Thanks. I’ll check that one out.

I don’t want to skip ads. I want to avoid them altogether. They’re intrusive. Especially after listening to the same podcast for a decade, only to suddenly find ads for car companies, and other things irrelevant to me, rudely shoved I to the middle of an otherwise serene experience.

I stopped listening to podcasts once it became impossible to avoid injected ads. I’ll find time to read.

My personal experience with buyouts from private equity investors is that they will milk every single cent out of the company as they crush its soul. They’re looking to make a huge profit, relatively quickly. Yes, the stock market is also looking to profit, and big share-holders have a lot of sway, but publicly traded companies don’t have to answer to a small number of ultra wealthy puppeteers in quite the same way private equity held companies do. Also, there are certain employee protections, particularly around layoffs, that apply to publicly traded companies but don’t apply to privately held companies. This seems to be one of the key strategies in the PE playbook:

1. Buy the company / take it private
2. Slash costs everywhere, including yearly layoffs.
3. Push the remaining employees to adopt a “lean” or “customer first” mindset, which really means “do more work, faster, for less reward”.
4. Profit?

As much as I dislike Ubisoft, I don’t dislike anyone enough to wish that process upon them.

I never understood the hardcore gamer mentality. Not that I care if someone else enjoys grinding or developing their skills. Good for them if that’s what they like. But it’s not what I like. I don’t play games to get gud. I play games to fantasize and relax. There’s gotta be some challenge, but I’m fine with it adjusting to meet my (generally low) skill level.