Why would Medicaid have the data of anyone who is at risk of immigration enforcement? The reported connection seems tenuous:
> The tool – dubbed Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) – receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid) and other sources, 404 Media reports based on court testimony in Oregon by law enforcement agents, among other sources.
So, they have a tool that sucks up data from a bunch of different sources, including Medicaid. But there's no actual nexus between Medicaid and illegal immigrants in this reporting.
My wife works in autism services in a predominantly Latino city. Those kids all have Medicaid, which includes info about their parents. It would be pretty trivial to cross reference with other data points to identify kids with undocumented parents and then you have their home address. Many of these kids go to a clinic everyday, so now you know when someone (likely a parent) is dropping them off too. She’s had patients with parents who have been picked up by ICE. I wouldn’t be surprised if that data came from Medicaid. It’s basically the same as the IRS data they’ve been using.
And it is next to impossible for average people to get adequate care for their kids with autism without Medicaid and early intervention can make the difference between someone who can live relatively independently with supports and someone who will spend their adult life chemically restrained in an institution. So they are in between a rock and a hard place.
What ICE is doing is naked incompetent fascism and the entity needs to be disbanded with hostility.
With that said, no, it's not evil to deport people who entered a country illegally. If I sneak into China, and China finds out, they are morally and legally clear to send me back, whether or not I've had children in China.
It likely wouldn't poll well for elections, but today's ICE does need to be disbanded. Its tasks can be given to other agencies until a replacement can be created and staffed. The recent recruitment drive makes it nearly impossible to reform the agency. There's just too many agents introduced in the poisonous culture and goals.
An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
>An easy win that should get widespread approval is bolstering the immigration court system. I have dark worries, but I'm still not entirely sure why this administration is whittling away at immigration courts. You'd think they'd want to process asylum applications faster, so invalid claimants could be deported sooner.
Absolutely. Especially since upwards of 80% of asylum claims are denied[0] when they actually get adjudicated. Which usually takes years to happen because there aren't enough immigration "courts."
Provide enough immigration "judges" and "courts" and we could clear up the backlog within a couple years. I'd also point out that while asylum seekers aren't (yet) legal immigrants, they are (based on Federal law[1]) legally in the United States until their case has been adjudicated -- once again arguing for increasing the number of immigration "courts" and "judges." It certainly doesn't argue for hundreds of billions of dollars for a bunch of jackbooted thugs to terrorize citizens and immigrants alike, all to deport fewer people than other administrations who didn't need to shoot citizens to do so. Funny that.
OG classical fascism was pretty incompetent and bumbling at times too.
eventually they got their shit together.
China is a demographic disaster in slow motion and should be keeping anyone they can get who wants to say. The US and EU have avoided much stagnation by importing more bodies, and there is no ethnic component to USA-ian identity compared to being Han and being forced to speak Mandarin.
Pam Bondi is now demanding voter rolls. It's clearly about suppressing liberal voters in liberal areas through a show of force. They're using this data to optimize who to harass.
If citizenship is required to vote then how would accessing voter rolls suppress liberal voters? Honest question; I'm not concern trolling. I had to Google who's allowed to vote.
I found this article[1] by the Brennan Center. It alleges this is an attempted federal takeover of elections but it doesn't suggest or allude to voter suppression. I'm not convinced by the article that having access to voter rolls can be considered a federal takeover of election administration (but I'm not in the know and would need things explained more verbosely).
If you have more information about the attempted centralization of election administration and its impacts on voter suppression I would be interested to know more.
Honestly my real fear is ICE agents at polling places on Election Day harassing would-be voters with citizenship checks and aggressive behavior, slowing things down and maybe causing some people to leave.
Regarding voter data though, if it becomes known that registering to vote as a minority will get you extra scrutiny from ICE, and perhaps a visit to your home, that would probably cause some citizens avoid voting altogether, especially if they are associated with people who are not her legally.
Either way, the federal government really has no right to that data or legitimate use for it, so hopefully they don't manage to get their hands on it.
There are not non-citizens on voter rolls. They want the rolls to get data on voters.
