51–60 of 537 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest "pretend" is where spokesmen, spin doctors, and sycophants for the plutocrat class have somehow convinced the 99% that stocks going up makes more jobs for the little people.
are stocks even going up outside of tech stocks that can benefit from AI investment? everything else seems stagnant
The S&P 500 is almost 10% Nvidia. Just Nvidia. Y'all that's scary.
These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the CNN report [1]: --- Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative. "Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said. --- [1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amaz…
Replace Jassy with AI
These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
It's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you. All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpet…
These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.
It's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you. All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpet…
This is a reflection of 1) compensation has come down since the ZIRP era at least in some roles and 2) it's a hirer's market. This means companies see an opportunity to bring compensation down. I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. For whatever reason you just don't see that happening anywhere
> I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. They do, almost every year when health insurance premiums/copays/deductibles/out of pocket maximum go up and number of in network or tier 1 providers goes down.
This is a reflection of 1) compensation has come down since the ZIRP era at least in some roles and 2) it's a hirer's market. This means companies see an opportunity to bring compensation down. I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. For whatever reason you just don't see that happening anywhere
I've taken pay cuts twice in my career, but both times it was at unfunded startups and it was more of a "we'll get you back for this later" (one did, one did not). I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents. Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it…
the unfortunate fact is that the people forced to be sellers of their time on the market have livelihoods and families to support, so the market is in most places very heavily regulated, some would say overregulated. OTOH capitalism really did pull out many countries out of extreme poverty, so it isn't globally bad, but outcomes for individual participants aren't always... that great.
By the way, could Amazon not even bother to proofread a mass layoff announcement? "We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly"
At least we know this was written by a human, because an LLM probably wouldn't make that mistake. Maybe they fired the proofreaders already.
This is a reflection of 1) compensation has come down since the ZIRP era at least in some roles and 2) it's a hirer's market. This means companies see an opportunity to bring compensation down. I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. For whatever reason you just don't see that happening anywhere
I wish workers voted for their managers and did so periodically, managers at the end of their term would return to their previous position if any. In fact, an expectation of every position being temporary could lead to exactly what you are describing.
But only if pay cuts hit everyone at the company equally or based on their merit, not the top layer deciding the bottom layer gets paid less, while giving themselves bonuses for saving the company money.