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Comment by sclarisse | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the instant pot succeeded; it’s the company who owned the brand that failed, in no small part because of its overreach.

Play capitalism games with borrowed money, win capitalism prizes.

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My prediction: the name will be bought by a competitor. The quality will nose dive in the next 5 years. The brand will be shut down following a fall in sales 5-10 years after that.

Honestly - having owned 2 of them, I think that process has already been happening for the last few years.

I think the name may be sold off, since it's well known - but there are already hundreds of non-instantpot electric pressure cookers. It's going to be a really tight commodity market.

Basically - go search amazon for "Electric pressure cooker" and you get a LOT of valid hits.

Ex: Brands already relatively well known, like

- Cuisinart - Ninja - Emeril - Yeti - Masterchef

You also get all the normal "Fake brands" that chinese resellers set up on amazon.

Exactly. This thing will be successfully manufactured by chinese factories for decades, no problem.

Capitalism works. You just need to be realistic. Its a cooking pot, not the next google.

Modern financialized capitalism, at least, perhaps any capitalism, demands growth (return on investment), so you can't entirely blame the company.

I think you can blame everyone not doing their best to create a better alternative, including the company.

The thing that demands growth is private equity investors. They demand that growth because they borrowed a ton of money and have to pay it back. No one demanded they borrow the money. No one demanded the bank lend them the money. They could have used half the leverage (and made half the profits per dollar invested if it succeeded.)

No one demanded they enter this line of business at all. It’s a risk game. It’s optional. If they had won, they’d be welcome to the cash; they didn’t, so, the banks that own the loan are welcome to ownership of the company. The real problem here is that if the bank had failed badly enough, the taxpayers might end up on the hook, which is why bailouts are bad, but that’s another matter, because the current wave of failures is more about interest rates on Treasuries than anything else. Maybe that will change. But with interest rates normalizing after 15 years, we’re liable to see less of this nonsense, not more.

PE is just the most egregious example of capitalism, where they can extract all the future value of a company immediately by swapping in debt.

But almost by definition, capitalism requires growth, else why would anyone place capital in a business.

Dividends

If this were true “by definition”, no bank would issue loans, no pension fund would buy bonds, and the only place you’d find landlords renting out homes are in cities with massive price appreciation. There would be absolutely no business occurring in Japan and “value investing” strategies would never have been imagined.

Growth is lucrative, but capitalism can put a price on finitude just fine.

oh, so where do loans come from? They compare to govt money, which is constantly inflating, aka growing. growth is baked into the system.

Bank loans are tied to US government interest rates because borrowers are competing with the government to borrow money, not because the banks are relying on it in some economically fundamental way. (It might be fundamental to some bank’s business plan, especially in the moment, I’ll grant that.)

Although I will admit, the only story in which the US government debt is anything other than insanely irresponsible, destined to become a millstone around our necks for decades to come? That one involves growth, and lots of it.

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