If you want to talk about context... MSFT has ~230K employees. According to a 2021 Microsoft blog, they had ~100K developers, or 43% of their employee base. Now it's not apples to apples, the 230K is from 2024 and the 100K from 2021, but I would assume at that scale it's fairly constant.

Turns out, they're doing layoffs and... whomp whomp 40% of the layoffs are developers, which are also 40% of their employee base. Shocking I tell ya.

He's not. He's a fascist.

First paragraph of fascism on Wikipedia: Fascism (/fæzm/ FASH-iz-m) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Don't confuse authoritarian communism with fascism. Under fascism, you still have rich elites, and no one even pretends to redistribute wealth.

I agree with you up until you say "there won't be anyone left to actually buy the finished products".

The thing with those tariffs and the imbalance of trade is it NEVER FACTORS IN SERVICE. And guess what, the US is predominantly a service economy. That's what Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. are. If you take service into account, the US exports more than it imports with many countries. Why would I want to repatriate all the manufacturing jobs, when instead I can create software or be in professional services? At the end of the day, iPhone manufacturing is a bunch of folks hunched over a table with soldering irons, paid at minimum wage or close if it was here. You want to do that?

The problem with everything being manufactured outside the US is if the supply dries out. We've seen that with Covid, and we're seeing it now. If there's an unusual situation (or god forbid, war), you won't have access to tangible goods as easily. From a security perspective, I understand wanting to bring manufacturing back, but it's a bad move for the economy and the citizens in general. You should want your people to work in "high value" roles, as opposed to manufacturing, and that will easily protect you from economic collapse.

Klarna is privately owned, so they're not accountable to public shareholders.

However, your point stands in general. We've seen many public companies make stupid decisions, with no visible consequences to the decision-makers. The Board of Directors is supposed to protect the shareholders and exert some oversight on management, but most of the time they just attend meetings, pretend they have questions or concerns, and then go back to their day lives. I wish modern BoDs weren't composed of other companies' C-suite, because even if they have the expertise, those folks don't have the time to care about a company they don't manage directly. BoDs should be composed of long-term shareholders, who can poke holes at management decisions using everyday person logic (seriously, as a consumer, you KNOW AI chatbots won't work and won't be popular, and need to be backed up by humans. Any normal person that interacts as a company could have told you that). Anyway, fantastical dreams and other musings in a capitalistic society.

People almost never think about the fact the government is for us, by us. Yeah our taxes pay for it, but the whole purpose of the government is services for the population. Healthcare, national parks, demographics data, whatever. If there's waste in there, all that happens is we collectively pay for a few people to get jobs, and I'm sure they don't actually do nothing, they may just do things not everyone values.

Instead of that, we try to push everything into private hands because "private businesses are so much more efficient". They're efficient because each ounce of efficiency is sucked into the owner's pockets. Every single private-public partnership ends with us as a society giving more hard-earned cash to a group of rich individuals, to prevent phantom public inefficiencies.

It wouldn't have happened without the tariffs, because Nintendo wouldn't have raised their prices last minute without the tariffs. It's just that Nintendo did it globally to so that the US market doesn't have to absorb the self-inflicted pain. Microsoft is taking this as an opportunity, because like all companies, they will use the "current conditions" to justify greed.

So like we publicly admit now the ol' US of A is controlled by a dictator with no limits on his powers, correct? Or do we just pretend not showing the tariffs is voluntary by Amazon, meaning our multi-billionaires and mega corporates self-censor to not offend the head of state?

Turning the shining symbol of democracy into Russia in 100 days. So much winning.

That's the scary part, that manufacturers increase the price worldwide, when the only change is the US tariffs. If you want the bully to stop, you need to stand up to them, but instead many companies will use tariffs as a perfect excuse to become greedier.

I was expecting this to be implicit sarcasm. I had to scroll back up, see who you were responding to, to then notice, wait it's not!

