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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.
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.
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.
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.