hashmap

It's so weird to post the first thing that feels like a thought, just to carry water for CEOs who are never going to see you write this, and will never like you, without getting paid for it. 1300s feudal serfdom mindset. And it's everywhere.

If you're continuing to hire past these layoffs, and expanding plans to do so, it's to take advantage of the environment created by the layoffs. If there really was a fiscal crisis you'd also see mass hiring freezes, but we're not seeing that.

> “We expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/41-of-companies-pla...

> These companies overhired and now they are realizing that the positive cash flow to justify all of these new employees isn't existing.

This is false in a broad sense - the majority of CEOs plan to increase headcount this year in spite of layoffs. You can find examples here and there where it is true, but in general it is not. There's tons of literature of this readily available, but here is an example from as recently as yesterday: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceo-outlook-report-optimism-r...

> None of these layoffs are focused on laying off their most expensive people.

The people you see laid off tend to be newly hired at higher recent market rates or people who have been there a very long time, both of whom are either expensive in a relative sense or an absolute one.

But even that is besides the point. Even if you fire randomly you still see this benefit if you're a CEO.

I don't know how this has gone over everyone's heads here, because what's happening is extremely obvious.

If you're a big FAANG-like company, you've seen workers make big gains in wages over the past year, and turnover rates have been increasing significantly during the great resignation. This isn't enough to sink you, but you don't like it, because it does eat into your margins a little. Of course you're still making massive profits, but workers getting any measure of power scares you. Imagine if this trend continues? Workers are only getting harder to find!

So what do you do? You can't walk up to all your CEO friends and say "Hey how can we go about paying everyone less? What if we all agree to lay off our expensive people at the same time? That way, we'll have a massive pool of workers to hire from that are all looking for jobs, and since they'll all be scared from having been laid off they'll happily take pay cuts. Additionally, it'll scare the hell out of the rest of the employees to see all their friends get blown up with no warning right in front of them. They'll want desperately to keep the jobs they have and won't leave!"

You can't say that because coordinated wage suppression is highly illegal (remember Apple and Google?). But wink/nod based wage suppression? Totally fine! If everyone just happens to fire their expensive workers at the same time but leaves no record of getting anyone to agree to it, it's perfectly allowed. This is not "copycat" behavior. This is all the CEOs recognizing what the game is and cashing in on it.

And better yet, there's nothing the tech workers can do about it! There are no real tech worker unions to speak of, and these companies know their workers have a highly libertarian bent who believe in the meritocracy myth, so there's no real risk of unionization no matter how bad things get. It's a pure win for them, with no real downsides, and the general consensus is that if they're smart they'll do this every so often to bring workers to heel. And given the pervasive attitudes about labor that I see among tech workers I don't see any reason to think that's wrong.

How often do products go under because of unresolved tech debt? Is it many? When I first got into software I spent a lot of time on refactoring and cleaning up code. As time goes on I find myself doing that less and less, and just focusing on work that produces meaningful results. Fixing tech debt, from what I can tell, is less meaningful than conventional wisdom says it is.

No software will be perfect. Eventually it will die and something will replace it. I think knowing what "good enough" is, is perhaps the more important capability. Larger fruit hangs lower than tech debt the vast majority of the time.

> The rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy centers around the concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), proposed in a 2018 study to be a subtype of gender dysphoria caused by peer influence and social contagion.[1] It has not been recognized by any major professional association as a valid mental health diagnosis, and use of the term has been discouraged by the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and other medical organizations due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence, major methodological issues in existing research, and likelihood to cause harm by stigmatizing gender-affirming care.[2][3][4][5]

This isn't science.

> Lisa Littman, at the time an adjunct assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, created the term based on an online survey of parents on three anti-trans websites who believed that their teenage children had suddenly manifested symptoms of gender dysphoria and begun identifying as transgender simultaneously with other children in their peer group.[6][7][8] Littman speculated that rapid onset of gender dysphoria could be a "social coping mechanism" for other disorders.[1]

Spreading this garbage is grotesque and bigoted. Stop it.

> You also seem to be able to predict the future ("you're on the wrong side of history"). Again, that's fine (I'll take some stock tips if you can make those predictions too). I just disagree.

It's not hard, since we see other countries already in the "future" where it's working. You're free to disagree and turn a blind eye. I'm hoping that the people reading will see that this kind of attitude about being resolute that the horrors we inflict on our prisoners both innocent and guilty are good, is itself its own kind of horror. That this attitude will perpetuate the suffering of our fellow Americans.

