[makomk]

It's not just a question of shareholder value and profits always needing to go up - there are real society-wide opportunity costs to companies like Sony continuing as before. All of the workers they employ and the resources they use are workers and resources that cannot instead be producing other things, and the increase in interest rates that's lead to all these layoff is essentially a signal that those opportunity costs are higher and the bar for economic activity to be viable is higher than before.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the pandemic and the economic shutdowns hugely impacted economic output in a way that couldn't be magicked away by printing money and handing out furlough payments - all the furloughed and unemployed workers and shuttered still produced nothing during that time, that unusued capacity could not be saved up for later, and so it wasn't possible for everyone to continue buying the same amount of stuff as before even though goverments in the developed world tried to create the illusion they could. This also created a temporary increase in demand in certain sectors, like video games, which has since vanished.

[opyate]

Sure, there are these macro-economic factors, and Sony is not a charity, but it still sickens me that CEOs get millions in comp (and others in C-suite, and exec bonuses), board members get hundreds of thousands for sitting in on a few meetings a year, yet the little guy suffers.

I'm a big believer in co-operatives and shared ownership, but then I should probably also face the reality that if you make it too comfortable for some people, they would just grow fat/lazy and not work at all, so perhaps all this "fire under your arse" and competition is good for us all.

A calculation Nathan Brown (Hit Points newsletter) made a year ago when Microsoft laid off 10% of its workforce:

> According to the salary-tracking website Comparably, the median Microsoft salary is $162,818 per year. Blowing the dust off the trusty Hit Points calculator, it appears that if Microsoft pulled out of the Activision deal and put that $68.7bn towards employee salaries instead, it could keep the 10,000 staff it is laying off today on the books for over 41 years.

(substack seems to be croaking, so no direct link, sorry)

Again, Microsoft is not a charity, but it does make you think: they'd rather be a monopoly than show some loyalty to their workers.