• 2 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 7th, 2023

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  • I see your point. I have no illusions that democracy is healthy in modern times. Perhaps not ever? We don’t even live in a democracy any more, we live in a corporatocracy.

    But doing nothing will solve nothing.

    edited to add: In fact, it’s our complacency that our corporate masters depend on. Corporate news is designed to overwhelm you. Advertising is designed to lull you to sleep. Together, they make it seem like there’s nothing you can do. But that’s not true. You can do something. Maybe not the things I suggested, but something. It will make a difference, even if it only makes a small difference for a few people. Isn’t that better than nothing?














  • My personal experience with buyouts from private equity investors is that they will milk every single cent out of the company as they crush its soul. They’re looking to make a huge profit, relatively quickly. Yes, the stock market is also looking to profit, and big share-holders have a lot of sway, but publicly traded companies don’t have to answer to a small number of ultra wealthy puppeteers in quite the same way private equity held companies do. Also, there are certain employee protections, particularly around layoffs, that apply to publicly traded companies but don’t apply to privately held companies. This seems to be one of the key strategies in the PE playbook:

    1. Buy the company / take it private
    2. Slash costs everywhere, including yearly layoffs.
    3. Push the remaining employees to adopt a “lean” or “customer first” mindset, which really means “do more work, faster, for less reward”.
    4. Profit?

    As much as I dislike Ubisoft, I don’t dislike anyone enough to wish that process upon them.