What do you think of the current efforts to go from quarterly to semiannual corporate reporting in the way it is playing out in the current administration?
Well, given that it was the company I founded, LTSE, that made the original petition at the SEC to try to move in this direction, you can guess. At the time, everyone said it was a fool's errand. Now that it seems likely to succeed, we've mostly been written out of the story.
However, the details matter a great deal, and I don't know that much about what the actual proposal the SEC is going to adopt is going to be. The last draft that I saw left me pretty worried.
What's interesting to me is that, in all the hubbub, neither the journalists nor the policymakers seem that interested in the actual evidence that we have amassed in academia on this question. For example, one important study suggested that moving from semi-annual to quarterly reporting costs companies something like 5% of their market cap. It's incredibly expensive, not because generating the reports is expensive, but rather the evidence seems to be that companies under quarterly reporting start to run the company for the benefit of the report rather than for customers.
That this is bad for investors, I hope you will see as self-evident.
OTOH one could previously pay an Instagram support contractor to do an account swap, so having a human in the loop allows for other avenues of exploit:
Since their private equity buyout in 2022, Zendesk will absolutely attempt to get you to sign agregious terms. They will attempt to hoodwink you. They will pretend they never received your cancellations and charge you for another year of contract. Legal counsel should be leveraged when dealing with them to ensure you don't get screwed.
I would argue that PE often makes things better for the consumer in the sense that they often buy businesses that are going out of business.
When the 65 year old sole proprietor of a local HVAC business sells it to a PE firm, the other option was likely winding down the business. If the owner had children that were interested in running the business, no doubt they would give it to them. But usually that is not the case. So the owner needs to sell. And if there were capitalized, enthusiastic local entrepreneurs that could buy it, no doubt the owner would consider them. But again, this is quite rare.
So the choices usually come down to: close up shop or sell to a PE firm. All other things being equal (which they never are), I think a market with more businesses is going to be more competitive and pro-consumer than a market with fewer businesses. Further, some economists have found that PE activity encourages business formation, perhaps partially explaining why the US has more small businesses per capita than Europe (where they have far less PE). So it's a double whammy: PE causes less businesses to close and more businesses to open.
Yeah but they're boring. Hilton, Skype, and Dell are PE success stories. PE, when they're not being egregious, makes the website go down a bit less? Support improves? Security and compliance gets a bit more spent on them and they land more enterprise deals? Hardly the stuff to counteract taking down everyone's beloved Toys'Я'us with leveraged debt.
Sure, in the case of private equity rollups in HVAC and electric and plumbing you often get higher rates but professionalized systems including real contracts, phone answering, emailed invoices, real quotes, real terms, enforceable warranties. Many who have trusted vendors may view this as degradation because of the cost increase but for others (a new homeowner with a job), the professionalization is a positive.
For software like Zendesk that was already thoroughly professionalized, I agree, it's hard to think of positive attributes to a PE buyout!
"Proof of Attendance" has long been worked on in the crypto space, basically giving digital badges to people based on verifiable attendance.
The problem in that space and in supply chains is at the end of the day you still have to eventually trust some thing as the source of truth to verify against. I've done supply chain verification in as simple of a way of comparing the downstream ERP to the upstream (e.g. Brand or Wholesaler) data, but it relies on access to the upstream data and trust that the upstream data is correct. You can reverse the problem by thinking about who has the incentive to try to game the state of the data in the system and what are the most common paths they are going to choose to do so.
You are right. I understood your "in supply chains is at the end of the day you still have to eventually trust some thing as the source of truth to verify against" concern. The source of trust for the data that can be garbage in or out.
But,
What if we give them accountability that data attribution is their accountability call who is entering there.
And Like handshake policy if we implement their and multiparty are contributing there like logistics providers, clicks the movement of goods and delivers, they already do in their system but if we can connect them in the same infrastructure.
And why should be data so corrected? Why we should not improve the workflow, like ERPs already have save draft and submit feature and also many software's and reporting tools have the delegation supports.
And today the provenance and traceability platforms are doing just upper things from brands call but not looking from suppliers POV.
Also, you said right, "has the incentive to try to game", so today as traceability and provenance are being done as reporting tools, why it so what's the truth source for that? What you think?
Both of these are better addressed in the books. It was an intentional choice to have no override and no maintenance access. And book 2, Colossus and the Crab, actually spends a bunch of time with Colossus testing the rationality of various humans.
Yes. That doesn't change my question, here. You can arrange to bootstrap another company. It could go bust in a way that you are not on the hook for any money, but you should be on the hook for the things you did. That is the entirety of my point.
The hypotheticals being pushed on this thread have a foregone conclusion that the arranging party is completely free of any hit.
The hypotheticals seem to be in line with reality though. This business model works because the people who make money are the ones who are in control of whether to do it. Liquidating a large company in bankruptcy can get a lot of the money back for the investors while leaving a smoking ruin where it used to be generating economic value.
Are they, though? There are certainly some cases where it has happened, but I don't think it has been established that that is the norm.
Naive searching on the term shows that they common in PE, and they do have a worse default rate at 20% over 2% otherwise. Certainly something to look at more closely. And I would be nervous being party to one. That said, 80% success is still better than what some companies are looking at otherwise.
Regardless of what you believe, the idea that big pharma doesn't believe in gut microbiome playing a significant role in human health is absolutely wrong as easily seen by the rise of GLP-1 drugs (which affect gut microbiome) and are the blockbuster drugs "big pharma" is investing heavily in currently. Perhaps, go take a look at that.
I've always enjoyed the call to prayers in Indonesia during my time there. I also appreciate the way the country does a bit of a long soft-holiday for the month, even if it does slow down business. Hope everyone there has a peaceful and fruitful Ramadan.
Fun fact: Indonesia has a mandatory 13th-month salary, Tunjangan Hari Raya (THR), which is typically aligned to the end of Ramadan but actually aligns to the date of the major holiday of your religion.
The THR (Tunjangan Hari Raya) bonus is a lifesaver for a lot of people basically a mandatory 13th-month salary paid before Idul Fitri to cover Lebaran expenses like new clothes, travel home (mudik), and food for open houses. It's tied to your religion's big holiday, so Muslims get it around Eid.
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