It is just about the only measure. People who claim something is extremely important and then will not take any action or spend any money - they're dishonest people.
Let's see if the Dutch are men of their words. I expect the government to offer to buy this company, or an offering being made for the Dutch investing public to get shares.
The question is rather: Why would a person complain about dying of thirst, but refuse to go to the river to drink, and also refuse to pay for a glass of water. That makes me believe he is dishonest when he's saying he is thirsty.
Or are we pretending that the Dutch people don't have any money between them to make an offer on this company?
The common expression goes: "Put your money where your mouth is"
I want to see if the Dutch will do that or not.
To see the full beauty of regulatory power, you also have to be blind to the long term consequences of decisions.
For example, are the best Dutch entrepreneurs government-aligned to the extent that they will create their startup or business in the Netherlands, knowing that they won't be able to sell shares for their company at full price? If the Dutch were willing to match the American offer, then there would be no long-term issues for them with this blocking action.
The result is that European hi-tech entrepreneurs create their businesses in a friendlier environment, which is usually the USA. And that European entrepreneurs who stay in their homeland have a hard time competing for European talent with pay.
It's easy for a nation state to mandate almost whatever they want when it comes to fixed stuff such as natural resources and agriculture. But when it comes to human talent, they (still) have the option to leave for better pastures. Or just leave business plans on the shelf.
> The result is that European hi-tech entrepreneurs create their businesses in a friendlier environment
An environment that lets you take European contracts since American companies can't compete for them is very attractive for entrepreneurs, so there is no problem here as long as they are consistent with banning American companies owning European government infrastructure.
>The result is that European hi-tech entrepreneurs create their businesses in a friendlier environment, which is usually the USA.
The inverse of that is that this creates a huge market in the EU, where you don't have to be the best in class and the most capitalistic - you can be good enough and still make a good buck serving local clients.
So it becomes more of a jobs program for the less talented entrepreneurs and their staff?
I would say the above as a joke if it wasn't true on how exactly the situation is in parts of Europe, where local IT experts and consultants struggle to deliver 1980s level software solutions to local governments - at prices which would make any US capitalist swoon.
But you are right in what you say, I won't argue against it.
This assumes that everyone is solely motivated by maximizing payout above all else, which is not only incredibly cynical, but also just plain empirically wrong.
(Again, by way of counterexample, I took a huge paycut to move from the US to Europe, but y'know, my quality of life is better, I live in a much safer, more pleasant place and I don't need to see people living in cardboard boxes from the window of my nice home anymore)
In 2008-9 Republicans did not even make the pretense of Obama being a threat to democracy. (Which would have been absurd in a way it isn't for Trump, who tried to overthrow an election he lost.)
I remember when some lady called Obama "Muslim" (in the same tone of voice as she'd say "demon" or something) and Mitt Romney took the microphone from her and said "no, no, we disagree politically but he's a good man."
Shows how poorly those politicians understood the constituency they were fomenting. He was boo'd for it by people that had come to see him specifically, and about 15 years later, republican voters built a scaffold outside the Capital they were breaking into while chanting about hanging the Republican vice president.
I feel like American politicians often play with fire without understanding its nature as something that burns.
> The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.
So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
Not catastrophic, but probably a sign that jobs are shrinking instead of growing and so good market information if you were thinking about getting promoted or moving around?
Numbers do not support that. Jobs might be shrinking within Amazon, but globally the situation is the opposite.
Population is still growing, 25% the last 20 years (trend that is slowly reversing), and unemployment rates are the lowest at global scale (~4,9% for 2024, lowest historically, down from 6.0% in 2005).
That's around ~1.0 billion more jobs in 2024 compared to 2005.
Most jobs are not interchangeable, especially globally.
What good does it do me if India creates 30k new teller positions in supermarkets? Also, even in the US, they use things like gig work to make the numbers look better. Sure, some jobs were created while others were lost, but taking on Doordash in addition to Uber is no replacement for a lost management / marketing / sales position at Amazon.
Rather, a correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates and excessive money printed which promoted & rewarded hiring just to be compretitive
> correction for over hiring during periods of low-interest rates
It's been three years since that though, and five years since covid. That's why we say "AI" now. Just make sure you don't say "executive incompetence".
I don't think it's incompetence, I think it's planned, merciless strategy. It costs nearly nothing to fire a ton of people, so why not hire a bunch with free money and dump them as soon as the free money disappears
Yeah pretty much. This is just late stage capitalism, and the working class seem to just be shrugging at it instead of what theyr forefathers did in reaction.
While bad, that’s something entirely different. The reported 30,000 seems to be because of economic conditions, whereas that 600,000 number is allegedly from robotic improvements in their warehouses. Not great for the American workforce either way, but they aren’t exactly the same.
It also forecast a certain business growth that we see not happening. Also, no sane PM would document to fire 600,000 people, it’s always “avoid hiring, wink wink”.
Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?
It's been 3 years of this. The frog has already been boiled, especially if you look at the comment activity here compared to 2023. HN is just caring less and less and tuning out the obvious economic headwinds we've been in. Real shame.
We had dozens of channels with almost 10 years of business information in them.
Over time the business gravitated towards putting anything long lived into other sources but since migrating off Slack was essentially a kill switch on our data we wanted to make sure we had ways to access this historic data if needed.
There's no way non-developers were going to parse JSON files for text. We wanted a quick and dirty way to attach the archived PDF file for a channel as a file attachment to the new Teams channel. It gave everyone peace of mind that they could find anything later.
It all worked out in the end and was worth the few hours of dev time to make the 1 off script.
Btw I wasn't the one responsible for making the tech choice to use or leave Slack for Teams. I was the one who was tasked to help with the migration and help make things as streamlined as possible for the business to switch.
One of the biggest pain points was going back to a bunch of Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, etc. sources and finding + updating the links to Slack to be screenshots of the conversation. Another one was converting a bunch of Slack app / webhook integrations over. Teams is absolutely horrendous for this compared to Slack.
In what way? Maybe you have a different definition of human, but as one myself, and someone who produces lots of PDFs for others, it's absolutely readable. Double-click, open, read. Ultimately though the readability depends on the producer of the file...
I think you don't understand what "human-readable format" means. The Wikipedia article has a good overview[1]. Open any PDF in a text editor instead of a PDF viewer and you'll see why it's not a human-readable format.
there may not be an algorithm at work here as there is on Instagram or TikTok, but there's still a bubble - the name, design and discourse of HN itself works as a filter.
> At the time, I went "WTF?" and just commented it out to get it running again. I had bigger fish to fry... and just kind of forgot about it. Everything seemed fine.
You're running a database system and you just casually comment out the configuration setting the timezone?
In what way did everything "seem fine"? SELECT 1 returned something? No further investigation required??
The world might have people like Erdogan hold less powerful positions if large social platforms like Twitter didn't enable populism and suppression so easily.
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