They've also made a strange habit of basically encouraging refineries to shut down, discouraging the construction of new refineries, and then blaming said (remaining) refineries shutting down (for needed maintenance) for higher fuel prices and calling it industry greed.

The disconnect is real.

https://ktla.com/news/local-ne...

"âoeCalifornia has made it very difficult to be a refinery here. In fact, the number of refineries here has fallen by more than half since 1991,â he says. âoeItâ(TM)s a spectacular level of policy failures from pushing renewable fuels, which cut the amount of output at refineries, to [emissions regulations] that require special blends in special areas at special times of the year.â

Caught in the middle, of course, are drivers who have no option but to dig deeper into their pocketbooks just to stay on the road."

BTW, for gasoline, California for the most part, consumes gasoline that it refines for itself, because the lower-emission summer blends needed are not produced elsewhere. This pretty much guarantees that our gasoline is more expensive because there isn't an alternative.

https://www.kcra.com/article/c...

""Thereâ(TM)s a lot thatâ(TM)s going wrong. First, the rising price of oil, but the lack of refining capacity, a special blend thatâ(TM)s only required in California, high taxes, a cap-and-trade program all of that. When prices are running normally, California is still about a dollar a gallon above everyone else," said Patrick De Haan, the head of petroleum analysis for GasBuddy."

Wow... new attack vectors using GPS spoofing.

GPS spoofing to speed (fool your own car.)

GPS spoofing to cause traffic jams (force cars to suddenly decelerate when previously traveling at freeway speeds.)

Actually, depending on how this is implemented, you won't even need to spoof GPS. Are you using an onboard database or an external one to determine speeds? If an onboard one, that has to be able to be updated on a regular basis. If an external one... you might be able to man in the middle that.

Until they go and talk to Bombardier and/or Embraer and ask them to build bigger jets, there's not much in the way of other options. Airbus is booked solid.

Stackexchange thread for people who are wondering WTF we are talking about:

https://retrocomputing.stackex...

Apparently this will also work, if you believe the comment regarding the SE/30:

https://www.amazon.com/Screwdr...

$9.95 via amazon prime

https://console5.com/store/t15...

"
Torx T15 Macintosh Case Tool for 128k, Plus, SE, SE/30 - T15H Extended 1/4" Drive
$2.95

In stock
Security screwdriver for vintage 68K Mac Computers
Units on Hand: 25 "

Unfortunately all I have to go on beyond the Register article is a google machine translation of the Steier article (https://wortfilter.de/warnung-datenleck-beim-jtl-partner-modern-solution-gmbh-co-kg/), but here's my understanding of what happened based on both sources:

1. Unnamed IT consultant was working for a customer of said company, found the password in the software from the company given to the customer to use. He then connected and found that everybody used the same password to connect to a single database.
2. Steier reports finding from unnamed IT consultant.
3. Apparently company figured out unnamed IT consultant gave Steier the tip and then sued him for using the password to connect to the database (presumably to check whether this password restricted access to the data that the customer he was working for... you know, his job.)
4. Courts originally sided with unnamed IT consultant, but upon appeal, sided with company.

If someone has more information to share, it would be nice.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Of course, now anybody doing work with that client will just sell any vulns to the dark web instead, so I'm not sure what the point of this exercise was, other than attempting to save face.

If they were smart, they'd allow the divisions to spin themselves off as an alternative to internal reshuffling/layoffs.

"We can give you a severance, or we can use that money to capitalize you as a startup in exchange for equity, and then it's up to you to find your own funding. You pick."

I suspect part of the problem are the employees themselves. If you're aiming for FIRE, and you're within a year or two of cashing out, you're not in the mindset to take risks. Multiply that across the entire company, and you've basically got the equivalent of a bunch of C-suite earners right before they get their gold watch.

There have been efforts to incentivize keeping patients out of hospitals.

https://www.cms.gov/medicare/q...

Insurers (including medicare) don't want to pay claims if they can possibly avoid it. Even better, they don't want claims at all, hence those wellness programs.

The problem is, as you point out, providers don't normally get paid unless they see patients - the entire billing and coding system revolves around that. If you try and make things easier for your doctor by bringing up multiple issues in a single visit... they actually get paid less, because the secondary codes don't get paid at the same rate as the primary code.

