onfocus

The layoffs come during a bad year for the tech workforce. The tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista, and is on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025 if the layoff trend continues.

Companies such as Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle have let go of thousands of employees each, all of them citing a need to refocus expenditures around AI projects as a reason to cut jobs and restructure their organizations.

And they wonder why people hate AI.

Most of the Americans surveyed believe that datacenters are bad for the environment, home energy costs, and the quality of life of people living nearby and the numbers aren’t close. Only four percent of people thought datacenters were good for the environment, six percent good for jobs, and six percent good for people’s quality of life.

Oh, here’s another thing Americans can agree on.

More and more Americans are voicing unhappiness with billionaires’ enormous power. According to the Harris Poll’s annual Americans and Billionaires Survey, conducted last November, 53% of Americans believe billionaires threaten our democracy. What’s more, 71% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, say there should be a wealth tax on top earners, and 53% (up from 46% in 2024) say there should be limits on wealth accumulation.

Turns out Americans can all agree on something.

As Doctorow observes, these products and apps are often created with good intentions—or, at the least, designed to deliver something of value both to users and to business customers (advertisers, for example). But as the impulse to boost the bottom line becomes irresistible, the companies slowly, and then with alacrity, implement strategies to increase profits. This invariably worsens the users’ experience while benefiting business customers. And then, once all avenues for wresting value from users have been exhausted, the company proceeds to, put frankly, screw their business customers. Eventually, the platform becomes little more than a money-extraction machine—a hellscape for users and a barely profitable but inescapable black hole for business customers. In short: a “giant pile of shit” for everyone involved.

The Aristocrats!

The German lender is looking at options including shorting a basket of AI-related stocks that would help mitigate downside risk by betting against companies in the sector.

That’s probably ok when your backers start mitigating their upcoming losses. I think they teach that’s a healthy economy signal in business school.

Federal Reserve quietly pumped $125 billion into the U.S. banking system over five days, marking its largest short-term liquidity move since the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. On October 31 alone, the Fed injected $29.4 billion through overnight repurchase agreements (repos), allowing banks to trade U.S. Treasuries for cash to ease funding stress.

That's probably fine. This is the only reporting I've seen on this beyond folks chatting on social media. Nothing to worry about I suppose.

“As I devote myself to Scripture, to my family, and to walking in the light of the Lord, I find that this process of renewal continues to unfold, deepening day by day, step by step,” she wrote. “I no longer desire to 'Burn the Man;' I now burn with zeal in the Spirit.”

Cringing at billionaires entering their youth pastor phase. Hopefully they'll get to the love thy neighbor parts.

Now, amid high interest rates and economic uncertainty, job openings have fallen and employers are hiring at their slowest pace in more than a decade.

Economy warning light flashing.

On Saturday, postal services around Europe announced that they are suspending the shipment of many packages to the United States amid confusion over new import duties. Postal services in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Italy said they will stop shipping most merchandise to the U.S. effective immediately. France and Austria will follow on Monday.

It's like the US imposed sanctions on itself. Elections have consequences.

A new study from MIT found that 95 percent of enterprise organizations report zero measurable gains from the adoption of AI tools.

Those billions spent on no gains are going to be a problem.

“It’s the Constitution. James Madison wrote it that way, and it was very explicit,” Bacon said of Congress’ power over trade. “And I get the emergency powers, but I think it’s being abused. When you’re trying to do tariff policy for 80 countries, that’s policy, not emergency action.”

If everything is an unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad then that phrase isn't meaningful.

Really what we’re dealing with more than anything else is the corrupting effect of an unprecedented level of wealth concentration. I’ve been covering wealth concentration my whole life, and it’s just exploded. And so it’s one thing to be like, “OK, a CEO is making 200 times what his workers are making,” which is like the kind of math that I was doing when I started becoming a journalist. But when you think about the levels of wealth that are now concentrated in the hands of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk, I think they truly believe that they’re gods. The point of their wealth is to be able to exercise a kind of absolute power.

Yes, I think it's hard to understand exactly how dangerous this wealth concentration is.