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Comment by arroz | Hacker News Reader

Intel is laying off so they can increase their profit margin from 45% back to 60% so investors are happy? Am I reading this correctly?

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Is Intel meant to be a jobs program? Should they just hire and retain people they don’t need…just to keep them employed? Should they hire me to twiddle my thumbs for $100k a year just because they can afford to?

Increasing productivity is a good thing actually.

a company that has low profit and employees a lot of people as a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite

Assuming output is the same in both cases, this is wrong. If a company is making $10 million in profits, is it better for society if they spend $9 million hiring people to dig ditches and then fill them in? No, because those people could be doing something else that is actually useful.

Why so? I think it would better if everyone were in a productivity maximizing role, not busywork.

is *

Geez I wrote everything wrong

a company that has low profit and many employees is a lot more beneficial for society than the opposite

It's good locally, yes, but our current economic system does not have adequate systems to support people who are laid off into other work. Layoffs will result in significant hardship. Also, it's good for a company to have a degree of slack.

Those are people. Each one could have a family with kids. Don't be so callous.

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