Private equity looting public health in a pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Private equity looting public health in a pandemic

pluralistic.net

104 pointssamizdis16 comments

Related to profiting off pandemics, or rather by causing them: pack animals by the thousand to breed viruses and put them near other species closely packed to promote virus mutations -- aka factory farming.

Presto, save money and promote viral mutations that can jump to humans. And they'll keep doing so as long as it's legal. In other words, expect bigger pandemics or legislate.

Here's a video on what few are working on but if we don't stop, we'll see more pandemics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ppXSABYLY.

My short podcast episode on it: https://shows.acast.com/leadership-and-the-environment/episo...

Never thought I’d see Dr Gregor on HN! This is an amazing presentation. Humans never learn though and so we’ll be back to our old ways, blaming others and going “back to regular life,” when it’s regular life they got us to this pandemic in the first place.

Sadly, the irony of people reacting to the pandemic by buying tons of factory farmed meat is buried under its deadly effect.

Somehow the media has focused so much on the here and now -- important as ventilators and distancing are -- that it hasn't tackled the ongoing and increasing causes that enabled us to predict pandemics like this decades ago.

. . . and more to come if we don't stop breeding viruses by saving a few cents per pound on meat (and encroaching into wildlife territory).

Well, for all it's ills this virus didn't arise due to and likely would never have arisen if the zoonotic reservoir was farmed instead of captured.

Completely and utterly false. Zoonotic diseases have been spreading heavily over the past few decades precisely in close proximity (factory) farming, and will continue to spread in the future in the horrible conditions we keep stressed out, sick animals.

I find his statement that there were no pandemics before domestication of animals and therefore domesticated animals must be the source of pandemics quite bold and it seems to me that it is more backed by wishful thinking or political agenda than by actual science.

Anyways, it seems that this time the source was bats, and I am not aware of any domesticated bats.

The video also covered encroaching on wildlife territory causing epidemics and pandemics such as ebola. He seems to have recorded it during a bird flu pandemic so focused on that type.

I think it tells a lot about the values of a society that let's something like that happen. And I don’t mean this in a judgemental way. It’s similar to corruption. It works as long as enough members of society either profit or don’t care enough.

One sentiment I see on hacker news a lot is that "government is inefficient (and that's never going to change).". But I read about PE and I think: public servants cannot fight these sharks.

Are there an examples of private equity losing these types of takeovers? Are there examples of public agencies fighting back and winning?

PE doesn't take over public agencies. But they extract public money in a clever way and that seems at the root of problems with big government too and it feels like it is seldom mentioned.

I work for a hedge fund where all of the founding partners are billionaires. One of them said "Private equity is the best business in the world to be in." Translation: If you are rich, it's the easiest way to get even richer. PE seems like another example where the rich get to play the game "Heads I win, tails you lose".

> I remember being at Defcon one year and going into a Vegas casino and asking a craps croupier to explain how the game worked, and as he rattled off the different odds on the different paylines, I was like, Ohhhhh, I get this. This is a scam.

The pass/don’t pass odds are the best of any game in a casino, where the house basically doesn’t have an edge. It’s most fun to play in a group though. Almost a positive expected value if you take advantage of the free drinks and entertainment, and stay away from the other bets on the table.

The initial pass line bet pays even money and is where most of the house edge derives from. Unless you have a very low minimum bet and very high odds, you are unlikely to break even with free drinks. If you can find one of these casinos, though, it's a great way to learn the game.

If you, like me, hate cheating and being cheated, you should really read the mentioned book "How to Cheat at Everything". Another book that I recommend is "The Big Con" by David W. Maurer. And if you are one of the few people who have never seen "The Sting" you should watch it now. It is one of the best movies ever and you may learn one or two things about cheating.

Edit: I just found that the book has become really expensive. It used to be 19 US$.

Thank you for the movie and the book references. I'm always looking for things like that, to teach myself how to see and look beyond appearances.

Any profit made not by genuinely improving efficiency/productivity is made through causing someone else a loss of the same amount.

Now, very few parts of the finance industry genuinely improve efficiency - classic market making (classic stock market, taking savings and giving out loans to real people) does, but that is just a tiny drop of water in the ocean of dodgy modern finance.

The same applies to tech, too, see Uber and AirBnB.

Look at what PE is doing in the Pet care/vet market. Capture the market, raise costs and extract value.

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