Disruptions to the 1000 employee lives are the social failure
Economics are demand-side: all jobs are paid for out of revenue, and thus out of consumer spending. Population grows in lack of scarcity, and tends to exceed employment opportunities by a margin--that's unemployment. There's 40% workforce turnover in the United states: 4 of every 10 people will leave their job this year, which means open job opportunities everywhere waiting to be filled; and that doesn't *create* jobs, so there are still not enough jobs for everyone to get a job.
The people who are unemployed right now, collecting welfare, and watching their lives approach the critical point of failure and homelessness as their limited savings or 6-months of unemployment benefits run out? Those people depend on *someone* being disrupted out of a job so they can snap up an open position, sending another working man to the unemployment line in their place.
That doesn't mean disrupting 1,000 employees's job is a public service; it means the argument is economically-ambiguous. If you focus on the individual, it sounds sad; if you look at the entire economy as a whole, you realize it's part of the basic functioning of any economy without central planning--and central planning can't be effective because of information load (including unknown and unknowable information, such as the development of technology and the shift in consumer demand for products).
Paying yourself @250k when you are paying your employees $180k is border line ok, but when you are paying your employees $60k then it is stealing. $400 per employee for 1000 employees increases the living standard of two city blocks
This argument, however, is unambiguous.
At higher rates of income, people save more. More savings means less spending, which means fewer jobs. Any cost-per-employee increase--the employee's salary or the management chain overhead--reduces buying power by increasing product costs, leading to fewer jobs as well. This suggests that paying the employees executive-level salaries actively destroys jobs to enrich a small set of elites.
It's more complex than that, too; but only slightly.
Paying your employees $60k versus paying them $60,400 won't make a huge difference *to the employee*. It's literally $15/pay, cut by taxes to under $10/pay.
Raising your employee's pay to $180k increases the cost of products; raising the back-end cost by $2,800/year (7 executives) per employee raises this cost less. It's the same effect on a different magnitude, meaning it makes fewer people poorer.
It's not true that higher employee pay with the same spending would lead to the same number of jobs, because the number of things purchaseable with that spending goes down. There's still $200,000 to spend, but a widget costs $1,200 instead of $800, thus 166 widgets can be bought instead of 250, meaning the number of total jobs in the economy is decreased by one-third of the jobs required to supply 250 widgets. The employees making $180k instead of $60k are, of course, getting $120,000 more and have to spend $1,200 more, so they come out ahead; if the entire market increases wages as such, we need more money, so we print and loan more money, all prices go up, and you just have inflation--essentially, prices didn't change if all prices and wages changed by the same proportion. If it's just isolated to this set of employees, then these people get rich while other people get poor.
This extends to the executive: Your $250k salary does, in fact, chomp at a few jobs. If you spend all the money your employees would have spent if they had $400/month more, then the impact is diminished, but not completely eliminated; if you sack the same proportion away into savings, then you've reduced the money available in the economy, taking a somewhat bigger toll.
Raising either the employee's pay -or- the executives's pay tends to decrease total jobs (you need to get the money
Start a business. You take a pile of money (possibly a loan), use it to set up operations, and run for a while. Three, five years go by, and you struggle just to hold up. Your balance sheets get worse over time, until you can't keep all the creditors satisfied; then you file bankruptcy. Failure, right?
From one perspective, while in business, you supplied a valuable product or service. People bought enough that you stayed in business for five years. You didn't gouge them, probably, since you got enough business to stay in business. Maybe you couldn't keep up because the other manufactures slimmed their margins, provided better products, or otherwise changed their markets to compete with you before you got off the ground. You did something real.
From another perspective, a shitload of money flowed through your business. The jobs you provided came from your revenues, and those revenues took away from other businesses, so you stole jobs rather than creating them (not destroyed; instead of 1,000 new employees at Verizon, there were 1,000 employees at NewMobile); that's not really bad for those people, aside from the sudden disruption--which might not be a real thing, since you'll wind up selling your operations to another competitor to pay debts, and most of those people will probably not get laid off. Those who do will be replaced elsewhere--someone unemployed gets a job, or they get a job; doesn't matter by the numbers.