When you ask yourself why the ultra-politicized DOJ (which isn't even the DHS...) from an administration that has explicitly called liberals the enemy is asking for voter rolls, it becomes pretty understandable why people might come to the conclusion that it is to suppress the people that have already explicitly been identified as targets.
If you think making sure only citizens can vote equals "suppressing liberal voters", that sound like a big self report. The voter lists don't tell you how people voted, it only tells you who did.
Voter registration gets names cross referenced to facebook gets you face recognition (Palantir can do this). Ice claims that facial recognition on their app is probable cause (Ice already claim this).
Ice goes down the lines at voting stations to "protect from undocumented aliens voting illegally". The government endorsed news stories will be about how many illegals were trying to vote. Meanwhile a bunch of US citizens were taken for processing due to false positives and unfortunately with such large numbers to process they aren't all released until polling stations are closed. (If only someone hadn't botched the facial recognition database update and contaminated it with a bunch of Dem voters).
If rioting against these actions occurs at a station, it's closed for safety and people in area are detained while it's sorted (the stations targeted had a tendency to vote D anyway as per voter roles).
Strange how that 'harassment' did stop US citizens from voting.
Results come in while the case for voter suppression goes to the Supreme court. Supreme court rules that while voter suppression did occur there is no legal option of redress within its permit and the peaceful transfer of power is more important than any one election A la Bush V Gore.
Are you a citizen, can you prove it at the polling station? I am doubtful you are, and your documents if you have them don't seem legit enough, so I think we'll set your vote aside, or possibly prevent it from being cast; we can't be too sure!
It doesn't matter whether you can prove it. ICE's current position [0] is that their face scanning app supercedes documents like birth certificates to determine status.
> Are you a citizen, can you prove it at the polling station?
Yes, I have multiple documents proving my citizenship. Never been asked though, ID always sufficed.
> so I think we'll set your vote aside, or possibly prevent it from being cast; we can't be too sure!
I have voted in more than one state (legally, I moved) never seen any voting place asking for any documents except for state ID and voter roll check. I don't think there is any voting place where local state ID is not "legit enough".
What's not hypothetical? Sure, there once existed racist laws in the US. How does it relate to establishing citizenship or presumedly some documents proving citizenship being considered "not legit enough"?
Isn’t the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act going to stop married women who have changes their last name from what was on their birth certificate from voting?
There has been many ways to stop you from voting, contesting your vote, calling your registration into account, imitating tests that are impossible to validate if you are intelligent enough to vote, etc
Spend some time educating yourself on how voting suppression has worked historically and you wont sound so ignorant.
Medicaid-receiving immigrants could have their immigration status change, legal violations, emergency medicaid use, sometimes there's state funded coverage that immigrants are offered, etc. There's lots of reasons where Medicaid will have information on immigrants.
That doesnt mean they are illegal right off the bat - there is no reasonable way to filter out the "illegal" members of the roles and essentially making it so the DOJ has a list of people who they can cross reference with expiring status and the moment the clock strikes midnight and their status changes they can get picked up. They should not have all those records for fishing expedititions.
They hold both that people whose citizenship depends on birthright citizenship are not in fact citizens and that naturalized citizens can be denaturalized either for disloyalty or based on some sham pretext. They also see people getting benefits as leaches worthy of targeting.
Also naturalized and birthright citizens are far more likely than others to associate or live with others of less legal status.
Naturalized and birthright citizens quality for benefits and they and their families are at risk.
If they are allowed to detain and deport without any due process as they have asserted anyone not white is at risk.
The DHS official social media presence shared a picture of an island paradise with the caption America after 100 million deportations.
This is the number of non-whites not the number of immigrants in even the most ridiculous estimates.
> EFF claims that some states enroll illegal immigrants in Medicaid
Actually they don't. They say "Some states, using their own funds, allow enrollment by non-citizens" - but they never say if it's legal residents or illegal immigrants. I am not sure whether it's part of the ongoing attempt to blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants, or all the states that allow that genuinely do not distinguish between legal residents and illegal immigrants, but we can not assume it by default.
