they’re crap on a lot dimensions of how they treat customers but data privacy/security is one thats taken pretty seriously at AWS, perhaps owing to the massive reputational damage that would result if they played loose with it.
that is incorrect, the 0.1% (>50m) live purely off capital. the 1% are still mostly highly paid specialized labor and despite high savings their capital would not sustain their lifestyle outside a brief retirement.
In the US, 99th percentile household wealth is ~$14M, which at historical rates of return is enough to live opulently indefinitely. (Of course although we're discussing a scenario where capital holds most of the cards, who knows if those returns would be dependable.)
if you dig into whats actual safe to distribute after inflation and taxes, or conservative FIRE mid-life recommendations, its around 1-2% of principal per year . From 14m, 10-20k/month, about the budget of the white collar household in a major metro. Which is nice but hardly opulent. Rent, healthcare, and kids (or some expensive hobbies) eat that up in hurry.
i think the narrative of “all white collar employment replacement in the near future” can sustain their public market valuation for many years, regardless of how profitable they are in the medium term.
I like to think of it like the difference between dropping a ball on a roulette wheel (get one random number/sequence of repeated) - vs dropping a ball on a carved topographic map, where valleys guide the ball to a particular outcome.
If you can stand a little AI expansion - here are a few points Gemini came up with - I think the idea has some merit:
Rube Goldberg machines (or Heath Robinson contraptions) aren't arbitrary, they're complicated or contrived ways of achieving the process; often a very literal interpretation of how an automatic machine might imitate an otherwise manual action – a robotic hand movement for example. I think it's quite a good analogy, even if agentic Goldberg works well.
Those machines are, to quote Wikipedia, "designed to perform a simple task in a comically overcomplicated way". This implies there is a much simpler way that works just as well.
I don't think the Rube Goldberg analogy works if the agentic meandering is essential complexity required to get at the results. Rube Goldberging it would be something like putting this loop inside some comically overengineered enterprise microservice web which is then found out to be running inside a Window 98 emulator or what have you.
I think it’s simplest to view these companies 2020s layoffs cycles through the lens of a political battle between executives and middle managers. Middle managers always want to grow ICs because it’s their main stake to higher title and more pay. Executives are the intermitten contra to this, with their incentive being tied to the stock (high growth at high margins). AI gave executives more leverage, productivity had gone up so they could fire more without compromising operations.
Its also notable that over the last few decades the business community has normalized layoffs and layoffs while highly profitable as net positive for the company (stock). While all the engineering driven companies, GE, Boeing, etc that pioneered this management philosophy end up in strategic decline.
the problems with the meth epidemic are 3 fold. two problems are intrinsic to meth and one is a matter of public policy.
1) meth is highly addictive and there is no pharmacological intervention for that addiction. there is no clinically effective therapeutic treatment for it either
2) meth is neurodegenerative. heavy users end up with a permanent disability
3) at some point around 2010 a bunch of cities decided it was totally cool if dealing and public use were normalized/decriminalized in areas their most vulnerable populations hang out.
(3) is an incredibly stupid and expensive policy given (1) and (2)
Small towns in North America are are being decimated by meth. The drug dealers move in because there are no drug task forces, just underfunded and ill-equipped sheriffs and local police.
My wife and I live in the suburbs now but grew up in a very rural community. Last year we went to a wedding there. It was shocking how many people under the age of 50 were missing half their teeth.
I believe they were using their teeth (or lack thereof) to reference their visible meth addiction. See GP, "2) meth is neurodegenerative. heavy users end up with a permanent disability."
Of course the prohibition is what leads to the loss of teeth. Methamphetamine impacts salivation much more commonly and to a greater extent than amphetamine does. But meth is the cheap and accessible option due to the law.
Yeah but if teeth are the worst of it, that's not really the government's problem. The government doesn't prohibit alcohol to prevent liver damage and that's worse than tooth damage. If teeth aren't the worst of it, what was the worst of it?
I consider it the governments job to keep the population in a state where they can have a net benefit to society. Obviously this needs to be balanced with personal freedoms.
its sickening that these companies making 10s of Billions in profit annually at 60% gross margins are going to throw their employees that got them there under the bus.
layoffs are for at risk companies undergoing restructuring not semi-annual financial engineering of your earnings release
I’m not a big collective action proponent historically but in the face of this bs, it might be time.
Among other differences, a house construction contract is understood to be limited in time.
Imagine the construction company said "record profits this year, thanks for building great houses, you're fired." The message wouldn't go over well. They are being outrageously cutthroat or hiding bad news.
Ive seen this exact analogy on HN quite a few times now, and its a bit odd (read: nonsensical). You dont tend to employ construction workers directly to build your house. You contract a housing company, who contracts construction companies (or has inhouse workers), who do keep their employees employed.
The individual is his own construction company in this scenario. Just like the construction company has to advertise itself to keep getting contracts, here the individual has to do the same with employers. The analogy is not superficial.
temporary contractor != employee. Many people expect employees should get some of the surplus, or at least get to keep working when the company is claiming they're financially secure.
I suspect you'll say the company owes them nothing in the US, which is true, but companies aren't/weren't always this stingy (or lying about financial strength), and you could have just said so without this strained analogy.
I have some loose thoughts. Please make a healthy and critical case fo this.
People earn money on capital.
Software developers work on code within a company. The company makes tonne of money. Then lays off the very people who wrote the code. Why shouldn't the code writers get royalties for as long as their code is in use. Consider construction workers. They build our houses. Why shouldn't we pay also royalties to them for continuing to live in that house. What if the code changes, should the royalty still be paid? Why is capital treated differently than actual production artifacts prepared by people? The company should share its surplus with its previous employees and the house owners should pay their surplas to construction workers too. What if my house is engulfed in a fire caused by shortcircuit due to faulty work by electrician?
Ask LLM to connect this distinct ideas and it will help you understand how difficult problem it is to assign monetary value to our contributions.
You believe more in the individual relationship each worker has with their employer to negotiate times like these? With what power? The employees did excellently so they are being let go. The individual worker has no leverage for anything.
opus 4.7 caliber models are trillions of params, and a single instance would likely run on multiple h200s. $100k of hardware. not coming to your laptop anytime soon.
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