Posts Tagged: "economics"

A cardboard-craft still life on white paper: a small paper graduate in a mortarboard stands where a cardboard path forks. To the left, the path turns dark grey and breaks into scattered fragments that disappear under a torn sheet of cream paper. To the right, three continuous teal lanes widen and sweep away into the distance.

The AI hiring split:
my playbook for new grads and companies

The entry-level squeeze happens through jobs that never get posted, which makes the damage almost invisible to layoff trackers.

A cardboard-craft still life: on the left, a spool of dark cable labeled '.com' with loose cables and scattered cardboard microchip tiles; on the right, a stack of cardboard server-rack units labeled 'AI' — the dot-com era set beside the AI buildout.

AI vs dot-com:
where they rhyme and where they don't

The AI buildout is not just a bet on demand. It is a bet that compute remains scarce long enough to repay the cost of building it.

A cardboard-craft still life: a conveyor of paper payroll cards, each stamped with a worker icon and a dollar sign, feeds into a central press that outputs a row of black server-rack blocks — payroll being converted into compute.

Payroll for Compute

For the biggest technology companies, the most important AI-layoff mechanism is often capital allocation, not direct labor substitution.

Two cardboard masks on a tan background: a smooth, intact face wearing neat red lipstick beside a cracked, broken face with the same red smeared across its mouth

Lipstick on a Sick Face

AI layoff language is used as a packaging trick: it turns budget pressure, weak demand, or management choices into a strategy story.

Halftone illustration of a hazy city skyline in muted blues and reds

The AI Layoff Taxonomy:
A Guide to What's Actually Happening

“AI layoff” is not one story but seven — and only one of them is AI literally doing someone's job. The rest are ordinary cuts relabeled as AI, payroll redirected into compute, org flattening, weak-demand retrenchment, or jobs that are simply never created.