[ehnto]

I think the free market response is that another vet with fair prices will show up, but A) that's a waste of everyones time and very inefficient and B) a real grass roots business takes time and passion, somebody to start it, buy in from the community etc.

That work had already been done. To throw it all away for VC or PE to squeeze the life out of it and by extension the community, that's just sad, and a net negative for society. I don't really care about who to blame, the PE or the business owner who sold, the process is destructive.

[NegativeK]

The business owner is in a job that takes a huge amount of their life, with a suicide rate four times higher than average.

People accuse veterinarians of being in it for the money, the same day another owner decides to euthanize their dog because they don't want it anymore. While an angry owner on social media is rallying pitchforks over something that the vet can't even respond to due to privacy standards.

I have no sympathy for PE that's wandering around our lives, destroying the actual purpose of businesses to extract profit from everyone they can.

[ambicapter]

There's only one way to combat this, which is to make it unprofitable.

[jellyroll42]

...by regulating the practice to extinction

[gradus_ad]

Waste and inefficiency is real. As unpalatable as it is, cleaning up the mess of decay often requires brutal methods. That begs the question, is waste and inefficiency socially undesirable? Maybe not. Maybe not on certain scales or in isolation. But waste compounds.

[pocksuppet]

A certain amount of inefficiency or slack is necessary buffer in any system to reduce brittleness. When a problem occurs, a system that is running with 50% slack can recover more easily than a system with 5% slack.

See Germany's rail network, where almost every time-slot is occupied by a train, and then one train is delayed, and the system collapses with nobody getting to their destination on time for the rest of the day, until the overnight buffer.

In queuing problems, queue length (which means latency) is inversely proportional to slack time. If a network link is running a 90% capacity, on average there are 10 packets queued up and a packet that arrives will have to wait for 10 packet transmission times. At 99%, 100. At 99.99%, 10000. And if you try to use exactly 100% of your network link, the expected queue length is infinity, and the expected latency is infinity, which will not occur in practice because sometimes it will exceed available memory and packets will be dropped, even though utilization never exceeded 99.9999...%.

[ahoka]

"That begs the question, is waste and inefficiency socially undesirable? Maybe not."

Organic farming is one example.