Aside, why not link the original video instead of a reddit post?<p>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.
The Reddit video is actually 3 different clips stitched together, the sources are in the Reddit OP.
<p><pre><code> Aside, why not link the original video instead of a reddit post?
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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!<p><pre><code> the vast majority of equity of companies are held privately
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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 <a href="https://www.harbourvest.com/insights-news/insights/cpm-how-does-the-size-of-private-markets-compare-to-public-markets/" rel="nofollow">https://www.harbourvest.com/insights-news/insights/cpm-how-d...</a><p><pre><code> 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
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...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 <i>way</i> 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!
My mistake, I should have said vast majority of companies, not equity in companies, are privately held.<p>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.
>> "brand dissolved" headlines > If you're seeing it in the media, of course it's confirmation bias.<p>It's a huge mistake to narrow down the problems of private equity firms (PEFs) to the dissolution of the companies they buy.<p>> Do you think it makes a good headline to say that a firm bought a company, grew it over 5 years, then sold it?<p>How is that different from what the video said? They buy all the hardware, <i>grow the price</i> of it by the mere fact of buying it up, hoard it, and then they sell it back to you at <i>even higher prices</i> as cloud services.<p>They make a profit but you are robbed. It's the strategy of <i>scalping</i> which has been going on in the GPU market for quite some time, but now it's used by corporations on an industrial scale.<p>The problem is precisely in the normal operation of PEFs, or rather, in the regulations that allow them to operate that way.
It’s like everyone on social media learned about PE in the last ~3 years and now sees it lurking in every shadow<p>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
One 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.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/m0GPnA9pW8k" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/m0GPnA9pW8k</a>
> It’s like everyone on social media learned about PE in the last ~3 years and now sees it lurking in every shadow<p>What a silly criticism.<p>Trickle down economics is from the 80s and people are still just starting to wake up to it.<p>PE has been around a while, but has also intentionally been hiding itself in your "shadows" because it knows its behavior is antisocial.<p>> enjoying this new ragey vibe Steve has going but I guess it must be getting clicks<p>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.
The 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.<p>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.
The cheap money is used for <i>scalping</i> the market on an industrial scale, in this process, inflation feeds on itself and people get robbed. I explained how it works here:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416934</a>
The 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.
The internet is so awful right now man. The illiterate, incurious populist rhetoric is getting so tedious. We are beating a dead scapegoat.
Dead rich people don't own own anything, their heirs do. Keep that in mind.
Buying memery is surely a future proof investment. It certainly was for my Amiga 500.
I 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.<p>46k up votes for this shit, Jesus Christ everyone's insane these days man
And 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.
PE didn’t kill housing. Private equity owns 2-3% of homes.
The 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.<p>Have you tried buying a home recently? It’s very tough to compete against the all-cash offers from investors.
Wonder what the % of houses are sold that aren't for the owners primary residence. Also what % in cash.
This is just patently absurd:<p><pre><code> "AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.
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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").<p>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 <i>the PC Gaming market</i> of all things is just myopic.<p>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...
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I feel like everyone online is becoming some anti-capitalist socialist and losing all critical thinking and it's making me crazy.<p>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.<p>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.
Devil’s advocate: depending on the ownership turnover rate, the pricing impact of institutional investors could be outsized compared to their current ownership share if their property acquisition ramped up recently.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.
Becoming? I've been hearing these takes for over a decade.
What'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.<p>I'm not against progress, obviously make things better, but the perspective is important.
It's messed up and should be illegal in a normal functioning society.<p>Another recent video about it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvahiVBvn9A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvahiVBvn9A</a>
It 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).