the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread

Avenger said:
The funeral industry has been doing that for a very long time. Where it's taking off that I wasn't expecting is dental.
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Been a long time in that industry. I have been involved with a few of those. Along with specialists, too. You would be surprised. Think hospitals buying private practices. Not exactly private equity, but the model is the same. Just different for tax purposes and how it gets accomplished. Think capital gain treatment vs ordinary income and how that would be equalized for the transaction to "work". I cut my teeth on one of these many years ago before it was in vogue.
 
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Roccus7 said:
Interesting piece regarding small, family business' owners retiring and cashing out, much to the chagrin of long-time customers. We're all seeing it and it's not a pretty sight...

Baby Boomers Are Retiring in Droves. Private Equity Is Waiting.
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Well, what choice are they left with? Most business owners I know facing this situation are left with little choice at times. Many have not saved in traditional ways, think 401k etc. Every dollar went into the business and the thought was "one day when I retire" the sale of my business will fund that retirement. Trouble is, there may be few buyers, or at least for the funds needed to retire. The business may not have kept up in the industry for a private buyer. Next would be try and sell to the folks working for you. News flash - this generation does not want to own, they want to leave and let the problems of the day fall on someone else. They do not want to work. They do not believe in themselves, otherwise depending on the business, may not see or want to see the opportunities. A lot of times there is no entrepreneurial spark in these folks.

Now to the flip side. The business owner took every dime out of the business and did not build for the future. They paid just enough to keep people working and the folks with some spirit moved on to other jobs. Finally, the business owner may find they can get many times more from private equity than even the business could provide. So they follow the money.

I could write for a long time on this topic.
 
longcast said:
Well, what choice are they left with? Most business owners I know facing this situation are left with little choice at times. Many have not saved in traditional ways, think 401k etc. Every dollar went into the business and the thought was "one day when I retire" the sale of my business will fund that retirement. Trouble is, there may be few buyers, or at least for the funds needed to retire. The business may not have kept up in the industry for a private buyer. Next would be try and sell to the folks working for you. News flash - this generation does not want to own, they want to leave and let the problems of the day fall on someone else. They do not want to work. They do not believe in themselves, otherwise depending on the business, may not see or want to see the opportunities. A lot of times there is no entrepreneurial spark in these folks.

Now to the flip side. The business owner took every dime out of the business and did not build for the future. They paid just enough to keep people working and the folks with some spirit moved on to other jobs. Finally, the business owner may find they can get many times more from private equity than even the business could provide. So they follow the money.

I could write for a long time on this topic.
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Oh, I know, a definite double edged sword. I don't fault anyone selling out, but in the long run, it's usually the long-term, loyal customers who will get the shaft.

When a small local business sells out in rural areas where they're the only game for an over a 90 minute radius, if private equity group changes the business model, e.g. Orient by the Sea marina or buying a struggling marina with a great location to kill the business and put up condos, the local, loyal boat owners are left in the lurch.
 
Roccus7 said:
Oh, I know, a definite double edged sword. I don't fault anyone selling out, but in the long run, it's usually the long-term, loyal customers who will get the shaft.

When a small local business sells out in rural areas where they're the only game for an over a 90 minute radius, if private equity group changes the business model, e.g. Orient by the Sea marina or buying a struggling marina with a great location to kill the business and put up condos, the local, loyal boat owners are left in the lurch.
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Like farmers, land rich, cash poor. You know what happens to the land if they sell!!
 
longcast said:
Like farmers, land rich, cash poor. You know what happens to the land if they sell!!
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That assumes land rich businesses. What about successful retail businesses that lease small businesses in the middle of small town USA? They go belly up and people have to go to the big box stores. Used to have a small hardware store 1.5 miles from my house, RIP, Lowes is 90 miles roundtrip...
 
Roccus7 said:
That assumes land rich businesses. What about successful retail businesses that lease small businesses in the middle of small town USA? They go belly up and people have to go to the big box stores. Used to have a small hardware store 1.5 miles from my house, RIP, Lowes is 90 miles roundtrip...
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One more time I'm going to point out the other side of the coin.

If all the local folk who "loved" the local store took the effort to always buy there it would probably still be a viable business.

Also, maybe visit the early history of Sears & Roebuck. They were the Amazon-ian disruptor of their day, forcing little General Stores out of business. Funny how they were eclipsed by someone using their own business model.
 
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These two headlines:

nypost.com

UC Berkeley professor refuses to grade his students’ homework after noticing worrying trend: ‘No point’

Richard Borcherds, a Fields Medal–winning mathematician, now grades on completion after seeing students use AI to earn top scores.
nypost.com nypost.com


Avenger Jr. is seeing some issues with people using AI at school, and it would be a novel. But these two things speak to a lot of what goes on.

The students are using it to cheat. His teachers are calling people in to explain their work when things haven't been covered in class. But in the next breath they're encouraging students to use AI because "It's the future."

It seems like neither side gets: If AI can do your job.... You're not going to have a job. 🙁
 

That Mummy for Sale on Facebook Could Make You Ill​

Experts warn that online black markets for mummified remains could pose health risks.

Browsing Facebook Marketplace can feel like an exercise in sociological despair. It’s a digital bazaar of crockpots, lightly used strollers, never used stationary bikes and unwanted espresso machines. Yet new research out of the University of Staffordshire in Britain reveals that the platform also caters to a rather more archaic, ghoulish trade.

A recent study, titled “The Real Mummy’s Curse” and published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, documents an online black market of mummified limbs, spinal columns and heads.

