America's new millionaire class: Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs

"The wave of investment is minting a new class of millionaires across the country, one that small-business owners say is helping add more shine to working with a tool belt."

How naive. PE does not enter a market in order to make existing workers into millionaires, but to create a monopoly/monopsony where they can gouge both customers and employees, to extract maximum profit. Quite often, the goal is not even to run the market sustainably, but just to produce optical profits for a quick resale.

A few local contractors may get bought out and become millionaires, but everyone else will be impoverished.

We can probably even predict some next steps. They will recommend and lobby for various 'safety' regulations or certifications that would be difficult for smaller shops to meet, and then pressure commercial landlords, housing associations, etc to require those certifications.

That has already begun. Saw stop technology is already working it's way into regulations. A decent non saw stop table saw will cost you ~500 USD. A saw stop saw will be 1200.

When this article first came out, I had a similar reaction, that it seems that regulations that just favor one company doesn't seem all that right.

But I remember in that thread a few had said that as part of this, SawStop will be forced to license their patent to competitors.

Maybe that'll drive up the cost of table saws, but to be honest, people like me (at best, a wannabe weekend woodworker, not a pro) have stayed away from Table saws because of a concern for safety, but things like Sawstop being more ubiquitous might result in people like me buying them, and expanding the market, possibly bringing prices down.

Sure, Sawstop does nothing to prevent the big issue with table saws (kickback) but still, having a riving knife + sawstop probably makes a huge difference in the overall safety of using a table saw, and that seems worth it.