This viewpoint of "the world has superpower states and vassal states, and everyone outside China/Russia is a vassal" is... interesting. Sure can make a lot of friends by calling 75% of the world "our bitch". But that's right, you don't need friends, you have vassals. Give it a few years. If there's a WW3, I'm not sure the US will find itself in the "allies" group.

I wish SaaS was only used for smaller companies. What we see in reality is many large companies, with tens of thousands of employees, migrating to Cloud. Because.. I don't know why actually. They got sold on that idea of more flexibility, or someone said it would be lowest cost and they believed it. And now you have a huge corporate that lost control of their infrastructure, and one day will find themselves 100% at the mercy of another company. It's mind-blowing.

Bit of a chicken and egg problem. In an ideal world, China would let Russia fail, and Europe would start dealing with China as a reliable commercial partner (and dare I say it, ally). From what I've seen of the CCP, they're a totalitarian but rational actor; they have to know that the EU market is way more attractive than the Russian market.

The thing is, the Western world has painted China as the antagonist, often at the behest of the US. Tariffs on Chinese cars? Done. Removing Huawei from our networks (to this day I haven't seen a concrete proof they had intentional backdoors)? Done. That limits China's growth, and so they sell their shit to Russia. I agree that it's a problem because now China enables Russia, but they've been given no compelling reason not to. "Doing the right thing" for Ukraine ain't going to cut it, China is looking for its own economic development above all else.

India can probably not do more, given they have a population the size of China and 25% of China's CO2 emissions. Frankly the only way to keep CO2 emissions down is to have people in the 3rd world stay in the stone age, otherwise you'd see a rise of CO2 per capita. I know a lot of people don't to talk CO2 per capita because for the planet only the absolute matters, but it does mean something from a quality of life perspective.

What's interesting as well is the same argument for these 36 companies applies to China. 36 companies are the "source" of emissions because they get our fuel out of the ground. They don't use all of it, they're in the business of producing fossil fuel, and therefore it's not surprising they're "the source". I would love to see a split between what China uses internally, and how much of it is due to their industries that eventually export to the western world. My personal hypothesis is if we reallocated the CO2 from goods destined for export, China wouldn't look as bad (they would have increased emissions regardless since 2000, again given population and quality of life changes, they just may not be as bad).

But hey we're apparently bringing production back baby! Maybe in 10 years we'll see a dramatic difference, with emissions in the US rising quickly and China's dropping.

I'm glad for them that they're successful. Sure, maybe they'll survive 50 or 100 years, I don't know. Maybe the Pokemon Company will be Disney 2.0, how am I supposed to know?

However, my bigger question is... who cares? Of course if you ask the CEO of a company whether they believe they'll be successful, they'll say yes. This is a puff piece, an entertainment article, and I'm not sure it matters nor am I sure it's connected to tech (except that Pokemon was originally a video game, and now is so much more).

This entire article/blog belongs on LinkedIn, amongst the other self-aggrandizing posts. Not sure why Slashdot is picking up on it.

This finding is nothing new to anyone that has worked on code (or frankly, done any kind of "development" project whether using computers or in meatspace). But oh no Mr. CTO over there discovered that, as a non-plumber who didn't understand the landscape of his project (his house, his tools, and his washing machine), his time estimates suck, and now understands that there are unknowns in all estimates including for software. You don't fucking say?

So, one dictatorial regime steals from a company based in Dubai. The problem is it's a State that committed the action. What's the company (Bybit) going to do to North Korea? Nothing. They're in no position of power to do anything. However, you propose the Dubai government, or maybe the UAE, will find a partner to avenge the crime against this company. How do you think that's going to work? What would be the "message"?

Not to mention, NK and Russia are friends as you say, since NK sends troops to Ukraine. Who's going to be this partner, or do you think the UAE has the military capabilities to do anything? Traditionally it should be the "Western world", led by the US, but right now Russia and the US are also friends, so good luck with that...