#private engineering

[collegechalo]

Private Engineering Colleges in North India

Hi, Welcome back we are sharing the list of the top 20 Private Engineering Colleges in North India.

Here are a few private engineering colleges in North India:

Amity School of Engineering and Technology, Noida

Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi

Delhi Technological University, New Delhi

Galgotias University, Greater Noida

Graphic Era Hill University, Dehradun

Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida

Krishna Institute of Engineering and Technology, Ghaziabad

Lovely Professional University, Jalandhar

MIT World Peace University, Pune

Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow and 10 more.

This is not an exhaustive list and there are many other private engineering colleges in North India. It's always recommended to research and compare multiple options before making a decision.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity rips off its investors, too

I'm coming to DEFCON! TOMORROW (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

It's amazing how many of the scams that have devastated our economy and everyday people owe their success to the fact that we assume that rich people know what they're doing, so if they're doing something, it must be real.

Think of how many people lost everything by gambling on junk bonds, exotic mortgage derivatives, cryptocurrency and web3, because they saw that the largest financial institutions in the world were going all-in on these weird, incomprehensible bets.

Then there are the people who are convinced that online advertising is built around a mind-control ray, because tech companies claim that's what they have ("I am an evil dopamine-loop-hacking wizard and I can sell anything to anyone!"), and because huge, sober blue-chip companies hand billions to these soi dissant svengalis. Sure, online ads are a swamp of clickfraud and garbage, but would these super smart captains of industry spend so much on online advertising if it didn't work super-well?

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

From our worms'-eye-view here on the ground, it's easy to assume that rich people and the people who sell them stuff are all on the same side. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," right? If Facebook is tormenting you with surveillance advertising, it must be doing so on behalf of the surveillance advertisers, for whom Mark Zuckerberg has bottomless reservoirs of honest, forthright impulses.

The reality is simultaneously weirder, and obvious in hindsight. The reason Zuck is tormenting you is that he's a remorseless sociopath who doesn't care who he hurts. He rips off everyone he can rip off, and that includes advertisers, who have seen steady price-hikes and lower-fidelity targeting, even as ad-fraud has skyrocketed while Facebook draws down its anti-fraud spending:

https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

This is not to say that Facebook advertisers have your best interests at heart, that they aren't engaged in active deception in order to better themselves at your expense. Rather, it's to say that there's no honor among thieves, and Zuck is an equal-opportunity predator. Moreover, both Zuck and his advertisers are credulous dolts, so the mere fact that they are pouring money into something (advertisers: FB ads; Zuck: metaverse) it doesn't follow that these are real or important or the coming thing.

For me, the Ur-example of "rich people are dumb, even when it comes to money" is the private equity sector. I've written a lot about PE, and how destructive it is to the real economy, from Toys R Us to pet grooming:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

How they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And how they actually created the death panels that Sarah Palin warned us about (it's OK, though: these death panels are run by the efficient private sector, not government bureaucrats):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The devastating effect of private equity on the real economy is increasingly well understood, and a curious side-effect of this is that people assume that if PE is destroying their lives, they must be doing so on behalf of their investors, who are making bank.

But – like Zuck – PE bosses are just as happy to steal from their investors as they are to to steal from the workers and customers of the businesses they acquire on those investors' behalf. They swaddle this theft in performative complexity and specialized jargon, but when you strip all that away, you find more fraud.

All the misery that PE inflicts on workers, communities and customers are just a convincer in a Big Store con, a bid to make the scam seem credible. For a certain kind of investor, any economic activity that destroys communities and workers' livelihoods must be a good bet. This is the dynamic at work in the pitch of AI image-generator companies, who spend tens of billions on technology that there is no substantial market for:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

AI image generators represent a high-profile, extremely visible example of "a job that AI can do." Nevermind that AI illustration went from a novelty to a tired cliche in less than a year. Even if you think that AI illustrations are a perfect substitute for commercial illustrations, that still won't come anywhere near making AI companies a profit. Add up the entire wage bill for every commercial illustrator in the world, hand it to Open AI, and you're not even gonna cover the kombucha budget for Open AI's staff kitchens.

