All we need is native Excel support, and HTML5 web support. In web browsers it should be the default copy formatting, and if you’re writing an HTML document these characters should be an alternative to using TD and TR tags.
Millionaire class? The article describes a small business owner who wants to retire. Meanwhile, the private equity firms are going to monopolize the market and raise prices. Sadly, none of the 20 or 30 year olds who are actually doing the work will be able to buy out their owners business.
Any young tradespeople: form a coop and buy your bosses business. Better to be a 10% owner than 0%.
What we need are new antitrust laws, not only to breakup or tax megacorps, but also to breakup consolidation of control from investment firms (private equity but also others). Without this, there is no real fair playing field for competition.
> Bad for the customer and the next gen of small business owners.
Another example of the previous generation pulling up the ladder once they've reached the top. Sell the business to Private Equity (who will squeeze both employees and customers), flip everyone the bird, and parachute off to Florida to suck down Pina Coladas for the rest of your life.
The real question is how do we get the next generation to realiie they can start their own business and take all the money the private equity is trying to get.
Owners would never sell their business to young tradespeople for any less than twice the value. The hatred that the old have against the young is just too strongly ingrained.
They'll be fine with selling for much less to a "worthy" buyer though, such as a private equity firm.
That seems a very cynical view, and it doesn't ring true to me. Anecdotally, I know of multiple business that were built up by one person, and then practically gifted to the employees. Some people really care about the business, customers, and employees.
> Anecdotally, I know of multiple business that were built up by one person, and then practically gifted to the employees.
And when was that? Because that's how it used to be, a business would go to the children or a child of the owner, or go to the employees. But that trend has changed and that's why we're reading this article. More small/medium business owners send their kids to study for different careers, and the relationship between owners and employees aren't the same as they might have been in the past. The owner generally feel a lot of resentment towards his employees because they are mere workers and not as successful as him, and partly because their salaries are an expense that he doesn't feel it is fair that he has to pay. The current generation of old people are quite different from previous.
Vertical integration is not monopolistic. A dairy farm can make great ice cream, like McConnell’s or Strauss. Apple’s acquisition of Beats is maybe the one that shouldn’t have been allowed since they were in competition for headphones. Most of their other acquisitions are pretty small companies with specific integrations into Apple products or services.
Ah yes the humble dairy farmer is obviously equivalent to the trillion dollar transnational corporation. Here I am thinking that since Apple makes it harder to repair their devices or install other operating systems on them that they are in a position to abuse their marketplace, silly me!
Not even close. LLMs can spew word salad. Images can be classified or dreamt. Physical movements can be iterated and refined. Speech can be processed as text. These are components of intelligence but these are all things that most animals can do, apart from the language.
Intelligence generally requires something more. Intelligence needs to be factual, curious, and self-improving. If you told me ChatGPT rewrote itself, or suggested new hardware to improve efficiency, that’s intelligence. You’ll know we have AGI when the algorithm is the one asking the questions about physics, mathematics, finding knowledge gaps, and developing original hypothesis and experiments. Not even close.
Chanterelles are not a great example as their look-alikes are easily distinguishable. Furthermore, they exist in symbiosis/parasitism with particular tree roots as a host. When you return to the same spot you’re harvesting new fruiting bodies of the same organism that you visited last time.
And yet most edible mushrooms do have these associations. Even saprophytic species will take a number of years to devour a nurse log, so that fallen oak or doug-fir will feed you many times.
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