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Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.
"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.
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[1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs
Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
I was at a smaller public company that overhired during COVID then struggled with profits (among other things). CEO and leadership lost a ton of money due to the share price drops from COVID peaks and CEO was ultimately pushed out.
It just doesn't seem to work out of the box. I test drove it on 20 BI questions, and for trivial questions, it gets about 50% right, and for more nuanced questions, it gets about 20% right. For example, I have a table like "people" with a column like "job_title" which has 10 possible values in an uneven distribution, and I asked "what fraction of people are nurses?". It gives me a pie chart where each slice wrongly gets 10%, because of the 10 possible values. Or if I asked what the mix by decade was, it would just show a flat line, 10% each period.
Then you have the more tricky questions, like "show me the revenue for each of the top 3 products in each quarter". It calculates an all-time top 3 first, and then shows the same products each quarter, instead of redoing it within each quarter. Reasonable enough, but when you try to correct it, it just gets stuck, possibly with an even worse answer, and there's no way out of the loop.
Why would they let executives touch something so half-baked?
This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.
If you're going to fire people, at least have the integrity to own your actions, instead of trying to make it sound like something that "just happened".
Going to go wash my hands after typing that.
"Job losses" isn't passive voice. "Jobs were lost" would be passive voice.
Why are people so hung up on "job losses", as if we don't hear this every day? Who cares?
If you don't care about this conversation, why are you participating?
Loss happens, firings are a decision.
They aren’t accidents, it’s an inherent part of how we designed cars and roads and we decided as society that we are ok with thousands of people killed by cars.
So it's much more faithful to truth to talk about accidents than by killing, even if both terms are semantically correct.
I agree that it’s a hard pill to swallow especially if you are US American.
Can you point me to countries that don't deflect agency in accident reporting?
Here's a headline from just today in the UK:
> Man airlifted to hospital after pedestrian hit
First line in of the story:
> A man has been airlifted to hospital after a vehicle hit a pedestrian.
But from my experience few nations are so dependent on the car as the US. It so very similar in Germany where I’m from but mostly because it’s such an important part of the economy. But in a big city you can easily live without a car. I found this almost impossible in the US.
See perhaps the book There Are no Accidents by Jessie Singer:
> We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators.
[…]
> In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/There-Are-No-Accident...
For automobiles specifically:
* https://crashnotaccident.com
* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...
* https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...
Then it says no one is at fault, but the definition specifically included carelessness and ignorance which does imply fault.
> Calling a crash an “accident” suggests no one is at fault. In reality, crashes result from preventable actions like distraction, inattention, or risky driving.
But all of these go under carelessness / ignorance.
And there is always a party that's at fault traffic accidents.
Normal dialogue:
Bob: I got into a traffic accident.
Alice: Who was at fault?
Bob: ...
I suppose there's at least one example of someone being hit by a car that slipped off a car transporter too. "Had car thrown at him by negligent shipping company" would be a more click worthy headline though
job loss / redundancy = there is no need for this role any more. your job is gone firing = you are not appropriate/fit/whatever for this role. your employment is gone. someone else can have your job
(the passive/active criticism is totally right though. this should read "Amazon CUTS / REMOVES 14,000 jobs")
Maybe it's political or religious terrorism, maybe it's suicide-by-cop, maybe it's a generic mental health issue (think schizophrenics whose head voice tells them to commit violence), maybe it's a health issue (heart attack, driver floors the gas pedal), maybe it's a streetrace gone wrong, maybe it's a DUI, maybe it's a mechanical issue (loss of brake/steering), maybe it's a geriatric driver who just doesn't have any idea where he even is, maybe it's a driver blindly following Maps and ignoring the policeman winking at him, thus not noticing he's heading right for a rally.
You see, the list of issues why a car plows into a crowd is very very long, and often it takes the police hours to determine what's going on. They gotta interview bystanders and victims, they gotta obtain and review camera footage, possibly search the driver's home and digital devices - because unlike Twitter pseudo-journalists and click/ragebait "news" media, police can normally be held accountable if they claim something in public that doesn't turn out to be true.
So it'd be nice if they'd say like "a man has ploughed into a crowd" - we'll safely assume he didn't use an actual plough since I hear those are fairly slow.
It does make a difference regarding people viewing news outlets as informers rather than an arm of some kind of agenda.
Well, not in Europe because that's the culture, but it objectively is.
And I mean, it's not like the racists hear "a car" and think "oh it was just a car on its lonesome, not like driven by a person from [group that I hate]", do they...
“Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses,” is not an example of the passive voice.
“14,000 workers were fired by Amazon,” is an example of the passive voice.
There is not a 1:1 relationship between being vague about agency and using the passive voice.
It's passive but crystal clear.
"Job losses" is a passive construction because it hides the fact that the agent - Amazon - made a deliberate and conscious decision to destroy these jobs.
People do occasionally lose things deliberately, but more usually it happens to someone through carelessness or accident, often with associated regret.
This is an example of framing, where a narrative spin is put on events.
"Amazon destroyed 14,000 jobs" would be far more accurate. But we never see that construction from corporate-controlled media outlets.
Companies create jobs. They never destroy them. "Losses" always happen because of regrettable circumstances or outside forces.
The company's hand is always forced. It's never a choice made out of greed (the truth) but because of a plausible excuse.
The BBC, on the other hand, is a major organisation employing professional writers and editors. It’s their job to inform clearly, not throw mud in people’s faces with the kind of indirect wording used to conceal intentions.
The situations are not in the same category. I made a mistake in word usage; the article’s title is manipulating meaning, using public relations-style words carefully chosen for the goal of minimising backlash.
Furthermore, I don’t think you need to be perfect to point out imperfection. It is perfectly valid to go to a restaurant and say “this pizza tastes bad” even if you don’t know how to cook.
All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it.
And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.
Is your livelihood, housing, ability to put food on the table for your family etc. not a risk by your understanding? Or are you only willing to accept certain types of financial risk as "risk"?
Here's an illustrative question: John Q. Billionaire owns shares in a passive index fund such that he practically has the same exposure to Amazon's stock price as if he owned $10 million in stock. I will potentially be homeless if I lose my 45k per year job at Amazon. Who has more risk?
Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.
But yeah, no risk. No risk at all.
Anyone with any familiarity about tech knew or should have known what kind of shitty company Amazon was. At 46, I went in with my eyes wide open. I made my money in stock and cash and severance and kept it moving when Amazon Amazoned me. It was just my 8th job out of now 10 in 30 years.
And I believe there is a huge shift of wealth going on, to a very small number of insanely rich people. And that is a very big problem.
This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.
Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.
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In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.
You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.
Still wouldn't be close to the level of inequality we have today: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guarante...
Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).
> In a society which claims that everyone is equal
No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.
Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
> No, you are making this up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal
Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).
Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.
Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.
[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
> Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
This sounds reasonable, as all bad ideas usually do (and good ones sometimes) but the complexity is in the implementation. If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Well, what do you do when your company hires over a million people? And, what do you actually distribute to the employees? Is it the market value of the company divided amongst employees? If they work for 6 months how much value do they get? How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
There aren't easy answers to these questions. We are in fact not great as a society (and I'm not sure we should even strive to be) at assessing who did what work. And, how do you handle people who are less skilled because they were born that way? Some people just aren't capable or competent and that's a genetic fact of life. Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay? How does that work?
