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AMD To Lay Off 10% of Global Workforce
Luyseyal writes "Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slashed its global employment by 1,400 jobs Thursday as the company seeks to boost profits and re-balance its work force to pursue new product areas. This amounts to over 11% of its global workforce, including Mark Langsdorf, who often posts AMD patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List."
No it doesn't make sense.
I am going to fire a bunch of people to save x millions of dollars over the next 3-5 years but right now I am going to pay out x millions (yea it is often a similar number) right now to give a bonus to a multi millionaire who doesn't need it.
The worst part is that next year they pay the bonus out again, and again all while the company loses money.
Instead of firing people to pay out bonuses. why not do something simple like cut upper management salary by 50%, and automatically save 3 or 5x right away. But you almost never here about a CEO or board, or congress who is willing to put the company(or country) before their own salary.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
In the prosperous 1960s, CEOs made about 30x the salary of the average worker for the same company.
Today, it goes higher than 1000x.
Corporate profits are up, worker incomes are down. That is not an economic system that is sustainable.
And, "the market" applauds when the prime minister of Greece announces that no, the Greek people won't have a say in their future after all. All you have to do is turn on the news tonight, any channel from Fox to NPR to hear the economic elite talk about how pleased they are that the people won't have a say in their future. It's stunning, really, to hear how out of whack our system has become thanks to the laissez-faire, supply-side, "trickle-down" economics that have been the policy of every US government since 1980.
It's the kind of intractable, illogical, unjust mess that can make people very angry.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, but you might be a poor investor. Yes, it'll boost immediate returns but only by sacrificing long-term benefits. The benefit will be brief. It's things like this that are why investment is almost entirely cognitive illusion and not based on skill or rational thought. The ones who are any good work along selective inaction. Responding to the market is the worst thing you can do.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Bring ideas in your head as well as comments like "Yeah, we tried that direction, but came up against issues with ...." are certainly not easy to prove.
Keep telling yourself that.
Besides, Intel isn't going to be stupid enough to try to get schematics and diagrams. It's much more about knowing long term plans, where companies are steering. What ideas they are looking to develop.
Trade secrets involve more than just schematics and diagrams. Long term plans are also trade secrets and if you think Intel is dumb enough to try that, you are an idiot. Intel has itself gone after people who have left them to go to AMD for trying to steal trade secrets. They aren't going to open themselves up to similar lawsuits. They'll throw that employee to the wolves and let them enjoy the lawsuit from AMD.
In our case, it's about finding as much as is possible about how their supply chain differs from ours. What details they take into account in their forecasting models, things like that. Half the value is simply seeing our issues from a completely different angle, then having our own ideas on how to best come up with solutions. Getting someone to prove that in a court of law? Good luck.
Except that people have been successfully prosecuted for doing that. But hey, go ahead and try it. I'm sure you'll love losing that lawsuit as you get thrown under the bus.
Mark Langsdorf, who often posts AMD patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List.
Mark Langsdorf authored a grand total of 22 patches in Linus' git tree since August 2005. Either slashdot editors have a very strange definition of "often posts", or this guy's patches are often lousy.
I encourage everyone to read The Lights In the Tunnel, as a primer on the coming age of technologically driven systemic unemployment.
Think of an idealized chip factory/company. The machines run themselves, AI systems design ever better version; raw material goes in one side and pallets of CPUs come out the other side.
This is a 100% capital intensive business, and has almost zero labor requirements. We're not there yet, obviously, but every year we'll get closer. Companies will be able to do more with less workers, prices will drop, and supply will be limited only by how much resources you have to turn into chips. That's ONE side of the equation. The other side is that such an efficient and streamlined business is destined to quickly go bankrupt.
