Meanwhile, on this side of the Pacific, the Trump administration is waging a war against the renewable energy industry... because, um... well, presumably, at the behest of oil and gas lobbyists.
It's one thing to have a backdoor so your engineer can unfreeze someone's phone or fix their smart lights. These are motor vehicles carrying people inside of them on highways.
I think various parties have managed to frame political discourse in America as an us vs. them, ingroup vs. outgroup, purely partisan sport. All that matters to people is that their team scores points and the other team loses points. There are no real principles or foundational beliefs, evidenced by how easily people flip their opinions on issues depending on who's acting on them. Biden using Executive Orders? Bad. Trump using Executive Orders? Good.
It's just a game, and winning the game feels good.
I have to assume they meant Visual Studio licenses, but whoever penned the tweet didn't know there was a difference between VSCode and Visual Studio. I mean, the names and logos do look pretty similar.
I'm generally optimistic for the potential benefits of chatbots to people who are lonely or depressed. But I wouldn't want to just hand over the burden of society's mental health to an unrestricted language model, especially one sold by a profit-motivated business. It would be akin to letting people self-medicate with a cheap and infinite supply of opiates. And that's basically the mental health crisis we are barreling towards.
What's the alternative? Regulation? Does a government or a public health agency need to make a carefully moderated chatbot platform with a focus on addiction-prevention and avoiding real-world harm? Why would people use that when unlimited/unfiltered AI is readily available?
Doesn't Google do that thing where if your team becomes redundant, they don't lay you off, they give you some time to find another team if you choose to transfer?
From what I saw in the UK, the Jan 2023 layoffs (the 12k) had a lot of people redeployed. Of the 3 people I knew personally impacted by it, 2 were redeployed elsewhere in the business (1 eng, 1 HR). I know it happened extensively in at least one other country too.
A company that plans ahead a little can also relocate top talent BEFORE the layoff rounds start, and even relocate people they want to get rid of TO the part of the or where layoffs are coming.
I'm sure some orgs stealthily start planning this months if not years ahead of such events, especially if they identify that they have unproductive people on board that are difficult to fire the regular way (like European employees, where regulations makes it harder to fire people than in the US).
I don't know of any countries where you're not allowed to make an offer.
But if you offer packages to people who are underqualified or underperforming for the terms they currently enjoy, it may require a very high sum to make them sign it.
And in markets where every job basically come with the same terms as academic tenure, people will be less worried that the company will play hardball and just fire them without compensation if the package is refused.
However, most if not all European countries allow layoffs, even though the terms of the layoffs may have to be approved by the union in a few places, or at least have the selection criteria for who gets laid off made public.
And if some department can be stuffed full of all underperformers, it can serve as a convenient proxy for performance to lay off mostly from that department, based on lack of profitability there.
I'm sure this happens in the US, too, at least if it turns out that a higher fraction of those on the way out belong to some protected identity group, which may easily be the case in tech companies where essential developers are disproportionality male and/or asian/white, while various support staff, account managers etc are recruited from a more diverse pool.
They do. And in some countries it's even about as easy as in the US. I wasn't granular enough.
_Some_ countries in Europe have very strong worker protection laws, probably correlated to trade union participation rate:
https://qery.no/trade-unions-worldwide/
For instance, if you want to do layoffs in Sweden, you probably have to coordinate it with union representatives before even making it public. Firing is even harder.
Another factor that may also apply to the US, is that if the people you want to get rid of disproportionally belong to some demographic groups or other identity groups, have medical conditions or have participated in disruptive activism, etc, claiming that they are fired for bad performance (even if true) makes the risk of bad press significantly worse.
Exactly what traits risk come with such risks may very from place to place.
Are you referring to the 60 days (from WARN act) to find another team before getting removed from the company? If so, yes, but imagine the difficulty of finding another team to take you while the company is actively shedding roles.
I received this email yesterday, which I found amusing in a sad way.
Hello, Thank you for booking time with me to discuss your background and opportunities at Microsoft. Unfortunately, I need to cancel our meeting because I will be leaving the company due to changes in our business and reduction in force in Talent Acquisition. I am grateful for my time here and recommend Microsoft to anyone. I wish you all the best in your career and your next opportunity!
I was in a job search from late August through early November last year. I've been around a while as a manager, including inside a FAANG, so I have lots of recruiting contacts inside those companies.
I estimate that at least 75% of my recruiter contacts (existing, plus new ones from the job search) have been laid off in the past 6 months. Ones least affected seem to be at smaller companies, though they're not immune either.
My interview "process" at Amazon was hilariously broken, as the following sequence happened:
1) Recruiter screen
2) Initial hiring manager screen
3) Re-org, so position went away
4) Recruiter radio silence
5) New recruiter for new role reaches out and we chat
6) New recruiter laid off
7) Another recruiter reaches out for previous role, and we chat
8) That recruiter laid off
9) I decide this isn't the time to try to move to Amazon
It doesn't matter if someone thinks Cantor "breaks the rules", or the square root of -1 "doesn't exist." The (majority of) mathematicians who take those as true have created a wealth of rigorous, interesting, and worthwhile results built on top of these concepts. I vehemently believe mathematics is more "abstract thought experiments" than "discoveries of universal truth".
I doubt that any results which rested on the assumption of Hume's Principle are worthwhile. Indeed, set theory seems to have been useless for most mathematicians except those who are interested in "foundations", since it is mostly ignored.
The Onion actually recently submitted a hilarious satirical amicus brief to the Supreme Court for the case Novak v. City of Parma [1] that made a splash in legal Twitter, for a case where a man who was arrested for making a parody Facebook page of his local police department. The amicus brief is itself a parody, an irreverent joke that has been submitted as a sincere legal document. (Thanks to LegalEagle for making a video on this [2]).
The entire point of the amicus brief is an argument that labeling a parody as a parody destroys the point of the parody. The four arguments:
I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real
II. Because Parody Mimics "The Real Thing," It Has The Unique Capacity To Critique The Real Thing
III. A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody
IV. It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face
It seemed a bit relevant to this. It's pending certiori and might go ignored, but the Supreme Court could rule that parody is protected under the first amendment, which would make Twitter an opponent of actual free speech (the legislative definition, not the new internet definition).
If only it was limited to Twitter. I'd pay the $8/mo for an official extension that content-blocks everything emanating from that domain. Call it Twitter Pro-phylactic.
> I. Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real
This is the opposite of what's true. Parody only functions because it's obviously NOT real, but real adjacent, a facsimile. How could it be a joke if you just think it's real and assimilate it into your world view?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/climate/trump-administrat...