Your simple idea opens up a pretty nasty can of worms here without clear answers. But there is one solution - if you (or others) think that giving ownership proportional to the amount of work done is the best way to run a company, the free market is right there waiting for you to give it a go.
Well, gods don't exist but many people substitute them with some kind of moral system so it's not only under the eyes of the law. The second part touches upon the core of the issue IMO - whether we want equal opportunities or equal outcomes.
Equal outcomes are obviously unjust because some people put in more work, have more skill or are better in some way at some things (whether that's work or morality) and equal outcomes can only be achieved by taking from them.
Equal opportunities are much more reasonable but they too have issues - specifically what counts as an opportunity and when does it start?
- If at birth, then the society must forbid any kind of inheritance, otherwise some people are obviously massively advantaged by being born to rich parents. Even that is not enough because rich parents can afford the child a much better education and contacts. You'd literally have to take children away from parents and assign them to random families, which would probably be somewhat unpopular.
- At the beginning of a particular school enrollment or job sounds more reasonable but then people who were advantaged or disadvantaged earlier have a much better change of getting into the school or getting the job so it just adds up.
- Not to mention people who are sufficiently rich through inheritance fundamentally don't have to work, they just invest. Assuming all people need roughly the same amount of money to survive and the rest can be invested, the rich will get richer faster than the poor.
These are hard problems with no easy solutions. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to solve them, even if that means trying out ideas that can turn out bad. The alternative is increasing inequality until a collapse, a revolution or until we're back to slavery.
> the complexity is in the implementation
No shit. I didn't say it was easy. But we can start by talking about an idealized world with perfect information and what justice/fairness would look like and then make changes according to real-world constraints such as imperfect information. This has already happened to criminal law - in an ideal world, you know ow much suffering an offender has caused, how severy punishment he deserves for it, how severe punishment prevents how much crime, whether somebody is actually rehabilitated or if they'll re-offend, etc. But in the real world, there are rules about what level of proof is necessary, about what evidence is admissible, whether you can assign punishments based on risk of re-offending, etc.
With compensation, the first step would be to negotiate based on equal information (not withholding information about compensation of other employees - in the name of privacy, it could be median and variance for each position). The second step is negotiating not money-per-unit-of-work but skill level relative to other employees.
> If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Not necessarily. If you started it alone and worked on it for some time, that time should count towards your share. Similarly, if you invested money into it, that should also count.
> How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
The exact details can be negotiated and various schemes should probably be experimented with at both the company and societal levels.
The point is that there should be no class divide between workers who get paid per uni of work and owners who take a cut from the income and/or can sell the company.
> Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay?
The company is still built on top of your work, your share just keeps decreasing relative to others as other people put in more and more work. This is actually something that protects founders - if you start as 1 man in a garage, then leave the company but it turns into something hugely profitable, you still keep getting a cut, just a small one.
A lot of people criticize my opinions based on risk (but incorrectly, given employees risk much more than owners - see other comments) but this actually spreads the risk around a lot. If you work for multiple companies in your life, you still have some income, unless all of them go bankrupt.
Oh and this solves the issue with privilege from inheritance to some degree - the children of workers didn't build the company, so they have no claim to a share in it.
No you don't. That's exactly the point. Once you get fired, there are no longer any paychecks.
Meanwhile you have spent a limited resource you can't get back while investors have spent an unlimited resource they can always make more of.
And that even ignores the bottom line that people who get fired might lose their homes or not be able to feed their families. Tell me which investors risk so much that they become homeless if they lose the money.
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The bottom line if you need a certain amount of money (an absolute value) to survive.
1) Workers get 100% of that from the 1 company they work for. Maybe they can work for 2 companies part time if they are lucky. But losing even 50% of their income hits their bottom line severely. Meanwhile, investors can (as you say) optimize their risk so they are pretty safe.
2) And workers often spend a majority of their income on this bottom line, not being able to save much, let alone amass enough to invest to a meaningful degree. Investors (people who already have so much money they can risk a significant hunk of it) can lose a significant chunk of it and still be comfortable able to afford rent or pay the bills.
In fact, they often don't pay rent because they could just buy their home (something increasingly difficult for workers). Imagine if these rich assholes had to spend a third or half of their income, just to have a roof above their head.
They'd do everything to change the system, in fact, they do exactly that now by evading taxes.
Morally speaking, your sentiment is right with most of us I think but asking for a company is asking for a thing, like asking for a building or a chair.
Earning more while exploring more than contributing back is unhealthy in any measurement of time. Back then, companies would have schools, universities and whatever to sustain the community they want to build. They would build roads, renovate public spaces and contribute to private transport and all of that apart from taxes. Now they invest on their own charities, which sometimes is quite hard to validate how much money goes in to where due to the conflict of interest and the possibility of fraud.
Sounds like company towns, which were derided for other reasons.
Do such risks truly exist for modern mega corps? Do we even still think the underlying stocks of these companies trend with performance only?
Your sentiment comes from a wholly different investment era, where investing was primarily done by professionals and ETFs did not exist.
I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:
- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.
- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA
- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools
- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.
In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.
If the choice is between propping up the economy which is built atop a delicate house of cards and is about to implode on us anyways thanks to the AI bros, or knowing that the psychotic C-suite can't fire me because he needs an extra 0.2% of profit margin to look good to investors, I'll take the latter.
Having experienced both worlds here, it's about roughly the same difficulty getting hired, except over here in NL at the end of my 1 month in which they can fire me for any reason, I get a nice little ironclad contract that provides me rights as a worker. Anyone claiming getting laid off unceremoniously is better is just coping
I would like people who cannot distinguish between an income stream and a capital value to learn what an "annuity" is.
Employees have very significant financial risk tied to the company because it's their main source of income. In America, there may even be significant health risks because health insurance is tied to the employer for baffling tax reasons.
Not to mention that in many startups, the employees are literally investors: they hold stock and options!
> So you get investors spreading their risk across many ventures
The employee version of this is called "overemployment", but it's quite risky.
In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.
Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.
And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.
As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.
Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?
Your "ability to get a job" is not what put money into your bank account twice a month. Your employer did.
I told my wife as soon as I had the meeting with my manager at Amazon back in 2023 about my “take $40K severance and leave immediately or try (and fail) to work through the PIP”. She asked me what were going to do? I said I’m going to take the $40K and we are going to the US Tennis Open as planned in three weeks. I called an old manager who didn’t have a job for me. But he threw a contract my way for a quick AWS implementation while I was still interviewing.
I doubt very seriously if my job fell out from under me tomorrow, someone wouldn’t at least offer me a short term contract quickly.
For now, expect that to be clawed back severely over the next few years.
I’m having to continuously move up and closer to the “stakeholders”.
This is extremely unusual in general, not at all typical.
Here, on Hacker News, we have an unusually high proportion of high earners, and I'd guess a lot of FIRE people like me (and I infer, you), but the median US person has $8k, about 3 months, of savings: https://www.fool.com/money/research/average-savings-account-...
I could not guess either the income nor the savings distribution of those 14k Amazon departures. Also, reports suggest most of these people will have a chance to find a different role within Amazon.
