It's certainly possible to maintain GA aircraft to a high standard and not break the bank. For example, a flying club I'm in has Cessna 172s for $116/hr wet with no-compromises maintenance.
This paragraph on organizational model is super relevant to understanding how tech companies are responding to LLMs today.
> Aoki’s key insight was that the J-mode had a comparative advantage in environments of moderate volatility: situations where conditions changed frequently enough that rigid central plans would be outdated before they were executed, but not so radically that only top-down strategic intervention could cope. In an environment of stable, predictable demand, the H-firm did fine; in an environment of extreme disruption, where the whole product line had to be rethought, centralized authority was indispensable, and the H-firm also did fine. But in between—where the challenge was to make constant small adjustments in a changing but recognizable paradigm—the J-firm excelled.
~30 years ago (in 2002), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was adopted. In the wake of scandals like Enron and WorldCom, it imposed a bunch of new rules that make being a public company more expensive. At the margin, that would impact the count of public companies.
It's also much easier to raise money for private startups. Back in the day there was a point at which you _had_ to go public in order to finance your business. Now you can have raises like the recent $122 billion OpenAI raise. https://openai.com/index/accelerating-the-next-phase-ai/
Reading all of the crabby comments about pothole repair make me feel great about my city in MN. Leave voice mail about pothole on my way to work in morning, pothole filled when I return home in the afternoon.
A school photography company I worked for used a custom Kodak stock. They were unsatisfied with how Kodak's standard portrait film handled darker skin tones.
They were super careful to maintain the look across the transition from film to digital capture. Families display multiple years of school photos next to each other and they wanted a consistent look.