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Layoffs at Microsoft, Intel, and IBM
Normally I try to avoid posting straight business news, but I think that these 3 stories combine to something meaningful.
Muleguy noted Microsoft is laying off 5,000,
Mspangler reports that
Intel is cutting 5-6k, while
nonyabidness afraid4myjob submitted that IBM Layoffs have begun with no number, but estimates as high as 16,000.
Microsoft are cutting up to 5,000 from a total of 90,000 employees - 5.5% of its workforce.
IBM might cut 16,000 from a workforce of 387,000, a cut of 4%.
Intel are cutting up to 6,000 from a workforce of 84,000 - 7% of jobs.
Economists like to pretend that they're dealing with a hard science but they are wrong, so very wrong. Economics is certainly a complex field of study but it is also one of the squishiest sciences there is. Economics is psychology with graphs and math. You can talk about supply and demand, this curve and that, but we're ultimately talking about human psychology. You can't use normal logic to figure this stuff out, you have to work with crowd dynamics, herd instinct, quit talking about how people should behave and pay attention to how they really behave.
If you want to understand how everything is going pear-shaped, just look at the Great White club fire. Huge crowd, small venue, and the band's pyrotechnics set the place on fire. Rationally speaking, there's no reason why anyone had to die. There were sufficient doors and sufficient time for a calm and orderly evacuation. And our economists are the ones who would look at that situation and not quite grasp why there was a panic, a human log-jam at the door, and a whole lot of dead bodies. "That wasn't rational behavior! That was irrational exuberance, or maybe irrational shit-the-bed terror. The problem here is that my observations of this event do not fit my models."
That's what we're seeing in this economy, a fire in a club. Everyone is working to maximize their own survival even though it will harm the chances for the group as a whole. Companies are shedding jobs everywhere, getting work is damned near impossible, and we've got a negative feedback loop that nobody seems to be able to break. And nobody wants to take a look at the wall where the writing stands hundreds of feet high -- "we need to reform the way we're doing business and this will change our entire economy as we've come to know it." The thought is too frightening.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
To be fair, it was Hoover's fault. Not that he could know; most of the techniques we use today to try and mitigate the effects of a long term downturn weren't even invented during Hoover's administration. It wasn't (at that time) recognized that unregulated capitalism was perfectly capable of committing suicide.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It changed when your company went public. As soon as the first duty of the company changed from working owners to non-employee shareholders, employees are simply meaningless. As a shareholder of our own privately held firm, our employees are our number one asset. Layoffs, when necessary due to lower service demands, are keenly felt. If our firm was to go public, we would morph into the same heartless money machines as all other publicly traded firms. You want employees to matter? Don't go public.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
Joking aside, most of the "journalism" I read today from major news outlets is filled with apostrophe errors, spelling errors, grammar errors, and just plain poor writing style. Go back 25 years or more and compare newspapers from then with newspapers from today; today's "journalists" can't write for shit. My local paper is even worse: "too-to-two" errors, words left out, just plain unintelligible writing, and more.
Newspapers aren't just being killed by the internet; they're being killed because no one wants to pay for such poor quality writing any more, especially when many papers are so blatantly biased in their reporting.