Edit: you dont want my stock tips

"Cite your sources as to why torturing prisoners is wrong" is simply shorthand for "I actually like the idea of this torture and you can't tell me otherwise". Like I said, I can't make an argument as to why you should care about your fellow human if you don't already. It's not a good faith question.

We know that punitive measures do not act as a deterrence and in the case of more progressive countries that have wildly better outcomes we know what actually has good outcomes. If you're really interested all the literature is just a google away. Check out US incarceration and recidivism rates (which are the worst in the world) and those of more progressive countries. The data is all there for you, if you are curious. We've seen what doesn't work, and we've seen what does. It's not my job to educate you.

Like I said, I'm not here to convince you of anything. I cannot change your value system, I can only make a public example of why it does no good to drag us into the past, and all the atrocities that entails.

EDIT: sort of an afterthought, but for those reading I always find it hilarious that whenever a reactionary sees something work in another country the first instinct is to say "actually the US might exist in a bizarro reality where everything is opposite, and you can't prove that it's not so ha". As if the most scientific approach to seeing someone's repeated successful results is to absolutely refuse to try to replicate it yourself!

> The reason I posted is because you seemed to be unaware other people have different moral value systems. This is the fundamental reason behind a lot of disagreements. Here's the root of it: you think I a morally wrong and I think I am morally right. There is no rational argument to demonstrate that either of us are correct.

I have no such illusions; I'm simply saying that this archaic one is objectively wrong from a humanitarian and historical standpoint. We both think we are right; the difference is you are wrong. There is no agreeing to disagree here, and it is quite cut and dried.

Further, I am not saying these things to convince you of anything, and I of course don't think I will. I cannot convince someone to care about their fellow human being. I am saying these things for the sake of those reading.

This is not the argument you think it is - of course the people creating an unjust system will define their own system as just. We know that there are better ways, and appealing to tautology is just sort of burying one's head in the sand.

https://www.wbez.org/stories/how-finlands-criminal-justice-s...

You are free to disagree and be in the moral wrong, and on the wrong side of history. There are good examples of much better humanitarian penal systems with far better outcomes in Scandinavian countries that demonstrate this reality well. Returning to the past as you seem to want is just reactionary and does not serve progress.

What you call "righteous punishment" is just revenge. You want revenge. It is a natural response to being wronged. But that is not justice. And it is no way to build a society. To be overly cliche, two wrongs do not make a right.

The moral use of the penal system is to remove the danger from society, make restitution, and rehabilitate where possible. Those are not always possible. Torturing people held captive is its own crime, and one we are guilty of to a horrifying extent as a nation. To say nothing of the innocent people we subject to these horrors.

If inflation is higher than the interest rate, you make money by taking out debt. Its a similar concept to how if you're wealthy enough you can issue margin indefinitely and you pay the interest with more margin, so you never actually pay it back or have to pay taxes. You can just do it forever and it never gets you in trouble.

> My that measure, my bank shouldn't mind if I don't pay my mortgage. After all, new money isn't being spent.

That's silliness. Your bank is not going to forgive your debt, so that will not pan out for you. Biden is forgiving the $10,000 in loans, so that will pan out for the recipients.

Biden isnt hopping in a time machine to take things away from you. Nothing is being taken from you. Someone else is getting something that you are not, that's all.

Err.. did you just look at your taxes and think, "this must be that student loan forgiveness!!"?

Student loan forgiveness is not being "paid for", because no money is changing hands. It is debt that is being forgiven. The government is not paying money out for this, because it is already spent.

Your taxes keep going up because you are making more money. It's not a bad problem to have.

Ok, so we're agreed that you're not affected at all but instead want to talk about an entirely different concern.

This concern is where does the money "come from?". No money is coming from anywhere, because no money is changing hands. It is debt that is owed that is no longer owed. No money is taken from any pool of money to pay is off, it is simply removed from the books. No government program is paying for this. No taxes are levied on you. You will not see your tax bill go up as a result of this. Levying taxes is a power of congress, no the executive, so Biden could not do this even if he wanted to.

Your next question is why are we helping these people who need it - we are helping them because they need it, because great countries take care of their own. You were able to pay off your loans - that's great! But many others did not fare as well, and it is in our collective interest that they not suffer so terribly for this financial burden. Less money being paid back to these programs (which have terribly high interest rates to begin with) means more money stimulating the economy. It means more money will trickle up to the corporation you work for, and you will see some measure of this benefit.

