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Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

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Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s happening now is very analogous to the 2000 dot.com crash. The economy overall will recover, albeit slowly. However companies are questioning why they need 100 engineers instead of 50. That doesn’t just reverse itself overnight. As the OP said those that weren’t around the last time might find it hard to believe that tech jobs really just disappear for years.

No it’s not. The fed printed so much money and dropped rates so low, there’s a massive excess of capital looking for business opportunities. Monetary policy is what is driving the economy, and it’s making this bubble bigger than ever. You can’t ignore economics and cheap money. We will have ten more we work like companies.

Rates are low now but it will take time for this to get reflected in VC/PE/corporate dollars to invest. The addressable market of consumers/enterprises that are willing to spend money on non-essential products/services is down and will drop further since budgets are being tightened and fat is being cut. The 2008 unicorns that were born out of the last recession had to provide oversized returns to investors based on them addressing needs well beyond what cash-strapped consumers/enterprises were willing to spend on. We're in for a ride.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#262
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 401(K) is not a pension. The latter is funded entirely by the employer.

Why does Wikipedia say it's a pension then?

You're being willfully obtuse here. No one in the US would call their 401k a pension.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty grim path to follow. If States are to go bankrupt and subject to federal imposition of what debts must be paid, then it may push States to seek further sovereignity. An example being pressure to mint their currency. This is currently banned in the constitution, but if things get dire... they could simply ignore?

I would prefer that states have more power and we further decentralize authority away from the federal government. This will limit the see-saw that occurs whenever the president switches parties.

> I would prefer that states have more power and we further decentralize authority away from the federal government.

No EPA. No DOE. No equality under the law. No EOC. No NLRB. No Amtrak. No federal enforcement of consent decrees. No voting right act. No gay marriage, etc?

Edit: Thanks for downvotes. Every single one of these is enforced by federal and not state courts. It is federal court that gave us Roe v. Wade, for example. It is a federal court that prevents Alabama from running its own little fiefdom. It is a federal courts that gave us Brown v. Board of Education.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lyft SWE here. Can confirm. My Lyft offer was significantly greater than Google, Uber etc. That said, with 20/20 hindsight, Google would have been a safer choice.

Are you aware how many engineers have been affected by the layoffs?

I am not I am afraid.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real questions. I'm not a history buff. Has there ever been a time in US history that the federal government has been so openly antagonistic and overtly willing to attack opposite-party state governments? If so, what were the outcomes? If not, is there anything even close? Current question - what is the endgame for those who what blue states to go bankrupt? What do they get if that happens, outside of talking points?…

End game is: GOP knows they're gonna lose the election. They want to hand the dems the worst economy possible. Then, 4 years down the road, they can start campaigning against "do-nothing-dems" and point to the horrible economy they had to start fixing.

The thing is, right now there seems to be a disturbing pattern of the world falling apart at the end of every GOP administration. This is problematic, because we still need the GOP so that we can vote out democrats when they mismanage the nation's affairs. We can't have one party, that's not safe for us as the citizenry for obvious reasons.

At the same time, we can't have this, "the world ends", at the end of every GOP administration either. So we really do need to fix this.

The alternative is we get some different parties, and I've seen little to no indication of that happening. The other parties have neither shown an ability to evoke a response large enough to get elected. Nor have they shown an ability to govern even in the extremely unlikely event that they were elected.

For the foreseeable future, we are stuck with the dem-rep dichotomy. Which can work. We just need for the reps to stop running the nation into the ground when it's their turn. Other nations have shown us that reasonable and effective responses to the pandemic were possible. Why are we here? What is the set of missteps or issues that got us here? We have to identify those issues, and fix them.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Wikipedia say it's a pension then?

You're being willfully obtuse here. No one in the US would call their 401k a pension.

Obviously someone who wrote this Wikipedia article would!

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alabama gets ~$3.50 form the federal government for every $1 it contributes in federal taxes. California gets ~$0.97 for every dollar it gives. So the real question is should Californians be bailing out Alabama all the time. Should states like South Carolina, Alabama and North Dakota just be left to die? I mean they are takers in even the best economic situation. The answer is of course not, they are states populated…

I always find those numbers interesting. IIRC, they come from the Taxpayer foundation and generally stop at “zip code where the Feds send the check”. Hypothetical example: The DoE wants to build a supercomputer from XBox 360s (ASCI RRoD). They select UNM as the lead contractor and write a check for $101M. UNM buys $50M in XBoxes from MSFT in Seattle, and another $50M for compilers and professional services from IBM i…

Note that often the ZIP code that is chosen is a result of senators pulling strings to get it awarded to their constituents, even for R&D–that's often new jobs.

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#268
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were a member of the media and the President of the United States - of any party - suggested people try injecting bleach as a cure (for anything), what would you do? What would you say about other politicians who implicitly supported such irresponsible behavior. This isn't even a political question - I mean it's basic science. Bleach.

Nobody suggested injecting bleach, please stop spreading exaggerated misinformation.

Really? Calling it bleach instead of disinfectant is the important source of misinformation here? The lengths people will go...

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A 401K retirement plan is not a pension. Are we both talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/401(k) ? "In the United States, a 401(k) plan is the tax-qualified, defined-contribution pension"

Defined contribution (401k) is not the same as defined benefit (pension).

[deleted]

Re: Lyft lays off 17% of workforce, furloughs hundreds more

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easier to be in better financial shape if you are taking in more federal funding than you are contributing via federal taxes. 8 of the top 10 states that take more funds than they contribute are red. Exceptions are Hawaii and New Mexico. Good read on the matter: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...

This spending constitutes things like social security checks and the upkeep of military bases and other facilities. It is not relevant to state budgets. And even if all the money went to a state general fund, the worst performers would not be significantly different.

In 2014 the federal government provided 40.9% of Mississippi's state budget. How is that not relevant to the state budget? As a percentage of state budget being provided by the federal government, 13 of the top 15 recipients are red states.

https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_aid_to_state_budgets

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