...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://mashable.com/article/c...

A few remarks...

> Meanwhile Huawei announced that it is increasing R&D spending

This might be a false comparison. Huawei and Amazon are very different companies. It would be difficult to directly compare them, and to suggest that the strategy that works for one would work for the other is at best naive. For example, it's worth noting Huawei is effectively a state owned enterprise of the PRC, and their business is subsidised by the state. It's also worth noting that the PRC tightly controls the public statements, censors everything, and many times statements are aimed at the domestic audience. Meaning that the CCP wants the Chines people to not be exposed to bad news, everything is just great with the PRC! Reuters acknowledged that in that link you shared, that they could not independently verify any of the statements made. So it's a bit weird you chose to cite a source with super questionable content. Also it's worth noting that in the USA several other big corporations are cutting jobs, and those might be a more credible direct comparison.

> This is so stupid. In a few years Amazon will be trying to hire these people back, having lost ground to companies that looked beyond the next quarter.

You might think it's stupid, that's your opinion, but I would suggest you might be fallaciously appealing to ignorance. That said, it was really amusing in an extremely ironic way, because you say "companies that looked beyond the next quarter", and I would argue that Amazon is probably doing exactly that. Consider that Amazon already cut 19K jobs, and is preparing to cut another 9K. Do you really think that is a company with a short term vision? They clearly believe the economy is going to get worse before it gets better, and if anything they now believe the economy is going to get much worse than they originally forecast.

Big corporations have teams of economists on the parole, they are not living in the same kind of denial that you might be. (no offence)

What is .xyz?

Hype.

"So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only âoeutilityâ for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."

https://www.usenix.org/publica...

Ah yes, the disgusting and false refuge of Chinese (and Russian) apologists and propagandists to the worst abuses of authoritarians: âoethe US does it too.â

These abuses are not âoeallegedâ; they are happening, and they are not based on dubious âoeresearchesâ [sic]:

https://www.propublica.org/art...

There is a genocide happening in Xinjiang; one that is erasing an entire culture, language, religion, and history of a people.

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Use https://feedly.com/

When Google killed Reader, I did, and never looked back.

One of the problems with "coding" and the other jobs these classes target is that you can only teach so much. Either you have a logical mind capable of a million levels of abstract thought, or you don't. I'm in IT and we have a similar problem with people with no troubleshooting skills trying to get and hold onto jobs. Either development is going to have to get simpler than it already is, or people will need to really ramp up their overall ability levels.

I imagine the simplification side of this equation is going to be in the form of (surprise) AWS proprietary, AWS-only, super-easy SDK provided, It Just Works!-level PaaS services. Getting people used to using only these services by not teaching fundamentals would be a really good way to ensure future business. I work in a development shop on the IT aide of the house and everything is "serverless" now...when coding becomes Legos even more than it is now, then anyone can code. We're seeing this in IT too -- on the Microsoft side of the house, Microsoft has discontinued all fundamentals training like the MCSA/MCSE track in favor of how-to-drive-Azure services.

The reasons for all this aren't altruistic in the least. FAANGs and Microsoft hate having to pay Seattle and San Francisco inflated salaries for developers, and they know they can only push offshoring so far - both due to public opinion and the same law of non-infinite talent. Why pay $300K for a Google SRE when you can force it down to a $50K job by flooding the market with good-enough people?

One thing I wonder is if Chinese families actually want more children. Here in the US, we've become a lot less religious, some have become better educated, and some of us have become more affluent. All these factors translate to fewer children (also, same goes for the more educated and less religious poor -- kids are expensive.) I imagine China's population has also experienced a massive increase in overall wealth given their economic expansion, so it's possible they have the same probkem.

Either way, it's pretty much a given that they'll find a solution to whatever demographic crunch they're in. They have a huge advantage over countries like Japan and European countries that simply suggest increasing the population...they can directly make it happen. It's the main advantage of having total economic control over a thriving economy...you don't have to beg and plead with people to do things. You can just use the money and policy levers you have at your disposal to make things happen. Look at how China just plowed money into infrastructure in 2008 to stave off economic problems, and we can't even get 400-odd Congresspeople to agree to invest comparatively little. China's flavor of communism appears to be working better than those tried before. They can choose economic directions, move millions of people form the countryside into cities, etc. -- so I assume population increases won't be a problem.

