Have there been any serious legal efforts to make this less profitable? It's very clearly detrimental to society.
This is crazy inefficient yet it's not captured in our economic theories, so we're essentially blind to it.
The main thing to do is make it so you can't just lay off people as easily as you can in the US for pretty much no reason. But it seems workers are still too divided to really come together and achieve such 9initiatives. Be it unions, pressuring their governments to make new laws, or simply chastising and boycotting companies who engage on such actions.
Maybe one thing we should do is to allow suing company executives for breach of fiduciary duty when they waste resources on some useless project or feature. This could make many companies more efficient.
Oh and also ban dumping. You should not be allowed to sell stuff below cost of production. Development effort with big maybe ignored.
> Hopper: You let one ant stand up to us, then they all might stand up! Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life! It's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line.
In our case, it's more like a million to one
People that are being squeezed by PE have less money to wield as political influence partially because they are being squeezed by PE.
The ones doing the squeezing are ok with that.
The people who are uninvolved, who fit into neither box, don't care enough or don't have enough money they're able & willing to part with. They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to.
This is the local optimum.
That lack of care is going to cost us all in ways we'll be forced to care about one day. Not necessarily for Vimeo, but definitely much more important things that people are ignorant or actively turning their heads against.
> They also don't have fancy accountants or corporate accounts to expense it to.
We call them our represenatives. We expense it to them with our votes (and literal expenses with tax dollars we are forced to part with). But votes require care and we're back in the loop.
By then, it'll be too late. The ruling party has a monopoly on violence, perpetrated by sycophants and enabled by wide-area surveillance analyzed by AI. We're a matter of months (maybe years) away from kill-drones being used with impunity against the populace.
> We expense it to them with our votes
Gerrymandering by the ruling party has ensured that your vote won't make a difference. Even if it did, election interference by the ruling party has ensured that it won't be counted. Even if it is, the ruling party has expressed its wishes to cancel elections, and who's gonna stop them when they have all the kill-drones and thugs, paid out of a bottomless bank account?
Sometime in the late 00's they realized people were still happily using software from the 90's, because it worked for their needs, and well, we can't have that...
I despise their business model, but it is what it is.
I won't repeat the same usual solutions again, but I'll mention one thing that already exists: the WARN act. The spirit of this is good, to give employees a 3 month buffer of when their job is ending. But it's clearly abused at worst, and not enforced at best. It's not as good as other countries' worker rights, but ot exists today to be looked at. In addition, severance can help to. This is standard, but even the "generous packages" in the US tend to be on the lower end of what other countries need to do.
Basically, it shouldn't be a drop dead easy decision for a company to mass layoff and have the workers surprised at the facs. It needs to both be slowed down and give immediate short term costs. That's a start of "kinda actual change" to strive for.
1. Bending Spoons model is known, everybody knows as soon it's announced
2. The company belongs to the shareholders and founders. It's them making the decision.
2. And I'm saying a cooperation shouldn't be able to make reckless decisions like "lets lay off most of our workforce" withotu reprecussions. Like most civilized societies outside the US do. Thats's what the bulk of my previous response is about.
What are you arguing? That you can do anything you want to something you own? That's not true for nearly anything in modern society.
Those rights need to show up in company balance sheets as a contingent liability.
That applies when the company is acquired as well.
The employment of a company need to be either paid out to employees at net present value, or need to be transferred to the new owners as part of the sale.
In the US, with employment sponsored health insurance, it's even more important.