But I have that amount in liquid cash because I’m an empty nest boomer with my wife who had a house built in 2016 in the burbs of Atlanta that I sold for twice the amount I paid for it in 2024 and downsized to a condo in Florida.
Before 2020, my only security was my ability to get a job fast.
But honestly anyone who expected loyalty from Amazon was like the old woman who took care of the snake. They should have been saving.
And I’m not at all FIRE, I’ll be realistically working until 65. Don’t cry for me. I work remotely and my wife and I travel all of the time including doing the digital nomad thing off an on where we are gone for months at a time.
Sure sometimes founders and angel investors take big risks - however often the money invested is other people's money!
So if you have a VC funded start up - the VC has persuaded other people to give them money they will invest on their behalf, and while there is a strong alignment with upside and VC renumeration - they still charge management fees come win or lose - and risk is spread across the fund.
Founders stock options are often aligned with VC's such that often they win with certain exit scenarios when the rank and file with ordinary options do not.
Under those scenarios I'm not sure either the VC's or the founders are really taking much more risk than the employees - as I'm not sure you see that many homeless VC's.
The real point here is that people who take the initiative ( to set up a company for example ) set the rules, and also often configure the rules to favour themselves - it's as simple as that. Isn't pretending otherwise window dressing/self-justification from people taking advantage of other people's passiveness?
Isn't it the same as the house in roulette - sure each spin the house is taking risk - but if the game is structured so the odds are in your favour - you are taking less risk than the customer.
It comes down to who is setting the rules of the game.
Having said that, the game is extremely rigged such that those types of wins are rare, while the downside risk of grants not having the expected value is uncapped.
I’m aware of the difficulties of running a business. I’d still always prefer to own the business rather than work within it despite that risk, which is why I do.
Owners don't get paid as such. They have risk of loss, and only if the company is successful do they get a positive return on their investment.
Employees do have risk of losing their jobs, but don't really risk not getting paid for work performed.
You're no more entitled to be paid a salary than you are to get laid. Both satisfy needs that you undeniably have, but must be negotiated with other people on a strictly consensual basis.
Unfortunately for us all, it is just a more complex and sophisticated version of "I'm going to club you over the head and rape and pillage your community". I have been thinking through how you would go about getting people to understand something that they have been conditioned to not just be unable or maybe even incapable of perceiving, but hav also been conditioned to actively and aggressively reject; effectively, how to do you deprogram people from abuse?
You are attempting to do that in a very small way, helping people realize the psychopathic, narcissistic, abusive word manipulation that the focus-grouped "job losses" represents; even though technically they are layoffs, but they are a predatory, abusive, grooming, gaslighting type behavior. But at least we should all rejoice, because now all these 14,000 people have wonderful "opportunities" in their life.
Or, as you said, firings.
(Not like, you know, some people getting divorced soon, some people biting a revolver soon)
I would use "sacking" for performance related termination, and "losing ones job" in all other cases. I suspect BBC would use the same.
People like to make too much out of active/passive word choices. Granted it can get very propagandistic ("officer-involved shooting"), but if you try to make people say "unhoused" instead of "homeless" everyone just back-translates it in their head.
“Fired” is also a technical term for both cases, in academic/economist speak.
This is only true when an employee has worked for a company for 2 or more years
OK. I was fired for no stated cause in a process that didn't involve headcount reduction, or the firing of anyone except me specifically. (The unstated cause seems to have been that I had been offered a perk by the manager who hired me that the new manager didn't want to honor after the original guy was promoted.)
How would you describe that, in British English?
Jobs are "created" by a company or an industry.
But they never seem to be "destroyed", instead they are "lost".
If the company starts hiring again, they're "creating" new jobs, not "finding" the ones they were careless enough to lose.
So in this case of our capitalist system, doublespeak exists in such a way because they can create money or not lose money by doing such doublespeak as saying to investors this as a destroyed would make them have a negative connotation with amazon itself which would reduce their stock price.
Everything is done for the stock price. Everything. The world is a little addicted on those shareholders returns that we can change our language because of it.
While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.
Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.
So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.
The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.
It's the same as language like "officer involved shooting" to avoid saying "an officer shot a person" or calling a "murder" a "loss of life".
Opening line in the article: "Amazon has confirmed it plans to cut thousands of jobs, saying it needs to be "organised more leanly" to seize the opportunity provided by artificial intelligence (AI)."
And the statement from Amazon uses the phrase "we are reducing..."
Ah I see, your beef is with the BBC, not Amazon.
In Hungary, where I’m originally from, one of my friends sent me an article, which was about immigration in 2015, because she thought that the local district government wanted to move “migrants” (dog whistle for non white people over there) into her district. The headline said that, the body said the exact opposite… and it worked.
Also there are a ton of comments here, on Reddit, and really everywhere, that makes it quite obvious that a lot of people don’t read just headlines.
Some employees are going to experience losing their housing. Losing their health benefits while sick. Children will be moved from their friends/schools. Some will lose their careers as they won't find new related work quick enough and will have to take whatever they can get for their next job.
While the owner vacations in space for fun.
Ugh, Capitalism.
Ugh capitalism is right.
https://www.cspi.org/article/fda-alert-supplements-amazon-po... https://www.consumerreports.org/health/fda-finds-hidden-drug... https://kagi.com/search?q=amazon+fake+fuses
Bad products and services exists in all markets, choice is the cure.
Is it Amazon branded products your upset with? I guess don't buy them? I genuinely do not understand your argument.
Unemployment insurance is a bit different. When a former employee files for unemployment benefits then the state will notify the last employer, and that employer can dispute the claim if the termination was for cause. In practice many employers don't dispute unemployment claims even for employees whom they terminated for performance reasons because it's not worth the hassle.
If you get fired you can lie about it. No one can find out.
There is the possible exception that you already have enough evidence that you were going to sue them anyway, then you can take that you were fired to your lawyer (you should already have a lawyer and gotten their advice on the situation). However I don't think this has ever been the case for anyone.
The other exception is when the police are there and will arrest you as part of firing you. I'm not aware of this happening, but it seems like it probably has at some point (like once per decade across all jobs in the world)
And I hasten to add that I'm fine being wrong on this point. Surprise can last a bit, though. :D
No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
It’s in old company best interest for you to get a new job because jobless people start talking to lawyers when they get desperate.
That is why they do it. However you still should accept the offer unless you are going to sue them which most are not. Just find a new job and move on. Try to do better.
> No one is going to know you got fired, if they call the company, it’s just dates and title, probably say in good standing.
The good standing is not something you want to risk. They have the ability to say not in good standing and might even have the obligation to say that to some people (depending on local laws, but if it wasn't in good standing it is at least unethical to say it was). By resigning first everyone agrees that it was in good standing and you all move on (even though you are clearly cutting the line).
Again, this assumes that like most people you won't be suing. Likely you know you screwed up (though perhaps you don't agree it is bad enough to be fired). For most it just isn't worth trying to fight it out. If you are an exception than by all means refuse - but be prepared for the consequences.
Worrying about company asking "Good standing" is like when Elementary Teacher talking about your permanent record. It does not exist.
Depends on whether they're offering something, otherwise yeah it's worse for you unless you suspect they have evidence of you embezzling company funds or something.