No executive, no matter how public the failure and how critical the infrastructure is, will care about security until they're liable for it. Execs have a whole staff that deflects problems; they never see the fallout of their decisions to not invest in security. I think one of the best ways to externalize this is to turn IT/development into a branch of engineering and use PE licensing as a way to shift blame back to executives while shielding them to a degree they'd find acceptable. Proposals like "corporate death penalties" for security violations don't work because the executive class will just call up their lobbyists and buy their way out of trouble.

Computers and connectivity have graduated from "cool toys that enhance productivity" to "critical infrastructure that the modern world can't live without." At the same time, we still let money-chasing idiots enroll in "learn DevOps in just 4 short weeks" bootcamps as their only education into this field and celebrate the lack of standardized education. The way to encourage basic education is to adopt a licensing structure that at least makes sure people have the fundamentals down. So many newbies are coming into this field with zero concept of the basics and IMO that's just going to make security issues worse over time.

I think we should just take life-safety and critical infrastructure systems and apply licensed-professional rules to them as a start. Work on licensing people by standardizing their education/experience requirements. Give licensed professionals continuing-education responsibilities, and liability that will prevent them from signing off on stupid designs. That's the balance point -- the licensed professional needs the ability to charge a premium for good work, and the system needs to be in place that encourages good design methods.

I live in metro NYC and it's expensive. California, especially a 75 mile radius around San Francisco, is a mind-boggling whole new level of expensive. Just like metro NY, they're not making any new land so there's only so many places to expand. Even with that, I'm not locked into a bidding war for a tiny 3 bedroom house with no property going for over $2M, just so my commute's less than 2 hours each way. Bring this kind of money and this willingness to pay crazy money into any real estate market and it'll go nuts.

Austin's not exactly a sleepy little town, but one thing it has (not necessarily a good one either) is the ability to expand hundreds of miles in any direction. Traffic will suck and it'll become a massive sprawly mess as people buy $2M mansions on 3 acre lots (and pay $2000/year in property tax) with their SV tech bubble money...just look at metros like DFW or Atlanta with few natural boundaries. So I'm sure they can absorb the population -- not sure they'll like the result.

Where I live, during the height of COVID and even a little bit today, houses are going for crazy amounts because people still want to live in NY but don't need to live in NYC anymore. Same goes for people living close to the city moving further out -- if you have to do a horrible commute 2 days a week instead of 5, suddenly living 1.5 hours away isn't awful anymore. The prices are crazy because people literally are trading $2M apartments (and I think a lot of residents who don't have retirement savings are seeing this as their one golden opportunity to move to North Carolina or Florida or whatever.) I imagine something similar is happening in Austin...a sleepy cow town suburb suddenly becomes super-hot real estate because it's near Tesla's headquarters.

"Often, unions do not look out for the health of the company."

Maybe so, but "the health of the company" would be a lot healthier if the executives weren't getting paid 300 times what the average worker is getting. A unionized workforce would force companies to share at least some of their profits with employees in the form of better wages or conditions. I think that's what modern unions need to push back against more than anything...the main reason everything is so lopsided economically today is because we've internalized the idea that CEOs deserve $100M salaries and god-like treatment, and that the workers just have to sit back and deal with it.

"Companies know they need to keep employees happy."

Skilled or unskilled, I have never worked in an environment where the company cared whether I was happy. Outside of magical chocolate factory FAANG employers with insane profit margins, I can't think of a place that says "let's prioritize raises/benefits/better working conditions over a bonus for us!" At least with the cold war/mutually assured destruction scenario in place, both sides have to at least come to a compromise.

Yes, it's 100% a good thing. It's the only way you get pushback against a much more powerful force. I would much rather work in an environment where labor and management are at least honest with each other that they're working toward different goals. It's better than pretending they're all on the same team. Even if I were in management, I'd be happier knowing that there were only certain levers I could pull with the workforce...it'd make the hard task of managing humans easier.

This is the story that has to come out, but employers hold too many of the cards now. People who say they can negotiate an amazing deal on their own aren't the wheeler-dealers they think they are. Even highly skilled labor faces the threat of offshoring.

I've never worked in a union environment, but I know how much goof they've done for the average worker over the years. The problem is that people are fed a constant diet of anti-union propaganda -- telling them that if they just work harder they can be just like the executives. It's not going to happen for 99.9% of people.