No they couldn’t because the severance is paid out of the money the budget set aside for wages for the year.
So out of the 12 months, they give 4 months to the laid off worker and Facebook pockets the other 8 months.
Facebook could give zero severance, "pocket the full year budget" to use your phrasing, and distribute it to owners as a dividend. The severance comes directly from cash that could have been distributed to owners, as GP originally said.
They don’t give severance to be nice, severance is hush money. To get the severance employees have to agree to forgo any legal claim they could have with the company.
They have calculated that it’s cheaper to offer this money than to have to pay lawyers to defend the company from pissed former employees seeking to drag the company to court.
This is an entirely new claim from the one you made earlier and somewhat divorced from your original line of questioning around severance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885133).
Ultimately, regardless of whether the severance is generous or just a calculated ploy to keep former employees quiet, it comes out of shareholders' pockets.
It is not my claim it is common knowledge. The problem is users here trying to pretend that a standard legal practice is Zuckerberg taking personal responsibility. No he is just following the advice of his legal team.
On severance:
> the reality is that severance payments are just as much about protecting employers as they are about helping employees. In today’s complex labor landscape, employers are acutely aware of the risks associated with employment disputes and potential lawsuits. By offering severance payments, employers aim to minimize their exposure to legal claims, maintain compliance with labor laws, and safeguard their reputation in the marketplace. This practice is not just about goodwill—it’s a calculated move within the broader context of employment law and labor regulations, designed to manage risk and maintain control over the employment relationship. Understanding the real motivations behind severance payments is essential for both employees and employers navigating the ever-evolving world of employment.
This is assuming, though, that should shareholders want to take distributions the money wouldn't be there unless the layoffs are done. Facebook has plenty of cash to cover both if it shareholders or the board wanted to keep employee count stable and also pay out a comparable dividend.
I bought the Lite plan back when it was $36/yr on sale and service has been degraded so hard that it literally unusable for coding. I've reverted simply using it to handle simple git operations here and there and using Codex or Claude for anything serious
Wish I could just refund the plan and use the money for API credit
I'd been trying to migrate from LR to RapidRaw, but it's been tough as most features are just trying to catch up to LR. DaVinci handles a lot of things better than LR from the start. Going to give it a go. Crossing my fingers
That assumes the regime cares more about the economic prosperity of their people than about staying in power. So far they seem to care more about power. North Korea provides a model for how terrible the situation can get for every day people in that sort of arrangement.
North Korea is effectively an island. Iran has many neighbors and long borders. They have no choice but to be at least semi integrated into the world and strong enough to defend themselves.
Their economic prosperity is more linked to Oil than Internet.
Plus, the elites economic prosperity is also linked to their not being protests and for the toppling of govt to not occur and they might be willing to offset some losses to keep the average population in check
Which sucks for the average iranian but we saw how their protests were cracked down with 20-30 THOUSAND people killed and Iran hiding bodies etc.
I have heard that all shops are either shut down or running at the most minimum capacity. Economic prosperity just isn't a question now in Iran.
Yeah, foreign intervention is probably the best option at this point. If the elites are willing to murder tends of thousands of innocent people, then I see no moral issues with foreign intervention to get rid of IRGC and current government using any means necessary.
Iran has 90 million people and a giant conventional missile arsenal that deter neighbors from allowing military action against it. Invading Iran would be enormously difficult. It will also probably get nukes sooner or later. But it doesn't need nukes to be nearly untouchable.
Considering America and Israel accomplished total air superiority over Iran in matter of days just few months ago, they're obviously pretty damn far from being untouchable.
Invading Iran would be difficult, but totally destroying IRGC and military (as long as they side with the former) wouldn't be that hard. Dropping communications equipment and weapons to Iranian opposition groups wouldn't be hard either.
Yes, but what was accomplished with the air superiority? It's not regime change. It set back the nuclear program, maybe six months. That probably won't work ad infinitum, at some point they are going to build redundant sites and hardened facilities that are resilient to bunker busters.
