THE past week was spent recovering from a severe hardware failure, but as soon as Monday we were able to post Daily Links as before (or even more often than before).
"The end of January was still dominated by bad news (lots about war), spiced up with layoffs."The clown computing and 'free' hosting bubble has begun to truly burst. Many companies admit that they operate at a loss and see no turnaround or a turning point. The longer they operate, the more money they lose. The layoffs are actually a lot bigger than companies announce to (and via) the press. In the US they dodge the WARN Act by implementing many layoffs -- additional ones -- at a smaller scale (ripples and waves). They barely say which divisions are affected because it lets them get away with laying off far more people than they told shareholders (or the media) about. It's hard to keep track, unless you're an HR whistleblower of theirs. They don't even count temps and contractors, who are nonchalantly let go (there are a few press reports about this in relation to YouTube/Google). Almost nobody in the media talks about Apple layoffs; they impact the 'stores' (sales have fallen).
"Don't expect media to be inquisitive enough to talk about the full extent of the impact..."It seems safe to predict that 2023 will be another gloomy year for the monopolistic "tech" sector, which is focused/centered around price-fixing, surveillance, and imperialistic censorship (done for political gain, funded or subsidised by "defence" contracts). The years 2000 and 2008 are memorable, but based on early predictions cited in the media we might be heading towards another such crisis (on par with those). Don't expect media to be inquisitive enough to talk about the full extent of the impact; instead it'll praise Biden for something about "jobs" (mostly low-wage jobs). ⬆