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Notes -
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
I've just recently read an article linked from Kyle Kingsbury's multi-part essay about LLMs that examines what a systemic crisis caused by an AI squeeze might look like.
In short, even though services will be getting cheaper, it's employment that has been generating demand since the invention of agriculture. Sure, companies might be able to fire 90% of programmers, lawyers, administrators and other white-collar workers, but these people aren't just paying for Netflix. They are paying their mortgages, and these mortgages have a baked-in assumption that college-educated people with white-collar jobs have stable careers that span decades. Except it's no longer the case. The same crunch happens to every company that used to cater to people with significant disposable incomes.
That's not the Citrini Report, presumably?
Yeah, that was the name
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