite pleased. It has historically been very difficult to get the average person to care about monopoly law and international relations, or even politics in general. I think our society has done a lot to try to insulate citizens from the consequences of policies, because groceries continue to show up in their supermarket, they need to keep going to work, and they can still visit their family on an individual basis even if statistically and in aggregate many of these may change based on what is going on. Every so often, there are events that really get people upset about the state of things. I think the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster thing would be one of them. In this case a guy who mostly wants his games to run fast is now caught in the middle of supply chains for the AI race and is finding out that when a trillion dollars are involved, his hobbies literally do not matter in comparison. So when someone ends up realizing this, I am hopeful that more people will as well and do something about it.
- Havoc 10mo agoIt’s like everyone on social media learned about PE in the last ~3 years and now sees it lurking in every shadow 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
- satvikpendem 10mo agoOne of the former Linus Tech Tips hosts mentioned that Steve was one of the driving forces behind them leaving as Steve's content against LTT drove reduced views. https://youtu.be/m0GPnA9pW8k https://youtu.be/m0GPnA9pW8k
- fkafldkj 10mo ago[flagged]
- Havoc 10mo ago>What a silly criticism. >hiding itself in your "shadows" I've spent the last decade in PE & adjacent circles so pretty sure I've got a better read on it than tech youtubers (or the average hn reader)
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 10mo agoReminds me of Nestle. When someone brings up Nestle and a vague issue with water, you know they are Reddit-educated due to their repeated nonsensical laser focus on one thing much like Kony 2012.
- dadrian 10mo agoPE didn’t kill housing. Private equity owns 2-3% of homes.
- postpawl 10mo agoThe national average obscures that institutional investors own 1 in 9 rental homes in Charlotte, 1 in 10 in Tampa, and one-fifth of all houses in some Atlanta neighborhoods. It’s likely to get worse too. Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.
- osiris970 10mo agoTime to build!
- postpawl 10mo agoBuilding helps, but without addressing who gets to buy the new stock, you're potentially just building inventory for PE portfolios.
- osiris970 10mo agoI don't generally agree, i think they should be able to buy them as well. We can't limit how many homes people own, how do you rent then? What do we classify as "too much" house ownership? 10?100?1000?
- postpawl 10mo agoA mom and pop landlord with 5 rentals doesn't have pricing power. A firm owning 1 in 5 homes in a neighborhood does. That's why antitrust thresholds exist in other industries.
- osiris970 10mo agoThat's fair, we aren't anywhere close to that though right? From research I saw, investors usually push prices down. Tangent but corporate landlords in my experience are so much better than mom and pops.
- anukin 10mo agoThe problem with this argument is that there are players who are incentivized to play on the opposite side of the PE memory hoarders or cloud everything people. One of the most valuable company namely Apple have been playing around with local everything for a while now. Housing is a regulation(mostly) problem and govt has 0 incentives against the lobbyists and nimby crowd who support reelection bid vs largely marginalized or non voter crowd of immigrants. It’s false equivalence in its full glory.
- appreciatorBus 10mo agoBut but but how am I gonna justify my critical theory phd if I can’t blame all the things I don’t like on the existence of markets???
- bigbadfeline 10mo agoThat's a rather uninformed attempt at sarcasm. 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?
- appreciatorBus 10mo agoOf course not. But one well-known characteristic of markets is that imbalances tend to, over-time, self correct. No it’s not perfect, and no, it doesn’t happen instantly. But the idea that GPU prices rising is the end of the world is just silly. If it’s a long-standing trend, people will build more GPU factories and people who own gpus will go broke. Or maybe it’s not a long-standing trend, and the AI companies go broke first. Either way GPUs get cheap again. But not tomorrow, not next week, so lots of time for click bait articles about how it’s a sign of end times.
