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Why Companies Are No Longer Hanging on to Employees

(www.wsj.com)
36 points fortran77 | 4 comments | 02 Nov 25 19:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.632s | source
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bentt ◴[02 Nov 25 21:04 UTC] No.45793429[source]▶
The era of cheap money led to a lot of mergers and acquisitions, which incentivized companies large and small to bloat to increase their value to prospective buyers.

I really don’t think this is AI causing all these layoffs. It’s just a return to business fundamentals, but we’re in a period of massive inflation and it’s getting harder to be profitable.

replies(1): >>45794193 #
streetcat1 ◴[02 Nov 25 23:02 UTC] No.45794193[source]▶
Its not the AI that causing it, but the AI race. Companies need to pay for the large capex.
replies(1): >>45794405 #
1. general1465 ◴[02 Nov 25 23:38 UTC] No.45794405[source]▶
But where are they racing? If AGI happens, capitalism is over. If AGI won't happen, they just wasted massive amount of resource in chasing of a white elephant and these companies are over.
replies(2): >>45796463 #>>45806754 #
2. thatguy0900 ◴[03 Nov 25 06:46 UTC] No.45796463[source]▶
They're racing to get the ceos and investors rich enough to build survival bunkers on their private islands in time for the societal crash they caused
replies(1): >>45797048 #
3. nis0s ◴[03 Nov 25 08:38 UTC] No.45797048[source]▶
You can’t survive in survival bunkers or islands, and thinking otherwise is a pipe dream. We don’t have a true model of what this might look like, but if there’s extreme instability then wealth doesn’t serve as a safety measure—it will be a target. You need backing by governed armies to protect status and wealth, but in some proto-civilization model, there will just be warring factions with bunker busters and maybe nukes going at each other. They’ll eventually form treaties and merge into city states, repeating the same trend towards nation states and democracy. Just skip the dumb bloodshed in the middle, and settle on Nordic socialism from the get go.
4. streetcat1 ◴[04 Nov 25 02:05 UTC] No.45806754[source]▶
Nowhere they are stuck in the prisoner's dilemma.