The basic issue is none of it seems to be making any money when it ends up in products and services.

Main reason there seems to be that their walled garden approach is tolerated at best. They just aren't very good at it outside of a feed.

But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street art" on the digital wall that jumps off the wall and they interact with it. Imagine having popup ads that jump up at you when you're walking (gliding?) down the street!

Some of this has nothing to do with COVID boom numbers. Some are bailing water as fast as they can (Atlassian, et al), some are treading water and betting on future returns from AI (Block), etc.

If you can show that the death of Franz Ferdinand necessarily caused tech layoffs in 2026, I'll listen. I don't think you can, though.

The AI caused the developer productivity to increase (similar to other two big SW engineering productivity jumps - compilers and open source), which gives them more leverage over employers (capital). Things that you needed a small team to build (and thus more capital) you can now do in a single person.

In the long run, this will mean more software being written, possibly by even larger number of people (shift on the demand curve - as price of SW goes down demand increases). But before that happens, companies have a knee-jerk reaction to this as they're trying to take back control over developers, while assuming total amount of software will stay constant. Hence layoffs. But I think it's shortsighted, the companies will hurt themselves in the long run, because they will lay off people who could build them more products in the future. (They misunderstood - developers are not getting cheaper, it's the code that will.)

In their defense, they make fun of nearly everyone. But they definitely were mocking White Southerners there.

Grocery stores have slim margins, but if you make 10k after selling 1M worth of stock buy turn over that stock 12 times a year that’s ~12% annual ROI not 1%.

Well except for a short period where that was going to be deliberated on by the courts, where they stopped calling it insurance since SCOTUS indicated this insurance wouldn't be constitutional, so instead they put it under general welfare clause but then changed up their rhetoric immediately after it was found constitutional back to it being insurance again.

Also the people that wrote the bill later admitted they intentionally wrote it in a confusing as way to evade public and judicial scrutiny.

Of course this was all predicated on the other prong, which was the 'switch in time that saved 9' where he also threatened to pack the courts to ensure it was found 'constitutional'. FDR was quite ruthless in his destruction of constitutional and democratic controls, and now so much of our government depends on it that it's effectively politically impossible to unwind.