deadryn.

there's a lot that these articles about Red Lobster skip over because the truth is embarrassing: it's all private equity shenanigans again

• to start with, there was the usual bullshit with private equity buying the company with its own assets, saddling it with immense debt right off the bat
• Red Lobster's new owners forced the company to sell the buildings to a separate holding company (also owned by the private equity firm, naturally) and pay them rent instead, leeching even more profitability from the chain. that's what the "above-market rates for rent" line actually means; before the purchase, most Red Lobster locations owned their buildings
• Red Lobster was also forced by the new owners to buy all its shrimp from a specific provider (also owned by the private equity firm, naturally), who made an enormous amount of money from the endless shrimp promotion, and the new owners insisted on keeping the promotion going even when it was draining the company dry

nearly every bankruptcy of a long-running company you see in the news these days is actually the result of private equity buying it up and sucking all the blood out of it. and you rarely get a real explanation in the regular news for reasons I shouldn't have to explain

smol bean shit has been cringe for years now but goddamn

as an anarchist ive never understood why some anarchists are so vehemently against voting. like obviously were not going to vote our way into anarchy but most of them seem to think that participating in liberal electoralism somehow gives the incoming government a kind of mystical power over you, but isnt that just believing in the liberal myth of voting as conferring legitimacy on a government? like its just a vote, it doesnt matter beyond what it does. surely you just use it to try to make things less bad (if thats an option) and then go back to doing whatever anarchist stuff you were doing before?

It's so wack seeing the flags up here in the northern ass PNW. Like at least back down south there was at least the THINNEST defense of southern pride, and there was a chance someone flying that flag was incidentally racist rather than explicitly racist. If you flyin that shit up here you HATE black people.