Hell, all the wages of every commercial illustrator that ever lived won't pay back even a fraction of the money the AI companies spent on image generators. The pauperization of an entire class of creative workers is just a canned demo, a way to fool investors into thinking that there is a whole universe of similarly situated workers whose wages can be diverted to AI companies. This is the logic of small-time spammers, scaled up to the scale of the entire S&P 500. Smalltime spammers looked at AI and thought, "OK, I can generate as much botshit as I want on demand for free. Science fiction magazines pay $0.10/word. So if I generate a billion words, I'll get $100 million." But that's not how any of that works: sf magazines don't buy botshit, and even if they did, the entire market for short fiction adds up to what Sam Altman spends on a single designer t-shirt. The point of destroying these beloved, useful things isn't to make a lot of money by taking their markets – it's to convince dopey, panicked rich people to give you lots of money you can steal, because they think you can do this to every market and they don't want to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Take "divi recaps": after a private equity firm acquires a company (by borrowing money against its assets), it typically declares a "special dividend," emptying out the company's cash reserves and pocketing them. A "divi recap" is when PE then takes out another massive loan against the company's (remaining) assets and pockets that:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

All of this happens under an opaque cloud, thanks to the light-to-nonexistent disclosure rules for PE. A public company has to open its books for the SEC, its investors, and the world. PE is private – and so are its finances. It is absolutely routine for PE bosses to put their spouses, kids, and pals on the payroll and hand them millions for doing little to nothing, all at the expense of their investors:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/sec-set-to-lower-massive-boom-on-private-equity-industry.html

PE bosses charge huge fees to their investors – not merely the usual 2-and-20 (2% of the funds under management and 20% of any profits) – but also a wide variety of special one-off fees that pile to the sky. They also dip into their investors' funds to issue themselves massive loans that they use to make side-bets, without telling the investors about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gary-gensler

PE investors are chickens ripe for the plucking: take "continuation funds," which allow PE bosses to soak the rich people and pension funds who supply them with billions:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Remember 2-and-20? 2% of all the money you manage, every year, and 20% of all the profits. You'd think that these would be somewhat zero sum, right? If you use some of your investors' cash to buy a company, and then sell off that company for a profit, you get the 20%, but now the pot of money you're managing has gone down by the amount you used to buy the company, and so your 2% carry goes down, too.

But what if you sell your portfolio companies to yourself, using your investors' own money? When you do that, you continue to hold the company on your PE firm's books, meaning you continue to get the 2% carry, and you can pocket 20% of the sale price as a "profit":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

This is straight-up fraud, wrapped up in so much jargon that it can successfully masquerade as "financial engineering" ("financial engineering" is really just a euphemism for "fraud"). PE bosses keep coming up with new, exotic ways to steal from their investors. The latest scam is "tax receivable agreements":

https://archive.ph/RczJ9

On its face, this is a tax scam. When a company goes public, early investors generally hold stock in the original partnership or LLC; this company ends up holding a ton of shares in the new, public company. When they sell those non-public shares in the LLC, this creates a (potentially gigantic) tax credit.

A TRA hustle involves tracking down these LLC shareholders and convincing them to sign off on dumping the LLC's shares, which generates a huge tax credit for the public company. The hustler offers to split these credits with the LLC holders.

All of this is especially attractive to PE bosses, who often take a company private, do a bunch of "financial engineering" and then take it public again, leaving the PE firm as the owner of those LLC shares that can be converted to a TRA and a huge windfall – which the PE bosses pocket, because they (not their investors) are holding those credits.

This scam is really doing big numbers. KKR – the monsters who killed Toys R Us – just diverted $650 million in TRA loot, prompting a lawsuit from Steamfitters union pension fund, which had handed these jerks millions of its members' money to gamble with:

https://archive.ph/kqQvI

This highlights another very weird aspect of the PE scam: they are absolutely dependent on pension funds. To add insult to injury, PE funds are notorious union-busters – they use union money to buy companies and destroy their unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/05/mr-gotcha/#no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism

People who try to understand the PE business model often give up, because it seems to make no sense, leading many to assume that they're too unsophisticated to grasp the complex financials here. For example, PE is absolutely dependent on massive loans as a way of looting its businesses, but it also often defaults on those loans. Why do banks and investors keep making huge loans to PE deadbeats? Because – like the PE fund investors – they are credulous dolts.

The reason PE seems like a scam is that it is a scam. It is a fractal scam – every part of it is a scam. You might have heard about the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to avoid billions in taxes on the money they steal from their investors, creditors, workers and customers. Most people assume "carried interest" has something to do with "interest" on a loan. Nope: "carried interest" is a 16th century nautical tax rule designed for mercantalist sea-captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

But rich people and other "sophisticated investors" (like pension fund investment managers) are no smarter than the rest of us. They are herd animals. When they see other rich people piling into some scheme or asset class, they rush to join them, which makes the asset price go up, which makes them think they're smart (until the inevitable rug-pull). When one plute jumps off the Empire State Building, the rest of them jump, too.