In a capitalist economy, every worker is also a consumer. There will be no other sector of the economy to shunt those unemployed workers to, especially not at the level they were employed at previously, because all the other businesses have gone capital-intensive too. Strangely, the most secure jobs will be the lowest paid and traditionally least desirable jobs such as janitors, cleaners, cooks, and other services. It's actually easier to build an automated chip factory than it is to produce a robot that can do everything a human janitor can do. When you lay off a worker, you're also getting rid of a potential customer. Now, one business doing this when all the others don't would benefit and outcompete the others. So to keep up, they all have to become more efficient (which in modern times means becoming less labor intensive). Each business doing what's best for itself in isolation ends up ruining everything for everyone. This is a classic tragedy of the commons scenario, but it's applied to the mass market itself as the common good, something that most mainstream economists, politicians, and citizens don't yet accept.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
You make a very good point, friend. German workers retire earlier than Greek workers and the German economy is even more worker-friendly than the southern-European governments. They are every bit as "socialist" as France or Italy or Greece or Sweden, yet they are strong enough to lead Europe economically.
They one big difference is that Greece doesn't tax its rich people and Germany does. In fact, there are a bigger percentage of millionaires and billionaires with Greek residency as any other EU country just for that reason.
You are welcome on my lawn.
never said it wasn't. managers and especially good mangers are tough to find.
however no one is worth 1,000 times the janitor. without whom the place literally turns to shit. No one is worth 800 times the salesmen who actual drive the profits. or the workers without whom your orders don't actually get filled.
For this Circuit city is my favorite punching bag. They fired all their top salesmen, to save money hired new people, paid out bonuses at like 75% of the money they saved by firing people to the board, and a little over a year later declared bankruptcy.
All so a manager can get a bonus.
that is the skill set your defending.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
NAFTA ...
China "free trade"
CAFTA
outsourcing
exporting jobs
tax cuts for companies that export jobs
All you've done is list "outsourcing" over and over. And that isn't even the cause, it's the symptom. The problem is that we need to adopt policies that make hiring Americans more competitive, but most of those policies aren't as egalitarian or redistributive as people might like.
Let me give you some examples:
We take the principle that everyone deserves a quality education, so we take the resources (tax revenue) that we have for education and try to divide it equally between all students. But some jobs require a better education than others. Complete fairness is not a competitive advantage. You can create a basic level of education in everyone without striving for perfect equality: It would be far better to have schools for smart kids that we spend substantially more per student on, and schools for less smart kids that we spend less money on. It doesn't really matter that the future retail workers don't have a strong grip on calculus. It does really matter that the future doctors and engineers don't because we reduced everything to the lowest common denominator.
Likewise, you look at the nominal corporate income tax rate. It's one of the highest in the world. Then you look at the effective corporate tax rate. For multinational corporations it's extremely low (because the nature of a multinational corporation allows them to report profits in lower-tax countries), but for smaller corporations it's much higher. It puts US small business -- who employ the largest number of Americans -- at a disadvantage compared to multinationals. Eliminating the corporate income tax would create no benefit to large corporations (which already don't pay it), but would help the job-creating small businesses that do. But the national feeling is that large corporations should pay more taxes, and we can't actually do that in a way that doesn't have ruinous side effects (e.g. tax on gross rather than net income), so keeping up appearances forces us into the charade that causes actual harm to small business. (The problem is that the only kind of tax you can force a high-mobility corporation to pay is a consumption tax on their products -- you can tax them on their customers that are in your jurisdiction. But that burden is then shared in part by customers, and that tends to raise the price of goods in a regressive way.)
The general problem is that we try to make everything fair on paper, but what is fair is not always what is competitive. There is sometimes a trade off between more jobs and more equality, and we have to be willing to admit that before we can make a rational decision about which is more important and when.
There's a huge difference between Greece and Germany other than the system itself. It's the Mediterranean syndrome. I've been to multiple areas of Greece several times. I have been to many cities in Germany and have worked with Germans for years. I have been to many western and central European countries and there are some things which are just plain obvious and any northern Italian will gladly tell you it's true.
The further south you get in Europe, the lower your motivation seems to be. Just last month I was in Crete and I'm not joking, all the frigging stores close in the middle of the day and all the coffee shops and bars fill up. Drivers of trucks on the island stop driving in the middle of the day and stop to have a glass of stong wine or moonshine. The only people working on the entire island at that time of day is the restaurant staff.