But I am not sure if the states use their own money for this - why would they send this information to HHS?
> Actually they don't. They say "Some states, using their own funds, allow enrollment by non-citizens" - but they never say if it's legal residents or illegal immigrants. I am not sure whether it's part of the ongoing attempt to blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants, or all the states that allow that genuinely do not distinguish between legal residents and illegal immigrants, but we can not assume it by default.
If a state bureaucracy doesn't explicitly check for legal immigration status then yes the policymakers in that state are trying to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration.
>If a state bureaucracy doesn't explicitly check for legal immigration status then yes the policymakers in that state are trying to blur the line between legal and illegal immigration.
When it comes to healthcare, many states don't care if you're a tourist or a resident or a one-eyed, one-eared, horned purple-people eater. They (because their constituents -- you know, the folks who pay for this -- believe people shouldn't be dying in the streets because they can't afford basic care, regardless of who they are/where they came from) provide healthcare to anyone who needs it because it's the compassionate, humane thing to do.
That some states do not do so says a lot about the folks who run and live in those states -- partly that they have little empathy for their fellow human beings. Which seems weird, given that many of those states have "leaders" and vocal residents who claim to be Christian, yet they are unwilling to engage in the very things that Jesus Christ prescribes[0][1][2] that they do.
I'm glad I'm not a Christian. If I were, I don't think I could abide such evil, selfishness and hypocrisy.
ICE has been harassing and following legal observers to their houses. They've shot and executed at least two people who were exercising their legal right to record their activity.
The FBI has been showing up at the door of some people who dare to organize protests against ICE.
Stingrays have been deployed to protests, ICE is collecting photos of protestors for their database, and has been querying YCombinator funded Flock to pull automated license plate camera data from around the country. Trump, Vance, Noem and Miller are calling anyone who protests them domestic terrorists.
It's pretty clear this isn't just about immigration, that this is about pooling data for a surveillance state that can quash the constitutional rights of anyone who dares to oppose the current regime. We've seen this story before.
When your whole system works by giving absolutely ridiculous amount of power to a single individual who has nobody above or at least on the side capable of interfering and changing things, this is what you eventually get. Crossing fingers and praying given person isn't a complete psycho or worse is not going to cut it forever, is it. Especially when >50% of population welcomes such person with open arms, knowing well who is coming.
Given what kind of garbage from human gene pool gets and thrives in high politics its more surprising the show lasted as long as it did.
Now the question shouldn't be 'how much outraged we should be' since we get this situation for a year at this point, but rather what to do next, how we can shape future to avoid this. If there will be the time for such correction, which is a huge IF.
I don't disagree with where you're coming from. But to be fair, our system did have separation of powers and rough legal accountability for most of the time it was accruing so much power. The fascists just managed to get enough of the Supreme Council on board to sweep these away under the guises of unitary executive theory and blanket immunity for their new president-king.
So from this perspective it's a matter of a corrupted interpreter, meaning merely adding more legal restrictions won't work. Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them and then have even more foot soldiers to escalate the situation with.
Its every branch of the government. The federal government, largely through congressional legislation, has been amassing more and more power for longer than anyone has been alive, while willingly ceding large chunks of that power to the executive branch, while the executive was grooming and shaping the justice department.
Just the abuses of the commerce clause alone should show our government is full of corrupt power mongers.
And it goes down the list too. States taking power from counties, counties taking power from cities, judges, cops, and prosecutors claiming authority over more and more issues despite a lack of sound legal precedence or public approval.
Sure. I agree, but I don't really get what larger point you're making. A "unitary executive-king" is still a drastic departure from the bureaucratic structures that had been accreting power. How I categorize the old system is bureaucratic authoritarianism - there was (/is) still arbitrary authoritarian (anti- Individual Liberty) power over our lives, but its exercise is bound up in bureaucracy that at least claims to be impartial and nominally answers to the courts. Whereas now we're dealing with autocratic authoritarianism - that same power is arbitrarily and capriciously wielded by the whims of a single demented career criminal.
> Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them
We tried that with the Articles of Confederation. Then half the country tried it again 70 years later. It didn’t work out either time.
Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
One failing of framing it as "just ... since television became widespread" is that it ignores the actual power "television" (really, mass media, and now individually-tailored mass media) has to exert effective population control. The worrying thing here isn't so much the specific draconian actions themselves, but how much of the population is actively and gleefully cheering for them. And as it's obvious that none of these policies are going to make our country materially better (eg economically or social cohesion), this performative vice signalling stands to get worse and worse as this goes on.
I'm certainly not a slavery apologist, but the Civil War was a terrible precedent that we are now paying the price for. Like always, power always gets agglomerated because the hero (Lincoln) desires to to good. But once it's been agglomerated, it tends to attract evil.
One of the clear underlying pillars of support for Trumpism is China/Russia trying to break up the United States so that it is less able to project power over the world. In this sense, supporting the paradigm of a weakened federal government is helping fulfill that goal. But it would be one way to stop the hemorrhaging and at least get us some breathing room in the short term. The current opposition party has trouble even mustering the will to avoid voting to fund the out of control executive, so whatever reforms we push for have to be simple and leverage existing centers of power. We can't let the national Democrats simply do another stint of business-as-usual phoning it in as the less-bad option, or we'll be right back here just like we are now from last time.
Convincing the Federal government to voluntarily relinquish power, or forcing them to do so is probably the hardest and least likely possible change we could make to our system of government. Positing that as some kind of easier more realistic stopgap vs essentially any other reform is bordering on madness.
Probably easier than convincing individual senators/reps and the part(ies) as a whole to give up their own personal power with things like Ranked Pairs voting, no?
And probably easier to have Congress pass such legislation to draw a new line in the sand, even if it could be undone later, than doing things that would inescapably require a Constitutional amendment.
The problem with the other reforms I have thought of is that we're so far gone it will take more than one reform. Like campaign finance reform would have been great a decade ago. But now that kind of relies on getting back a non-pwnt and even trustworthy law enforcement apparatus, too. Same with a US GDPR / tech antitrust enforcement - would have been great a decade or two ago, but it won't particularly change much now that half the pop culture is already enamored with fascism.
But I agree that we need to be brainstorming and discussing many approaches to reform. So what specifically are you thinking of as the reforms we need?
My initial comment stated the goal very strongly. I don't see that an initial stopgap version of it would require a Constitutional amendment. The President's power to federalize the Guard comes from legislation passed by Congress ("Insurrection Act", etc), which Congress could straightforwardly undo. Congress could also reaffirm Posse Comitatus, tighten up any loopholes in the President's ability to divert funding from the state-controlled National Guards. Congress could also include a bit indicating that state courts are the appropriate jurisdiction for claims over control of the guard. The Supreme Council might try to go against that last bit under the guise of "Constitutionality", but the goal would be to give the chain of command stronger grounds to refuse illegal orders.
I'm eager to discuss other avenues of reform, though. What do you see as a minimum viable path to reform?
The President's power to control the national guard comes from the constitution not acts of congress.
“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”
But ignoring all that, if a governor used the national guard against federal agents, that’s open civil war. The military gets deployed, and death and destruction follow.
The reform needed is that congress takes back constitutional powers they’ve delegated to the President, and removes a President who violates their will.
Congress has the power to control the President right now. If they aren’t willing to do exercise that authority, there’s nothing we can do.
Let’s say you got Congress to grant states the ability to make war on the federal government in order to provide an extra-congressional check on Presidential power (which I don’t think you can do, but just pretend you can). That’s only useful in a situation where the President has effectively captured Congress. Otherwise an extra-congressional check isn’t needed. But in the case Congress will just remove that power from the states.
This only works even a little bit as a Constitutional amendment—even if you could pass legislation to do it.
> Trump’s not even close to the worse President we’ve had. He’s just the craziest since television became widespread. FDR who is widely considered one of our best Presidents put nearly 100k US citizens of Japanese descent in interment camps.