The one thing all that cash flowing through your business *did* accomplish is *it made your executive board friggin' rich*! Success? You started a business, paid yourself a $250,000 salary for a few years, then bailed. Your salary was something like $150-$400 per employee, so it's not like you were robbing your employees; the rest of the economy, maybe. Ethics and distant economic considerations aside, *you got rich*.
Search engines are almost worthless in my native language because cocksuckers can't tell the difference between "inevitably" and "invariably", or really any other word in the language, god damn you all.
There are no "Security Patches." People generally imagine you can skip CommDlg32.dll update 3, 4, 5, and 6, and only apply CommDlg32.dll update 7, because 7 is a security patch. Surprise: Update 7 is the 7th version of CommDlg32.dll. The "Security Patch" doesn't go into your CommDlg32.dll binary and modify that one little broken thing; it's all prior updates, rolled together.
So if you avoided non-essential update 3, 4, 5, and 6 because "they might break something," now you have to tell Microsoft or your third-party software vendor that something in 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 broke a particular tool, and you don't know which update did it because you skipped four updates.
The counter-argument is you delayed 3, 4, 5, and 6, and someone else probably hit that problem already, so it's been fixed by now.
That's kind of the point, isn't it? Business profits are revenue minus expenses; if wages or taxes go up (wages including things like benefits), expenses go up. Where's the money come from to pay all this? Revenue. Where's revenue come from? Prices. If you're charging 1/5 a dollar per ride, you don't offset that by selling more rides; you offset that by raising the price per ride.
So what if a ride is $2 and Uber has a 10% margin? 20 cents is 10%. How does Uber expand? How does it handle any slowing of business? How does it handle natural economic variations? The first risk event they face, they go out of business.
That's why Uber has to raise prices to offset the tax. If they can't, then the service falters. It may be advantageous for them to just leave town--which, considering this tax goes to racketeering (paying the taxi companies protection money), is probably a defined end-goal.
Not even. You have to create an app that allows people at home to bake goods in response to requests for baked goods. WTB[1x]BirthdayCake "Happy Birthday Faggot with a Tuba".
I mean, a soap bar phone would possibly save me $60/year; but only because I elected for $5/month of additional data plan. The unlimited talk/text is still $55/mo.
Ting says 1 line, 2100 minutes, 4800 texts, no data (at all) is $52/month, plus 1.9 cents per additional minute, 1/4 cents per additional text, and $10 per GB of data; versus T-Mobile 1 line, unlimited voice, unlimited texts, unlimited non-4G data, $55/month.
I guess I can tailor Ting to 100 minutes, 1000 texts, and no data for $14. At my usage level I'd get probably a $30/month bill.
When we switched to Skype phones, they purged my voicemail for the past 4 years. I didn't even know how to dial into it. I still don't. I never check voicemail.
You have a 1Gbit pipe. You have 10 users each using 250Gbit--that's like 2.5Gbit. The network's going to get slow.
Well it turns out you use a hell of a lot more than everyone else. You know what happens? Those other 9 guys get bumped up in the queue. When packets are waiting, you're assigned a priority of 30 and they get a priority of 20; and every time a packet goes through, the next-in-line goes, and everyone else gets their priority knocked down a peg. So those guys's packets will step in front of yours repeatedly, until you float up to the top and get to use the line.
Actually, given the trouble Comcast seems to cause (yes, the Blast tier is fast; but my T-Mobile seems to be more-reliable, with fewer stalls and faster downloads in general), I could see switching to T-Mobile as my primary ISP. I'm paying $80/month for Comcast, yet switching to 4GLTE on my phone causes Cyanogenmod updates and Spotify music downloads to come down 3-5 times faster than my 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac access point (an Asus RT-AC66U AT1750) supplies my OnePlus One.
$60 + $80 or just one straight $70/month bill? Even if T-Mobile charges an extra $30/month to allow tethering or whatever, it's still cheaper.
