While not perhaps the best argument is the private equity provides liquidity for founders that want to exit. If you started business X, you’ve grown it for 20-40 years and you want to retire, selling is typically the answer. Let’s say the business makes $1m/yr after tax cash flow, PE might buy for $10m, besides PE there aren’t a bunch of likely buyers for your business (of course maybe there is a big competitor, and maybe you could sell it to an employee (but they probably don’t have the money and would need you to seller finance etc)). So for entrepreneurs with a successful small business (say $2-5m+ of ebitda) selling to private equity is the clearest path to a liquidity event for them.
I feel like medical practices should be like law firms where effectively non-lawyers can’t own equity and equity owners have to comply with ethics and code of conduct rules…
A former employer owned a combined cycle power plant -when they were having issues (not huge ones, but weird issues or gauge readings) they’d call this old timer and he’d come in walking around ask the operators to make some settings changes and be listening the whole time. And he’d come back and be like “hey the second stage compressor is out of balance” there were all sorts of telematics and manuals, but he could tell what was wrong just by listening…that was invaluable
The diagnostic/service steps you have to write to preclude any requirement of skill/experience make it stupid proof waste a lot of labor in the process. Cheaper to have the guy with the skill/experience show up and listen to the thing.
TD bank has branches but that's not super helpful if you're at the airport. the helpful thing is having a "relationship manager", someone you can call or email directly - you can get that at a big bank or a small one, and you don't need tons of assets, a lot of banks its having your direct deposit with them is enough to qualify for some special relationship.
Online banks typically offer much more competitive financial products. I have some HYSA accounts at 4% APY, that’s not achievable with a CU or traditional bank.
The solution is the same solution as any financial risk: diversification. I have many accounts at many banks. If any one of them goes down, I’m fine. If multiple go down, I’m still fine in the interim.
I moved over to Fastmail a maybe five years ago and it was pretty painless. The actual mechanics I did in an hour or so while half watching a movie.
The hardest bit, which you just have to do slowly over the course of 2-6 months is update your new email in services and accounts (banks, insurance, airlines, etc) but with a password manager, you just do it as you use them and it’s pretty easy.
The best thing for me was that I’ve had my Gmail for 20+ years, so thinning out the list of companies that have my email is nice - now my Gmail is mostly marketing emails from companies I don’t care about. I go into it occasionally to see if there is anything I need and then just delete in bulk.
11-13yr payback on something that is going to degrade ~3-4%/yr for 10 years (and limited terminal value) doesn't seem like the greatest investment unless you think the arb is going to widen a ton.
Alternative systems are closer to 5 years payback if you have access to off peak energy. 3-4%/year degradation is very high, battery packs available in the UK from Fogstar are rated at 8,000 cycles with a 95% depth of discharge.
FWIW my high voltage battery pack has almost 365 cycles and is still at 100% state of health.
And any arbitrage is also trivially exploited by the electricity company, who has a much greater financial incentive and scale, so there's really no reason to think that it's going to widen in the future either.
Until grid-scale batteries are more established, you're helping the electric company, and that's why they're exposing the arbitrage. They're providing the incentives to nudge demand, so a home battery is doing exactly what they want (use more at time X, use less at time Y). Otherwise they'd just have the 24/7 price be whatever it currently costs when the supply and demand curves are tightest for them (when demand is highest and/or supply is lowest).
You could exploit it yourself, but only if you have several million to invest, less than that and it isn't worth the bother for the electric company to talk to you. Even at ten million invested you really need to have this is round one in your proposal with the understanding you intend to invest a lot more when it proves in the real world to work like you expect.
Add in that my freezer probably contains over $500 of food (and the fridge has less, but not none.)
Usually you can buy ice, but when I had a ~36 hour outage a couple years ago, I couldn't. Most stuff was fine for that long, but 2-3 days would've meant tossing pretty much the entire contents.
(Plus, I don't have cell service where I live, so being able to power my router is pretty useful.)
This is probably a bad move if you live in a city. It makes more sense in rural areas.
Let's assume the calculation is correct and you actually earn back in 11-13 years. You are better off investing the money in something like the S&P 500 where you'd double your investment in about a decade without the hassle.
Things will start to get interesting where €1600 don't buy you 5kWh but double or triple the amount.
I can imagine most people are better off either investing like I said or in insulation.
Yeah - I was in the nostalgia boat, until you said this and remembered all the times I was in the country going to a friend's house that I've never been to before, its night time, nothings open, your low on gas, an your looking for a dirt road with a red snow plow reflector that was after the old white house on the left… yeah don’t miss that too much.
Growing up near the epicenter of Lyme disease (which is awful) - it’s not that hard to deal with on a regular basis (I probably take half a dozen plus attached ticks off me year. When your pre-in-post shower - tick check. Take them off, worried they were on for a while, doxycycline as prophylactic. Feel crappy afterwards doctor+blood test / maybe antibiotics. It sucks but it’s manageable. Bourbon virus and alpha gal are super scary. When you k ow about them it’s easier to manage - when you’re oblivious it’s when it’s really dangerous.
What would be way more useful is a quick blood test (pin prick type à la thernos) that could diagnose early for treatment.
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