Whose decision could reveal something about employee and if employee thinks it's bullshit, that's defamation lawsuit possibility. I even know companies who bosses talk good about people they have fired because having ex-employee stew is not good. Get them a new job and move on.
1) Sticking to the legally safe answer of only confirming dates
OR
2) Confirm dates and share a few anecdotes about how the person was good to work with
If a previous employer chooses only to confirm dates, and refuses to answer any other questions, it's often a way of signaling something bad went down but you can't talk about it.
You need to be memorable enough too.
Backchanel is not really a real concern unless you did something really fucked up.
Otherwise who do you think knows?
I can only imagine what this will do to morale. If even positive quarters means job cuts, why even try to have a positive quarter.
If someone, say did a great job of updating API documentation that can be fully automated now, that's not good enough nowadays. I realise that's not exactly fair because the capitalists / shareholders 'only' have to have to have money in order to receive compensation, and you as a labourer face increasing demands. If you don't like the balance of power you find a niche / leverage as a laborer or you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
If you truly believe the best people are not layed off from corporations, you must be extremely young and just starting out. Corporations are a lot less rational than you imply
It's not the 2010's anymore. You're not fired because you did a bad job or even because you weren't productive enough. You're fired in a larger cultural wave to try and remove American labor from the American economy as they push everything overseas and pretend it's about "efficiency with AI". Nothing is hiring outside of hospitality right now.
>you switch to being a capitalist eventually.
Hope you have generational wealth. Otherwise that "capitalist" position is you delivering doordash just to survive.
If you take the comment about "AI" at face value, isn't that exactly what you'd expect? If a textile mill is making record profits because of new textile machinery, would you consider it reasonable for the business to keep the old workers around, even though they're not needed anymore? Yes, it always sucks to lose a job, but I don't see how Amazon did them dirty or even broke some sort of informal contract.
With that said, I would consider doing layoffs after a profitable quarter to be anti-social / anti-culture. It creates fear and uncertainty in the organization which will cause people to move to 'cash checks until I am fired then I'll leverage this to get a job somewhere else' versus trying hard to make the company their career where they put down roots.
In my opinion, chasing ever increasing profitability as a tech company is cannibalizing future earnings. By cutting over and over in pursuit of more profit, you are trading compound earnings (ie: create new products) for money today by injecting fear into your 'innovation centers'.
So going back to the textile mill example above, what should the owner do? Keep the workers around even though they're not needed until the next recession, and only then fire them? If it's a particularly profitable industry, it might even still be profitable even with a recession, so is amazon on the hook for decades, until there's some sort of industry-wide crisis (think the one that hit the American auto industry in 2008), and by then it's too late because upstarts without the burden of older employees have already overtaken them?
Tossing people out as a giant tech company after a profitable quarter is non-sense. They have money to be innovative, why are they choosing not to push that back into more attempts at products.
People expect bad news if the company gets bad news. If a company cuts after good news, people are going to lose faith in either their truthfulness (ie: are they cooking the books), their loyalty to employees, or both.
Sure.
Too bad I don't take it at face value and know this is just more outsourcing that's smokescreened under AI. Just check their hiring in earnings calls and see if that's actually going down. Amazon did them dirty and lied about why they aren't needed.
In the modern capitalist world, entire industries are shipped over seas or simply vanish.
Question. Why is it the shareholders of AMZNs responsibility to keep people employed?
There could be other conditions too depending on whatever employment agreement exists, but the point is to determine if an employee’s lack of performance caused their employment to be terminated or something external to the employee caused their employment to be terminated.
You meant i.e. or e.g.?
Under performance may be considered termination for cause in your state. It is not generally.
Layoffs suck. Companies should be judged by their actions (e.g. severance, who is being laid off, etc.) and just ignore the words.
To me everything else is weasel words.
This meaning is present in many people's minds. It is not present in many people's minds or any dictionary I saw ever.
to remove someone from their job, either because they have done something wrong or badly, or as a way of saving the cost of employing them[1]
The act or an instance of dismissing someone from a job.[2]
the action of forcing somebody to leave their job[3]
And so on.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fire
[2] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/firing
[3] https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fire#Verb
4. (transitive, employment) To terminate the employment contract of (an employee), especially for cause (such as misconduct, incompetence, or poor performance).
Part of me hates the capriciousness of randomly selected layoffs but it’s done for a few main reasons, firstly that it’s not exploitable by internal politicking (at least less explicable). Secondly, reduces exposure to lawsuits about performance. Thirdly, reduces reputational damage to those laid off. Of course there is an incredible incentive to lie about the randomness.
People are fired for a cause, namely Amazon needs more profit for its shareholders.
AFAIK you are using the term "for cause" incorrectly. Firing "for cause" is usually more serious than simply firing for poor performance or similar. It's usually for something like breach of contract, for getting in legal trouble, for theft, wilful misconduct, etc. It also usually results in losing severance, options, etc.
Simple firing for poor performance is not firing "for cause".
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. A blue-green planet from suborbital space. Four commas in my net worth. I watched tens of thousands of employees get misplaced in my couch cushions. All their jobs will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
You don't understand. Amazon lost 14,000 jobs in its couch cushions. It can happen to anyone; clearly, no one is at fault. Least of all Amazon, which, if you really think about it, is the real victim here.
/s
I think these companies have lost all their brains and there is a stupid AI system making bad decisions for them. I also fully expect these companies to lose their shirt to smarter companies in the next few years and decades.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".
Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005).
That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005.
[1] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-expects-global-unemplo... [2] https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/ilo-annual-jobs-report-say... [3] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.
I think the relevant number here is working age population.
The leaked plan is to fire up to 600,000 people. So roughly up to 40% of their workforce.
Amazon is not firing up to 600,000 people, they plan to automate jobs to avoid hiring 600,000 people projected out to 2033.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/technology/inside-amazons...
Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?
For others: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/jeff-bezos-day-1-versus-2-com...
> “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by death. And that’s why it’s always Day 1.”
Sharks don't look back, cause they don't have necks. Necks are for sheep
(Actually don't know if I used day 2 correctly, feels a bit like trying to use skibidi ohio in a sentence)
Sharks eat sheep?
No, great white sharks do not eat sheep. They will eat pigs.
If people are surviving that then who are are the people being ejected? Unprofitable areas or new products which didn't pan out?
By the process of natural selection, the people who survive such rounds of firings are the ones with the political skills to survive them. Some of those guys will be star performers, but most will simply be politicians. Over time, this process will result in an increase in the ratio of politicians to star performers.
But it’s a mistake to assume the remainder is automatically high‑performer‑only. Three patterns I’ve seen:
1) People with options leave first. If you can find a stable, supportive org at similar pay, you go. That’s often your top performers. We've lost some truly amazing people who left because they were simply not willing to tolerate working here anymore. Being absolutely ruthless in getting rid of low performers is honestly not worth it when you also lose the people who truly move the needle on creating new products, etc. If you make a mistake and get rid of some people who were talented high-performers, trust is instantly gone. The remaining high-performers now know that they may also be a target, and so they won't trust you and they'll leave whenever they can. And when you're axing 10k+ people, you're absolutely going to make mistakes.
2) The survivors change. Trust and empathy plummet. Incentives tilt toward optics and defensiveness, and managers start competing on visible ruthlessness. You can keep the lights on, but actually trying to innovate in this environment is too scary and risky.