Which is why there's more money flooding into PE than at any time in history, $2.62T in "dry powder," handed over to greedy, thieving PE bosses in a poker game where everyone is the sucker at the table:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance

[ravenpureforever]

Actually it is deeply funny to me how the Batman fandom does not acknowledge Harold in any capacity so when I first saw him in comics I was fully jumpscared by “who the hell is this motherfucker”

Anyway more fics need to feature the full on Hunchback of Notre Dame subplot that apparently went down in the Batcave

I want Tim or Dick to offhandedly mention missing him or something while the newer kids are like what the fuck are you talking about what do you mean

[carlyraejepsans]

aro papyrus warrior forever..... however. papyton doth compel me

[mxboxlocks]

PRIVATE DOMINATION/DOMINATED LINES!

i think i've posted them before, but this is my tf2 self-insert, the Private! they work under Soldier as an apprentice and mostly sticks by him through a lot of missions. i took a bit of time brainstorming their dom lines to get a feel for their personality and i think i did a pretty good job! so here you are!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

dominating scout "You run circles, I run miles, twerp!" "St-eee-rike! You're out!" "And that's what we do to spineless boys around my turf, slick. This is MEN'S territory!" "You're gonna need bandages for a lot more than your hands after that one." "DOMINATED, ya whiney little brat!" "I just knocked your ass out the ballpark!"

dominated by scout "Are you- Are you always this stupid? Cuz that was embarrassin'." "Dominated, bootlicker!" "You oughta get discharged, cuz there's no comin' back from that." "Y'know you take after your boss a lot; you're both easy to shoot, and you're both dumb as dirt!" "(laughter) Oh man! Wait'll I tell Soldier he's raisin' a HIPPIE!"

dominating soldier "Looks like THIS Private just moved up in rank!" "I'm taking your title, old man! Trial by combat!" "Land of the free, home of this boot I just shoved up your ass, Sarge!" "They should give me a medal for how hard I'm kicking your ass." "Saludos desde México, GRINGO! (Greetings from Mexico, FOREIGNER!)"

dominated by soldier "I don't wanna see your nose out of that dirt until your arms are about to fall off! IS! THAT! CLEAR?!" "Have you learned NOTHING, son?!" "DOMINATED! You are a disappointment! You are a coward!" "DOMINATED, you spineless hippie!" "Ohh, get up, it's only a scratch. UP, I SAID!" "DOMINATED! DISCHARGED! DEEEECEASED!"

dominating pyro "I got a waterhose back home with your name on it, Gas." "You're in hot water, ain'tchu?" "Holy mole, that's gotta burn!" (mole is a kind of Mexican spicy sauce) "Flail that 'thrower all you want, you can't burn a phoenix! CAWWW!" "DOMINATED, Pinkie Pie!" "You just got SMOKED!"

dominating heavy "Need an ice pack for that? Don't worry, we can bury you in the snow." "Your big gun doesn't scare me, Stallingrad!" "I never quit, I wanted your head! And so I shotcha til you were dead!" (reference to the song Rasputin by Boney M.) "Take that domination where the sun don't shine, lover-of-the-Russian-queen!" (another Rasputin reference) "Tell Dr. Boytoy he's gonna need to do a lot of work to get those bullets out of ya!"

dominated by heavy "DOMINATED. Now be quiet." "Dominated! You do not live up to your title." "Mm. You need more training." "Private is not disciplined! (singsong) Oh, Soldier!" "Stay down, little man. I do not enjoy killing babies."

dominating demo "Gotcha that time, Cap'n Loch Ness!" "Those bombs of yours ain't really all that useful when you can't keep your eye on 'em, are they?" "Didn't see me comin' did ya?" "Oof, you're gonna need more than a drink for that." "You just LOVE my bullets, don'tcha Cyclops? CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!"

dominated by demo "TELL YOUR SORRY EXCUSE FOR A LEADER THAT I'M COMIN' FOR HIM NEXT!" "A fine sendoff for a boot-lickin' bib-wearin' git!" "For your sake, laddie, I'll tell your ma you died doin' what you loved; gettin' your BLOODY ARSE handed to you!"

dominating engineer "You ever thought about buildin' a bulletproof vest?" "Not very intuitive design when your own sentry can shoot at you too, y'know." (rare) "Dominated! Tell Beecave I said best wishes!" "Twelve pHDs and for what?! Try a tour in the army, Quickdraw!" "They don't teach fightin' like that in IT, do they?" "Tend to your farm and mind your own damn business!" "DOMINATED, Marty Robins!"

