I didn't realize that air dominance prevented enemy missiles from hitting surface ships. That's a rather unique definition of air dominance.
If your enemy has access to satellites, long range sensors, submarines that can fire hypersonic anti-ship missiles, and modern air defense systems, then a strategy based on the assumption of air dominance will fail.
Let's also not forget that the U.S. has never achieved air dominance over any nation with sophisticated air defense systems. The last time the U.S. actually tried to fight an air war against an enemy with access to relatively modern air-defense systems was in Vietnam, where 3700 US planes were shot down (and about 5000 helicopters). Air defenses are much better now, which is why Israel - with its advanced F35s -- is so afraid of Syria's S300 systems that it only uses standoff weapons when it raids Syria, proving once again that long range missiles are what matters, and outdated concepts like "air dominance" are only relevant when the enemy is limited to RPGs and Toyota trucks.
The US has achieved air dominance over Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia managed to down a stealth aircraft, and if you read about that event you realize their air defense system was very advanced. Likely better than what Russia has now (roughly the same systems, but better training and discipline).
When the US has air dominance, the only strategy to launch missiles - of any type - is shoot-and-scoot. That can work with man portable missiles like Javelin, or pickup-truck mounted missiles. But it won't work with anti ship missiles. Those you can launch from large platforms, such as huge trucks, surface vessels, ground silos, or aircraft. If the US has air dominance, all of these are as good as dead once they fire their missiles.
There is no increased risk of being a victim of violence for being transgender that is not fully accounted for by the increased risk of engaging in prostitution. It is just that transgender people tend to have higher rates of prostitution.
Simply not true, violence against transgender women is 1/4 where as cis women are 1/10. "Transgender people tend to have higher rates of prostitution" is baseless.
The data you cite does not say what you think it does. In fact, it makes the very mistake I was pointing out in my original post -- failing to control for rates of prostitution and other risky behavior and simply comparing rates of violence based on gender only.
Simply citing a study that makes no attempt to control for rates of prostitution does not disprove my argument. Repeating a myth does not make it true, even if you repeat it over and over again.
> I'm seeing a lot of claims here that DEI initiatives are about actively hiring under-qualified under-represented candidates to change the demographics of the company.
This is exactly what DEI is, and I guarantee you that your own company, if it is of any substantial size, systematically hires under qualified candidates because of DEI. It would require a hermetically sealed reality-avoidance filter to not notice this. While there are some people who walk around with these filters on, the vast majority of people do not, and will readily tell you exactly what DIE is about once they feel safe enough to speak honestly with you. Listen to them.
This is hacker news, so they are going to be focusing on tech layoffs, but really there are layoffs happening in all industries, and tech is about the middle of the pack.
In terms of complaining about growth companies being too aggressive in hiring, I mean, that's the point of a growth company. Almost all companies gearing up for fast revenue growth get fast headcount growth as part of the deal.
The biggest hit industry has been arts, entertainment, and recreation. The second biggest hit was construction. The third biggest hit was professional and business services, and information was fourth biggest hit. After that, transportation, trade, and utilities. The usual safe sectors like government are doing well, but mining and manufacturing as well as retail have done pretty well.
My personal theory is the reason for all these news articles is that media has been hit really hard. So the journalists writing for media are in mass panic mode -- not a good time to be working for either a news website or legacy news outlet.
I like this thread :D But be good to yourself too. You don't have to be the perfect parent all the time, as long as you are nice to your kid(s) most of the time.
I though I've laid it out: you don't have to be the perfect parent all the time, so please don't suffer because you cannot always adhere to your own quality standard ("no cake at 3am"). I say this because many do and suffer when they are not perfect. And they think they are alone in this.
By the same logic, all the houses built in the earthquake zones of San Francisco and LA should also be raised.
I've noticed that there has been mass hysteria in some California-centric websites that flood insurance must be provided by the Federal government in Florida, but not that earthquake insurance must be provided by the Federal government in California.
Botton line, the private sector doesn't handle this type of correlated risk well, and somehow picking on Florida when California does the same thing is pretty weird. We know there will be a big earthquake that will level a lot of property in California just we know there will be a big flood in Florida. Yet "entitled fucks" keep choosing to live in these states. Life goes on.
> I've noticed that there has been mass hysteria in some California-centric websites that flood insurance must be provided by the Federal government in Florida, but not that earthquake insurance must be provided by the Federal government in California.
Earthquake insurance availability is mandated within the state. Why would we need a Federal mandate when we have an effective state mandate. It's not attractively priced, but Federal flood insurance often isn't attractively priced when they've updated maps recently either.