3) In an atmosphere of fear, people who are willing to be genuinely dishonest and manipulative -- and who are good enough at it to get away with it -- have a serious competitive advantage. I've seen good, compassionate leaders go from a healthy willingness to make tough decisions on occasion to basically acting like complete psychopaths. Needless to say, that's extremely corrosive to meaningful output. While you could argue that skillful dishonesty is an individual advantage regardless of climate, an environment of repeat layoffs strongly incentivizes this behavior by reducing empathy, rewarding "do whatever it takes to win" behavior, etc.
Edit: Did some research with ChatGPT and found the following papers if anyone else is interested in the above concepts.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9537742/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235279297_The_survi...
https://backend.production.deepblue-documents.lib.umich.edu/...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10025906/
https://strategy.sjsu.edu/www.stable/pdf/Staw%2C%20B%2C%20L%...
The most nefarious kind I saw was to use tenure capital towards influencing peers (above and below) into over-engineering complexity to improve longevity (or simply to flex on the basis of tenure) and this is a game-able closed loop. The longer one has been in a position is in a position to stay even longer via influence and no-one questions.
The up-levels explain this as "trust" which probably is slop/laziness or pure lack of time due to how busy the up-levels are managing up the chain (and working towards their own longevity)
The below-levels probably are afraid to question/oppose strongly due to obvious reasons. This becomes worse if the tenured person in question is already a "celebrated hero" or "10x-er".
If you are just an employee - it’s beyond naive to prioritize anything but your own job. Of course I am not advocating back stabbing and throwing others under the bus. Getting ahead in BigTech is always about playing politics and getting on the right projects to show “impact”.
Local TV says it's because too many people caved in to the return-to-work demand.
We are already in it.
Exactly. It's a for-profit company, not a charity or a jobs program.
(most of their money is from AWS, though. I wonder if AI is making that less stock-relevant.)
People mistook ZIRP for genius for 25 years.
And they did kind of successfully roll out a global logistics network, at a time when no one thought anyone could compete with Walmart. And they became leaders in the cloud computing space.
These aren't trivial accomplishments solely enabled by ZIRP.
Not Ironic at all that Dot Com immediately followed.
If you're not working in nursing the flux of retired Baby boomers you're either already rich or on unsteady ground.
As soon as the AI bubble pops and the true definition of AGI has been achieved i.e (30% increase in global unemployment by 2035) then it will mean the gradual decrease in many BS tech salaries.
We will certainly get a huge financial crash along the way.
It is correct that we are due for a big crash. Prepare yourselves while you can.
>the true definition of AGI has been achieved i.e (30% increase in global unemployment by 2035)
I'll paraphrase something I heard from Twitter: "companies who really feel they are on the cusp of an AGI breakthrough to no then proceed to announce something like SORA". I don't think AGI is in the 10 year plan here.
as for 30% unenployment? I don't think we're getting to that point without other major conflicts first. I'm sure by 10% there will be all sorts of coups (as we are slowly seeing now). at 20% there will be full blown wars.
So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?
I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI
Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment
People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.
Perhaps as the departures were staff decisions not some faceless corporate executive, dropping X% cos that’s what he thinks would please the markets or his boss. Or the department is making profits but as much as his MBA says that’s sufficient. That’s the really depressing and infuriating aspect.
>People joined, some stayed, some left and it was fine.
For who? It's always a shame how we underplay the human element in these stories.
It sounds like the first step in desensitizing folks about firings and forcing the remaining people to work in fear. That’s what they want, they said it themselves, they want people to work in fear.
They do an annual “top grading” layoff that’s variable in size from 5% to 10% which are performance based. There is obviously attrition as well. This leads to a constant hiring flow as these are typically backfilled.
These layoffs are often in addition to top grading and are not backfilled.
Note this is also on top of the RTO misery and thumb screw attrition drive to force out top performing talent in an inverse top grade maneuver.
Almost every single person I had an ounce of respect for at Amazon has left over the last few years. I find it hard to understand why anyone would work there any more.
To your point the system is friendly to the employer, but it’s very much not to the employee.
I’m fairly ignorant to these things, but why does Amazon need 350k corporate employees?
People losing jobs always sucks, but I can’t help but think that a company of this size inevitably has bloat that they do not need.
At this point it really does feel like a corporate welfare program.
I would agree that Amazon in general and AWS should never be this big. But that does not equal "bloated".
This means companies see an opportunity to bring compensation down.
I wish employees would instead have an opportunity to sign up for lower salary. For whatever reason you just don't see that happening anywhere
I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents.
Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.
Rather than trying to “negotiate” with these entities, regulations should be wielded to stop min-maxing beyond a certain point or in bad faith, and firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.
Countries used to be overwhelmingly autocratic - often ruled by hereditary dictators called kings. People realized unchecked power will always lead to abuse and overthrew them.
Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].
If only we had a system of rules we could vote on which would make this arrangement forbidden...
---
[0]: You can't legally overthrow a government either but if you do it successfully anyway, then you are the government and you decide what is legal.
Ironically, no democratic countries I know of have clauses in their ruleset ("laws") which declare that people are allowed to overthrow the government if it's no longer democratic, even if those democratic governments were created by overthrowing a previous dictatorship.
Related to your second point about autocracy - I mean the good thing is you can, today, go start a company with the exact governance structure you propose and go compete in the market.
It won’t work not because it wouldn’t work - you’re also assuming 100% military compliance and, as a veteran who served in active duty I can tell you not everyone agrees or disagrees with the current administration and people really do care about the Constitution, but it wouldn’t work because when you sit down and really think about it, the status quo for 90% of people is pretty good and they’re not going to take up arms over the vast majority of things a government does.
Yeah? How's that working out right now, when the government is unquestionably violating the Constitution left and right?
Obviously governments have superior firepower and can and have quashed rebellions. But rebellions have been successful as well. Taking away arms from the people makes rebellion in the case of tyranny that much harder.
I don’t think it’s unfair to question whether such rights are worthwhile or not, but I do think it’s unfair to suggest that since the government has helicopters you can’t have a rebellion. They sure didn’t need any tanks or helicopters when the MAGA goons tried to hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
However, this is a huge danger of ML ("AI"). It allows individuals to concentrate power. All real-world power comes from violence. Sufficiently advanced ML models allow individuals to profile subordinates and remove them before they rebel and (partially now but increasingly in the future) to control swarms of drones and robots.
Also, as an army veteran who served on active duty including a tour in Iraq (not direct combat role, thankfully) I can tell you that in my experience you're spot on - the systematic indoctrination isn't to a political party but it's to the military and to defending the country and the Constitution. That's up to interpretation. The military has never been faced with resolving a constitutional crises so we really don't know how things would play out - but not every soldier is a rabid Trump supporter or something. Far from it. Very far from it.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/socprac/vol10/iss1/15/
Rebellions have been successful in underfunded countries with few resources. Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
And those people were all pardoned by the same President who cheered them and on and he was voted back into office. If Trump - who was still president then had wanted to call in the full force of government he could have.
Do you think they would have let thousands of minorities invade the capital?
> Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
No because that's a strawman. Though those yokels on January 6th sure gave it a try.