dominated by engineer "You're not much smarter than yer mentor, are ya? Hell, y'all might be related." "Dominated. Tell Houston I said they can go to hell!" "Take your humid ass air back down to the coast, damn it!" "Not in my damn base, ya don't."

dominating sniper "You piss in jars and you keep 'em. I don't need to embarrass you any more." "Dominated, Heeler!" (vague reference to Bluey) "Aren't Australians supposed to be the best fighters in the world?! C'MON!" "I got you in my sights. Wanker."

dominated by sniper "(sotto voice) Gotcha, trench rat." "Gotcha, trench rat!" "(sotto voice) Another bloody moron crossed off my list." "Another bloody moron crossed off my list!" "You think wearin' a uniform makes you special, punk?!" "(sotto voice) They got cages in hell for people like you, grunt." "They got cages in hell for people like you, grunt!"

dominating medic "Someone call the waah-mbulence!" "And for your death certificate, that'll be 200,000 dollars! Name of insurance?" "What's this? A DNR? Baaad news, other team, the doctor is OUT!" "Dominated, pillskirt!" "Dominated, psych ward!" "DOMINATED, Frankenstein!"

dominated by medic "I would use your body for science, but it's so full of sugar and plastic I think I'd be better off robbing a grave!" "Ooh! That limb looks infected. I'll have to take it off." "You never SAW me coming, did you, fraulien?!" "Ha-ha-hah! Your blood, it gives me youth!" "Shut up and let me do my job!"

dominating spy "You sorry sacks of scum are USELESS to your teammates!" "Ooo, a ghost?! So spooooky!" "Need a cig, baguette?" "That's what you get you little weasel!" "Buy me a drink later and we'll call it even." "Eat that, white flag!"

dominated by spy "If your spatial awareness were as large as your ego, you'd have caught that!" "Now to torture the information out of you - or is that too much to handle?" "A knife in the back, like a kiss, au revoir." "I've met politicians with more conviction than you!" "Dominated! Now go back to your play-pen!" "Dominated, you scraggly ill-kempt mutt!"

[smol4bluengine]

The Duke and Duchess of Boxford held onto each other tightly as Spencer rushed down the track, the private engine was trying to save Flying Scotsman from an electric orb.

From what Edward had told Sir Topham Hatt, it seemed like these electric orbs were the cause of the others babyfication humanization, and now Scotsman was in danger of joining his brother Gordon for nap time.

By now Spencer had caught up to Scotsman.

"What should I do"? Scotsman called out.

"Take the next points, we need to avoid going up Gordon's Hill." Spencer said.

The cousins took the points that would lead them around Gordon's Hill, however Scotsman noticed too late that the track was blocked by a mud slide. His driver slammed on the breaks, but it was too late. Scotsman slammed face first into the mud, he was stuck.

Spencer was lucky to stop buffer to buffer, any later and the two engines would've had a collision.

"Spencer behind you"! Scotsman called out.

The Duke and Duchess just got out of their private coach in time to see the orb approaching, as it did the orb began to slow down and began to make it's way toward Spencer slowly and menacingly. Spencer got a sudden realization that the orb hadn't been after Scotsman, it had been using him as bait to get to Spencer.

"Stop right there"! The Duke demanded the orb.

"I don't know what your game is, but these engines shall be having none of that." The Duke told the orb, his brow furrowed in a scolding manner.

This seemed to have upset the orb as it began to enlarge, arks of sparking electricity angrily shooting out of it.

Fearing for the Boxford's safety, Spencer jostled out his crew, causing his driver to accidentally switch Spencer into reverse as he tried to hold on.

"Spencer what are you doing"?! Cried the Duchess.

"I'm sorry your grace but I cannot allow this thing to harm you, even if it means putting myself out of commission." Spencer said bravely as he inched closer to the orb.

The orb gleefully reached out towards its next victim, consuming Spencer in a brilliant light. The onlookers had to shield their eyes.

As it faded, the wail of an infant filled the night sky. On the track, the Boxford's found Spencer, laying on the track. The new human was wiggling around, confused at his new limbs.

"Oh, Spencer." The Duke said solemnly as he took off his coat and helped his wife swaddle up their former private engine.

The crews of Scotsman and Spencer set out to free the former from his muddy prison, the Boxford's headed towards the nearest signal house to call for a rescue crane as well as inform Sir Topham Hatt about the situation.