Until Comcast rolls out 2G Internet for $80/month anyway.
Because you can't see it. If you are a huge flamer and act fantastically gay, that's your fault; but any class of obviously-heterosexual white male might actually be deepthroating 78 cocks at night and getting horny over the thought of being all soaped up and wet with a barracks of marines. It's not your business and you just can't tell.
Isn't this really just a handicap system? If you're not X, you get an advantage; that is logically-equivalent to being assigned a handicap for being X.
Inflation doesn't mean growing cost. 20% inflation and an object going from $100 to $115 means the cost is shrinking.
There's all kinds of ways to make weird economic statements. You can ignore inflation and just point to raw dollars (i.e. $5 in 2016 is expensive; the thing cost $1 in 1938!). You can claim the cost of X is growing because the utilization is growing--we're running 50,000 meters of fiber optics instead of 500, so the cost of fiber optics now represents a bigger chunk of the data center's budget (100x more stuff, even if it costs 1/10 as much, is still 10x the cost).
Technology shifts how we do things. New technology means making a thing is cheaper; scarcity means your technology doesn't scale that high (more labor per unit to make that much that fast); and the deployment of a new technology to replace an old technology increases its market share, raising that technology's total marginal cost. I find it surprising that fiber optics would increase in cost per linear foot, considering fiber optics are relatively easy to produce in mass quantity and shouldn't have any scarcity issues.
Self-driving cars aren't a consumer reality yet, and capturing the market share in any significant fashion will capture the market. They're essentially the same kind of technology as holographic displays and flying cars.
Yeah it's like everyone getting into wearable fitness trackers after everyone in the world already bought a Fitbit. This isn't an emerging market; it was an emerging market when the Motorola Cliq was a leading-edge phone.
It's not so much "older" as "different" in the artificial benchmarking world. Real-world loads don't tend to follow benchmarks religiously, and the newer benchmark might favor a configuration that's not as good in real-world loads.
The classical marketing maneuver is to select from multiple sets of up-to-date benchmarks and pick the ones that favor your particular product. CPUBoss usually shows that one CPU outperforms another consistently (except for single-core vs threaded with dissimilar cores or SMT--fast clock wins single-core, many-cores wins threaded); and frequently shows the same benchmark tool using different strategies and rating each CPU faster than the other based on how it was configured, or shows that one benchmark favors one CPU and another favors the other.
This goes all the way up to real-world functional tests, where you select games which perform better because of some feature or strategy of your GPU and CPU. You have better shaders? Pick a shader-heavy game. Heavy parallelism? Pick a game that meshes with that. You've got fewer parallel operations, but a higher clock? Avoid games that work best with 387-core GPUs and pick ones that like that 1185MHz clock. Show off 6 or 7 games running at freakishly-high 292fps.
Data center professionals shouldn't custom-compile new kernels, either. The distribution maintainers backport security fixes; there's no need to upgrade Ubuntu/CentOS/whatever with some frankenkernel that then doesn't work with your ACPI and udev userland.
I am amazed at the number of layoffs in the tech industry these days, yet we continue to dump money into these code camp programs, and other STEM initiatives of dubious value.
I have no argument against the logistics problems with teach-everyone-to-program and college-as-a-state-service; and these are different concerns than tech field workforce turn-over.
In this case, CISCO is essentially claiming they need fewer EEs, more CS. Hardware engineers are giving way to microcode, FPGA, and firmware; they've grown and resisted rounds of lay-offs and major shifts, and now they have to batch all that up. That means huge, impressive changes of staff instead of slow rounds of sending 15 people off here and hiring 10 there. It's really hard to change workforce without a definitive reorganization--not because of politics, but because your business needs a strong sense of direction to actually function--so these big lay-offs are the only way for it to happen.
