Facebook has many employees in the EU. What they try in the US they'll try in Europe if they think they'll get away with it.

A union would allow Facebook workers to push back against company bullshit and back it up with industrial action. And yes unions can be useless and exist to leech off members. But in this case, it is a clear cut example of where a union is needed and it is needed NOW.

It is effective at reducing staff cheaply, but it has a huge downside, shared with most attrition-based schemes for reducing payroll: The best employees are also the ones who find it the easiest to leave. The worst employees are also the ones who will grit their teeth and hold on to the bitter end.

It's harder and more costly (in the short term) to do targeted layoffs which allows the company to target low-performers, or those who are low performers relative to their cost. It's the better choice, though.

Lots of the top performers will.

Why would any of this require reducing benefits or even increasing working hours? These are orthogonal issues with privacy and sovereignty and national security.

A gold sprayed phone that will chip and flake in no time, assembled from the cheapest Chinese parts, with a firmware that will doubtless be terrible and filled with spy/malware.

This is a clear cut situation where workers should unionize to push back on this bullshit.

European employees can complain about violation of their privacy from this tracking. I expect lawyers could also make a strong case that training an AI amounts to constructive dismissal and take Facebook to their country's labour relations tribunals over it.

Not sure that makes sense in this context: "each operator improvising its own survival plan in isolation" is the essence of open source. Scratch your own itch. Do it without endless coordination and compromises with other people being required. Explain and share your solution. If others like it, they can use it. If not, they can improvise their own.

Hush now, trumpist, we've debated this to death in another story. You lost.

I think it's a great idea. It was a technically reasonable solution to sharing the costs of hosting and serving content when the web was small. It got run over by spam and trolls and warez eventually but we've learned a lot about content moderation and filtering in the last 25 years.

The main issue is that companies feel they can't monetize their own content if they have no way to control distribution servers, but that should not be a consideration for open source provided it's the kind of open source that is willing to be free to use by everyone.

And just like that.... we're reinventing Usenet.

So they should willingly contribute to the public good by wholly paying for not just the expansion they want themselves but also extra.

Many of them will eventually, by going out of business. That will cause demand destruction. In the meantime they are like the smelly neighbour who showed up at the party, and everyone just has to hold their nose.

The US Navy has been acting as pirates in international waters. That is a fact. People have been kidnapped, cities on the shore have been bombed, civilian ships have been threatened, damaged, and sunk, people have been murdered. What part of this isn't piracy?

And the comment wasn't unrelated to the thread: Bread and circuses. Roman Empire. Predatory behaviours. Every empire that runs low on resources inevitably thinks to plunder from the neighbours.

Perhaps lower the hyperbole intake. You're frothing at the mouth.

I don't give a fuck about the accounting, mate. I'm not American, I care about oil prices, and I blame the crazy foreign fatso for causing trouble.Rein him in.