As they waited for the Fat controller to arrive, the Boxford's stayed close to each other, comforting Spencer to the best of their abilities. To their shock and relief, it didn't take long for the new baby to calm down, even falling asleep in the Duchesses arms. The Duke gently stroked Spencer's silver hair.

Him and the Duchess always wanted to have a child.

[allgremlinart]

stop arguing the existence of forklifts in the atla comics under my post you guys. there was an honest to god truck in Day Of Black Sun

[nocternalrandomness]

Beech Baron leaving Phoenix Deer Valley Airport

[pxmun]

Holly Huntington S: F Birthday: October 25 Age:9 Height: 85cm? Parente: Lucius and Clegg Huntington Hometown: Pelican Falls Engine: Spencer Conductor# 423

Special Notes: ~Holly has Achondroplasia Dwarfism. ~As such, Holly should have a slightly large head and short limbs. Even appearing bow-legged ~Physically Holly will not be able to do certain activities like the rest of the human cast. ~ Nonetheless, our other M.C.'s are always willing to lend a helping hand when Holly needs it. ~We are hoping Holly will be a good representative for the Dwarfism community and that she'll leave a positive impact on the audience about acceptance, help, inclusivity, and not feeling negative for having a disability. ~The cancer Holly had was Leukemia. -She was exposed to Gold Dust during her time on Sodor. Its magic regrew Holly's hair overnight and turned it silver rather than her original light brown hair. Holly is an imaginative child with a love for horses and fairy tales. She lives with her dads on their farm in Pelican Falls, though Holly is just now returning home from the hospital after beating cancer. Her reunion will have to wait though, as the night before she was due home, Holly uncovered the Jukebox Band and their manager, J.J. Silvers. Holly joins the band and helps them travel to Sodor via Lady the magic engine, so the band can learn the fate of their friend Mr. Conductor. However, their little visit doesn't go as planned as Holly ends up taking a midnight train ride all around Sodor when she meets and befriends Spencer the silver engine. Can Holly get back home before her parents find out she's missing? Holly & Spencer The two work and act like siblings. With Spencer he learns how to treat those with differences kinder compared to how he was in "Hero of the Rails". With Holly Spencer helps her learn how to be independent.

[cyatzura]

can you tell me more about this jjk hacker au

this is set in cyberpunk-ish universe where

yuuji finds out he's not entirely human (on both sides of his family actually) and accidently ingests the world's most evil virus (sukuna is still his uncle somehow)

gojo is trying to figure out how to bypass all of sukuna's security to free yuuji; he is the world's greatest (supposedly) ethical hacker, a cryptography professor and ceo of his own (very successful) cybersecurity firm where he employs his students; he is not only very good at accessing computer systems but he can easily manipulate people into simply revealing the information he needs

nobara actually really wanted to be a popular streamer (in order to become a successful influencer) but every time someone pissed her off in a game she would just hack into their account and steal everything; gojo offered her a scholarship based on that and while nobara does not particularly care about getting a degree she used the chance to get out of her hometown

maki is on a sports scholarship and could probably be an olympic athlete but her actual goal is to get her hands on information about the zenin that will allow her to become the head of the family; she is very good at accessing buildings / physical spaces (or just torturing information out of people)

megumi is writing increasingly powerful algorithms that can easily access different systems but more importantly he is the world's most suffering teacher's assistent; he felt indebted to gojo because gojo used to tutor him for free and bought him any hardware he wanted so megumi thought he could pay him back by helping him with his lectures. he is regretting everything now.

if you get a phone call from your boss asking for a password and you need to tell it to him now it's urgent that was actually inumaki

panda rarely (never?) leaves the campus but if you need another identity he's the guy; he will make you a linkedin account with 200 connections in 1h

this is the pre-shibuya team lineup so yuuta is currently doing his semester abroad after accidently creating the world's first conscious ai that he modelled after his dead childhood gf; he did start the singularity but this is not about him so gojo was like 'this is going to be miguel's problem for now'

[kacey-byten]

considering naming myself after engineer tf2

[in-death-we-fall]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The antitrust Twilight Zone

Funeral homes were once dominated by local, family owned businesses. Today, odds are, your neighborhood funeral home is owned by Service Corporation International, which has bought hundreds of funeral homes (keeping the proprietor’s name over the door), jacking up prices and reaping vast profits.

Funeral homes are now one of America’s most predatory, vicious industries, and SCI uses the profits it gouges out of bereaved, reeling families to fuel more acquisitions — 121 more in 2021. SCI gets some economies of scale out of this consolidation, but that’s passed onto shareholders, not consumers. SCI charges 42% more than independent funeral homes.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/09/high-cost-of-dying/#memento-mori

SCI boasts about its pricing power to its investors, how it exploits people’s unwillingness to venture far from home to buy funeral services. If you buy all the funeral homes in a neighborhood, you have near-total control over the market. Despite these obvious problems, none of SCI’s acquisitions face any merger scrutiny, thanks to loopholes in antitrust law.

