An acquisition like that would have non-compete restrictions. And often the previous owners don't get 100% cash, they would receive part as shares in the new holding company.

Technically true, but RoE expectations from a PE firm are typically a lot higher than from the original owners of a small business.

And the LBO model is much less resilient to economic headwind. Let's assume a 25% EBITDA margin business, with most costs fixed (like the clinic example). Unfortunately revenue drops 20% because of external factors. It would maybe have a tiny profit left, tax would also be tiny and there is no interest to pay. The shareholders receive near zero, absorbing most of the problem for a year waiting for times to get better.

Now the same business, same reported EBITDA, but paying a large interest sum every year to the bank. If revenue drops 20% they can't pay their interest, and banks don't just wait for next year. Now the business has the restructure, agree with the banks what that looks like, or face a bankruptcy risk.

While the new PE shareholder has a better RoE due to leverage in the upside scenario, the business (and the PE) could be completely cooked in a downside scenario. For the PE this is a calculated risk, they optimise the overall portfolio. But for the employees and customers this isn't a great scenario.

While this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite some time, with estimates/interim counts in between.

I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened.

No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station.

It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.

CRM datasets don't really get that big. So DuckDB sounds like a great choice.

> OpenAI, meanwhile, has been attempting to quell the backlash against its deal with the U.S. government, putting out a blog post claiming that “our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons,”

As a non-US person, that sounds far more concerning than no statement at all. Because if their tools weren't used for surveillance against Europeans they would have said so as a marketing message...