My charitable company strategy take: this is companies skating to where they think the puck will be

Given the rapid progress in LLM capability in recent history, it's reasonable to expect that continues... at least to some degree.

Consequently, companies are going to need to continue to cut, and delaying those cuts will only leave them in a worse position.

Devil's advocate counterpoint: it's currently unclear where AI does and doesn't provide efficiency gains in a business, so some companies are making headcount reductions without knowing where they should target them

I'd say the most accurate casting would be:

Companies have ideas.

Companies have finite budget to pursue these ideas, and never enough to fully pursue all of them simultaneously.

It's management's job to prioritize the order in which they're pursued, subject to available budget.

In the last 5 years, leadership at the Mag 7 has been bad at this core responsibility.

* Alphabet: failed to productize its AI research

* Amazon: completely ignoring the erosion of customer trust in its core logistics business driver (warehouse retail)

* Apple: Vision Pro and lack of product vision (outside of their microprocessor group)

* Meta: VR. Enough said

* Microsoft: Windows. Enough said

* Nvidia: Granted, probably the one standout, but they did get the golden ticket to own a shovel factory during a gold rush

* Tesla: Everything

Objective check: Mag 7 ex Nvidia only outperformed the S&P 500 by +17% over the last 5 years, in contrast to prior periods (and much of that thanks to Alphabet boosting the average)

Ooh, like an advent calendar of crazy!

Me? I'd rather just keep reading through mentions of Trump in the Epstein files.

Or as one late-night host put it: "The Trump Files, featuring Jeffrey Epstein."

Kimmel does the Trump-Epstein Files (TM), but as we've been repeatedly told, he's not funny and has abysmal ratings and should be fired. He's so bad, he's put his entire parent company's broadcast license up for review. You realize how bad you must be for that to happen?

I actually don't find Kimmel all that funny, but fuck I'm glad he's doing what he's doing.

Colbert and Jon Stewart are more my flavor. Shame Colbert is coming to an end.

I'd agree with your ranking while putting Fallon below Kimmel. It is funny to watch each of their stand up routines on YT the next day to compare how often they all have very similar jokes. They, along with John Oliver, like to do supercuts of things where everyone is reading the same script, yet I've never seen them do the same thing to themselves. The only thing different is they are not reading the same script. Sometimes, the jokes literally write themselves and not a coordinated effort.

I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or one of the cultists. Great job if it’s the former.

I honestly never thought a /s would have been necessary

Exactly. The deeper wisdom is that the current bifurcated US economy reveals the malaise at the heart of modern America.

When a company can make more profit by catering to the ultra-rich-only than selling a quality mass-market product at a reasonable price to masses, that says a lot about the economic segmentation of those masses.

There's two takes on America.

One: It's terrible that you're shopping at a big box hardware retailer instead of a local hardware store and drinking high fructose mass market soda.

The other: Home Depot usually has what's needed, at a decent price, nearby. And Coke from the cooler next to the cash register is convenient, cold, and delicious.

Neither of these are wrong, and they're both worth keeping simultaneously in mind: life should be both aspirational and satisfying.

The French, I guess kinda the paragons of mom and pop (well along with Italy and Japan) still built out lots of carrefours where lots of people go shopping for stuff while still enjoying the corner pastry shop and non-chain coffee shop.

As you say it’s not one or the other.

Just went to my neighborhood HW store yesterday. They didn't have any of what I needed, so now I'll be going to Home Depot.

I just wanted some landscaping rocks. I didn't think I was asking for much....

The irony is that, in contrast to their relative positions in the 1960s, communism (in the political-economic Marxian sense) vs capitalism (in the 2026 sense) is now more true to the original communist view above.

To wit, that end stage capitalism has become an ouroboros eating its own tail that profits off artificial scarcity, while communism's primary defect (an inability to execute economic planning at a pace, scale, and granularity required to run a country well) is now technologically-feasible.

Though the greatest enemy to communism was always the people who made up the party and their fallibility as human beings.

So you’re saying China is in the drivers’s seat to make Marxist-Communism a reality?

I would say that OpenAI, Anthropic and Donald Trump are the vanguard of the proletarian revolution.

Is this sarcasm?

Please tell me this is sarcasm.

I didn't say that this is their intention.

But it surely looks to me like they are accelerating a movement towards a giant crisis of the capitalist system.

I bet if they wrote a 100 year plan then taking a detour through selling things to Capitalist countries is part of the plan to getting to a Marxist utopia.

AI space datacenters only make sense from one perspective -- sovereignty.

If you're someone with a lot of money, who dislikes governments meddling in your business, and often pisses off governments...

... oh, I see why this is an Elon talking point now.

I had a "Violence in the Political System" professor who only assigned executive summary research assignments. No more than one page.

His explanation: I don't want to read more than that, and you should be able to fit all the most important details in one page.

Great lesson.

One of the last existent species of North American megafauna!

> bullshit performance management

Having a manager manage performance is the worst organizational option, except for all the others.

Good managers understand they (like senior ICs) are the grease between the working gears of a large company.

Bad managers think it means status.