These loopholes have allowed the entire US productive economy to undergo mass consolidation, flying under regulatory radar. This affects industries as diverse as “hospital beds, magic mushrooms, youth addiction treatment centers, mobile home parks, nursing homes, physicians’ practices, local newspapers, or e-commerce sellers,” but it’s at its worst when it comes to services associated with trauma, where you don’t shop around.

Think of how Envision, a healthcare rollup, used the capital reserves of KKR, its private equity owner, to buy emergency rooms and ambulance services, elevating surprise billing to a grotesque art form. Their depravity knows no bounds: an unconscious, intubated woman with covid was needlessly flown 20 miles to another hospital, generating a $52k bill.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

This is “the health equivalent of a carjacking,” and rollups spread surprise billing beyond emergency rooms to anesthesiologists, radiologists, family practice, dermatology and others. In the late 80s, 70% of MDs owned their practices. Today, 70% of docs work for a hospital or corporation.

How the actual fuck did this happen? Rollups take place in “antitrust’s Twilight Zone,” where a perfect storm of regulatory blindspots, demographic factors, macroeconomics, and remorseless cheating by the ultra-wealthy has laid waste to the American economy, torching much of the US’s productive capacity in an orgy of predatory, extractive, enshittifying mergers.

The processes that underpin this transformation aren’t actually very complicated, but they are closely interwoven and can be hard to wrap your head around. “The Roll-Up Economy: The Business of Consolidating Industries with Serial Acquisitions,” a new paper from The American Economic Liberties Project by Denise Hearn, Krista Brown, Taylor Sekhon and Erik Peinert does a superb job of breaking it down:

http://www.economicliberties.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Serial-Acquisitions-Working-Paper-R4-2.pdf

The most obvious problem here is with the MergerScrutiny process, which is when competition regulators must be notified of proposed mergers and must give their approval before they can proceed. Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) merger scrutiny kicks in for mergers when the purchase price is $101m or more. A company that builds up a monopoly by acquiring hundreds of small businesses need never face merger scrutiny.

The high merger scrutiny threshold means that only a very few mergers are regulated: in 2021, out of 21,994 mergers, only 4,130 (<20%) were reported to the FTC. 2020 saw 16,723 mergers, with only 1.637 (>10%) being reported to the FTC.

Serial acquirers claim that the massive profits they extract by buying up and merging hundreds of businesses are the result of “efficiency” but a closer look at their marketplace conduct shows that most of those profits come from market power. Where efficiences are realized, they benefit shareholders, and are not shared with customers, who face higher prices as competition dwindles.

The serial acquisition bonanza is bad news for supply chains, wages, the small business ecosystem, inequality, and competition itself. Wherever we find concentrated industires, we find these under-the-radar rollups: out of 616 Big Tech acquisitions from 2010 to 2019, 94 (15%) of them came in for merger scrutiny.

The report’s authors quote FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter: “I think of serial acquisitions as a Pac-Man strategy. Each individual merger viewed independently may not seem to have significant impact. But the collective impact of hundreds of smaller acquisitions, can lead to a monopolistic behavior.”

It’s not just the FTC that recognizes the risks from rollups. Jonathan Kanter, the DoJ’s top antitrust enforcer has raised alarms about private equity strategies that are “designed to hollow out or roll-up an industry and essentially cash out. That business model is often very much at odds with the law and very much at odds with the competition we’re trying to protect.”

The DoJ’s interest is important. As with so many antitrust failures, the problem isn’t in the law, but in its enforcement. Section 7 of the Clayton Act prohibits serial acquisitions under its “incipient monopolization” standard. Acquisitions are banned “where the effect of such acquisition may be to substantially lessen competition between the corporation whose stock is so acquired and the corporation making the acquisition.” This incipiency standard was strengthened by the 1950 Celler-Kefauver Amendment.

The lawmakers who passed both acts were clear about their legislative intention — to block this kind of stealth monopoly formation. For decades, that’s how the law was enforced. For example, in 1966, the DoJ blocked Von’s from acquiring another grocer because the resulting merger would give Von’s 7.5% of the regional market. While Von’s is cited by pro-monopoly extremists as an example of how the old antitrust system was broken and petty, the DoJ’s logic was impeccable and sorely missed today: they were trying to prevent a rollup of the sort that plagues our modern economy.