> If today, the National Guard dropped a non nuclear bomb on a blue city, 40% of the US population would shrug if not outright cheer.
This would never happen unless there's a zombie apocalypse or that city was invaded by another country. No American would cheer a nuclear bomb being dropped on New York or Houston or something - why are you even entertaining such outlandish nonsense?
40% of Americans cheer how the current administration treats immigrants, non straight people, etc and continue defend the words of a racist podcaster. They wouldn’t want a “nuclear” bomb because it affects them. But there was no real fallout politically for the police MOVE bombing.
If you don’t think this country is divided, you haven’t been looking at where this country is and it’s view on reality.
Those yokels on January 6th tried. But do you think they could have overcome even the local SWAT let alone the military? There have been yokels running around for decades trying. Heck an entire Confedrrsre army couldn’t defeat the US government backed by the states
Well they did - they weren't far away from grabbing Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. What's the US military going to do? It's not really equipped for this kind of stuff, oh and those yokels didn't really bring a ton of firearms, but they could have. Thankfully I don't think those yokels expected to have the success that they did and they didn't really intend to try and overthrow the government, though I personally believe they all should have been tried as many of them were.
> There are very much two views of what America should be like and pretending there isn’t is why Democrats keep losing.
The Democrats are losing because their ideas are by and large bad, and most Americans don't agree with them. Communism? Open Borders? Those are the topics that dominate the Democratic Party right now and as an independent I also find those ideas completely unpalatable, even though perhaps stupidly I still keep voting for Democrats locally because the MAGA goons make me so mad.
I'm not suggesting the country isn't divided - it always has been and it's perhaps more divided now because people are spending all day on the Internet, but further dividing the country be calling things "red" or "blue" is actively harmful. Besides even in those so called "red" or "blue" areas there are plenty of people who are on the other side of the dominating spectrum. Plenty of rural Californias who vote Republican, plenty of liberals in Kansas City.
Again do you think if the terrorist on Jan 6th had bern minorities there wouldn’t have been overwhelming force? Even if they did manage to get to Pelosi and Pence, they weren’t going to overthrow the entire government.
What could the military do? They had guns. They could shoot people. I’m well stew that red and blue is not statewide and there are more Republican voters in California than South Dakota.
No, there are many progressives who are quite literally calling for communism or to implement economic policies we know are destructive. This is like you trying to tell me MAGA goons don't want a 3rd Trump term. Call a spade a spade.
> Again do you think if the terrorist on Jan 6th had bern minorities there wouldn’t have been overwhelming force? Even if they did manage to get to Pelosi and Pence, they weren’t going to overthrow the entire government.
Some of them were minorities by the way. In fact you can go look at polling and you'll see Trump outperformed his last win across minority groups.
But no, I don't think there would have been overwhelming force. There were/are too many J6 losers and they're not going to just gun them all down on TV. The military certainly wouldn't.
What Democratic candidate on the national stage is saying that the government should take over all private industry and pay everyone the same and control industry? This is real “communism”
I don't really know, are they a Black Million Man March for a sitting president named Donald J. Trump? You're just throwing straw man arguments out there.
> What Democratic candidate on the national stage is saying that the government should take over all private industry and pay everyone the same and control industry? This is real “communism”
There's always talk about things like nationalizing industries and such. Government run grocery stores, you name it. Some ideas are worth trying, some aren't, but as we do try new ideas we should be vigilant against authoritarian ideologies whether those are coming from MAGA or commies. Keep in mind I'm separating out Progressives from Democrats because like the Republicans they're not all united.
As I know you are well aware with MAGA goons, you don't have to come out with a piece of paper and say "Hello, we are Communists and we want to implement these specific things to achieve our stated goal of Communism. Thank you". It's emergent from policy and platforms, terms of usage "equity" etc.
What Democratic candidate is saying we should be a “communist country”?
But your original arguments was that J6 was evidence that a few people with guns could have taken over the entire federal government and that the full force of even local SWAT couldn’t have intervened.
I don't think that's really what my argument was, and things are getting convoluted here. Happy to clarify to the best of my ability.
What was written that I responded to was:
> Can you actually come up with a scenario where a few yokels in the south running around the field playing militia could overthrow the US government?
My point was look at what a few yokels did on January 6th, and they weren't even armed with weapons and frankly I don't think 80% of them even thought they'd get in the building and do the damage that they did do. For many of those folks they found themselves almost in an accidental insurrection.
Can local SWAT open up fire with machine guns and gun all those people down (especially without weapons)? Sure they can. But that's crossing one hell of a Rubicon and not the standard operating procedure for this kind of stuff. Instead of gunning people down they wait until things cool off and then arrest people 1 by 1.
> What Democratic candidate is saying we should be a “communist country”?
As I already explained you don't have to say "we should be a communist country" - instead you can just espouse communism views or other harmful views with various twists of language. You know that's true because MAGA does it.
You don't have to be a candidate for office either, you just need to have influence. That's an arbitrary requirement you made up.
Again, separating out Democrats from Progressives, you can find various instances of folks advocating for things like nationalization of industries, "equity", and so forth. I don't need to provide a specific example because there's no point - what does that accomplish? If I provide an example of a Progressive arguing for communism or communist ideology (whether explicit or implicit) what does that change?
If I find a single example of a Progressive politician arguing for communism or specific features of communist ideology what does that change? Are you going to reply "I was wrong"? It's just arguing for arguing sake.
Bigger picture, I'm not sure why you're so hung up on this. Communism and its ill effects are just one of many things that you can find Progressives arguing in favor of, similar to things like Open Borders. Those policies are unpopular for a good reason, hence Trump and Republicans won the election and Trump got more votes than he did last time. The reason Democrats are losing is because Progressive ideology and frankly I don't care what we really call it (socialism, communism, whatever it's just one big basket of deplorable ideas) is unpopular with Americans and the votes continue to prove that out. I'm pointing this out as someone who is independent and quite frankly votes Democrat most of the time. You don't have to agree with my assessment, but you can look at the election results and see for yourself that I'm right. If the Democrats don't drop this nonsense they'll continue to lose elections because for most people (not me necessarily) MAGA is a preferable alternative to Progressive and I don't see that changing anytime soon unless Trump is out of the picture.
You haven’t seen videos of local police taking on protestors during the civil rights movement with impunity? Do you think the current administration would have any problem doing the same in all of the cities he’s invaded with the National Guard and that his supporters - 40% of the country - wouldn’t just shrug like they did when he pardoned 1500+ domestic terrorist who look and think like them?
I’m limiting it to national politicians who won the nomination to represent their party in Congress because no one cares what someone’s crazy uncle who calls themselves a Democrat thinks.
You brought up “Communism”? What ideas are you now calling “socialist”?
And everyone loves “socialism” as long as it benefits them - see almost every red state that gets more in federal tax dollars than they pay, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA (as long as they don’t call it “ObamaCare”), give a few “socialist” ideas that national Democrats want to implement that you are afraid of?
And “open borders” is another boogeyman talking point. Check how many illegal immigrants were deported by Obama vs Trump for instance or even Biden.
