Tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook (now known as Meta), and Salsesforce have also recently announced tens of thousands of layoffs as they tighten their belts amid a worsening outlook for the industry
Breitbart News recently covered Microsoft’s announcement of the layoff of 10,000 employees through March 31 as the company prepares for slower revenue growth. The software giant further stated that it will be taking a $1.2 billion charge tied to a lease consolidation and other activities.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and the head of its parent company Alphabet, informed staff on Friday of the layoffs in an email that was also posted on the business’ news blog. Pichai claimed that the layoffs are a result of a “rigorous review” of Google’s business practices.
According to Pichai, the positions being eliminated “cut across Alphabet, product areas, functions, levels, and regions.” He expressed his “deep regret” for the layoffs.
Regulatory filings show how Google’s workforce increased during the coronavirus pandemic, from 119,000 at the end of 2019 to nearly 187,000 by the end of last year. Google, which was established almost 25 years ago, was “bound to go through difficult economic cycles,” according to Pichai.
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Wedbush Securities analysts Dan Ives, John Katsingris, and Taz Koujalgi, recently stated that “the clock has struck midnight on hyper-growth and digital advertising headwinds are on the horizon,” forcing the previously booming tech sector to halt hiring and announce layoffs.
Microsoft recently announced the elimination of 10,000 jobs, or nearly 5 percent of its workforce. Amazon announced this month that it is eliminating 18,000 jobs, though that represents a small portion of its 1.5 million-person workforce, while business software provider Salesforce is eliminating 8,000 jobs, or 10 percent of the entire workforce. Facebook announced last fall that it would cut 11,000 jobs, or 13 percent of its workforce.
The Wedbush analysts stated: “The stage is being set: Tech names across the board are cutting costs to preserve margins and get leaner.”
Despite indications that the economy is slowing down, employment in the United States has remained strong, and another 223,000 jobs were created in December. However, the tech industry expanded incredibly quickly over the past few years due to increased demand brought on by employees starting to work remotely.
Both Pichai and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted the value of leveraging their advancements in artificial intelligence technology in their layoff announcements, reflecting a resurgence of competition between the tech titans sparked by Microsoft’s expanding partnership with the San Francisco startup OpenAI.
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Biden classified files were sent to ANOTHER D.C. location before they were stored at think tank – by team led by aide who’d been recommended by Hunter – sparking more questions about the documents debacle
- Files from Biden VP’s office first went to a transition office near White House
- Then then went to a temporary Penn Biden space in downtown D.C.
- Eventually went to Penn Biden think tank that paid Biden $900,000
The long and winding document trail that leads classified documents from Joe Biden’s vice presidential office to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C. and now back into the hands of the government, includes yet another stopover: a temporary facility in the nation’s capital, a source tells DailyMail.com.
The documents were moved in the summer of 2017 after spending about six months at a government transition office near the White House once Biden left the vice presidency.
The space, in DC’s Chinatown neighborhood, was overseen by the Penn Biden Center while its prized location near the Capitol was being readied. The office had its formal opening, attended by Biden, in 2018.
‘Everything was just moved en masse to temporary space, then moved to Penn Biden,’ the person told DailyMail.com.
The new location adds yet another layer to the confusing classified documents debacle in which the files ended up inside a locked cabinet at the Penn Biden Center where they got discovered in November 2022 – while raising new questions about the total universe of people who might have had access to the documents over a last six years.
People involved in the process include Biden’s former staff members, General Services Administration personnel, and the staff at the think tank, an entity that would later have roles for senior aides that remain in Biden’s orbit, including now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who served as the center’s managing director.
The woman who oversaw the packing and shipping of Biden’s documents in 2017 was former administrative assistant Kathy Chung, who secured the position with a well-placed recommendation from Hunter Biden, who touted her capabilities to his father.
‘Hunter Biden recommended it. They had worked together at Department of Commerce years ago,’ the person said. Hunter notified her of the opportunity, asked her if she was interested, and found out that she was.
‘He spoke to her father about her,’ said the person. So did former Delaware Sen. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden associate who is among the trio of Democratic senators she had worked for in the past.
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The costly stupidity of the recycling religion
The ugly truth is that many “recyclables” sent to recycling plants are never recycled
For decades, we’ve been told: Recycle!