- bigbadfeline 10mo ago> one well-known characteristic of markets is that imbalances tend to, over-time, self correct. That's not true for all markets, least of all for "free" markets which not only "tend" to become monopolized, they do end up as Robber Baron lands on steroids. If you were right, there would be no need for anti-monopoly regulation or even for any market regulation, and I wouldn't have to repeat twice that a market is just a set of regulations. > But the idea that GPU prices rising is the end of the world is just silly. Nobody claimed that but it can't be disproved either :) On the other hand, you seem to think we should be concerned only with problems that provably lead to the end of the world. I'm not sure how wise that is. > Or maybe it’s not a long-standing trend Or maybe it is? Should we close our eyes and rely on chance or just use the opportunity to fix what clearly is a systemic problem in the fundamentals of the US market and economy - it's quite clear that the problem isn't limited to just RAM and GPUs.
- lilwobbly 10mo agoI feel like everyone online is becoming some anti-capitalist socialist and losing all critical thinking and it's making me crazy. 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.
- zahlman 10mo agoBecoming? I've been hearing these takes for over a decade.
- octoberfranklin 10mo agoA decade ago it was the fringe lunatics. Now it's the only thing that seems to be "surfaced" and "boosted" in any of the infosilos like reddit/youtube/etc.
- zahlman 10mo agoI don't think it's because there are more people on the fringes, so much as because there's so much more "surfacing" technology in use.
- octoberfranklin 10mo agoThat was my point. Well that and the fact that the "surfacing" is very very aggressively selecting for this particular viewpoint, which used to be a fringe lunatic one.
- osiris970 10mo agoWhat's immensely frustrating is so much of this conspiracy shit, comes from the U.S. as well. A population where the median is living better every year, and better than 90% of the world. It's mind boggling, people don't understand how good they have it. I'm not against progress, obviously make things better, but the perspective is important.
- osiris970 10mo agoI dislike these sensationalist headlines, but the housing one irks me the most. PE didn't make housing expensive, your neighbors, grandma and grandpa did by restricting new construction. In cities dumb policy like the rent control did. Stop blaming Boogeymen and actually look into issues. The ram thing is unfortunate, but i don't really see a solution to it, for now. 46k up votes for this shit, Jesus Christ everyone's insane these days man
- biophysboy 10mo agoAnd along with permitting/zoning BS, there is also many other headwinds for real estate: high aggregate income, land scarcity, automation challenges (no prefab houses), and high labor costs.
- osiris970 10mo agoIs land scarcity really an issue? Genuinely asking, cause curious
- biophysboy 10mo agoIn the places people want to live, yeah. It would be great if Manhattan were twice as wide, for example. There is the artificial scarcity from the zoning stuff, but then there is also just the geographic boundaries and human preferences for the "cool part of town".
- osiris970 10mo agoCouldn't we just build higher?
- biophysboy 10mo agoAbsolutely you can, and we should! not saying manhattan is maxed out
- astral_drama 10mo agoThe current admin wants even cheaper money, which is likely to embolden well connected borrowers to pump up whatever they think will hold a bit of value. It was housing, which hit an equilibrium (can't milk it much more), then stocks, then gold and now silver and memory chips of all things. 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.
- bigbadfeline 10mo agoThe cheap money is used for scalping the market on an industrial scale, in this process, inflation feeds on itself and people get robbed. I explained how it works here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934
- ryandv 10mo ago[flagged]
- DetectDefect 10mo agoThe belligerent name-calling only further degenerates quality of discourse. Consider detonating your emotions in a more responsible blast-radius.
- pembrook 10mo agoIn this case I believe it is warranted. I fully support OP's emotional take. 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.
- ribosometronome 10mo agoPoisoning the well adjacent behavior rather than actually taking issue with anything said by the content truly illustrates how intellectual a take OP had with his "everyone's a retard and the internet sucks" take.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ryandv 10mo agoWould you dignify timecube with a measured response? I wouldn't - I would call it out for the drivel it is, assign it the ridicule it rightfully deserves, and move on, as I have done here.
- DetectDefect 10mo agoThen downvote or flag the thread and move on? Not everyone wants to be exposed to disablist vitriol, no matter how toxic the hellstew runoff is.
- 10mo ago
- biophysboy 10mo agoThe internet is so awful right now man. The illiterate, incurious populist rhetoric is getting so tedious. We are beating a dead scapegoat.
- lr1970 10mo agoAbout four years ago, during COVID, there was a shortage of chips for cars, fueled in part by PE scalpers hoarding chips. Sounds familiar? EDIT: more accurate language
- MarkusAllen 9mo ago[dead]