I mean… I don’t see acting wrong with that, really. As a fan, it sucks to have the story retconned, but it’s not your story, it’s Disney’s.
Official canon, at that point, is just a marketing tool.
If you as the reader don’t like it, don’t engage with it.
The only real restriction placed upon readers is that they can’t sell their alternative stories under the franchise name, which seems fair to me. It’d cause too much market confusion otherwise.
I am always very curious of hugely enthusiastic New Labour supporters. Happy to share my own opinion, but what are the achievements you laude them for, and what failures are they to be weighed against?
Off the top of my head: saving the NHS from decades of under-investment; introducing the National Minimum Wage; putting in place a huge school repair programme; ending the Troubles in NI; writing off the debts of poorer countries; Scottish devolution; and, for the majority of their term at least, fiscal stability and consistent economic growth.
The other side of the coin is, of course, the Iraq War. We needn't debate that, because we'll surely violently agree, but let's not pretend the Blair/Brown partnership didn't lead to many positive things for the UK. It did.
Introducing tuition fees is also firmly on the "other side of the coin", for many people that I speak to. And for me personally, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act is a huge misstep with ongoing repercussions.
Like the other commenter, I think that his interventions in the NHS were potentially short-sighted and ultimately more damaging than they were worth. It feels to me that rigorous performance metrics and PFIs contributed - along with subsequent under-funding by Tory governments - to running it into the ground.
I will concede however that the minimum wage and Good Friday Agreement are big wins!
New Labour more than doubled the NHS budget in real terms, and maintained that level over time [1].
Having worked in both environments, it's not particularly important to me whether work gets done by a private or a public entity, the most important thing is that money is spent efficiently. If the public sector is spending public money then efficiency usually means ensuring that pointless work is stopped, and that staff who have become ineffective are shed. If the private sector is spending public money then efficiency usually means hawk-like contract negotiations are required to prevent a good chunk of the cash from being siphoned off by middlemen.
Why should a company be assumed to be eventually sold? What the heck is that kind of perspective. The vast majority of small/medium companies are not sold - instead they provide regular income to their owners.
This sounds to me like typical toxic silicon valley startup mindset.
> The vast majority of small/medium companies are not sold - instead they provide regular income to their owners.
This is true. Most people don't want to buy and run a restaurant, bodega, hardware store, etc.
SaaS companies, on the other hand, are much more attractive to buy. They can be run remotely, often do not require many employees, and can be managed by a team that manages other companies simultaneously.
The author's company falls into a middle ground. Hardware manufacturing has certain idiosyncrasies that make it less turnkey than SaaS. But nonetheless, many of the functions (shipping out units) can be carried out by staff who are trained but not necessarily highly technical. And it sounds like the advertising has been pretty dialed in and automated (though would need to be tweaked in future years, undoubtedly).
There are some types of businesses that are hard to sell. Law firms, for example, can only be owned by lawyers! But companies like this one (and SaaS companies run by many HNers) are much more attractive for buyers.
But even if it's not ever sold, the notion of valuation is still useful because it quantifies the value of the future cash flows and the anticipated time-cost of running the business.
Eventually, the owners are gonna want to retire or they will die. Maybe, the business can be inherited or passed on to family, or an employee. But if your family doesn't want to take it over and you don't have any employees who are able to run it (if it is profitable enough you could consider hiring a manager), you either sell or shut down. Generally, most find it preferential to sell. And most who have spent their life working on something would prefer to sell and use the income to fund their retirement- and see the business continue.
There are lots of different exit strategies, but oftentimes a sell of some sort is the only one that really makes sense.
The vast majority of small/medium companies aren't saleable either. However, building them to be sold, even if you have no intention of selling, makes them more valuable.
Your question can be rephrased as why should a company be valuated?
Do you not see a point in valuating a company?
Because if you do see a point, how else will you do it without assessing how much someone else would be willing to pay to acquire it, i.e. how much would it sell for?
> This sounds to me like typical toxic silicon valley startup mindset.
I think this is naive cynicism, as it were. Lots of companies are started by people who eventually want to sell them, be it after 5 years or 50. Being biased against Silicon Valley won't give you a good handle on this stuff.
Further to this, even if you don't intend to sell the company, it's only really worth something besides the salary or dividends you draw for yourself if it is generally in a condition where it could potentially sell.
If it's legally dodgy; if accounting is a total mess; if it relies entirely on personal connections or favors; if tax returns or licensing are a mess; if there is no documentation; if there is no consideration for bus encounters; etc; etc - then it would take major work before it could be sold and it is worth little until that work is done. (Besides the current payouts to the owner which only exist as long as the owner works on it.) That's because if the owner quits or is incapacitated, the company just about doesn't exist anymore.
Yes, of course there are different options. I'm not saying there's only one option. I'm saying there are more possibilities, not fewer. I.e. selling isn't some weird, Silicon Valley mindset.
Not true at all. The local corner store, laundromat, and plumbing company are usually not something that can be sold easily. If they do, it takes years to find a buyer and they are getting a low sale price.
Tech startups had high multipliers in the past 10 years thanks to dumb money, low interest rates, and lot of hope. Most of those things are drying up and many tech startups that had decent valuations are now worthless.
> If they do, it takes years to find a buyer and they are getting a low sale price.
Is this true of standard businesses like laundromat or plumbing?
Or is it a matter of such businesses rarely being in a condition that makes a sale easy? If these are in a good condition accounting-wise for example, they should integrate readily and for a basic multiple of sales into one of the neighbors?
What I have seen is unrealistic prices - and that's another matter.
Just like with (most) cryptocurrency, it disgusts me how much energy is wasted on such frivolous pursuits like the majority of Generative AI usage.
The world should be fully awake to the incoming (on-going?) climate disaster, but instead we have vast amounts of additional energy demand being created mostly only in pursuit of making rich people richer.
A lot of anecdotes about people switching to keto and feeling better, but not giving the context of what kind of food they were eating beforehand.
As I'm sure many of us know, a lot of software engineers (to be fair, this applies to most people as well) have very bad diets; buying fast food lunch every day, eating free snacks, etc.
what irks me about dismissing people's experience is that is so unscientific.
The response should not be "surely they had crap diets" or "it's just placebo/it's just psychosomatic", it should be "uhm, I wonder why this is happening, let's investigate.
which is the whole point of the article, after all
California has a population density of 249.1 people per sq mile compared to 103.2 people per sq mile in Texas. Seems an obviously more important factor here.
Both states have a lot of rural areas that should not be counted when considering density. CSA and MSA for a city are the easiest to look up that can be compared. Even then though things are misleading. (the MSA for my city is mostly large farms so overall our density is very low, but if you only take the parts that look like a city is much higher)
Looking at his pictures I would estimate him at around 12-14% BF. Go on google and search "5% body fat", the difference between what he looks like and what 5%-6% BF would look like is stark. People often get BF % very wrong so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case.