In the general case, tech has been expanding. That doesn't mean CISCO gets bigger; it means *everyone* gets bigger. CISCO has competitors--FortiNet, Extreme Networks, Gigamon--and it's competing with cloud services which utilize their hardware infrastructures more-efficiently. Five companies with fifty switches and twenty IT people are now five companies outsourcing to a sixth company who runs all their stuff on twenty switches and two IT people. Even with the tech sector expanding, CISCO is no longer expanding at the same pace as the demand for IT.
So some other IT shop competing with CISCO gets 6,000 workers as they outpace CISCO; CISCO expanded in anticipation of being the market leader, and now has lost sales of products and services produced by 6,000 workers. CISCO makes 6,000 non-replaceable lay-offs. CISCO re-organizes and lays off a bunch of EEs, replaces them with a bunch of CSes. People look at CISCO and ignore the rest of the market.
Even better, people have distorted thinking. When the political party line changes tack, people change with them. The old Republican line was that a raise in minimum wage would push all wages up, because a middle-class worker doesn't want to be $5 away from a McJob; the new Republican line is that prices will go up instead, and everyone's wages won't react, and we'll all get poorer (this is more correct, but they take it to an incorrect extreme). Veteran Republicans argue fervently that the ideal of minimum-wage increases causing a lock-step increase in all wages WAS ALWAYS A LIBERAL-DEMOCRAT LINE and was never a position they had--even when, 15 years ago, they were the ones arguing exactly that.
They actually believe their new beliefs are their old beliefs, and their old beliefs are some ancient Liberal lie they'd never bought into. They believe they've professed their new beliefs all their lives, and never professed their old beliefs.
Corn is old-hat. RR Soy is what everyone wants now. RR-Bt corn is probably great stuff, though; especially since Bt is a great source of essential amino acids (the Bt protein doesn't make it past the stomach in tact; if it did, the pancreatic juice would destroy what's left anyway).
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Disruptions to the 1000 employee lives are the social failure
Economics are demand-side: all jobs are paid for out of revenue, and thus out of consumer spending. Population grows in lack of scarcity, and tends to exceed employment opportunities by a margin--that's unemployment. There's 40% workforce turnover in the United states: 4 of every 10 people will leave their job this year, which means open job opportunities everywhere waiting to be filled; and that doesn't *create* jobs, so there are still not enough jobs for everyone to get a job.
The people who are unemployed right now, collecting welfare, and watching their lives approach the critical point of failure and homelessness as their limited savings or 6-months of unemployment benefits run out? Those people depend on *someone* being disrupted out of a job so they can snap up an open position, sending another working man to the unemployment line in their place.
That doesn't mean disrupting 1,000 employees's job is a public service; it means the argument is economically-ambiguous. If you focus on the individual, it sounds sad; if you look at the entire economy as a whole, you realize it's part of the basic functioning of any economy without central planning--and central planning can't be effective because of information load (including unknown and unknowable information, such as the development of technology and the shift in consumer demand for products).
Paying yourself @250k when you are paying your employees $180k is border line ok, but when you are paying your employees $60k then it is stealing. $400 per employee for 1000 employees increases the living standard of two city blocks
This argument, however, is unambiguous.
At higher rates of income, people save more. More savings means less spending, which means fewer jobs. Any cost-per-employee increase--the employee's salary or the management chain overhead--reduces buying power by increasing product costs, leading to fewer jobs as well. This suggests that paying the employees executive-level salaries actively destroys jobs to enrich a small set of elites.
It's more complex than that, too; but only slightly.
Paying your employees $60k versus paying them $60,400 won't make a huge difference *to the employee*. It's literally $15/pay, cut by taxes to under $10/pay.
Raising your employee's pay to $180k increases the cost of products; raising the back-end cost by $2,800/year (7 executives) per employee raises this cost less. It's the same effect on a different magnitude, meaning it makes fewer people poorer.
