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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."
Have gnu, will travel.
I am sure that there are many companies out there who would be more than happy to hire these folks to gain some insight into what plans are for the next few years from AMD. While cost cutting and laying off some people is never nice, certain industries that are so competitive will always be looking to hire (even bad employees) to gain access to their knowledge.
Heck, I work in a multinational retailer (read: tough times in terms of profits and trends) and we hired a guy who works for a competitor chain in Europe without so much as an interview - even knowing it is just for a few months while his girlfiend is on study vacation out here. Sometimes the more competitive the industry, the safer the employees.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Expect to see EXTREMELY large executive bonuses come December.
It is a system that makes sense in one way - shareholders simply want maximized return on money, and shareholders in amalgam play the role of idiots without an interest in future of the company willing to pay money for a stake and a vote.
So, in return for promise of transforming the company in an idiotic direction that sounds good from the perspective of shareholder marketing, the shareholders then provide bonuses to the management.
Thus solving the problem once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL.
Ryan Fenton
Sacking one of the people responsible for good Linux performance on servers is not just stupid... it's cutting the branch which you're sitting on.
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.
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
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