It is similar in many places in Spain as well. Malta..... well let's not bother with Malta and Gozo. Southern Italy as well.
On the other hand, if you go to Germany, from the time the day starts, you work and you're efficient. People take pride in their efforts. They set standards for themselves which are high and they achieve the goals they set for themselves. Germany's biggest problem is the cleanliness of their cities. People don't walk the extra 3 steps to make it to a trash can, but there are a lot of workers cleaning up the streets most of the time, so it's not that big of a problem.
Sure taxing the rich would help a bit in Greece, but size of the numbers we're talking about in Greece, if you taxed the entire top 5% of the country a total of 25% of their gross worth each year, it wouldn't touch it. The problems are much bigger than that and they would have to fix it by making people actually change their ways. The goal isn't to tax the people themselves but to produce things in a way which would bring money into the country. Closing down the parasitic tourist industry which barely works in Greece would be a great start.
Nearly every island in Greece is supported by the tourist industry which exists for about half the year. A waiter at a restaurant I frequented in Crete let me know that his personal income after tips is 12,000 euro per year. He works 14 hours a day 6 days a week during the tourist season to accomplish this and he's highly motivated and a hard worker. Problem is, when the winter comes, he uses his savings during that time for food and necessities and then uses oil he produces in his parents green house to heat his apartment on their property.
These establishments are supported by hotels built, maintained and later abandoned by owners in other countries. These companies exploit cheap labor and build these massive resorts at disgustingly low rate and perform all transactions outside of Greece to avoid paying the Greek taxes and costs of maintaining the money in multiple countries. They fly people from richer countries into Greece using their own airlines (or from other companies similar to their own like Thomas Cook) and their excuse is that they're bringing tourist money to Greece and helping the economy. The problem is, when the economy strengthens in a given area, the resort company practically closes down the last hotel and builds a new one further down the beach where the local workers are willing to work for less money. They don't totally abandon their old hotels, but they'll attempt to sell them to lesser resort companies which have a lower level of patrons with less purchasing power.
These resorts also do everything they can to make a closed environment where they cater to a specific nationality. So the German hotels have German restaurants with German beer and German speaking staff. The Scandinavian hotels have Swedish food with Swedish speaking staff and Swedish convenience stores. They do this so that their guests will be less likely to spend their money outside of the hotel and instead spend a great deal more inside of the hotel. They also attempt to build these hotels as far as possible from cities. Th
Multi-nationals can be required to report profits made IN THIS COUNTRY, and to pay the same tax rates that our small businesses pay.
No you can't. Profits are defined as revenues minus costs. What multinational companies do is to pay a sister company in another jurisdiction for products or services. The sister company makes a big profit on the transaction, the US company offsets almost all of their US revenues with it, but it's a legitimate product or service that they actually need. They just arrange to buy it from a sister company.
So you want to stop it, how do you do it? The first attempt would be to say that costs paid to non-US companies should not be able to offset US revenues. The effect of that is very similar to an import tariff. It probably violates a list of treaties as long as your arm and it would have all the countries that sell to us screaming bloody murder. On top of that, you would quickly get scams where a nonprofit conducts a "fund raiser" where they buy foreign goods and then resell them in the US at low margins to 'raise money' but really to import the goods without paying the tax and then sell them to a US company that in effect donates the nonprofit's 2% margin to charity instead of paying 35% in tax. To fix that you would have to make it even more like an import tariff, and good luck with that.
So let's make it more targeted at the problem then. Make it so only costs paid to foreign companies that are in the same corporate family tree can't be deducted against US revenues. But now if Volkswagen manufactures a car in Germany and sells it in the US, they pay income tax on the whole cost of the car because the cost is paid to their own German subsidiary, whereas if Toyota manufactures in Alabama from US parts they only pay income tax on the profit instead of the whole cost of the car. That still seems like a problem, international relations wise.
So we need to not discriminate against foreign products. The way you do that would be to impose a tax on just revenues and not allow anyone to deduct any costs. That wouldn't discriminate against foreign products, but "tax on revenue" is a synonym for "sales tax." I don't think that's what we were going for.