Strange you linked to some random journal article describing the incident as "In 1985 police bombed the Philadelphia headquarters occupied by members of the black counterculture group MOVE.". The wikipedia article adds far needed context:
>The 1985 MOVE bombing, locally known by its date, May 13, 1985,[2] was the aerial bombing of a house, and the destruction of 61 more houses by the subsequent fire, in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, by the Philadelphia Police Department during an armed battle with MOVE, a black liberation organization. MOVE members shot at Philadelphia police who had come to evict them from the house they were using as their headquarters. Philadelphia police aviators then dropped two explosive devices from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter onto the roof of the house, which was occupied at the time. For 90 minutes, the Philadelphia Police Department allowed the resulting fire to burn out of control, destroying 61 previously evacuated neighboring houses over two city blocks and leaving 250 people homeless.[3] Six adults and five children were killed in the attack;[4] two occupants of the house, one adult and one child, survived. A lawsuit in federal court found that the city used excessive force and violated constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.[5]
Furthermore it's a stretch to claim that some incident that killed 11 people is somehow expandable to nuking a whole city.
Nearly every publicly trade company has a very well defined method by which executives can be replaced.
Companies are a dictatorship appointed by an oligarchy that is appointed by the democratic votes of shareholders.
That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.
The more correct statement is they suddenly cared about under performers. It's not any different than say, you noticing your grocery bills going up and as a result you cancel all the subscriptions you don't need. It's not like all those SaaS services' value propositions suddenly plummeted because the price of eggs went up, but now you suddenly have an eye for cutting costs.
Underperformers should be rotated out long before a mass layoff occurs. If your company isn’t axing them until a mass layoff, they’re doing bad business.
the unfortunate fact is that the people forced to be sellers of their time on the market have livelihoods and families to support, so the market is in most places very heavily regulated, some would say overregulated. OTOH capitalism really did pull out many countries out of extreme poverty, so it isn't globally bad, but outcomes for individual participants aren't always... that great.
And the reverse? We literally just went through a phase where tech companies over hired like crazy, at ridiculous salaries. We had people remote working 3 or more jobs at a time. And yet, people still act like companies have all the power?
This stuff ebbs and flows. The reality is the value of your labour fluctuates, despite the inconvenience of that to you.
They do, almost every year when health insurance premiums/copays/deductibles/out of pocket maximum go up and number of in network or tier 1 providers goes down.
but you just assuming the vacancies position stayed the same which is never happen
Or, even easier, just be a capital owner, instead of a wagie. (/s)
I wish workers voted for their managers and did so periodically, managers at the end of their term would return to their previous position if any. In fact, an expectation of every position being temporary could lead to exactly what you are describing.
But only if pay cuts hit everyone at the company equally or based on their merit, not the top layer deciding the bottom layer gets paid less, while giving themselves bonuses for saving the company money.
If we're on wish mode: I sure wish worker would come together and proper unionize rather than do anything else to grovel to the company. These are not new problems, and blood was spilt to get where we are today, follow by decades of disestablishment to claw it back.
Layoffs are very tricky because just the act of laying people off can trigger good employees who remain to start looking elsewhere. It can trigger a sort of evaporative cooling of your whole workforce. A strategy of offering reduced pay instead of being laid off would exacerbate it.
Amazon's backloaded vesting is terrible (for both Amazon and Amazonians) for this exact reason.
at first that just meant many of us adopted a middle-aged-coasting career strategy after covid and/or having kids
but now management is agreeing
By the way, could Amazon not even bother to proofread a mass layoff announcement? "We’re convicted that we need to be organized more leanly"
At least we know this was written by a human, because an LLM probably wouldn't make that mistake. Maybe they fired the proofreaders already.
To be fair, an Amazon model might, so if they're using those.. /s
Also with less need for hiring and fewer people to manage - there’s an opportunity for companies to make their HR leaner.
> Reuters said the job cuts would affect Amazon's HR and devices teams.
See, that's the problem with tying all these amazing advances in automation and labor-saving to a system beholden to capital: it only considers what can make it more profit, not what can make the world better.
I guarantee you there are many, many more things we can do with "more", at any scale, if you take the profit motive out of the equation (or even just put it second or third on the list).
More Ubers and Doordashers, more people trying to make it big as influencers, and probably more cam models as well. Those are the modern "jobs" as jobs no longer wish to employ workers and you expect to bounce in and out in months, not years. In-between the AI interviews, your employer is an app and your clients are an audience to please.
Technology truly made for a better world.
Numbers are all in the black and up year over year and compared to previous quarter.
Double digit revenue growth in both retail and AWS.
Often I wonder whether corporate leaders took any kind of logic class in college or if they just have a fetish for harming people for no reason. Either that or whatever business school they went to believes that poor customer service and bad products increase revenue.
I’d bet $5 that Q3 is profitable with similar growth.
Because of that experience (and lots of other anecdotal evidence), I see no reason for anybody to ever work at amazon unless they are ok with being a contractor.
It's this sort of thing that has me re-thinking the fairness of employees giving employers the customary (in the United States) two week notice before leaving.
Employees don't get two weeks notice before being fired without cause.
It's supposed to be because replacing an employee is so difficult for the company. Well, it's a hell of a lot more difficult for an employee to lose a job than it is for a company to lose a worker.
If I'm employer "at will" then my employer should also be retained "at will." If they want to negotiate another arrangement, that's fine.
Of course if you're willing to burn bridges with your employer, there's nothing stopping you from quitting immediately. Have at it.
>Of course if you're willing to burn bridges with your employer, there's nothing stopping you from quitting immediately. Have at it.
I think that's their point. The social contract is broken and no one's trying to make company careers anymore. If you're not respected, why respect their time?
How did it benefit the company's accounting? Doesn't it create an additional expense in both severance and hiring costs?
So:
- Company has 10 employees at an annual cost of 100k each. That's 250k (1mm / 4) of employee expenses for the quarter.
- Company lays off 5 employees right before the end of the quarter. That's only 5 employees on the payroll in the current quarter, because you account for the number of employees when the statement is issued. Re-hiring and severance payouts are going to be done sometime in the future.
Congratulations, your employee expense was only 125k for the quarter!
1. 14k was the net change in “corporate headcount” which is PR puffery speak saying they’re firing a lot more but when you net out folks let go slotting into open roles elsewhere the net change today would be a 14k reduction
2. It also says that “looking ahead” “we expect to… find additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.” That’s PR puffery speak for “there will be more layoffs coming soon.”
Amazon has really struggled under Andy Jassy’s tenure as CEO. Innovation has slowed, and there were huge misses on areas like AI.
What’s happening today also isn’t the result of “pandemic overhiring” or “AI efficiencies” but the cleanup of big messes that developed on the watch of present leadership. Andy Jassy preaches about company culture and efficiency but the culture went to crap and the company became bloated on his watch so…
Amazon likely needs new leadership to get it past the Andy Jassy chapter and move to a new phase of innovation and growth. It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.
Honest question. What could they have possibly gained from AI? What did they miss out on by not getting into AI?
They had a bridgehead device of the type that OpenAI are struggling to create with Jonny Ive in Alexa... but nothing seems to be happening with Alexa now.
Google clearly believe : a chunk.
People switched to GPT and Claude...
Amazon risk becoming logistics and datacenters, what's wrong with that you ask? Well, it's not where the money is. The money is in the website and the application layer.
Even if “agents” aren’t overhyped, why would someone switch to Amazon instead of just using Google’s offerings?
