Mastodawn

mcc May 27, 2025

Airlines are like "instead of all those agents, we'll make a sort of assembly line manned by customers. Check in with one machine, drop your baggage off with another."

Then literally anything happens with the computer network requiring an elevated number of customers to need manual intervention, and suddenly you have an enormous immobile line while every single customer lines up before the two (2) remaining agents.

Corporations don't care about "efficiency" they just wanna fire people

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mcc May 27, 2025

I really believe this. We were told capitalist entities will act to minimize costs and maximize profit. But what corporations actually seek to do, for whatever reason, is minimize *labor* cost. They prefer to bear any other kind of cost. They will minimize labor costs even if it increases overall costs and/or hurts profits

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Asta [AMP]May 27, 2025

@mcc my personal pet theory as to the "why" of this is because fees paid for "technological" solutions go to their friends and friends' companies and stocks, whereas wages are just "lost".

I have no evidence to back this up, but it does feel like they explicitly are attempting to block class mobility and that's certainly one way to do it.

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cthos 🐱May 27, 2025

@aud @mcc Corporate finance gets real wonky when you start digging into it. Capital expenditure vs Operational Expenditure. Those have to be reported different ways on earnings reports and wages typically fall under the latter (though there are some exceptions).

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@cthos @aud @mcc

capex is a way to signal investors you're hiring people who could have agency and start a competition business. op cost show investors how much money a corporate raider can make by verticalizing (layoffs), so dictates acquisition premium and most of stock price is faith revenue is detached from it, which is the job of the ceo saying things like we're AI now.