The IRGC and military are HUGE. This is a numbers thing, not a competence thing. Neither the US or Israel has the munitions to make a lasting dent with air power alone.
I don’t think a lot of their economy depends on the internet. Even rich countries in the Middle East would continue to sell oil if the internet wasn’t functional. Might cause some logistical issues but nothing that can’t be done over the phone.
I think everyone knows Apple's rollout of AI features including Siri has been lackluster. No doubt the execs are aware. It's not a case of priorities, but of capabilities
I've found that setting my phone display to grayscale has reduced my phone time by around 15% - 20%, with most of that reduction being in the YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter apps.
I still research topics for fun, but I actively have to Google for information and read wiki articles. It feels much more substantive, and I retain the information better.
I hadn't really calculated what percentage my life I've used up. This is so anxiety inducing. I'm realizing how much of my time I've wasted. I need to live more.
I hate to refer you to a search engine, look for any major issue where the population differs in opinion to the donor class. An obvious place to start is with healthcare, where even slight majorities of Republicans wanted it socialized (at least before 2016) but picking out issues is a waste of time. The vast majority of the public has no influence on public policy. The elite consensus becomes policy 100% of the time. If there isn't an elite consensus (on around 11% of studied issues), the median public preference is chosen 1% of the time; instead one of the elite factions not aligned with public opinion usually carries the day.
People's opinions are highly correlated with elite opinions, of course (because elites control what they hear, read, and see, and whether they'll progress in their careers or be employed at all), but when there's a divergence, public opinion is followed 0% of the time.
>I hate to refer you to a search engine, look for any major issue where the population differs in opinion to the donor class.
That's not what I asked. I asked for an issue supported by voters, not population. A lot of people have opinions, but not many people vote, which skews actual legislation. There's also a conservative tilt because rural voters have disproportionate power.
The populist "it's the elite and their money controlling legislation" sentiment doesn't seem to correlate with reality from what I've read.
On healthcare, the support of socialization is complicated. Voters are iffy depending on how questions are phrased, so it's not totally clear on exactly what they want. It seems something like the ACA was pretty close, but even that was very controversial.
For example, I know you can get very high approval for M4A, but if you phrase questions in a more partisan manner, approval tanks. Something along the lines of "Would you support government provided healthcare that would ban private insurance?" would poll terribly, even though they're both referring to the same policy.
Would have allowed for professionals in a given field to be accredited to make investments related to their profession. Or to put it another way, you would no longer need to already be rich to use the tools that the rich use to get richer.
The bill was passed unanimously in the house, and then quietly killed in the senate.
5 years later, we got a neutered version. Now you can make investments if you get a series 7 license, etc. But from what I understand you can’t just take the test and get the license, you need to be sponsored by an institution, but that misses the point of the original bill that represented the actual will of the people.
Do you have data to substantiate a strong majority of support for this bill among voters, and adjusted for voting power? I'd assume a lot of voters would be indifferent to this issue. It seems quite complicated. It seems it's a tradeoff between freedom and saving uniformed people from losing their money.
Are you citing this poll [0] for the healthcare questions because if so, I'm not sure how relevant that is. I'd bet a lot of money those support numbers drop once you throw in the nitty gritty details that actual legislation requires such as how you plan on paying for a X trillion dollar per year spending bill.
Think you can have an effect by contacting your elected officials? Public preference has almost no impact on what legislation gets passed. Not to mention all the gerrymandering...
Your first two sources are just comparing spending to returns. It doesn't address the hard question which is about causality.
A better explanation for The American Jobs Creation Act is probably the fact that republicans support lower taxes, and they won in 2016.
Regarding the Microsoft case with the IRS, perhaps the fact that everyone hates the IRS is a better explanation?
>Public preference has almost no impact on what legislation gets passed.
Why would it have a significant impact? We don't pass laws by poll.