The researchers tracked 128 listings from 2015 to 2025 across social media and e-commerce platforms including Meta and online auction houses. One U.S. listing for an “Important Ancient Egyptian Mummy Head” fetched $115,000 a decade ago.

What researchers found was that the lucrative and often anonymized trade exploited digital loopholes and used coded language to circumvent platform bans, turning standard postal and global courier networks into conduits for antique human and animal remains.

But the true curse of these displaced ancestors goes beyond obvious ethical and legal violations. The researchers argue the trade poses a biological threat. The paper warns that the stored artifacts can harbor dormant, resilient pathogens like Aspergillus spores that can survive hundreds of years. When these items face shifting moisture levels during transit, the pathogens can reanimate, endangering couriers, postal workers and unsuspecting buyers.

According to Kirsty Squires, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Staffordshire and the lead author of the new paper, listings for mummified remains on platforms like Facebook and Instagram are usually far from pristine museum specimens. “The online offerings are routinely coated in fuzzy fungal blooms and cotton-like microbial growths,” she said.

Beyond the visible mold, century-old mummified keepsakes and taxidermy can be saturated with lead, arsenic and mercury. These elements are the enduring legacy of ancient preservation practices.

The transactional relationship with the mummified dead has a long, chaotic pedigree. Centuries of grotesque consumerism passed before anyone thought to secure the artifacts behind pristine museum glass. Ages before dynastic elites became the solemn, climate-controlled wards of national heritage, medieval curiosity seekers were bartering for human remains as if they were fruit from a street market.

By the dawn of the 19th century, a worldwide obsession with ancient Egypt transformed this novelty into an all-out capitalistic frenzy. The craze was so pervasive that in 1830, the French monk Abbot Ferdinand de Géramb noted, with a mix of exhaustion and absolute precision, that “it would be hardly respectable, on one’s return from Egypt, to present oneself without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.”

This insatiable appetite created a booming, highly commodified landscape of supply and demand. As the University of Manchester archaeologist Nicky Nielsen detailed in his 2020 book, “Egyptomaniacs,” the ancient dead were treated less like historical entities and more like wholesale inventory. In the bustling Egyptian markets of Cairo and Luxor, dedicated vendors lined city walls with mummies stacked as casually as cordwood, while others lay scattered across loose, mismatched sarcophagi.

Generations of long-gone ancestors were transformed into tourist trinkets. For the traveler conscious of packing constraints, vendors were happy to oblige a macabre economy of scale: selling hacked-off heads and hands, tailored specifically for easier, luggage-friendly transport back to Europe.

The phenomenon eventually reached its cultural zenith, or perhaps its absolute nadir, when it penetrated the polite drawing rooms of Victorian high society. Wealthy hosts, eager to distinguish their salons, began organizing private “unwrapping” parties, integrating grave robbing into the structured rituals of a rainy London afternoon.

Guests would gather over tea, sandwiches, scones and polite gossip to watch Cleopatra-era linens stripped away layer by layer. Once the thrill of the reveal subsided, the afternoon would conclude with a gesture that reconfigured the macabre into the mundane: The host would regularly distribute mummified body parts to the departing crowd as party favors.

Dr. Squires of the University of Staffordshire said that while the trope of the vengeful pharaoh began creeping into Gothic fiction in the 1880s, it achieved peak cultural notoriety in 1923 with the sudden death of Lord Carnarvon, the frail English aristocrat who funded the excavation that discovered King Tutankhamen’s tomb.

The financier died of pneumonia and blood poisoning set off by an infected mosquito bite just five months after entering the pharaoh’s tomb.

British newspapers feverishly descended upon the story of Lord Carnarvon’s death, blaming mysterious, unleashed forces for any subsequent misfortune or passing of anyone connected to the excavation. Even the Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a known occult enthusiast, fanned the flames by insisting that an “evil elemental” was at work, a narrative Hollywood later transformed into cinematic gold.

But beneath the supernatural sensationalism lies a chilling scientific reality that modern researchers are finally untangling. For decades, medical and historical commentators alternated between floating and dismissing the theory that toxic spores caused Lord Carnarvon’s symptoms. In 2003, the British medical journal The Lancet published a letter by two physicians suggesting that Lord Carnarvon had inhaled dormant Aspergillus flavus, a type of mold, from ancient grain offerings inside the tomb.

Rebuttals note that Lord Carnarvon was the only one of 25 Westerners on the excursion to fall ill immediately, making a localized bacterial infection from a bug bite more likely than a tomb pathogen. But the microbial threat of sealed vaults remains a risk.

Consider the grim fate of the excavation team that breached the tomb of King Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland in 1973. Sealed for nearly five centuries, the wooden casket had dissolved into a rich, rotted mulch of royal remains. Entering the vault with neither surgical masks nor hazmat suits, the researchers unknowingly walked into a biological trap. By the end of the next year, four of them were dead. Over the next decade, 10 of the 12 succumbed to what some scientists determined was a severe occupational hazard.

Pharaohs could not cast spells, but the mold in sealed vaults could kill.

The new mummy’s curse study argues that the online market is putting amateur collectors at risk of skin rashes, respiratory distress and maybe even long-term organ damage. The danger is compounded by a lack of basic safety hygiene. Dr. Squires noted that eager sellers regularly posted photographs of themselves handling fragile, centuries-old specimens without gloves or masks.

Because a vast majority of these antiquarians operate in total ignorance of chemical residues and biological hazards, what looks like a harmlessly spooky historical keepsake on a social media feed can quickly morph into a domestic health crisis, Dr. Squires said.
 

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