It's not true that higher employee pay with the same spending would lead to the same number of jobs, because the number of things purchaseable with that spending goes down. There's still $200,000 to spend, but a widget costs $1,200 instead of $800, thus 166 widgets can be bought instead of 250, meaning the number of total jobs in the economy is decreased by one-third of the jobs required to supply 250 widgets. The employees making $180k instead of $60k are, of course, getting $120,000 more and have to spend $1,200 more, so they come out ahead; if the entire market increases wages as such, we need more money, so we print and loan more money, all prices go up, and you just have inflation--essentially, prices didn't change if all prices and wages changed by the same proportion. If it's just isolated to this set of employees, then these people get rich while other people get poor.
This extends to the executive: Your $250k salary does, in fact, chomp at a few jobs. If you spend all the money your employees would have spent if they had $400/month more, then the impact is diminished, but not completely eliminated; if you sack the same proportion away into savings, then you've reduced the money available in the economy, taking a somewhat bigger toll.
Raising either the employee's pay -or- the executives's pay tends to decrease total jobs (you need to get the money
That depends on your definition of success.
Start a business. You take a pile of money (possibly a loan), use it to set up operations, and run for a while. Three, five years go by, and you struggle just to hold up. Your balance sheets get worse over time, until you can't keep all the creditors satisfied; then you file bankruptcy. Failure, right?
From one perspective, while in business, you supplied a valuable product or service. People bought enough that you stayed in business for five years. You didn't gouge them, probably, since you got enough business to stay in business. Maybe you couldn't keep up because the other manufactures slimmed their margins, provided better products, or otherwise changed their markets to compete with you before you got off the ground. You did something real.
From another perspective, a shitload of money flowed through your business. The jobs you provided came from your revenues, and those revenues took away from other businesses, so you stole jobs rather than creating them (not destroyed; instead of 1,000 new employees at Verizon, there were 1,000 employees at NewMobile); that's not really bad for those people, aside from the sudden disruption--which might not be a real thing, since you'll wind up selling your operations to another competitor to pay debts, and most of those people will probably not get laid off. Those who do will be replaced elsewhere--someone unemployed gets a job, or they get a job; doesn't matter by the numbers.
The one thing all that cash flowing through your business *did* accomplish is *it made your executive board friggin' rich*! Success? You started a business, paid yourself a $250,000 salary for a few years, then bailed. Your salary was something like $150-$400 per employee, so it's not like you were robbing your employees; the rest of the economy, maybe. Ethics and distant economic considerations aside, *you got rich*.
What is failure? What is success?
Search engines are almost worthless in my native language because cocksuckers can't tell the difference between "inevitably" and "invariably", or really any other word in the language, god damn you all.
It's better than that.
There are no "Security Patches." People generally imagine you can skip CommDlg32.dll update 3, 4, 5, and 6, and only apply CommDlg32.dll update 7, because 7 is a security patch. Surprise: Update 7 is the 7th version of CommDlg32.dll. The "Security Patch" doesn't go into your CommDlg32.dll binary and modify that one little broken thing; it's all prior updates, rolled together.
So if you avoided non-essential update 3, 4, 5, and 6 because "they might break something," now you have to tell Microsoft or your third-party software vendor that something in 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 broke a particular tool, and you don't know which update did it because you skipped four updates.
The counter-argument is you delayed 3, 4, 5, and 6, and someone else probably hit that problem already, so it's been fixed by now.
That's kind of the point, isn't it? Business profits are revenue minus expenses; if wages or taxes go up (wages including things like benefits), expenses go up. Where's the money come from to pay all this? Revenue. Where's revenue come from? Prices. If you're charging 1/5 a dollar per ride, you don't offset that by selling more rides; you offset that by raising the price per ride.
So what if a ride is $2 and Uber has a 10% margin? 20 cents is 10%. How does Uber expand? How does it handle any slowing of business? How does it handle natural economic variations? The first risk event they face, they go out of business.
That's why Uber has to raise prices to offset the tax. If they can't, then the service falters. It may be advantageous for them to just leave town--which, considering this tax goes to racketeering (paying the taxi companies protection money), is probably a defined end-goal.
Not even. You have to create an app that allows people at home to bake goods in response to requests for baked goods. WTB[1x]BirthdayCake "Happy Birthday Faggot with a Tuba".
