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Anyone who is interested in how this sort of thing could work, or interested in how it has worked, could read the book "Barbarians at the Gate".

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate)

This sort of acquisition is typically called an LBO or Leveraged Buy Out. The story gets into the details of key figures involved, including Henry Kravis who people today would better know for his private equity firm KKR.

Basic formula is raise cash using junk bonds, buy company, fix up company or kill off costs, use money company earns to pay debt, sell company. Since you have leveraged, your payout can be large.

It's a similar style financing activity to a house flipper. example: buy house for 1M, but pay $200K + 800K debt (mortgage). Fix up house, sell for $1.2M. Pay off $800K debt. You're left with $400K, or 100% return!


Minus fixing + selling costs

Yep! Always helps when you have sweat equity or some clever idea.

LBOs can have other formats. Take Debt, assign debt to part of the company, auction off arms, legs, kidneys of company to pay off debt... you're left with a shell of your former company but a boatload of cash to pay off the debt and everyone gets their bonuses.

Unfortunately a lot of LBOs tend to result in job cuts. The Twitter deal was a bit of that sort of thing, and we all see where that went.


I have a GC but it is about to expire this summer. If I apply for citizenship, can I still travel? Do I need to apply to extend my GC as well?

Yes, the processes are separate so you will need to apply for a new green card to be able to travel internationally but after you apply, you should be able to travel on your green card renewal application receipt notice (along with your expired green card).

This is basically the same problem of products astroturfing reddit, or SEO optimizing google. You want a new X, and so they heavily go after the keywords associated with it.

This is sort of why "brand" matters; it provides a source of trust.

Encyclopedia Britannica used to be that source of 'facts'. Then it became whatever page-rank told you. Eventually SEO optimization ruined that.

News stories are the same thing. For certain groups, they have their 'independent' publication whose reporting they trust.


>This is sort of why "brand" matters; it provides a source of trust

it tells you more about who you are buying from than how good the product will be, so I guess it's like National ID/Internet ID


It's such a pity the Oxford English Dictionary decided to paywall themselves decades ago - they used to be THE dictionary in most countries, now nobody seems to know who they are.

They would have been better off going freemium or ad-supported. Or 501(c)(3) ala wikipedia?

The OED’s goal isn’t really to be every nation’s dictionary.

What would you say their goal is >_>

curious!


Does polymarket have trial markets? Maybe 12% chance of being a mistrial - oh wait just shot up to 99%; new user called the_judge88 just bet $100K on that?

Read this as a Piece of sh... company. Then I saw response of someone saying they're a POS developer and was like oh I think he means point of sale.

Or that guy is just a really bad programmer.


I worked at a company that developed a niche POS as part of a larger system. It was, by far, the worst part of the code base. Just imagine a bunch of late 90's era Java 1.2 code, complete with a Swing UI, tons of concurrency issues, singleton objects and synchronized blocks all over the place, custom binary protocols...

Both work (:

But the point was it was in a comparble situations without the microservices / k8s / whatever pet tech you want to hate on.


IRGC targeting systems have entered the chat.


I thought for a second this was going to be an archival infographic of the dark web.


What you’re looking for is a research topic, or maybe a better way to put it is your hobby is research… if that makes sense?

So for ideas, sorry that’s going to be whatever floats your boat. You listed a bunch of different things.

But hobby is normally “playing softball” or “guitar”, but it could be “researching next gen PCs”… but that seems more like a PhD lab project.


Am I the only one who was surprised the obvious answer is to map frequencies to notes and basically turn your LED strip into a piano visualization? Then just norm to strip size?

There’s plenty of visual experiments of pianists doing this “rock band” “guitar hero” style visualization of notes.


I get the appetite for frontier models. But why not just invest in Google. Do they really expect the return profile of OpenAI to be vastly different than Google’s Gemini?


I imagine they get a bigger slice of the pie with OpenAI than they do with Google, an extremely mature company who’s had investors buying in for 30 years.

Alphabet’s market cap is $3.5 trillion, compared to OpenAI’s $850 billion reported here.


it's not really investing though. Amazon will provide 50B worth of compute and Nvidia will provide 30B worth of chips etc. Google doesnt need any of those.

The only one that is really investing is SoftBank who is pushing for a faster IPO so they hope to make a profit on that and again Google does not offer that opportunity


Google has little need for more money, so the price will be much higher. OpenAI being a separate entity also means Google's competitors (Microsoft, Amazon) can invest there without looking silly.


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