“If we’re not using recycled paper, we’re cutting down more trees!” says Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka Recycling.
Recycling paper (or cardboard) does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But that’s about it.
The ugly truth is that many “recyclables” sent to recycling plants are never recycled. The worst is plastic. Even Greenpeace now says, “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street.”
Hoffman often trucks it to a landfill.
Years ago, science writer John Tierney wrote a New York Times Magazine story, “Recycling Is Garbage.” It set a Times record for hate mail. But what he wrote was true.
“It’s even more true today,” Tierney tells me. “Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less.”
It would be smarter to just dump our garbage in landfills.
People think landfills are horrible polluters. But they’re not. Regulations (occasionally, government regulations are actually useful) make sure today’s landfills have protective barriers so they don’t leak.
Eventually, landfills are turned into good things: ski hills, parks, and golf courses.
But aren’t we running out of landfill space? For years, alarmist media said we were. But that’s not true.
In 1987, the media gave lots of publicity to a garbage barge that traveled thousands of miles trying and failing to find a place to dump its load.
But that barge wasn’t rejected because there was a lack of room. States turned the barge away after hysterical media suggested it contained “infectious waste.” The Environmental Protection Agency later found it was normal garbage.
Landfills have plenty of room for that. In fact, America has more space than we will ever need. Sometimes states and businesses even compete to get our garbage.
“If you think of the United States as a football field,” says Tierney, “all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line.”
Putting garbage in landfills is often much cheaper than recycling. My town would save $340 million a year if it just stopped recycling.
But it won’t, “because people demand it,” says Tierney. “It’s a sacrament of the green religion.”
The religion’s commandments are complex. New York City orders me to: “Place recyclables at the curb between 4 p.m. and midnight. … Rinse plastic containers. … Separate paper from plastic, metal, and glass.” Paper must be tied “with twine into bundles no taller than 18 inches,” and so on.
“That’s one reason recycling fails,” says Tierney. “It’s so complicated; people never learn the rules.”
Worse, some recycling is pointless or harmful. “If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water,” Tierney points out, “the net result is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage.”
Since most plastic can’t be recycled, what’s the environmentalists’ solution now? “Stop producing it,” says Greenpeace’s John Hocevar. Lots of environmental groups now want to ban plastic.
That’s just silly. Plastic is useful. Using it often creates fewer emissions than its alternatives. Plastic bags create fewer than paper bags. A metal straw has to be used 150 times before it creates less pollution than a plastic straw.
Environmental groups rarely mention that or how they misled us about recycling year after year.
“It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted,” complains Tierney. “Instead, they have a proposal [banning plastic] that will make life even worse.”
Plastic is not evil. Recycling is no climate savior. When Los Angeles mandated it, it added 400 big, noisy garbage trucks. That creates lots of pollution.
But environmentalists still demand we do things like pick through our trash, and switch from plastic to paper bags that rip. California even banned small plastic shampoo bottles.
“Some of these rules are just so arbitrary and silly,” complains Tierney. “It’s simply a way for greens and for some politicians to pretend that they’re saving the planet.”
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T-Mobile says hacker accessed personal data of 37 million customers
In a financial filing on Thursday, T-Mobile revealed that a hacker accessed a trove of personal data belonging to 37 million customers.
The telecom giant said that the “bad actor” started stealing the data, which includes “name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and information such as the number of lines on the account and plan features,” since November 25.
In the SEC filing, T-Mobile said it detected the breach more than a month later, on January 5, and that within a day it had fixed the problem that the hacker was exploiting.
The hackers, according to T-Mobile, didn’t breach any company system but rather abused an application programming interface, or API.
“Our investigation is still ongoing, but the malicious activity appears to be fully contained at this time, and there is currently no evidence that the bad actor was able to breach or compromise our systems or our network,” the company wrote.
This is the eighth time T-Mobile was hacked since 2018. The most recent incident was in 2022, when a group of hackers known as Lapsus$ were able to gain access to the company’s internal tools, which gave them the chance to carry out so-called SIM swaps, a type of hack where hackers take over a victim’s phone number and then try to leverage that to reset and access the target’s sensitive accounts such as email or cryptocurrency wallets.
T-Mobile has 110 million U.S. customers. A spokesperson for T-Mobile did not respond to a request for comment.
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