They are putting people in interment camps right now, people are dying in them. You can find stories on a daily basis about discovered deaths in camps in texas being determined to be homicides, and those are just the ones we know about.
> Andrew Jackson committed literal genocide.
Give Trump time. Also the deaths as a result of just the destruction of USAID, millions of children will and are dying; it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
Andrew Jackson did it 1 year into has fist term. Trump is already in his 2nd.
> it's comparable and beyond to the worst things any president has done in the history of the country
It’s horrible to be clear. But ending assistance to other countries is in no way morally worse than genocide, slavery, and war.
>detention camps
The last year of the Biden administration, there were about 40k people in ICE detention facilities. The number has gone up under Trump, but it has less than doubled.
Any preventable deaths of people in ICE custody are unacceptable, but the number of deaths are a little higher proportionally than under Biden.
This is all horrible and condemnable. But detaining undocumented immigrants temporarily is something every administration does (even if this administration is ramping it up) and is in no way comparable to rounding up 100k innocent US citizens for a 4 year term.
Trump is an awful, greedy, morally corrupt human being, and a terrible President. But we’ve seen and survived much worse.
When was the ideal time for RBG to retire? Was it when Mitch McConnell was refusing to even hold hearings for any Obama nominee in the last years of his presidency? There is no indication that RBG retiring would have resulting in a confirmed Obama selected justice, it could have just resulted in Trump getting his picks earlier.
I would point out that even had RBG retired early enough for Obama to appoint a replacement, the court would still have Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh in the majority.
Sure, there may be a case here or there that would go the other way, but the vast majority of cases before this hypothetical court would be decided the same way as they have been, merely with a thinner majority.
Yes, RBG retiring would not have switched the court.
But 6-3 is meaningfully different than 5-4. 6-3 means you can lose one from your coalition, enabling more extreme majority opinions. You can see this even in the very highest profile cases like Dobbs and Trump v US, where one of the conservatives didn't join the entire majority.
It also makes flipping the court enormously more difficult. 5-4 means that one conservative dying and an inopportune time and you flip it. 6-3 makes this statistically unlikely.
I very strongly suspect that we will see Alito and Thomas retire this year. Everybody knows how this goes now.
People do realize that Republicans have agency right? It’s more fun to blame democrats but it’s fairly striking to blame them while hand waving away that the right wing fascist project has been ongoing since at least 2010. They could have also stopped the fascist corruption.
I mean, sure. The problem is that ignoring Republican agency is seemingly incubated by both parties' philosophies (such as they are). It's a common "conservative" vice to blame problems on those you identify less with (right now, Democrats). It's a common "liberal" vice to put the onus to fix a problem on those you identify more with (also Democrats). Therefore, most people's solution to any given problem involves putting pressure on Democrats. Putting pressure on Republicans "doesn't help", either because they have nothing to do with the problem or because they obviously will never fix it.
Part of me thinks this is fundamental to the human condition, but most of me thinks it isn't. This doesn't seem to have happened in the FDR era, or the Nixon era, for example. I think it's just fallout from the post-Reagan coalitions in the US political system.
RBG had cancer twice, and she refused to step down and let Obama replace her. More should have been done to convince her. McConnell blocking Obama from filling Scalia's vacancy probably didn't have to happen the way it did, if Democrats stood up and forced it - the Republican reasoning was absolutely stupid and not based on any lawful reason.
Yes, the Democrats fumbled this and it led to the problems we have now. I'm still a lifelong Democrat voter and always will be, but goddamnit did we shoot ourselves in the foot.
Trump had no problem convincing Kennedy to step down and be replaced. Republicans know the game, the Democrats we elect don't seem to know how to play it.
Renee Good blocked half the [small, suburban, low traffic, no lane markings] road and told the officers they were free to drive around her. I don't know what the blockage was about the but she seemingly wasn't trying to get in anyone's way.
“If it was up to Stephen [Miller], there would only be 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like him.”
To accomplish things like that, a lot of us are going to be removed. I don't think these are jokes, it's a pattern of statements to condition and normalize. A thing he has done over and over.
