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Amazon cuts 16k jobs

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#371

Post by mghackerlady »

ipaddr wrote: post #303
rune-dev wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American this does not match my experience at all. What profession were those women looking for?

Vets, climate change scientists, doctors, environmental lawyers and athletics. Bonus points for trustfunds and influencers. Women want to make as much as men but also want their partner to make more than them. Ever see a female doctor marrying a plumber or construction worker? No they marry Male doctors or lawyer of higher status.

Has it ever occurred to you that all those fields have one thing in common? it's empathy. The people in those positions tend to not be the kind to murder you when you say no. Not saying that's true for blue collar men, but the odds are significantly higher. Also doctors and lawyers naturally tend to be around doctors and lawyers, that's hardly the crazy observation you seem to think it is

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#372

Post by mghackerlady »

johntarter wrote: post #269
rune-dev wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American this does not match my experience at all. What profession were those women looking for?

Bartenders, starving artists, musicians, and athletes?

They tend to have personality, which I and most women consider more important than looks or money in my experience

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#373

Post by mc32 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #366
autokad wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there. and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local peopl…

You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children. The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To und…

Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#374

Post by JeremyNT »

rich_sasha wrote: post #68
paxys wrote: post #4

Every large company is updating its standard layoffs announcement press release from "economic headwinds" to "AI".

Excuse is only half the story. I don't fully understand why they are doing it though. Companies hire people to make money, not as an act of social conformance. Global economy doesn't look that terrible. Nor is the AI story that believable. Is it just the CEO Zeitgeist? All the guys at Aspen talking about what fraction they cut, just as 5 years ago they bragged how bloated their org chart is? TBH the "ZIRP overhiring"…

> TBH the "ZIRP overhiring" seems like the most likely real reason. I could never understand how all these companies could hire so many people for so much money, only to have them work on later-to-be-canned open source projects.

I agree this is the root cause, also a big reason for inflation are all these do-nothing white collar management/tech jobs subsidized by the post-pandemic money printer with fat paychecks burning holes in their pockets. Of course these companies tried to use the free money to grow when they could, now they want to fix the balance sheets. And AI is a great excuse, especially if you're in the business of selling AI products!

It's why Trump wants to turn the money printer back on, inflation be damned, because mass unemployment due to belt tightening would be politically even worse than inflation.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#375

Post by dzonga »

Insightful Comment from X - https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198?s=2...

I was an L7, I led global AI enablement. I built systems executives depended on, moved wherever the company needed me and fixed problems that had been sitting untouched because no one else could untangle them.

And I was still cut.

Here’s the part we’re all supposed to politely ignore: in the U.S. right now, experience isn’t an asset, it’s a liability. And if you’re expensive because you’re good at what you do, the system eventually “optimizes” you out.

We're now in the realm of hold onto your nuts -- sink or swim -- ownership of your own company is the only way out

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#376

Post by mghackerlady »

tmoertel wrote: post #209
dheera wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are enough american job seekers in CS To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American. When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the a…

> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the adversity but that's it. Is bullying nerds still happening? It was commonplace when I was young in the 1980s. (In fact, it was so common that it was the basis of the 1984 movie…

Yes and no. Generally, you don't necessarily get bullied but you lose opportunities to interact with people. Most students in the US do not care about academics more than they need to, and the kind of "nerd" to care about math and science likely doesn't have much to talk about with these people or even is able to have a meaningful conversation without being told something along the lines of "it's not that deep" or "I'm not reading allat"

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#377

Post by bwestergard »

medvezhenok wrote: post #149
bopbopbop7 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any quantitative evidence for AI increasing productivity? Other than AI influencer blog posts and pre-IPO marketing from AI companies?

What exactly would that evidence look like, for you? It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a day to write before, for work) - although I would have never written this visualization before LLMs (because the effort was not worth it). So I guess it's Jevons Paradox in action somewhat. In order to observe the productivity increases you n…

"What exactly would that evidence look like, for you?"

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MFPPBS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

Productivity is by definition real output (usually inflation adjusted dollars) per unit of input. That could be per hour worked, or per representative unit of capital + labor mix.

I would accept an increase in the slope of either of these lines as evidence of a net productivity increase due to artificial intelligence (unless there were some other plausible cause of productivity growth speed up, which at present there is not).

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#378

Post by [deleted] »

mc32 wrote: post #373
Analemma_ wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children. The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To und…

Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#379

Post by paganel »

khazhoux wrote: post #256
paganel wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly looks like AI slop, so I stopped reading pretty fast.

It’s pretty sad that when people write well now, others dismiss it as AI.

It's not written "well", it lacks that human touch, especially when writing about such a sensible subject, such as getting fired. It's too cold, actually too well written from a syntactic pov, which makes it inauthentic hence most probably AI.

Re: Amazon cuts 16k jobs

#380

Post by malshe »

sejje wrote: post #35
still-learning wrote: post #11

I wonder what kind of unprecedented economic growth we'd be seeing right now if we kept with the status quo rather than imposing tariffs and scaring off foreign investors.

[flagged]

That's because Trump gave many extensions and concessions to so many countries. Remember there was 125% on China in May 2025 before Xi decided to use rare earth minerals to fight back. Maybe you have heard of TACO. So the tariffs as threatened never panned out in reality.
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