Often an acquisition of a company is for the set of customers. If I sell my lawn care business and then turn around and email all my former clients offering them lawn care via my new company, I’ve just undercut what I just sold.
Noncompete shouldn’t be so broad that I couldn’t move to another city and start a lawn care business there, but I shouldn’t be able to compete directly with the business I just sold using my insider information of that business.
There's also a big difference between starting a competing business like your example, and being barred from say working on "cloud infrastructure" because your previous employer also worked on "cloud infrastructure". It can be blurry for executives, but in general noncompetes seem to be used to push pay down more than for any legitimate business purpose.
> Often an acquisition of a company is for the set of customers.
That's a merger. You can, not having any business currently, buy yourself into one. In which case the acquisition is purely for the profits.
> I’ve just undercut what I just sold.
No you've just competed with them. If your prices are lower then you've undercut them. If their prices are artificially high then the market, a.k.a. those customers, are the ones to benefit.
> but I shouldn’t be able to compete directly with the business I just sold
Competition is _competition_. You didn't buy a market you bought an opportunity. You still have to compete against everyone else.
> I just sold using my insider information of that business.
Insider information? On a lawn care business that has no issued securities?
> Even the authors of this study go to great pains to not challenge the dogma that microplastics are existentially terrifying.
What great pains are they going through? The study is a discussion of measurement techniques and makes no comment on whether they are harmful because that’s irrelevant to the paper.
This could just as easily be a paper on how wearing the wrong type of gloves results in overestimating calcium in soil. You’re the one injecting a political agenda.
I don’t even get the point of this site. They say:
> Most of this spending isn’t waste. Hospitals need staff. Universities need facilities. Even small charities need people to run programs. The problem isn’t intent. It’s that the reporting system was designed to satisfy the IRS, not to show donors where their money went.
The complaint seems to be that the form filed with the IRS has the information the IRS is interested in, not the information whoever made the site wants.
The reality is that I know how the places I donate my money and time to use their money because I’m not relying on their IRS filings to get that information. I would suggest others do the same and donate to places where they understand what the org is doing and where the money is going.
Having a detailed and auditable report of how money is being used is really helpful for creating the understanding you are talking about. That is what accounting is for and why it is so essential to modern life.
The site is obviously just an advertisement for a weird camera surveillance system, but the concern about incomplete accounting is very real. In many places one might want to contribute to non-profit efforts, IRS information isn't even available. In my work in Ecuador, I have seen a lot of fraud, and half-baked charities. Some rich NGOs sometimes walk in on some field trip that donors have paid for, make some statements about all they are going to do and disappear without follow-up. Basically they are just tourists on a free vacation taking publicity photos. There is a specific organization that comes down to build environmentally safe toilets. Not only are these built by young middle class volunteers that know nothing about building anything but their CVs, the communities they are helping don't even need new toilets. The building supplies tend to be repurposed after the volunteers are gone, every single year. I'd like to know if I paid for that. There are seeds of merit in the program, but also unnecessary waste.
Despite negative examples, there are many worthy things that are done, and could be done in the region. Northern money can go very far in the areas I work. It can do a lot to not just improve but transform people's lives. So you suggest that an answer to money misuse is to have personal experience with any organization you donate to. How many people who have the money are going to spend any real time in Amazonian Ecuador? They aren't there now. What is going to change? Since there are few people with money who can be personally involved, does that mean that no effort should be made to better people's lives there? Obviously, that is what accounting is for. I think the article is absolutely right about that. I find their solution to be creepy and invasive. Maybe just having better auditing and reporting standards makes more sense than pointing cameras at hospital patients, but what do I know?
> one company ends up classed a "supply chain risk" while another agrees the the same terms that led to that
Never discount the possibility of Hegseth being petty and doing the OpenAI deal with the same terms to imply to the world that Anthropic is being unreasonable because another company signed a deal with him.
It’s been a term in rare-to-moderate use since the 1990s — Trump/Hegseth ramped it up to 11 and it’s every 3rd word out of Hegseth’s mouth because he thinks it sounds tough.
> nobody seemed to have released a version people could actually easily use
Yet I’ve known many people who have said it is difficult to use; this was a 0.01-0.1% adoption tool. There is still a huge ease of use gap to cross to make it adopted in 10-50% of computer users.
Deepmind’s Nobel Prize was primarily for its performance in CASP which is pretty much exactly this. Labs solve structures of proteins, but don’t publish them until after all the computational teams predict structures.
So I’m not sure where you’re coming from claiming that this isn’t scientific.
Noncompete shouldn’t be so broad that I couldn’t move to another city and start a lawn care business there, but I shouldn’t be able to compete directly with the business I just sold using my insider information of that business.
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