If interested, Charlie Munger had a special take on the failure of old GM and several other things, including what was said about unions:
"General Motors, out of the profits of their good years, they could have bought, every year, for many years, a big company. They could have bought Eli Lilly one year and Merck the next, and United Technologies. General Motors could own the world. Instead, what they declared to their shareholders was a goose egg. They took the common equity to zero. And they would say it was all somebody else’s fault. The climate was bad, the unions got powerful. Those damn Asians and Europeans were too competitive.
The truth of the matter is, their very prosperity made them weak. The dealerships got in the hands of inheritors, and the executives on the sales field go around and drink martinis with inheritors, and didn’t pay enough attention to defects in their vehicles. And one thing led to another, and when they were all done the shareholders’ equity went to zero.
And that was in a company that at its peak was one of the most admirable companies in the world. Take the stuff that Boss Kettering (Charles Kettering – head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947) had invented in the early days. Kettering was one of the most useful citizens that ever lived in America.
A self starter on a car is a wonderful thing. Under the old system, you frequently broke your arm. You would give it a crank and it would answer back by spinning backwards and breaking your arm. I would much rather push a button than have my arm broken. Nor do I have the opportunity to go and crank in the sleet and snow." [0]
The article seems pretty clear; it talks mainly about the two business owners, one is Aaron Rice and the other is Dana Spears, as well as the relationship with private equity over time.
If interested, another medical school in NY that offers free tuition is NYU. They write, "1st medical school to offer Full-Tuition Scholarships for all students" [0].
Interesting! Does anyone know how this affected their application numbers, selectivity, or ranking?
> We award Full-Tuition Scholarships to all current students and future matriculated students, regardless of merit or financial need, that cover the majority of the cost of attendance, provided each student maintains satisfactory academic progress in accordance with NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Satisfactory Academic Progress Policy
I wonder what it means to cover a "majority" of the cost of attendance. Does this mean they cover tuition, but living expenses (which are not trivial in NYC, but which are less than tuition) are not covered? Or are they just referring to their own fees?
More broadly, as tools advance and catch signals to notify of certain irregularities, this may be of interest:
"Jan Egger and Jens Kleesiek, medical researchers at Essen University Hospital in Germany, are looking at ways in which the headset might be useful for health care2. They say that the Vision Pro’s advanced eye-tracking technology might be capable of picking up conditions such as vertigo, or even early signs of a stroke or dementia. The pair plan to study this when they get one of the headsets. “You have different eye movements and these can be detected using such a device,” says Kleesiek. “The quality of the sensor readings is so high that you can actually utilize it for such medical tasks.""
I have worked with multiple people over the years that use rapid eye movement as a false sign of intelligence... let me explain:
A CIO I worked with would rapidly move her eyes banck and forth as an indication she was "scanning and super smart analyzing all things..."
Total fraud. wound up only hiring BSAs on her court and tantilizing CEOs into paying her and her friends 200K++
(BTW GoPro fell victim) (regardless that they are successful as a company, this person was successful in frauding through things they dont know)
--
Another person I knew built a very successful company, but in any interactions had rapid eye movements attepting to "demonstrate" how focused they were and pulling the Beautiful Mind Meme/rain-man BS.... only later to learn, rfaud.
Focus on the people who have their eyes closed.
"You can always close your eyes, but never your ears"
To be fair, the author does link to that study in the first paragraph of this piece, and then adds some context about languages near the end:
“But while the English-language web is experiencing a steady — if palpable — AI creep, this new study suggests that the issue is far more pressing for many non-English speakers.
What's worse, the prevalence of AI-spun gibberish might make effectively training AI models in lower-resource languages nearly impossible in the long run. To train an advanced LLM, AI scientists need large amounts of high-quality data, which they generally get by scraping the web. If a given area of the internet is already overrun by nonsensical AI translations, the possibility of training advanced models in rarer languages could be stunted before it even starts.”
"General Motors, out of the profits of their good years, they could have bought, every year, for many years, a big company. They could have bought Eli Lilly one year and Merck the next, and United Technologies. General Motors could own the world. Instead, what they declared to their shareholders was a goose egg. They took the common equity to zero. And they would say it was all somebody else’s fault. The climate was bad, the unions got powerful. Those damn Asians and Europeans were too competitive.
The truth of the matter is, their very prosperity made them weak. The dealerships got in the hands of inheritors, and the executives on the sales field go around and drink martinis with inheritors, and didn’t pay enough attention to defects in their vehicles. And one thing led to another, and when they were all done the shareholders’ equity went to zero.
And that was in a company that at its peak was one of the most admirable companies in the world. Take the stuff that Boss Kettering (Charles Kettering – head of research at General Motors from 1920 to 1947) had invented in the early days. Kettering was one of the most useful citizens that ever lived in America.
A self starter on a car is a wonderful thing. Under the old system, you frequently broke your arm. You would give it a crank and it would answer back by spinning backwards and breaking your arm. I would much rather push a button than have my arm broken. Nor do I have the opportunity to go and crank in the sleet and snow." [0]
[0]: https://fs.blog/worldly-wisdom-from-charlie-munger/