As the Supremes wrote in 1963: “A fundamental purpose of [stronger incipiency standards was] to arrest the trend toward concentration, the tendency of monopoly, before the consumer’s alternatives disappeared through merger, and that purpose would be ill-served if the law stayed its hand until 10, or 20, or 30 [more firms were absorbed].”

But even though the incipiency standard remains on the books, its enforcement dwindled away to nothing, starting in the Reagan era, thanks to the Chicago School’s influence. The neoliberal economists of Chicago, led by the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork, counseled that most monopolies were “efficient” and the inefficient ones would self-correct when new businesses challenged them, and demanded a halt to antitrust enforcement.

In 1982, the DoJ’s merger guidelines were gutted, made toothless through the addition of a “safe harbor” rule. So long as a merger stayed below a certain threshold of market concentration, the DoJ promised not to look into it. In 2000, Clinton signed an amendment to the HSR Act that exempted transactions below $50m. In 2010, Obama’s DoJ expanded the safe harbor to exclude “[mergers that] are unlikely to have adverse competitive effects and ordinarily require no further analysis.”

These constitute a “blank check” for serial acquirers. Any investor who found a profitable strategy for serial acquisition could now operate with impunity, free from government interference, no matter how devastating these acquisitions were to the real economy.

Unfortunately for us, serial acquisitions are profitable. As an EY study put it: “the more acquisitive the company… the greater the value created…there is a strong pattern of shareholder value growth, correlating with frequent acquisitions.” Where does this value come from? “Efficiencies” are part of the story, but it’s a sideshow. The real action is in the power that consolidation gives over workers, suppliers and customers, as well as vast, irresistable gains from financial engineering.

In all, the authors identify five ways that rollups enrich investors:

I. low-risk expansion;

II. efficiencies of scale;

III. pricing power;

IV. buyer power;

V. valuation arbitrage.

The efficiency gains that rolled up firms enjoy often come at the expense of workers — these companies shed jobs and depress wages, and the savings aren’t passed on to customers, but rather returned to the business, which reinvests it in gobbling up more companies, firing more workers, and slashing survivors’ wages. Anything left over is passed on to the investors.

Consolidated sectors are hotbeds of fraud: take Heartland, which has rolled up small dental practices across America. Heartland promised dentists that it would free them from the drudgery of billing and administration but instead embarked on a campaign of phony Medicare billing, wage theft, and forcing unnecessary, painful procedures on children.

Heartland is no anomaly: dental rollups have actually killed children by subjecting them to multiple, unnecessary root-canals. These predatory businesses rely on Medicaid paying for these procedures, meaning that it’s only the poorest children who face these abuses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

A consolidated sector has lots of ways to rip off the public: they can “directly raise prices, bundle different products or services together, or attach new fees to existing products.” The epidemic of junk fees can be traced to consolidation.

Consolidators aren’t shy about this, either. The pitch-decks they send to investors and board members openly brag about “pricing power, gained through acquisitions and high switching costs, as a key strategy.”

Unsurprisingly, investors love consolidators. Not only can they gouge customers and cheat workers, but they also enjoy an incredible, obscure benefit in the form of “valuation arbitrage.”

When a business goes up for sale, its valuation (price) is calculated by multiplying its annual cashflow. For small businesses, the usual multiplier is 3–5x. For large businesses, it’s 10–20x or more. That means that the mere act of merging a small business with a large business can increase its valuation sevenfold or more!

Let’s break that down. A dental practice that grosses $1m/year is generally sold for $3–5m. But if Heartland buys the practice and merges it with its chain of baby-torturing, Medicaid-defrauding dental practices, the chain’s valuation goes up by $10–20m. That higher valuation means that Heartland can borrow more money at more favorable rates, and it means that when it flips the husks of these dental practices, it expects a 700% return.

This is why your local veterinarian has been enshittified. “A typical vet practice sells for 5–8x cashflow…American Veterinary Group [is] valued at as much as 21x cashflow…When a large consolidator buys a $1M cashflow clinic, it may cost them as little as $5M, while increasing the value of the consolidator by $21M. This has created a goldrush for veterinary consolidators.”

This free money for large consolidators means that even when there are better buyers — investors who want to maintain the quality and service the business offers — they can’t outbid the consolidators. The consolidators, expecting a 700% profit triggered by the mere act of changing the business’s ownership papers, can always afford to pay more than someone who merely wants to provide a good business at a fair price to their community.

