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ekianjo 4 days ago

Don't buy connected stuff is a lesson people still need to learn

bhhaskin 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Connected stuff is fine, but who owns the connection matters.

burnt-resistor 4 days ago | parent [-]

Private equity will buy anything and everything even moderately profitable using LBOs, stick them with the loans, take out more loans to pay themselves, spin them off, and wind them down.

Basically no one is going to run a business for the sake of customers or brand goodwill because, in the real world, there are no regulations or motivations to do so because "everything is a scam" is the normalized deviancy.

Take even a boring other industry, say single phase motor start and run capacitors. In the US, 3 of the 4 major original manufacturers of said products are owned by private equity and manufacture under under an array of cannibalistic turtles that M&A'ed basically every manufacturer. The net result is increased prices and shorter product life.

anonzzzies 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Two of my largest clients are factories in Germany and Italy that make specialist screws. Been running profitable since the 50s by the families. That I like.

nbngeorcjhe 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> stick them with the loans, take out more loans to pay themselves, spin them off, and wind them down

China would probably just imprison the people responsible for things like this

anonzzzies 4 days ago | parent [-]

and rightly so

wilg 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not really, they shut it down and basically now it's just not a connected thing. "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs."

rkomorn 4 days ago | parent [-]

Aw man, I'm gonna be that guy who goes kind of off topic, but videos of runaway escalators definitely dispelled the "it can only become stairs" failure mode of escalators for me. Terrifying stuff.

Mitch Hedberg just died too soon after YouTube launched to see it himself.

Polizeiposaune 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the best documented runaway escalator case I'm aware of -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Rome_escalator_accident -- it was determined to be the result of criminally negligent maintenance practices that included the use of zip ties to keep an emergency brake mechanism from engaging.

There was a similar incident this summer at a subway station in Atlanta but there doesn't seem to be a clear root cause published yet. As in Rome, the trigger was too many people on the escalator, but the mechanism is supposed to cope with overload by stopping the escalator.

rkomorn 4 days ago | parent [-]

This reminds me of the recent funicular crash in Lisbon where the initial report said the brakes were applied after the cable disconnected but could not slow down the vehicle.

I find all these out of control scenarios terrifying (I suppose I am not alone in this).

wilg 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I also watched that video but we pretend it's not possible for Mitch

rkomorn 4 days ago | parent [-]

I used to pretend it wasn't possible. I still do, but I used to too.