I mean, a soap bar phone would possibly save me $60/year; but only because I elected for $5/month of additional data plan. The unlimited talk/text is still $55/mo.
Ting says 1 line, 2100 minutes, 4800 texts, no data (at all) is $52/month, plus 1.9 cents per additional minute, 1/4 cents per additional text, and $10 per GB of data; versus T-Mobile 1 line, unlimited voice, unlimited texts, unlimited non-4G data, $55/month.
I guess I can tailor Ting to 100 minutes, 1000 texts, and no data for $14. At my usage level I'd get probably a $30/month bill.
When we switched to Skype phones, they purged my voicemail for the past 4 years. I didn't even know how to dial into it. I still don't. I never check voicemail.
That's still unlimited.
You have a 1Gbit pipe. You have 10 users each using 250Gbit--that's like 2.5Gbit. The network's going to get slow.
Well it turns out you use a hell of a lot more than everyone else. You know what happens? Those other 9 guys get bumped up in the queue. When packets are waiting, you're assigned a priority of 30 and they get a priority of 20; and every time a packet goes through, the next-in-line goes, and everyone else gets their priority knocked down a peg. So those guys's packets will step in front of yours repeatedly, until you float up to the top and get to use the line.
If the network's not flooded, you get full speed.
Actually, given the trouble Comcast seems to cause (yes, the Blast tier is fast; but my T-Mobile seems to be more-reliable, with fewer stalls and faster downloads in general), I could see switching to T-Mobile as my primary ISP. I'm paying $80/month for Comcast, yet switching to 4GLTE on my phone causes Cyanogenmod updates and Spotify music downloads to come down 3-5 times faster than my 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac access point (an Asus RT-AC66U AT1750) supplies my OnePlus One.
$60 + $80 or just one straight $70/month bill? Even if T-Mobile charges an extra $30/month to allow tethering or whatever, it's still cheaper.
Until Comcast rolls out 2G Internet for $80/month anyway.
Because you can't see it. If you are a huge flamer and act fantastically gay, that's your fault; but any class of obviously-heterosexual white male might actually be deepthroating 78 cocks at night and getting horny over the thought of being all soaped up and wet with a barracks of marines. It's not your business and you just can't tell.
It's harder to hide being black or having tits.
Isn't this really just a handicap system? If you're not X, you get an advantage; that is logically-equivalent to being assigned a handicap for being X.
How does that compare to laying that same fiber in 1998?
Inflation doesn't mean growing cost. 20% inflation and an object going from $100 to $115 means the cost is shrinking.
There's all kinds of ways to make weird economic statements. You can ignore inflation and just point to raw dollars (i.e. $5 in 2016 is expensive; the thing cost $1 in 1938!). You can claim the cost of X is growing because the utilization is growing--we're running 50,000 meters of fiber optics instead of 500, so the cost of fiber optics now represents a bigger chunk of the data center's budget (100x more stuff, even if it costs 1/10 as much, is still 10x the cost).
Technology shifts how we do things. New technology means making a thing is cheaper; scarcity means your technology doesn't scale that high (more labor per unit to make that much that fast); and the deployment of a new technology to replace an old technology increases its market share, raising that technology's total marginal cost. I find it surprising that fiber optics would increase in cost per linear foot, considering fiber optics are relatively easy to produce in mass quantity and shouldn't have any scarcity issues.
Self-driving cars aren't a consumer reality yet, and capturing the market share in any significant fashion will capture the market. They're essentially the same kind of technology as holographic displays and flying cars.
Yeah it's like everyone getting into wearable fitness trackers after everyone in the world already bought a Fitbit. This isn't an emerging market; it was an emerging market when the Motorola Cliq was a leading-edge phone.
Yeah, it was. Haven't heard anything about that in a while.
I'm more interested in budget fair queuing, which is an instant performance maximization with no trade-offs.
It's not so much "older" as "different" in the artificial benchmarking world. Real-world loads don't tend to follow benchmarks religiously, and the newer benchmark might favor a configuration that's not as good in real-world loads.
