It isn't good optics at the moment, or good politics, for a company to loudly proclaim "we're firing people because of AI taking their jobs".

That doesn't mean that's what happened, it only means that whether or not its true, most companies aren't going to say it. The few that have said anything of the sort have suffered some backlash, and they aren't even as prominent as Meta or Microsoft (which also just announced plans to reduce by ~7% through buybacks, the first in their > 50 years) And this is on top of their decline to ~210,000 employees after 2025 firing of 15,000.

It's probably not fun for executives to admit "we overhired and invested in the wrong things" either.

Didn't Square do that a couple weeks ago?

"When others explained that Facebook and Google didn't sell customer data, they didn't believe it"

I'm not sure there's a significant meaningful difference between direct selling and what they actually do, which is to make it available to target and manipulate people with extreme granularity. This is a huge part of why a person may not want their data to be held much less purchased to begin with, meaning it's "doesn't sell your data... but does or facilitates all of the things you do not want a group, in buying it from them, able to do."

It's a distinction without much practical difference.

Also: They buy your data from other brokers who do sell it, vastly enriching the degree to which customers of their ad platforms can make use of the data you already know they have far, far beyond your ability to know their full capabilities and the profile they have on you.

Again, it's not actually selling your data, but it's worth noting that when "they didn't believe it", that misconception was possibly helped along by Facebook or Google being on of the potential customers for that data either directly or via the proxy of a data broker whose largest customers are companies like that.

They aren't complicit when the cheap edition isn't reprinted and instead it's "2nd, 3rd, revised" etc.

Universities could band together and write and publish their own textbooks. These days they don't even need to print them.

A poor analysis that excludes any talk of the production costs of different aspects of getting a book to market.

Printing + labor in editing etc was 30% to 40% of sticker price in 1960. Today it's 10 to 15 or lower while author royties are about the same. Retail channels like Amazon demand a higher cut but not enough to cover that gap.

The net margin % of sticker paid by consumers above cost of production in all print and labor is paid by consumers, with the result that in raw dollars consumer still pay ~50% more than can be accounted for by inflation alone.

Consider: as a portion of average income, a very large # of everyday factory produced items are substantially less expensive, some even in non-inflation adjusted terms! A TV? A fraction of the cost. Plenty more examples. Books are expensive.

Roughly half the people you'd see walking are "walking away from home". It's not a known risk factor. In fact unless they live near "nature" then being seen walking anywhere at all near their home is pretty reasonable evidence that their disappearance, whatever the cause, is less likely to be "Got lost hiking" or similar.

Okay but one of them literally got lost hiking. Two, if you count the cancer researcher that a lot of people online seem to be bundling in for some reason.

They publicly said they were receiving threats. And that if something happened to them, don't believe it's suicide. That's a bit different than just, you know, saying it at random, or because someone asked you how you're doing.

It's a little different when the person is saying "I've received threats, so if you hear something happens to me, I did NOT kill myself!"

Then, you know, bringing up suicide and it being a warning sign they're about to? The odds have shifted a bit.

I mean, sort of? Let's put aside whatever she claims to have been working on. Then, consider, if there is a group of people more likely to be attacked by odd advanced weapons? Probably people whose work puts them into contact with with or near research into odd and exotic things. If someone was murdered in their NYC apartment and a schizophrenic neighbor claimed it was a wild tiger then sure, you'd take that with some salt. If you then found out the deceased worked at the zoo? Well...

Out of 50k people? These specific of backgrounds and scenarios of their death/disappearence?

No. That is surprising. Any statistics you'd find about the rates of any one or more of these kinds of disappearances are going to be population level, averaged out over groups that are much higher risk and therefore skew the average rates to seem higher than their priors actually dictate for many sub populations, eg, working professionals at large corporations of this specific type.

Surprising != something actually being connected, but it sure as hell is surprising and isn't something to dismiss as "well, law of large numbers so ::shrug::"

> No. That is surprising.

I'm genuinely curious if you found any data to support it especially when you add JPL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, MIT, Caltech, and the Kansas City National Security Campus to the list, over four years.

And what puts an even bigger question mark on the whole thing is that the FBI embarked on this whole thing after being asked by members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform when they read about it in the newspaper. How critical are these people and how surprising their final fate if the US needs a tabloid to ring the alarm?