771–780 of 1001 posts
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"Exchanging goods and services for money to a locale" is not a colonial model. I, a strawberry farmer in Florida, should have no obligation to create an office of locals in every geographic location I sell strawberries in.
No but you give up a large margin to shippers, importers, distributors and retailers in those geographic locations.
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2008 didn't really impact tech sector much though. Companies continued to hire through it, and in fact those that didn't often had a headcount deficit afterwards. And also the worst of 2008 was confined to the US. What we have now is more like 2001. Also most of these big companies were completely dysfunctional on their hiring through 21/22, just going completely apeshit. Now they're making everyone suffer for it.
Much less severe than 2001, where tech lost 250,000 jobs peak to trough (~18.5% from 2001 to 2003). Current downturn from peak (2022) is about 80,000 jobs (~3.2%). The timeframe for this period is longer and the magnitude is much lower. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES6054150001
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> Global economy doesn't look that terrible. It doesn't? I was born in the 90s (so admittedly 2008 was before I started working), but the economy is looking the worst it's been in my lifetime to me.
2008 was a lot worse.
We're still on our way to hit the bottom for this round, and by all accounts it's likely to be much bigger when we finally do.
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I'm going to sound like a luddite I'm sure but I'm tried of these analogies using horses, tractors and so on. Labor involving muscles was replaced with tractors but people could just switch to using the other half of their body; The Brain. Now that a lot of the creative tasks and knowledge work is being replaced there isn't anywhere for those people to go. Maybe people with esoteric industry knowledge, vibe-coding sk…
I still don’t understand why people oppose that rather than enthusiastically desire it. The end state you’re describing is the culmination of the enlightenment project. Automating labor is the point! Then you can paint, or play chess, or eat amazing food, or do whatever you want. Work isn’t the end, it’s the means. Products and services is the end. If we can achieve the end via technology, who cares about the work?
Any more room as part of the painting and chess class this time, or are we all maintenance again?
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It's interesting that the AI is taking job story is so prevalent in these sorts of posts even though there's zero indication of it in any financial analysis. Amazon and big tech companies like it are using AI as the smoke screen to cover up the obvious, which is these companies have lost their ability to grow exponentially. Since their stock price and debt demands this impossible growth, they are now starting the dyi…
when you consider AMZN's p/e ratio is under 35 and WMT is closer to 45, what makes you think this?
How's the $100K H1B fee that was announced to distract from the Trump Gold Card announcement [0] going? The HN hive mind said it would bring back the jerbs and those of us who warned [1][2] it would incentivize mass layoffs and offshoring were hounded. Before the layoffs were announced Amazon also committed to expanding hiring and infra expansion in India [3], and depending on the org, affected employees on work visa…
This summer I went camping and at the campground next to me was a middle manager at Amazon. I’ve been out of the workforce for about a year, so I asked him how much of an impact AI was having in his role. He told me that he had worked to develop a tool that would replace effectively all of the middle management function that he was responsible for: gathering information from folks below him, distilling it down and re…
TBH the last 20-30 years was exactly like that but computers were eliminating other peoples jobs for really good profits for the investors and really good salaries for the workers doing the elimination. Before that people were eliminating blue colar workers with highly productive machines and industrial robots. I don't see how eliminating your co-workers is any different. Software ate the world and now AI will eat th…
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You are describing a colonial model, extract all the wealth while investing nothing in the local economy. That era is over. If anything, Meta is the anomaly, not the role model. They should be required to invest more given their dominance, rather than being praised for extracting maximum value with minimum local footprint. Regulators will likely close that gap eventually.
"Exchanging goods and services for money to a locale" is not a colonial model. I, a strawberry farmer in Florida, should have no obligation to create an office of locals in every geographic location I sell strawberries in.
Case in point - US actively forced TSMC and Samsung to build $65B+ of factories in Arizona and Texas to secure domestic interests.
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TBH the last 20-30 years was exactly like that but computers were eliminating other peoples jobs for really good profits for the investors and really good salaries for the workers doing the elimination. Before that people were eliminating blue colar workers with highly productive machines and industrial robots. I don't see how eliminating your co-workers is any different. Software ate the world and now AI will eat th…
There might be a time when software developers become obsolete, and I don't pretend to know the future, but if today's models are anything to go by then it won't happen any time soon. At the end of the day, there'll still be a need for highly skilled technical experts, whatever that job looks like.
Why? There was a time when there was a need for highly skilled seamstresses. And we never developed the technology to do their jobs as well as they could. But people just learned to deal with mass produced clothes that didn’t fit perfectly because it was so much cheaper.