While that seems like a convincing explanation, 750Hz is a rather odd value to use for a timer, and more importantly the overflow would be at 66d6h43m43s instead of the reported ~66d12h.
That's why I said (ish). I agree, it's predominantly an EV. I hope they backpedal on the decision a bit and offer both an EREV and a regular EV at the same time. I'm quite happy with my Lightning and will buy another, but I'm not super interested in the EREV as it just adds expense, complexity, and maintenance requirements without offering me much additional functionality for my use case.
The whole point is to sell more cars, the EREV Lightning will not be cheaper to produce or sell.
At current prices, the standard range battery in a Lightning (which is nominally about 107kWh or so) should cost under $10K. They will not be able to shrink the battery enough to offset the cost of putting in an engine and generator. For one, they have to stay competitive with the Dodge EREV pickup, which will have a ~90kWh battery.
My guess is they leave out one or two modules from the standard range pack and price the truck starting at $70K. They won't make a ton of money, but they might be able to get a nice boost in volume to make up for it.
They do not. They have no qualms about eliminating more senior roles as necessary, and generally prefer to staff in a bottom-heavy way because, among other things, it's more frugal.
That's because the people running these companies learned the hard way not to write their collusion down, so now they just all totally coincidentally act in the same way that ends up driving wages down and keeping workers afraid and in line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Why would you explain this with a conspiracy theory of collusion instead of Occam's razor -- that they were responding to similar changes in market conditions, with input from similar shareholders?
This is not a conspiracy theory, even though what I'm about to say will sound like it. If you can talk to someone from the exec class in confidence (which unfortunately may require a close personal relationship or high trust), they'll tell you there was a clear -- if somewhat tacit -- understanding that the job market had gotten too hot during Covid and something "had to be done" about it after ZIRP ended.
Elon's layoffs at Twitter were basically the signal for the rest of the industry that it's time to reverse the trend.
Right, but I'm contending there is a form of collusion. Here's a paraphrased conversation I had with someone who's in the exec class when I remarked on all the layoffs happening at the same time:
"Elon has signaled to the industry that you can layoff a 80% of your employees and things will still be OK, and the rest of the industry is following his lead."
When I pointed out that that wasn't true, things were actually getting rather bad amongst the employees and from a product quality / safety perspective, the response was, "It doesn't matter. They've all decided the status quo must change and decided that they want to do the same things."
This rhymes with what I heard from other senior people as well. And suspiciously the same anti-employee tactics have been happening across the industry at the same time -- layoffs, forced attrition, shifting jobs offshore, RTO, increased workloads with reducing headcount leading to record levels of burnout...
Even if we charitably assume it's group-think, that's still a form of collusion.
Even if we're being charitable and assuming it's group-think, it is still a form of collusion. The group of competitors collectively decides on specific outcomes that are beneficial to the group as a whole even if they know that the individual outcomes are sub-optimal.
Look at the evidence: Most of these companies had been highly and ever-increasingly profitable even before the layoffs, and they knew they were burning employee goodwill. Are you saying their actions haven't been coordinated and just accidentally happened to all follow the same practices at the same time? Including things like RTO, which their own internal data proves does not improve productivity and industry data actually shows increases attrition?
Sure, there's not been a written industry-wide memo laying out a playbook (that we know of), but everyone is following the same steps. And you would assume there is no secrecy, rather than (as sibling comments point out) "they have learned from the last time they got caught colluding"?
It's not some global conspiracy, it just aligns with the end of the ZIRP era. Companies could ignore headcount and hire endlessly just to singla growth to investors, while free money was raining from the sky.
Amazon made $17.4 billion profit in Q3 2025 alone. That is, they made so much money they couldn't find any way to spend over five BILLION per month even with this 'excess' headcount.
> Amazon has about 350,000 corporate employees and a total workforce of approximately 1.56 million.