Last time I was in the housing market in San Francisco, earthquake insurance was not mandated. Can you point me to the law mandating it now? Perhaps you mean it's mandated by your bank when taking out a mortgage? That's a private sector decision that depends on your bank and your loan.
Anyways, you are confusing the issue of whether insurance is mandated with the fact that no private insurer will cover it, and so the risk is socialized and the only providers are government.
That's what people are complaining about -- that private insurers walked away from covering flood/earthquakes in regions prone to the same, and so the government has to step in to insure the correlated risk. This causes no end of outrage for Florida but is somehow just fine in California. And my only point was to point out this hypocrisy and argue that there are good reasons for government to cover correlated risks and that there is nothing wrong with either state or those who choose to build in either state. They can accept risk or they can purchase government insurance.
1989 was, what, 34 years ago? This is a 5-10X generation event to you, I guess. I can't even begin to unwind all the innumerate assumptions, but motivated reasoning is powerful I guess.
There are fewer places where it is more reckless to build housing than coastal California.
My point was that if voters had to eat their own medicine they wouldn't encumber new entrants to rules they themselves are immune to. I didn't seriously think they would vote to raze their own (previously immune) houses.
I don't think this is due to illegal aliens, without which our construction industry would be in even worse shape, but rather that there have been massive declines in the competence of domestic workers across the board, and this has been hidden by outsourcing, importing skilled workers, and technological growth (e.g. have machines do things that domestic workers cannot), so that you see productivity declines in those areas where you cannot outsource and you cannot pay extreme wage premiums to attract people with basic reasoning skills.
You can see this literally everywhere. Unless you are going to pay 200K+ you will have difficulties hiring reasonably intelligent, motivated, conscientious workers.
I will assume you are asking in good faith, so here goes.
What you think of as "profit" -- e.g. just some random, arbitrary, completely free bonus that Google should be grateful to have at all -- is actually the cost of capital for Google. It is a payment to equity, and the amount of the payment is determined by the interest rate as well as the time path of expected future earnings, adjustment for risk, and other factors. The presence of these other confounding factors often confuse people and make them think profits are arbitrary. They are not. Just because something is complex doesn't mean it is random.
Now when the interest rate increases, that required payment goes up, because investors always have a choice of buying a share of google or buying a bond, and if the bond pays 7%, then buying a share of google should also give you 7%. Now, that 7% could be taken as future growth, as a number of things, but it still needs to be competitive with the bond, which is itself set by government policy in setting interest rates for the economy in such a way as to limit inflation. So we see that companies paying employees a lot of money without actually generating profits is related to inflation. Stop and think about it.
Recently, the government has not been doing a very good job of this and has set the rates -- the payments -- too low, causing inflation to be too high. It's now trying to correct, raise the rates, and so the required cost of capital -- the required profits of companies like Google -- have to increase.
Now suppose Google doesn't do that, e.g. it says "these profits are enough and you should be glad to have them". What investors do is say "well, I'd rather buy the bond" and so they sell their google shares and buy bonds, and in this way the value of Google falls up until the profit rate (profits divided by market price) is compatible with the bond. Well, so what? If Google shares sell for a dollar, who cares, since all that matters is that there be no layoffs, right? Well, when the market share falls below the liquidation value of the company, investors buy up the outstanding shares and liquidate the company. But long before that, there are lot of mechanisms -- e.g. stock options, voting on the corporate board -- that are designed to encourage decision makers to be aligned with the interests of shareholders so that you generally do not see companies trading for less than their scrap value for very long. And this does not need to happen to the whole company, most will scrap unprofitable divisions and projects and not stick their heads in the sand and wait for the whole company to be scrapped. What's an example of a company that has a ton of unprofitable projects? Hmm, one such name comes to mind.
So now we see why, when interest rates go up, businesses struggle to increase their profit margins -- and those that do not go out of business. It is no different for the farmer that needs to earn a higher return on his crop when interest rates rise, so the business needs to earn higher margins when interest rates rise as well. The higher interest rates cause a reduction in investment, which generates a reduction in spending and they incentivize more savings (deferral of spending), and in this way they reduce inflation, which everyone is complaining about as it hurts workers' standard of living.
Couldn’t Google adopt a wait-and-see approach for a few quarters, if all of this was propped up by interest rates to begin with? Maybe instead of reflexively panic-layoffs they could have some sort of longer term strategy to see if the Fed reversed course in a matter of months, which has been speculated already. Why are these megacorps so dependent on the flighty whims of investors, who themselves sat by and allowed the companies to overhire and possibly demanded such a short-sighted risk?
