Easy. PE 99% of the time buy businesses that were already failing and provide a lifeline. A failing business can't afford to pay for expensive medical treatments without a loan that a bank will not provide since it is failing.
People who are vehemently against PE generally do not have any idea of how the system works
That's one model of private equity, but PE has also been buying up very successful local businesses in areas like veterinary care. The PE firm keeps the name and branding of the local vet because people have traditionally wanted to take their pet to a trusted local vet, not a big chain.
They don't have to have an in-depth understanding of leveraged finance to get pissed off when their doctors start doubling prices or their own employment conditions get worse or their parents get treated badly in care homes because the staff are now overworked etc. they're mad at the outcomes they're overwhelmingly not actually trying to debate the merits of it from an exit liquidity perspective.
Strong and unpredictable early game, solid middle game, strongest late game. It also has some of the best units in the game: zerglings, mutalisks, defilers. Especially defilers, they are arguably the strongest spellcasters in the game
This is not a viable strategy in competitive play. It's a huge resource/time investment with a dubious payoff.
If you could win as Protoss by building Dark Archons, raiding your Zerg opponent's base to capture a worker, building a bunch of Zerg production and tech buildings, and attacking with a combined army... you most likely outclass your opponent, and could have won much faster using a more conventional strategy.
What you're describing is a casual game, not competitive play. And, of course, all bets are off if you're playing with additional rules like "no rush" which remove the element of tempo from the game.
Glossing over everything, but either you feel Descarte's 'I think, therefore I am', or you don't.
Singularities are interesting 'moments': places where timelines converge. One of these seems to exist at the 'Big Bang', and one seems to exist at the center of a 'Black Hole'.
This man's 'math' suggests we live in a black hole.
This is a almost entirely oversimplified take on the Great Depression to the point of meaninglessness
For a decade before Black Thursday,there had been many things that were signs that the economy was having trouble even if the "Roaring Twenties" made it seem like everything was fine.
IMO the largest issue was that American farm sector was teetering on the edge because of the dramatic drop in crop prices. This deflation screwed over farmers who mechanized with lots of debt, which because of said deflation, became impossible to pay off.
The fed also implemented rate hikes to curb speculation right before 1929 which froze up credit contributing to deflation
The problem of the Great Depression was NOT the stock market crash, it arguably wasn't even the real start, just the most "spectacular" one. The problem was that with the entire economy deflating, it caused a massive downward spiral that the Fed did not really have the tools to fix, because of Gold Standard and lack of legal authorization.
This was why the Govt went to extreme lengths to try and figure out how to raise prices, which is why you get programs to pay farmers to NOT grow food, and mass killings of pigs and cows and other farm animals, even as the farmers who raised those lifestock went hungry.
So no, speculation was not the problem, it just sparked the key issue of the fact that the economy was deflation uncontrolled, but was just hidden.
This is a complex topic and I think you have done a good job of summarizing the main issues. To add a little context:
>...that the Fed did not really have the tools to fix, because of Gold Standard and lack of legal authorization.
This was just bad policy by the Fed. The Fed had the legal authority to be the lender of last resort and could have prevented the bank failures. Many explanations have been given over the years as to why the Fed didn't provide liquidity. Because the Fed failed to supply emergency liquidity, the U.S. money supply plummeted by nearly 30% over the next couple of years, which essentially turned what likely would have been a recession into the Great Depression.
This is not to say the gold standard was not a problem. During the 1930's, leaving the gold standard was one of the few good moves done to help the economy by the federal government.
Since its a one party state, there is barely reason to bother to care about being actually effective.
The train to nowhere will always be a train to nowhere because every single second it continues to not run, billions of dollars are being spent on consultants, construction workers waiting around, armies of lawyers, NGOS who barely have any reason to be paid, etc.
They are curiously also fans of the politicians shoveling this money at them to not actually build the thing they are also being paid to build simultaneously
This is such a bad response. The space race was to get to the moon. There is a reason the USSR dropped any crewed lunar plans instantly when the USA landed (also they couldn't get the N1 to stop exploding) and went all in on satellites. They also kept the crewed tests secret because they knew they were behind the USA and was embarrassing.
That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed.
You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...).
Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight.
The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.
reply