>Not to mention all the gerrymandering
This one seems real from what I've seen, but I need to look into it more, and I don't think it should be tied very closely to money in politics.
I doubt it. The parallels of this rhetoric from the war on terror is stark. You can put anything under the umbrella of national security, and your average senator is perfectly aware of that. A theoretical threat to semiconductor distribution pails in comparison to the actual threat of climate change or the real threat of poverty which millions of Americans are facing.
No, I don’t believe the senators looked at this with an unbiased mind and came to this conclusion on their own volition. Much rather, they rely on some funding for their campaigning, and said funding had a deep influence on their decision. Not rational thinking.
Securing core resources has been a long standing national security concern for countries. Also, there’s a good chunk of populist isolationist sentiment in the zeitgeist.
Senators aren’t unbiased. They’re biased towards what their voters want. If they step out of line, they’ll likely get crushed.
I don’t think money in politics is very explanatory. It seems a basic understanding of the 3 branches and the interplay between the states and federal government explains a lot.
I think you might be underestimating voter apathy. Voter apathy stems further then low voter turnout, it also includes people who vote despite not caring or despite not believing their values will not be represented in that vote. That is, the lesser of two evils is a very real thing for many (most?) voters.
For that to be true there would have to be some dissonance between what voters actually want and to what their representatives actually deliver. If you don’t believe this dissonance exist, then sure, there is nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. I on the other hand, not only believe such dissonance exist, but is a fundamental flaw in our democracy.
I mean… yes? I thought this was common knowledge; there’s certainly no shortage of documentation available: the ROI from lobbying efforts is insanely high, on the order of 75,000% by many estimates.
I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.
(Not so clear, personally, how you justify transposing this semiconductor handout to the more superficially defensible “national security”; but see also fossil fuel subsidies, corporate tax breaks, barring negotiated drug pricing: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/politics/amazing-ro... )
As for “why is it so cheap”? I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.
It’s very low effort for a corporation to threaten to offshore and ask for a handout to not follow through on the threat. And it’s a very easy call for the politician to take the bribe, because then they can go back their constituency and say “We saved your jobs from going to China!” Everybody wins except the taxpayers. (And the corporations will go ahead and offshore, or not, just like they would have anyway, because one of the services they pay their lobbyists for is ensuring there will be no consequences for accepting the handout.)
>I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.
This is wrong. That's not what lobbying is understood to be. I think you're confusing lobbying with campaign contributions or PAC money. Lobbying is basically just advocating.
>I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.
That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?
That's fair. I was imprecise: I should have made it explicit that I was speaking about lobbying in America:
> The one big difference between the US and the EU is that the majority of policymakers in the EU institutions are not elected, and since they do not need to stand for elections, they do not need to find the significant amounts of cash to support campaigns. Instead of spending innumerable hours fundraising, they balance competing interests in an effort to produce policies that are seen as legitimate, though produced by a less-than-democratic supranational structure. https://www.politico.eu/article/why-lobbying-in-america-is-d...
US Lobbyists funneled a total of 3.77 billion dollars into campaign coffers in 2021, and are already over 2 billion for 2022. I hope it's not necessary to point out that they're not doing that without the expectation of a return on that investment (and as we've already seen, they absolutely are getting that ROI.)
> That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?
Not sure I see how it's dodging the question, especially since my following paragraph continues not dodging it in greater detail.... but setting that aside, the obvious answer to "why are there so few funding sources" is "there is a finite number of wealthy individuals and organizations", with a side order of "and they tend to consolidate their lobbying activities into industry groups". (To be specific, in 2022 that finite number is 11,441.)
In an economic system where the rich earn money just from being rich, you have a strong incentive as a politician to sell your country as ten million dollars will result in a perpetual and exponentially growing income stream that exceeds a politicians salary multiple times and you don't even have to lift a finger, just do a single corruption stint and be locked in the upper class with the rest of the wealthy for the rest of your life.