I see some other comments have mentioned this shareholder myopia.
The "payment" can be taken in the form of higher share price, share buybacks, dividends, future dividends, etc.
It does not have take one specific form or another. Despite the fact that Google doesn't pay dividends, it's not a charity. Investors purchase shares of Google in order to get a return, and they have a choice between buying Google or a mortgage bond or ATT, etc.
Now for growth companies like Google, they are effectively "paying" investors with promises of stock price appreciation and high future dividends. This is why they are more sensitive to stock price declines than income investments like a cable company. It's a two edged sword - they are faster to hire and faster to fire and are more responsive to their share price.
At some point, the growth companies discover they need to start paying dividends or doing regular share buybacks in order to stabilize their price, when their growth story is no longer believed by the market.
Well, so in theory they could have used some of the billions they have on hand to start a dividend to prop up the stock price while making their own decisions about staffing.
This narrative that the market forced them to do layoffs feels flimsy when they have so much money, doesn't it? They had other options.
> This narrative that the market forced them to do layoffs feels flimsy when they have so much money, doesn't it? They had other options.
The options they have is to abandon positioning themselves as a growth stock and say "we are now an income stock". You are right, this is a valid choice.
But think a little about what this would mean for Google. This is a company that has one cash cow -- Search. Pretty much everything else is losing money. But only a small share of Google employees are actually needed to run search. So if they tell the market "We are no longer a growth stock", then why are they spending all this money on money losing projects? The rationale up until now was that these are moonshots where some of them would turn into the next big search. That's what a growth company does, but not what an income generating company does.
So my guess is that Google does not want to transition to being an income earning company because that would require laying off a lot more people. You can lay off 80% of Google's staff and just keep search, and then turn those profits over to investors. Google does not do that because it is still promising growth.
But I agree that at some point, the market isn't going to accept the growth story for Google, and this type of transition will happen. Google has also been sucking up a lot of first class talent and putting them to work on money losing projects without a lot to show for it. Those top developers really belong elsewhere, from an economic efficiency point of view -- they should be working on things that really are legit growth opportunities.
It depends on whether the tech is itself inherently sensitive or whether it will just be used for defense among other uses.
A lot of defense stuff falls in the latter category in which case you can start by needing to hire some sales engineers with security clearances who meet with the defense customers -- mostly contractors themselves. The devs don't necessarily need clearance.
If you are making something sensitive -- like a new nuke -- then you will have trouble going the start up route. IN-Q-Tel, DARPA, these programs were designed to fill the gaps.
But if you are making an AI for drones, for example, or some new polymer that has good materials properties that would be useful on a tank, then you can ease into it as these have multiple applications and you just need your SEs to meet with the defense people and say "hey, we have this cool tech, are you interested in it?" and then if they are interested they will work with you on clearances by helping sponsor key employees and letting you know what their requirements are and how you can meet them.
In many cases an acquisition by said contractor is your exit.
Imagine you are running a restaurant and normally you get 100 people a night and you service that with 10 staff, and you know for the next year you will get 200 people a night and can support that business with 20 staff and then after it will go back down to 100 people.
So you can choose to:
1. Refuse to hire the extra staff for a year and lose out on the profits of 100 customers a night for a year.
2. Go with the flow, expanding when demand increases and contracting when demand decreases.
Most people will go with option 2 as that is what gets you more money and also allows the economy to respond to price signals in a rational way. This is particularly true of growth companies like Google. The idea of a growth company is not to maintain constant revenues and employment over time. People who go to work for Google should understand that Google will hire more staff when demand goes up. But then they should also understand that Google will cut staff when demand falls.
That it's predictable that demand goes up and down does nothing to change this calculus. It's like people blaming the home builders in 2010 for expanding home building. I mean, when there is an increased demand for new housing, why wouldn't they expand home building?
If your enemy has access to satellites, long range sensors, submarines that can fire hypersonic anti-ship missiles, and modern air defense systems, then a strategy based on the assumption of air dominance will fail.
Let's also not forget that the U.S. has never achieved air dominance over any nation with sophisticated air defense systems. The last time the U.S. actually tried to fight an air war against an enemy with access to relatively modern air-defense systems was in Vietnam, where 3700 US planes were shot down (and about 5000 helicopters). Air defenses are much better now, which is why Israel - with its advanced F35s -- is so afraid of Syria's S300 systems that it only uses standoff weapons when it raids Syria, proving once again that long range missiles are what matters, and outdated concepts like "air dominance" are only relevant when the enemy is limited to RPGs and Toyota trucks.