davel

davel, 5 days ago

The New York Post in c/technology, or really anywhere but c/nottheonion?

davel, 6 days ago

That’s a poor analogy given that the Pi 5 & Pi 400 are incomparably more powerful than 1980s home computers, and I don’t think OP was asking if a Pi 5 can run WordPerfect or VisiCalc.

davel, 6 days ago

People in China and Hong Kong can, actually. Presumably your understanding of the Tiananmen riots is about as garbage as almost every other Westerner’s.

• The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
• 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
• A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
• Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
• https://twitter.com/carlzha/status/1134582926325104641?lang=de
• [Carl Zha’s] Memories of Tiananmen Protest

davel, 8 days ago

I’ve never heard anyone say “on people” instead of “about people”? Is it an Albany expression?

davel, 9 days ago

Some people do get upset; some people don’t.

The easily upset don’t—or refuse to—understand that 1) some of us have brains that just don’t remember people’s names very well, and that 2) they should get over themselves.

davel, 9 days ago

You spelled donations wrong.

davel, 10 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

a sister post

Do you mean your repost of the same article to the same community at about the same time, which was removed for being a repost? That’s what we do to reposts regardless of content.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c47b2490-233a-4a7a-98b6-bb35207a12bf.png

Just a cursory search shows that it’s been talked about:
lemmy.ml/search?type=Posts&sort=TopThreeMonths&q=…

davel, 12 days ago

How would the foreignness of the agents be relevant? And why ask that when I’m a thousand times more likely to be hunted down by domestic agents?

davel, 12 days ago

We get the strangest reports sometimes.

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Piracy

davel, 12 days ago

@d3Xt3r, did you actually look at the options in this poll? Because some of them are as racist and as fascist as can be imagined.

davel, 14 days ago

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Election interference

davel, 14 days ago

Making me divide by 12: that’s a paddlin’.

<span style="color:#323232;">> console.log(`${Math.trunc(74/12)}' ${74 % 12}"`)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">6' 2"
</span>

davel, 14 days ago

For the moment at least. Whatever problem we had before, it seemed to get worse over time, eventually requiring a restart. So we’ll have to wait and see.

davel, 16 days ago

This is especially concerning given that citizens […]

Not everyone with a US driver’s license is a US citizen.

davel, 17 days ago

This comment is triggering and it should have a NSFW spoiler.

davel, 19 days ago

Added. cc @mudle

davel, 19 days ago

Added. cc @Quintus

davel, 19 days ago

tl;dr: Private equity. Quoting myself:

Private Equity colludes with the private banks (which control the Federal Reserve and have largely captured the Treasury) to acquire companies using almost no initial capital. They then strip those companies of as much value as they can and then sell the depleted companies to lower-rung PEs, which squeeze out what little value is left, and so on until the companies default from the highly-leveraged debt PE saddles them with. These are asset stripping schemes.

Part of the scheme in this case was to make Red Lobster sell off its stores and rent them back at high rates. LA Times:

If one is looking for the original sin in Red Lobster’s decline, however, a good candidate would be the deal that brought it under Golden Gate Capital’s ownership. The private equity firm bought the chain from Darden for $2.1 billion, financing the sale in part by selling the real estate underlying 500 restaurants to the real estate firm American Realty Capital for $1.5 billion.

This was a sale-leaseback transaction, in which Red Lobster was instantly converted from the owner of its property to a tenant on the same property. The leases were typically long-term — as long as 25 years — with annual rent increases of 2% baked in. They were also triple-net leases, meaning that the restaurants were responsible for paying operating costs, property taxes and insurance.

Red Lobster thus lost a great deal of flexibility for closing underperforming restaurants and cutting costs. The bankruptcy filing says that a material portion of the leases charge above-market rates. Of the company’s lease obligations of $190.5 million last year, more than $64 million was for “underperforming stores.”

This exacerbated the company’s financial problems. “Given the Company’s operational headwinds and financial position,” the filing says, “payment of lease obligations associated with non-performing leases has cause significant strains on the Company’s liquidity.” In other words, the sale-leaseback arrangement was draining the company of cash.