Google has reported record revenues even after the advent of LLMs and have integrated AI overviews and a separate chat tab.
right now I have no idea what Alexa is for anymore. It pings me when a package arrives but so does my phone. I can't order from it, because it makes me open the app. I can manage a shopping list I guess? I ask it the temp outside from time to time b/c I don't want to go look at the thermometer outside my window?
A proper device would discuss with me product options and Q&A, or something. Even piping Grok/GPT5 through to answer questions would be light years ahead of the current crap answers I get when I ask questions. And why doesn't it do a good job of identifying songs that are playing? That's trivial software, and it could recommend some songs like this (which is something I use GPT for).
I don't know I'm just a trad software engineer, but it sure seems like it's low risk / high improvement to at least have a modern LLM feature in that product.
Again, the privacy concerns need to be addressed. However there is a lot of potential for an AI in my house if it works.
I don't get why they just don't do it. There are jailbreaks, making it talk trash and so on, but is that the majority of users? I doubt it.
As a daily user, it's clear they have been actively messing with Siri still, particularly in the last year. But the changes seem to mostly make it worse. It now misses "hey siri" half the time for no apparent reason. I feel like they just don't know what they want to do with it.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generativ...
Amazon had Alexa (Echos) everywhere and that was teed up to knock it out of the park putting a real AI assistant in every home. Then the devices team totally blew it and did almost nothing to take advantage of that huge lead. Folks are now basically just throwing these things in the trash and the devices unit is a huge pit of cash on fire.
The list goes on…
Never seen a single person use AWS for this.
The silver lining for Amazon is that nobody is making a profit by actually providing that service. It's just massive valuations and VC money flowing freely instead of a sustainable business model, and Amazon plays a much longer game - they can recover even if being so far behind is a "bad look" for their current management.
It's not hard to switch between OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure/Google/whatever and Amazon can surely eventually compete well in this space.
Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.
I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?
Second, Amazon had a problem before Andy took over. Way too many managers and incompetent people in very senior levels. The fact that he's doing something about it is a good thing for Amazon. You don't become a CEO of a behemoth such as Amazon and expect to show impact within 6 months. It takes years.
In terms of AI, they did invest in Anthropic early on and are a significant stakeholder. That's critical since Anthropic is a trillion dollar company in the making and they trump everyone in enterprise AI. They are much more likely to succeed with smart partnerships than doing their own thing.
2. He then hired Adam to take over AWS which didn’t work out well
3. Good to see he’s cleaning things up, but we’re past the “clean things up” phase for a CEO. He’s been in role for a while now. That should have been the first few years of his tenure.
4. Anthropic was a good investment, but Amazon is just one of many investors. It’s nothing like the partnership that MSFT and OpenAI have, which was further strengthened with today’s announcements there. Amazon has nothing comparable to counter that.
You had me all the wya until this line.
It's the result of economic headwinds and companies switching to maintenance mode. Except whever they can sell "AI" in their initiative. And of course, add in a healthy dose of outsourcing under the hood.
I guess this has just become kind of a feature of our times.
Greed is good?
I'm "employed" but am doing part time work with no benefits. It's dreadful but I still contribute to the "low unemployment". As does others who defer to Uber or Doordash for quick cash. We need a complete overhaul of job numbers down the line.
you're fired.
Fired?
W-W-What do you mean,
fired?
Um, how else
can I say it?
You're being let go,
your department's
being downsized,
you're part of
an outplacement,
we're going in a
different direction,
we're not picking
up your option...
Take your pick.
I got more.
"The Emperor's new groove"
> we want to operate like the world’s largest startup
This is a phrase I hear repeated by leadership a lot, and it's usually code for "why doesn't everyone else just make the business grow faster?" It is almost always, as in this case, followed by statements that suggest they don't understand what is actually different about the way a start up functions and why they stopped operating that way at some point in the first place.
Standard 3 mo w/ insurance during that period? Do they accelerate vesting schedule?
Any AMZN drones care to chime in?
Former AWS drone. Fortunately I never had to work in an office.
I don't see any issues as long as everyone plays a fair game.
“Amazon will fail”, maybe, in 50 years, from decisions made now.
Well that's the issue. If you've been paying attention to what's really going on you know that this isn't a game at all but merely a hostile coup from the plutocracy. If you really think AI is automating all these jobs then you've fallen for the spin.
code4life•3mo ago
johnebgd•3mo ago
reactordev•3mo ago
formerly_proven•3mo ago
bell-cot•3mo ago
nemomarx•3mo ago
array_key_first•3mo ago
The S&P 500 is almost 10% Nvidia. Just Nvidia. Y'all that's scary.
piva00•3mo ago
The same cycle just goes around and around...
reactordev•3mo ago
lotsofpulp•3mo ago
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR
noir_lord•3mo ago
It's pretty clear what happens next.
Over 42 million people are about to lose their SNAP payments in 4 days[1] and millions more medical care.
It's gonna get bad.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7d9j7p5qo
drstewart•3mo ago
raw_anon_1111•3mo ago
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
I never would have bet on an Nvidia crash alone being what causes the 21st century great depression, but reality is alwways stranger than fiction.
drstewart•3mo ago
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCAD
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXJPY
https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXCNY
Hmm, might have you cherry-picked some data?
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
I see about a 10% growth in your charts and that's what experts estimate the loss on the dolar has been this year. What's the deal?
drstewart•3mo ago
Maybe your experts aren't such experts.
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
I'm no expert myself, but feel free to argue with them if you are:
https://www.morganstanley.com/insights/articles/us-dollar-de...
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/d... (note: This one comes from Paul Graham himself).
HelloMcFly•3mo ago
It's a system of forced complicity. We have to root for the billionaires, or we risk our own survival in old age.
reactordev•3mo ago
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
I'm not even halfway there. I'd rather think long term and legitimately fix issues in the economy. I don't need number to go up explosively every year.
softwaredoug•3mo ago
actionfromafar•3mo ago
markus_zhang•3mo ago
ericmay•3mo ago
markus_zhang•3mo ago
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
deaux•3mo ago
softwaredoug•3mo ago
adestefan•3mo ago
conception•3mo ago
nbaugh1•3mo ago
The system/ideology you're looking for starts with an "F" and ends with "ascism"
gabrielgio•3mo ago
drstewart•3mo ago
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
JKCalhoun•3mo ago
(Actually I'm not, but the rest of the market seems to be. In this version of musical chairs, you can sit down any time you like—you just miss out on potential gains before the music stops.)
z3dd•3mo ago
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
boilerupnc•3mo ago
“ Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45512317
vkou•3mo ago
gjm11•3mo ago
The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.
(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)
The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.
I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.
philipallstar•3mo ago
dep_b•3mo ago
mattmaroon•3mo ago
whobre•3mo ago
kasey_junk•3mo ago
MangoToupe•3mo ago
carlosjobim•3mo ago
jalapenos•3mo ago
aesh2Xa1•3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession
> In the United States, a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."[4] The European Union has adopted a similar definition.[5][6]
_fizz_buzz_•3mo ago
Employment is an important indicator according NBER.
lycopodiopsida•3mo ago
It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.
johnnyanmac•3mo ago
rvz•3mo ago
einrealist•3mo ago
rkozik1989•3mo ago