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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
Depending on how you see it, it already has, or can't. It's a group that, collectively, has
wastedspent a substantial part of the prime of their life, maybe even substantial debt, for credentials of dubious value. They already overwhelmingly vote for parties (generally green & left-wing) that promise them exactly what they want (positions based on "merit, as measured by their credentials", and a fallback of welfare). What should they do, vote for right-wing parties that call their degrees fake & gay?Also, from their PoV, the economic immigration overwhelmingly doesn't compete with them. After all, they are the ones with the impressive credentials. Only someone who didn't get those would feel threatened by immigrants. You're not one of those losers, are you?
They're not even wrong. Not getting a degree really is strongly correlated with being a loser. For this reason, employers do look at whether you have one. Especially public institutions outright require them. Underemployed also doesn't mean the job is terrible, just below what you might have hoped for.
Sure, what I'm saying is that this isn't itself a 'political constituency'- we aren't seeing protests, or advocacy groups that are explicitly around jobs for the young. There's no "Occupy Wallstreet", Tea party, or anything else. Rather, it's fractured and absorbed into the two other party's existing platforms - socialism on the left, and economic and immigration protectionism on the right.
On the left, this concern is subordinate to general immigration welfare, on the right it was kind of forefront, but has been backseated to the current... whatever.
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