To make this worse, an unprecedented number of small businesses are all up for sale at once. Half of US businesses are owned by Boomers who are ready to retire and exhausted by two major financial crises within a decade. 60% of Boomer-owned businesses — 2.9m businesses of 11 or so employees each, employing 32m people in all — are expected to sell in the coming decade.

If nothing changes, these businesses are likely to end up in the hands of consolidators. Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, private equity firms and other looters have been awash in free money, courtesy of the Federal Reserve and Congress, who chose to bail out irresponsible and deceptive lenders, not the borrowers they preyed upon.

A decade of zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) helped PE grow to “staggering” size. Over that period, America’s 2,000 private equity firms raised buyout warchests totaling $2t. Today, private equity owned companies outnumber publicly traded firms by more than two to one.

Private equity is patient zero in the serial acquisition epidemic. The list of private equity rollup plays includes “comedy clubs, ad agencies, water bottles, local newspapers, and healthcare providers like hospitals, ERs, and nursing homes.”

Meanwhile, ZIRP left the nation’s pension funds desperate for returns on their investments, and these funds handed $480b to the private equity sector. If you have a pension, your retirement is being funded by investments that are destroying your industry, raising your rent, and turning the nursing home you’re doomed to into a charnel house.

The good news is that enforcers like Kanter have called time on the longstanding, bipartisan failure to use antitrust laws to block consolidation. Kanter told the NY Bar Association: “We have an obligation to enforce the antitrust laws as written by Congress, and we will challenge any merger where the effect ‘may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.’”

The FTC and the DOJ already have many tools they can use to end this epidemic.

They can revive the incipiency standard from Sec 7 of the Clayton Act, which bans mergers where “the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly.”

This allows regulators to “consider a broad range of price and non-price effects relevant to serial acquisitions, including the long-term business strategy of the acquirer, the current trend or prevalence of concentration or acquisitions in the industry, and the investment structure of the transactions”;

The FTC and DOJ can strengthen this by revising their merger guidelines to “incorporate a new section for industries or markets where there is a trend towards concentration.” They can get rid of Reagan’s 1982 safe harbor, and tear up the blank check for merger approval;

The FTC could institute a policy of immediately publishing merger filings, “the moment they are filed.”

Beyond this, the authors identify some key areas for legislative reform:

Exempt the FTC from the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) of 1995, which currently blocks the FTC from requesting documents from “10 or more people” when it investigates a merger;

Subject any company “making more than 6 acquisitions per year valued at $70 million total or more” to “extra scrutiny under revised merger guidelines, regardless of the total size of the firm or the individual acquisitions”;

Treat all the companies owned by a PE fund as having the same owner, rather than allowing the fiction that a holding company is the owner of a business;

Force businesses seeking merger approval to provide “any investment materials, such as Private Placement Memorandums, Management or Lender Presentations, or any documents prepared for the purposes of soliciting investment. Such documents often plainly describe the anticompetitive roll-up or consolidation strategy of the acquiring firm”;

Also force them to provide “loan documentation to understand the acquisition plans of a company and its financing strategy;”

When companies are found to have violated antitrust, ban them from acquiring any other company for 3–5 years, and/or force them to get FTC pre-approval for all future acquisitions;

Reinvigorate enforcement of rules requiring that some categories of business (especially healthcare) be owned by licensed professionals;

Lower the threshold for notification of mergers;

Add a new notification requirement based on the number of transactions;

Fed agencies should automatically share merger documents with state attorneys general;

Extend civil and criminal antitrust penalties to “investment bankers, attorneys, consultants who usher through anticompetitive mergers.”

[windydrawallday]

GHOST HEART

"Do you ever think of me Cause you're the ghost in my heart."

COVER ART for the ship week challenge hosted by @heartsandsparksshipweek // I'm going to a more platonic route with these two to show how admiration can be as powerful and lovable between characters of different species!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

[ 01 Differences ]

[ 02 Affection ]

[ Interlude - Initial Sketches ]

[ 03 Night Out ]

[ 04 Celebration ]

[ 05 ]

[ 06 On Cybertron]

[ 07 Voyage ]

[ 08 BONUS Thank You]

[flyingprivate]

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) 

Courtesy of Wave Engine Corp

[mxboxlocks]

Dear soldier,

Do you have any stories or memories you'd like to share? Also! Do you look any different from your source material?

-🎾

🪖 Hey. I remember a date night Dell and I had one day. He hung string lights all over the campground and he sung to me while we drank and talked the night away.

I just remembered it today. For those of you that don't know, I'm an amnesiac. So I'm really happy I could remember.