Is it mentioned anywhere that the roles eliminated are all going to be software engineers, because that’s what all the threads so far are interpreting this as. This feels more like preparing for a recession without saying it out loud. People aren’t buying as much anymore and with focus on cost savings across tech, can easily understand AWS not covering for lower retail revenue anymore.
I’ll say that the parent comment is correct and explain why I think it’s correct.
Amazon has demonstrated a preference for “unregretted attrition” (URA). URA is the name for what happens when engineers exit the company and Amazon is happy that they do. The exit can either be due to a PIP failure (performance improvement plan) or just unhappiness with the company. If you believe URA works well, then URA is how Amazon gets rid of low-performing employees. If you are like me, then you believe that URA is mostly explained by the following factors:
- Failure of Amazon to successfully develop engineers. A good company will turn engineers into better engineers, and Amazon gets rid of them instead, which is inefficient. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon was not competent enough to develop these engineers into better engineers.
- Consequences of poor culture, causing good engineers to mentally check out and eventually leave. The attrition is only unregretted because the good engineers will care less and therefore look like bad performers, when they’re good performers in a bad environment.
- A way for Amazon to avoid paying out stock grants at the 2-year mark (which is when you get most of your stock grants at Amazon). The attrition is only unregretted because somebody at Amazon cares more about the short-term bottom line.
- A way for managers to exercise control over employees they don’t like. The attrition is only unregretted because Amazon’s decisions about employee performance are based on bad data provided by managers.
I won’t share stories here but the targets are around 5% per year, maybe a little higher.
Meta also does something like 5% in unregretted attrition a year. I just don't know why you think AMZN wouldn't include those people in layoffs preferentially to higher performers.
During my time at Meta, they were teaching the engineers a lot, spent a lot of effort on proper onboarding, allowed changing teams at least once a year (more often with longer tenure), and otherwise seemed to make it easier for an engineer to find a better place in the Meta's structure instead of leaving.
I've been in the tech industry for 45 years. Layoffs happen regularly. Well, not regularly, what it is is a chaotic system. There will be good times and bad times. The best way to deal with it is to immediately save, at a minimum, 6 months of runway. Preferably a year.
When you're in between jobs, work on:
1. improving your job skills
2. network
3. build your resume by contributing to open source
I don't intend to be dismissive by sharing a bunch, I ate a bunch of downvotes so I should share something. But, there's no singular, like, Wikipedia article for "tech layoffs spiked significantly in 2022 and have stayed elevated" - so this is a mix of informal and formal and academic and business news that treats that knowledge as implicit while discussing it.
(I am deeply curious what valhalla you are at that skipped this so much that it was a foreign idea! N or A, it must be one of those two)
Sure, it waxes and wanes. 2022-2023 were probably above average layoff years, while 2020-2021 before that were probably below average years. I think layoffs have fallen since 2023 rather than staying elevated, but I haven't attempted to quantify that.
Q: You know what investors and shareholders love more than having 1 billion dollars?
A: Having 2 billion dollars. And with all the money being burned on AI, having 2 billion is better than 1.
If mass layoffs causes the stock to go from 1 to 2, then guess what's gonna happen?
In the ZIRP era companies would hire needlessly to get the stock up because that signaled growth to investors. Now it's the opposite, you trim because that gets the stock up, not because they conspire together to lay off people.
Why is the highest and best use of a company's free cash paying the least productive employees, instead of returning cash to shareholders or investing it in something more productive?
To what end? The runs aren't going to be long enough for fiber to provide a benefit, and the transceivers are more expensive for consumer use like this.
Some of it is historical reasons or portability more than anything else. Chrome is an old C++ project and evolved many of its own versions of functionality before standardization; and there's benefit to staying on its own implementations rather than switching.
> The tool – dubbed Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) – receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid) and other sources, 404 Media reports based on court testimony in Oregon by law enforcement agents, among other sources.
So, they have a tool that sucks up data from a bunch of different sources, including Medicaid. But there's no actual nexus between Medicaid and illegal immigrants in this reporting.
Edit: In the link to their earlier filings, EFF claims that some states enroll illegal immigrants in Medicaid: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/eff-court-protect-our-...
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