So there are attempts to basically pay a flat fee to provide care in exchange for fewer super expensive bills like hospital admissions. But now you require much more data to track health outcomes. I think these are mostly being used in rural areas where practices have fewer patients and need that additional income. I don't see this working as well in an urban area where you have a larger patient pool, and all of your daily appointment slots are full.

Higher interest rates help make leveraged buyouts more difficult.

https://www.philippehottinguer...

When rates are low, companies are less likely to go under even when terribly mismanaged, so there are more opportunities to either kick the can down the road, or paper it over.

Ironically, the government drove a lot of this.

https://www.ama-assn.org/pract...

While the top reason was getting paid:

"In fact, almost 80% of physicians indicated that the need to negotiate higher payment rates with payers was a âoevery importantâ (46.1%) or âoeimportantâ (33.4%) reason why their practice was sold to or acquired by a hospital or health system."

The second reason was administrative/regulatory requirements:

"Managing payersâ(TM) regulatory and administrative requirements was the second most-cited reason. More than 71% of physicians said it was either very important (36.2%) or important (35.2%)."

Basically put... if you're a small practice, you spend more of your overhead for administrative staff or administrative outsourcing. One of these requirements emerged out of government efforts to encourage/require the use of EMRs:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

"One panelist summed it up by stating that âoethe EHR will allow fewer patients to be seen per day and that will decrease revenue.â Several panelists stated that their practice had already seen a decrease, and some cited a significant decrease, with the reason being increased data entry time compared with traditional dictation. At no point in the study did any panelist state that their practice saw an increase in volume."

"...Panelists were worried that there would be an increased number of small practice closures due to cost concerns as well as the increased burdens placed on physicians. One panelist noted a recent decision to close their practice and move to a hospital system because they felt their small practice was no longer viable. Others mentioned colleagues who had retired or joined another practice or hospital to avoid the complications and cost of the EHR. Small practice closure was a concern for some who felt not enough was known about future cost increases and reductions in patient volumes to fully understand how viable small practices would remain..."

It makes sense - if you install a system that requires an IT department in order to do your work, and it causes you additional overhead such that your profitability is reduced, consolidation is one possible outcome.

Private equity is all about killing the golden goose for the eggs now, then stuffing and mounting the corpse and then selling to someone else, or back out to the public as an IPO.

The problem isn't necessarily with private equity - it's not like people don't know that when they come in, they're going to use leverage to buy the company, and then wring out the cash flow to pay dividends to themselves first, before forcing the company to use the remaining cashflow to service the debt that they used to to buy the company.

The problem is shareholder greed. Private equity is a liquidity event. Instead of waiting 10 years to get value, they're promising you the value up front today. You get money, they get the company for effectively nothing because it is all debt financed, and then they do things that basically destroy the long term viability of the business in exchange for short term valuation boosts to allow them to "extract" even more money.

If shareholders wanted, they could support defensive strategies like the poison pill:

https://www.investopedia.com/t...

But in most cases, they won't. Because they want the money now.

Boeing sold the fuselage factory to private equity.

Knowing how private equity works, they probably squeezed the plant for all it was worth, loaded it with debt, and then took it public after massaging the books with short term fixes that probably crippled its ability to function profitably long term (like firing workers and then rehiring them as independent contractors).

Then Boeing treated them like a disposable supplier instead of a critical partner, and since Boeing was pretty much almost all of their business, they couldn't exactly say no to Boeing's terms.

And now Boeing is surprised they're getting substandard deliveries. I think what we should be surprised by is that nobody has died yet from these manufacturing issues (with the possible exception of the 737 MAX crashes, to the extent that manufacturing quality issues affected the single sensor that the defective by design MCAS system was relying on.)

I anticipate insurance costs to rise for airlines that rely on Boeing planes, which they will go back to Boeing with to negotiate for discounts on future planes. Boeing will publicly be contrite, but in their boardrooms, to preserve their profit margin and their fat executive bonuses, they will scheme future ways to try and pass their lumps onto other customers (like the federal government) and their suppliers.

Best case scenario at this point is the FAA revokes Boeing's ability to self-certify.

There is a possibility that they overhired during the pandemic.

There's also a possibility that they're doing this in advance of reorgs that will result in units being spun off or sold to make their balance sheets look better.