“It’s not just mammals. Wild bird populations are also tumbling. Domestic poultry now constitute 70% of the world’s avian biomass. Average populations of thousands of monitored species of wild vertebrates, birds, fish, mammals, amphibians, have declined ~60% since 1970. Populations of #invertebrates, including essential #pollinators, are also in free-fall: Butterflies down 53%; beetles down 49%, bumblebees down 46%… All species monitored by WWF are down 68–70% in just 50 years.”"
Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp
A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business,
blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water!
But – as David Dayen wrote at the time – the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, #StarboardValue, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks.
They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") 🔸with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company.
They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings
and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars,
while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden,
converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.
In other words they wanted to asset-strip the company
("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos) @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates