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Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

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Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#461

Post by coldtea »

ericd wrote: post #412
coldtea wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless these folks had degrees in Working At Intel, losing a job is not the same as becoming permanently unemployable. A 50 year old Intel employee might find it quite difficult to get a new job any time soon. Not to mention that where they live they'll have some other thousands ex-colleagues recently fired looking for similar type of jobs. We're talking about thousands of people -- few of them will be highly sough…

This is largely a problem because of the pitiful savings rate in the US. If you've been saving 0% of your pay, being laid off at 50 is a disaster. If you've been saving 30-50%, this is likely to be a non-issue. Highly paid people in this country spend way too much of the money they earn.

Not only in the US, and not only because of being "highly paid" but "spending too much".

In most of the world, including large parts of western Europe, unless you're upper middle class and higher, it's either hand-to-mouth or smallish savings (nowhere near 30%).

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#462

Post by jonathankoren »

ovi256 wrote: post #448
drewm1980 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some european countries have already achieved this; your unemployment benefits after getting fired are a significant fraction of your previous salary, and slowly ramp down. You pay for it in taxes (and then some), but at least you know you can still make rent if you get canned.

You also pay for a bureaucracy to perform administration and fight abuse. That consumes a fraction of the system's resources. It's hard to argue that this adds much value, or any. What this system boils down to is a compulsory savings scheme. So an alternative would be a voluntary savings scheme, which would have higher efficiency by not consuming resources for administration.

Of course the obvious downside to a voluntary savings plan is that it isn't effective at actually creating savings. We know this, because in the United States, we don't have compulsory savings plans, and thus have a voluntary system. So how's that working out? Not well. Approximately half of all Americans save 5% or less of their income[0], which isn't enough for emergency situations. Another study in 2013[1] said 27% had no savings at all. Now the main reason for this is quite simple. A lot people don't make enough to have anything so save.

[0] http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/30/pf/income-saving-habits/ [1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#463

Post by cannam »

majewsky wrote: post #443
reality_czech wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people are among the most overweight because food is so cheap in the US. I don't see why implementing Basic Income would magically make food expensive or make people have to "eat ramen or possibly Soylent." Anyway, the world you are so worried about is already here. A small number of people do continue to do important work that can't be automated. Most other work is unecessary busy work. Artists and musicians al…

> The endgame is that we're all government employees in a Dilbertesque hell. I once heard about the British Colonial Office. The time when it had the most employees was precisely the time when it was dissolved because Britain did not have colonies anymore. They were all just shuffling papers around all day. I sadly don't have a source for that. Does anyone have a link, by any chance?

> Does anyone have a link, by any chance?

C. Northcote Parkinson, 1955. http://www.economist.com/node/14116121

"A glance at the figures shows that the staff totals represent automatic stages in an inevitable increase. And this increase, while related to that observed in other departments, has nothing to do with the size - or even the existence - of the Empire."

What I don't know is where Parkinson got his own figures from. Some of them are cited in the article, but I think not this one.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#464

Post by jonathankoren »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #305
djsumdog wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why job losses are a bad thing. The last generation of machines was built so well that people don't need new ones. Good! This should be a great thing. Valuing growth over sustainability makes these backwards ass goals of hiring more, building more and growing. The way this is spun is pretty horrible. Amazon and Wal-mart losing is a good thing for the environment and society as a whole. You yell, "But peop…

It's important to distinguish "a bad thing for the economy in general" from "a bad thing for an individual's share of the economy". Job loss without a corresponding drop in production is a good things for the economy as a whole - it's getting what's demanded more efficiently. It's terrible for the unemployed individuals in question, since they lost the leverage they were using to extract a larger share of the total e…

Yeah, but what's the societal point of efficiency when wealth has become so concentrated, that the economic ladder has been pulled up?

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#465

Post by swalsh »

TheLogothete wrote: post #413
swalsh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently started working on a little eCommerce project. I found a way to indirectly estimate the sales of some of my competitors products. So I downloaded about 13gb of this data, processed it down into about 80 million rows and than ran a bunch of stats on it. Now 80 million rows is not "big data" scale, but it's not super small either. With my 16gb of memory (that I paid I think $400 for), my humble quad core i7…

Yeah, I want to hear about estimating competitor sales too.

Maybe i'll do a write-up in the future. I assume everyone does it already, but on the off chance they don't.... i don't see any upside in writing about something that might help my competition.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#466

Post by hohod »

zmmmmm wrote: post #404
dingo_bat wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it just means none of the 10k people were qualified enough. They were not fit for the open positions. Otherwise there is no sense in hiring an H1B with the same salary plus all the H1B related fees and expenses.

> Otherwise there is no sense in hiring an H1B with the same salary plus all the H1B related fees and expenses I am sure some employers will perceive them as more compliant employees, given their visa status depends on their continued employment.

Intel sponsors the green card of their employees.

Just saying'.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#467

Post by phatfish »

kbart wrote: post #433
rtpg wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, $50 smartphones tend to suck a lot. Even the highest-end Firefox OS phone for a while had major keyboard lag. Chances are trying to use things like Skype/VOIP over them would be painful.... I think if you're looking to invest in one useful thing, a good phone would be a great purchase. Maybe the Moto G at $200? Amortized over a year, you're talking about a lot of bang for the buck.

I still use Samsung Galaxy S3 with Cyanogenmod I bought for 60€ that still meets my needs. If you are on a budget, buying a new, shiny smartphone is a waste of money imho as you can get a cheap, used but fully functional one for much lower price.

So do i on Cyanogenmod 10 (Android 4.4.4) and it handles all web/music/video needs. I guess the latest games that you wouldn't really want to play on a mobile anyway might have issues.

The S3 generation of hardware has stood up very well.

My only reason to upgrade would be for some good security hardware that can support full disk encryption with no slowdown.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#468

Post by phatfish »

marmadukester39 wrote: post #437
bubbleRefuge wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>yet, the Dow just hit a 9-Month high, and the S&P500 is >now above 2100. Its because bad news is good news in the twisted upside down world of speculating on the Fed's interest rate policy direction via the stock market. Expectations of rate hikes go further into the future with every bad economic indicator released and there are many(retail sales, auto, housing, industrial production, rail traffic, oil and gas, cap…

What's a lad? As someone who instinctually believes this is a house of cards, understanding how to prepare financially is a real challenge.

A group of males, like a flock of swans ;)

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#469

Post by noir_lord »

prewett wrote: post #360
noir_lord wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced that moores law has ended (using the processing power doubles not transistor count doubles). We've hit the physical limits of our current processes but we haven't remotely hit the physical limits of..well physics. It's possible that we are on the flat before the next curve starts whether that curve will reach the consumer space I don't know but at the top end of computing (supercomputers) there is s…

What makes you think we haven't started to hit physical limits of physics? A 4nm transistor is 7 atoms wide. Obviously, a one atom transistor is pretty much the absolute smallest possible, which would be about .5nm. Anything less than 7nm experiences quantum tunneling, which is going to really mess things up, and will get worse the smaller the size. [1] I imagine the interference between transistors will be fun... Ne…

Maybe but (and I could be way off I'm a programmer not a physicist) those limits are pretty much the limits on our current technology, it's a bit like saying "well we've reached the point of diminishing returns with this steam engine, that's it no more progress" and over in a shed somewhere else someone is inventing the AC electric motor.

I'm optimistic because I've seen "end of progress" reports on computing power since I was a kid in the 80's.

We are long way away from this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremermann's_limit

We've known for ages that Germanium and similar offer better characteristics than Silicon but the cost to improve silicon has stayed below the cost to retool for Germanium til now, if we do hit the limit at 5nm silicon then the cost equation changes and alternate materials become worth the investment.

Re: Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

#470

Post by naveen99 »

xg15 wrote: post #420
reality_czech wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people are among the most overweight because food is so cheap in the US. I don't see why implementing Basic Income would magically make food expensive or make people have to "eat ramen or possibly Soylent." Anyway, the world you are so worried about is already here. A small number of people do continue to do important work that can't be automated. Most other work is unecessary busy work. Artists and musicians al…

Using the big number of overweight people as a sign that healthy food is available cheap is an amazing feat of backwards logic IMO. A significant cause of overweight is that your diet is too imbalanced and your body is missing certain important nutrients while getting too much of others. That is the exact opposite of healthy food. And in fact, the "cheap food" most people consume is exactly that - fast food and high-…

If you supplement with protein powder which is cheap also, count calories, lift weights, fast food is just fine for not getting fat. Lots of people on /r/fitness have done McDonald's or chipotle.
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