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Snap (Chat) stock rises on AI motivated layoff
Now, I am surprised that Snap even still exists, and would assume that financial pressures would have forced down layoffs anyway. The article says about 1000 people are affected, which implies they have over 6000 employees. Wild.
But regardless, whether AI is an accelerant (I can't see how it's not) or a convenient excuse, we are going to continue seeing tech downsizing and stock jumping, encouraging more of it.
Meanwhile 43% of US grads are underemployed.
I am not going to bank on any hard predictions, I am not a great forecaster. But it does seem like things have already unravelled much more than the PMC and neoliberal middle class want to admit.
We will continue to have more Mandamis and more Trumps gaining popularity as alternatives to the stuck middle that seems to be held hostage. As long as keeping housing market, medicare, and 401ks proppped up for the older middle class are the primary concern, we're building pressure to the system.
To me, it seems wild to look at this and not want to shut all eonomic immigration down hard, (H1-Bs, etc). Yet somehow, the economic disenfranchisement hasn't quite reached that fever pitch. I am surprised (again I'm not a good predictor) that such an economically disenfranchised college graduate population (if that 43% is accurate) haven't solidified into any kind of a political movement yet. I can still understand (while disagreeing with) wanting to keep cheap laborers here to work manual labor. But the writing appears to be on the wall about the white collar squeeze that's already here.
Left unaddressed, I'm sure we'll get more Mandami's and socialism, with a leftish solution that is more about socialist subsidizing while promising immigrants can have it too; but we are also seeing massive fraud being uncovered in California, and Mandami claiming NYC is worse than broke; if both those fall apart, it will certainly undermine 'welfare' + immigration based solutions; and it seems like we will also have to get realistic economic opportunity protectionism as a major political block as well. But what do I know
Economics is often not intuitive, and this is not likely to actually help the situation.
There are basically two economic tracks that anyone can take. They can either offer services to the global market or the local market. The global market pays really well, but its also competitive as hell. The local market pay is dependent on how many rich global market people you have living nearby. Local market pay is often going to be heavily tied with local cost of living, but generally the local market pay outpaces the cost of living (or when it stops doing that people to leave).
An immigrant moving to your country can either work in the global market, in which case there is more money and resources flowing into your local area. Or they can work in the local market, in which case they are slightly lowering the cost of living for you. If they stay where they are they can still compete with you on the global market, its just that none of the money/resources is flowing to your area.
This is a nice theory but in the software industry, it turned out it just isn't so. Indians in India simply cannot compete as well as Indians in the US, and even Indians in Canada are somewhat inferior. Not so inferior that you can't use them at all, but enough that an H-1B engineer is a direct substitute for a US-born engineer whereas an Indian engineer in Bangalore is not.
Could it be that the most motivated and skilled Indians are all leaving to first world countries, with the US being the most coveted destination? If we ban Indian immigration to the US, it still would be a poor policy choice if it will makes Indians in Toronto, Sydney and London more competitive against us on the global market.
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It's pat to say this. But that isn't going to change the fact the CS grad working as a waiter can literally count the CS H1-Bs being brought in, and the CS foreign exchange students getting those jobs he isn't.
"No, no, no, this is all good for the economy" doesn't seem like it can hold if native americans can't get jobs.
This just doesn't represent reality. The CS underemployment rate is way below average. There's also no trend in the overall underemployment rate, and it's a little better than it was when they started tracking in the late 80s.
This whole thing is a nothingburger.
hope so!
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