I would suggest that instead of spending so much time being upset about how some people at the bottom got some help you instead redirect that energy toward the programs benefiting those who do not need the help and are absorbing resources that utterly dwarf students having to pay $10k less - the military, oil subsidies, megafarm subsidies.

As long as we're punching, why not punch up instead of down?

EDIT: As for "why are we only giving to these people who need it" - great question! I would welcome giving more help out. I would agree this measure doesn't go far enough. We could be doing more, and we should demand that we do!

> Except we do have an idea not just from the news/knowledge

This is the crux of it. You're not actually penalized, it just makes you upset. You can choose to not be upset. I'm happy that people who most need help are getting some.

> But also from the fact that taxes fund this scenario. > One gets their tax money (plus some) back. Another pays taxes, but gets none back.

This is false. No taxes were levied on you to fund this scenario.

If you want to count the downstream effects, the deficit is drastically down under the Biden administration, so this is part of a package deal that helps you out (not that the this would raise your taxes anyway even if the deficit were to increase).

Not to mention the effects of stimulus from people who would otherwise be paying money on a loan but can now spend it on other things, which will trickle up to whatever corporation you work for, so from this action alone you may actually come out ahead.

But I contend that you're not interested a full accounting or the dollar amount people are receiving, because if you were, you would be much more interested in the pounds being given to interests that clearly don't need them (military, mega farms, oil) instead of the pennies given to those that do.

The short of it is no taxes are levied on you for this to happen, it really is a win for everyone, and it's ok for these people to get a little bit of help that you're not getting.

The government pays off my $10,000 and your situation is literally no different. I'm not sure how you're not getting this. If you were locked in a room and had no idea the government gave me that money you would have no idea and remain unaffected.

This is what I mean by bucket-crab mentality. The inability to discern someone else doing better from you doing worse.

That disappears when forgiven, exactly.

The fact that the people arguing against this spend less time arguing against the massive spending increases for the american military is a pretty big hint that the central point is "I want to punish my fellow american, I want them to hurt." and not the actual money amount. They don't care if it's $10,000 or $1. "Personal responsibility" is largely a dog-whistle for "if your situation is bad, it's your fault and you deserve it. FYGM."

It is debt that does disappear if it is forgiven.

It is not a tax levied on you, so you are not paying for it.

If you paid your loans off, you don't lose anything by someone else getting $10,000. That is, indeed, incontrovertible. Imagine I have an apple and you have an apple. If I get another apple, that doesn't mean you now have zero.

This is bucket-crab talk. Not getting a reward is not the same as getting penalized; those who paid everything off have an unchanged situation. You might say the action doesn't go far enough and should lift up more people, and there is an argument for that.

This, however, just smacks of "the train ran over me, so it's disrespectful if it doesnt also run over everyone else."

I can count on zero fingers the number of times I've needed to know any sort of calculus working in tech.

I tried making a fried egg using this suggestion and it did not turn out as well as I had hoped.

This may be of help https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-fixing-external-m...

What makes you say that? His website lists current social programs as the first source of money for this program. People either switch over and see a marginal benefit, or they do not switch and they get nothing from the Freedom Dividend:

> The means to pay for the Freedom Dividend will come from 4 sources:

> 1. Current spending. We currently spend between $500 and $600 billion a year on welfare programs, food stamps, disability and the like. This reduces the cost of the Freedom Dividend because people already receiving benefits would have a choice but would be ineligible to receive the full $1,000 in addition to current benefits.

https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/

It gives the Freedom Dividend this weird behavior of providing the least help to people who need it most.

> This came our of nowhere as social programs were not mentioned before this line. It's basically fearmongering at this point.

Perhaps he did not spell it out explicitly, but this is what Andrew Yang's policy proposal is. Since he is the leading candidate on UBI at this point, it makes sense to address how he plans on handling it.

Assuming the unlikely scenario that no new revenue was collected, printing $x to give to every U.S. citizen would not cause every U.S. citizen to also lose x real dollars to inflation. The average citizen still ends up ahead.

Stable, positive, and modest inflation is actually a good thing! It's a major feature of being able to control the money supply: it is instrumental in preventing deflationary spirals, it circumvents the sticky wage problem, and it transfers wealth from debt owners to debtors.

This is not to say I am a big proponent of UBI before other better-tested solutions for the more pressing problems people face, but what you are suggesting is not, by and large, what is happening.