The classical marketing maneuver is to select from multiple sets of up-to-date benchmarks and pick the ones that favor your particular product. CPUBoss usually shows that one CPU outperforms another consistently (except for single-core vs threaded with dissimilar cores or SMT--fast clock wins single-core, many-cores wins threaded); and frequently shows the same benchmark tool using different strategies and rating each CPU faster than the other based on how it was configured, or shows that one benchmark favors one CPU and another favors the other.
This goes all the way up to real-world functional tests, where you select games which perform better because of some feature or strategy of your GPU and CPU. You have better shaders? Pick a shader-heavy game. Heavy parallelism? Pick a game that meshes with that. You've got fewer parallel operations, but a higher clock? Avoid games that work best with 387-core GPUs and pick ones that like that 1185MHz clock. Show off 6 or 7 games running at freakishly-high 292fps.
Data center professionals shouldn't custom-compile new kernels, either. The distribution maintainers backport security fixes; there's no need to upgrade Ubuntu/CentOS/whatever with some frankenkernel that then doesn't work with your ACPI and udev userland.
So scroll to a new thread; we're having a side-discussion here.
I am amazed at the number of layoffs in the tech industry these days, yet we continue to dump money into these code camp programs, and other STEM initiatives of dubious value.
I have no argument against the logistics problems with teach-everyone-to-program and college-as-a-state-service; and these are different concerns than tech field workforce turn-over.
In this case, CISCO is essentially claiming they need fewer EEs, more CS. Hardware engineers are giving way to microcode, FPGA, and firmware; they've grown and resisted rounds of lay-offs and major shifts, and now they have to batch all that up. That means huge, impressive changes of staff instead of slow rounds of sending 15 people off here and hiring 10 there. It's really hard to change workforce without a definitive reorganization--not because of politics, but because your business needs a strong sense of direction to actually function--so these big lay-offs are the only way for it to happen.
In the general case, tech has been expanding. That doesn't mean CISCO gets bigger; it means *everyone* gets bigger. CISCO has competitors--FortiNet, Extreme Networks, Gigamon--and it's competing with cloud services which utilize their hardware infrastructures more-efficiently. Five companies with fifty switches and twenty IT people are now five companies outsourcing to a sixth company who runs all their stuff on twenty switches and two IT people. Even with the tech sector expanding, CISCO is no longer expanding at the same pace as the demand for IT.
So some other IT shop competing with CISCO gets 6,000 workers as they outpace CISCO; CISCO expanded in anticipation of being the market leader, and now has lost sales of products and services produced by 6,000 workers. CISCO makes 6,000 non-replaceable lay-offs. CISCO re-organizes and lays off a bunch of EEs, replaces them with a bunch of CSes. People look at CISCO and ignore the rest of the market.
Even better, people have distorted thinking. When the political party line changes tack, people change with them. The old Republican line was that a raise in minimum wage would push all wages up, because a middle-class worker doesn't want to be $5 away from a McJob; the new Republican line is that prices will go up instead, and everyone's wages won't react, and we'll all get poorer (this is more correct, but they take it to an incorrect extreme). Veteran Republicans argue fervently that the ideal of minimum-wage increases causing a lock-step increase in all wages WAS ALWAYS A LIBERAL-DEMOCRAT LINE and was never a position they had--even when, 15 years ago, they were the ones arguing exactly that.
They actually believe their new beliefs are their old beliefs, and their old beliefs are some ancient Liberal lie they'd never bought into. They believe they've professed their new beliefs all their lives, and never professed their old beliefs.
Corn is old-hat. RR Soy is what everyone wants now. RR-Bt corn is probably great stuff, though; especially since Bt is a great source of essential amino acids (the Bt protein doesn't make it past the stomach in tact; if it did, the pancreatic juice would destroy what's left anyway).
How does the encryption work? I can't find an explanation on Google.
Key handling and exchange is hard; most non-hard methods of key exchange require some sort of penis-shaped sound wave to remediate their bad design.