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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (158249)	5/23/2020 9:16:51 PM
From: Pogeu Mahone	Respond to of 217516

We would still be the old normal However brilliant central planning lead us here to the NEW normal: PLAGUE YEAR —IBM laying off thousands, seeking “flexibility” during COVID-19 crisisIf other companies close their doors, whom does an enterprise supplier supply? KATE COX - 5/22/2020, 3:27 PM Enlarge / Unlike the illustrative man in this stock photo, employees at HPE, IBM, and other firms conducting layoffs at this time may not even be able to gather their effects from offices closed due to coronavirus. Tetra Images \| Daniel Grill \| Getty Images 106WITH 84 POSTERS PARTICIPATING SHARE ON FACEBOOK SHARE ON TWITTER The COVID-19 crisis is hitting almost every market sector hard, and now the dominos are starting to fall. As other small, medium, and large businesses pare back operations or shutter for good, the tech firms that rely on enterprise clients are themselves taking heavy losses and laying off personnel. Both Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and IBM this week announced significant cost-cutting measures, including pay cuts and significant job losses. Ars Technica Join Ars Technica and Get Our Best Tech Stories DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX. SIGN ME UP Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy IBM announced its layoffs late Thursday. In a statement, the company said the "highly competitive marketplace requires flexibility to constantly remix high-value skills," which in this case means deciding you no longer place a high value on the skills a significant number of employees bring to the socially distanced table. IBM, like many firms now facing cuts and layoffs, was not in the best of financial situations before COVID-19 hit. The company's CEO, Arvind Krishna, has been with the company for decades but only stepped into the top seat in April, saying at the time he was focused on building up the parts of the company that support cloud computing and artificial intelligence and was willing to move away from the rest. IBM did not specify how many positions were being cut, but both The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News report thousands of employees were affected in five states: California, New York, North Carolina, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. Employees, who spoke to Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity, reported entire teams are being cut and mentioned receiving severance packages. IBM said in a statement it would offer subsidized medical coverage to affected employees for the next 12 months. HPE also announced its cost-cutting plans on Thursday as part of its more recent quarterly earnings report. The company will cut some salaries through at least October 31, with executives seeing pay cuts of 20 to 25 percent. The company, like younger tech brethren such as Facebook and Twitter, says it will further save money by embracing remote work in the longer term, allowing it to shutter some offices. Although the company expects to conduct layoffs, company leadership did not specify which divisions or how many jobs are at stake. For now, the company said it is "working through the details in the next couple months" to determine what makes sense for the business. The older, stalwart enterprise firms are not alone. Modern tech upstarts such as Uber and Lyft have laid off thousands of workers in response to cratering consumer demand during the plague year 2020.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (158249)	5/24/2020 7:10:02 AM
From: Pogeu Mahone	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217516

Lockdown was a waste of time and could kill more than it saved, claims Nobel laureate scientist at Stanford UniversityProfessor Michael Levitt won the shared Nobel prize for chemistry in 2013 Suggested the decision to keep people indoors was motivated by 'panic' Professor Levitt also said Neil Ferguson's modelling overestimated deaths Here’s how to help people impacted by Covid-19By SARA SCARLETT FOR MAILONLINE PUBLISHED: 20:30 EDT, 23 May 2020 \| UPDATED: 04:01 EDT, 24 May 2020 e-mail 6.6kshares 2.2k View comments The coronavirus lockdown could have caused more deaths than it saved, a Nobel laureate scientist has claimed. Michael Levitt, a Stanford University professor who correctly predicted the initial scale of the pandemic, suggested the decision to keep people indoors was motivated by 'panic' rather than the best science. Professor Levitt also said the modelling that caused the government to bring in the lockdown - carried out by Professor Neil Ferguson - over-estimated the death toll by '10 or 12 times'. His claims echo those in a JP Morgan report that said lockdowns failed to alter the course of the pandemic but have instead 'destroyed millions of livelihoods'. TOP ARTICLES1/5READ MOREOxford University vaccine trial has only a50% chance of success because virus is vanishing in UK Author Marko Kolanovic, a trained physicist and a strategist for JP Morgan, said governments had been spooked by 'flawed scientific papers' into imposing lockdowns which were 'inefficient or late' and had little effect. He said falling infection rates since lockdowns were lifted suggest that the virus 'likely has its own dynamics' which are 'unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown measures'. Denmark is among the countries which has seen its R rate continue to fall after schools and shopping malls re-opened, while Germany's rate has mostly remained below 1.0 after the lockdown was eased. +4 This graph published in a JP Morgan report shows that many countries saw their infection rates fall rather than rise again when they ended their lockdowns - suggesting that the virus may have its own 'dynamics' which are 'unrelated' to the emergency measures +4 A second graph shows a similar effect in the US, showing that many states saw a lower rate of transmission (R) after full-scale lockdowns were ended +4 Michael Levitt, a Stanford University professor who correctly predicted the initial scale of the pandemic, suggested the decision to keep people indoors was motivated by 'panic' rather than the best science Prof Levitt told The Telegraph: 'I think lockdown saved no lives. I think it may have cost lives. It will have saved a few road accident lives, things like that, but social damage – domestic abuse, divorces, alcoholism – has been extreme. 'And then you have those who were not treated for other conditions.' Professor Levitt, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2013 for the 'development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems', has said for two months that most experts predictions about coronavirus are wrong. He also believes that the Government should encourage Britons to wear masks and find other ways to continue working while socially distancing instead. Prof Ferguson's modelling, on the other hand, estimated up to 500,000 deaths would occur without social distancing measures. RELATED ARTICLES Previous 1 2 Next Publication of Professor Neil Ferguson's latest model is... Two metre rule could be relaxed and is under frequent review... EXCLUSIVE: Senior Tory MP fears Boris Johnson has 'lost his... SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Prof Levitt added: 'For reasons that were not clear to me, I think the leaders panicked and the people panicked. There was a huge lack of discussion.' The 73-year-old Nobel prize winner in not an epidemiologist, but he assessed the outbreak in China at the start of the crisis and made alternative predictions based on his own calculations. Although Professor Levitt does acknowledge that lockdowns can be effective, he describes them as 'medieval' and thinks epidemiologists exaggerate their claims so that people are more likely to listen to them. His comments come as other scientists working in the same field also reported that they couldn't verify Prof Ferguson's work. Competing scientists' research - whose models produced vastly different results - were largely ignored by government advisers. David Richards, co-founder of British data technology company WANdisco said Ferguson's model was a 'buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming'. +4 Between May 12 and May 19, in a rolling seven day average, Britain saw 5.75 deaths per million inhabitants. In Sweden the figure was 6.25 deaths per million, higher than the United States (4.17), France (3.49), Italy (3.0), Spain (2.95) and Germany (0.81) Coronavirus epidemic could plateau within 10 days: govt advisor Loaded: 0% Progress: 0% 0:00 Previous Play Skip Mute Current Time0:00 / Duration Time0:35 Fullscreen Need Text Mr Richards said: 'In our commercial reality we would fire anyone for developing code like this and any business that relied on it to produce software for sale would likely go bust.' University of Edinburgh researchers also reportedly found bugs when running the model, getting different results when they used different machines, or even the same machines in some cases. The team reported a 'bug' in the system which was fixed - but specialists in the field remain staggered at how inadequate it is. Four experienced modellers previously noted the code is 'deeply riddled with bugs', has 'huge blocks of code – bad practice' and is 'quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen'. After the model's grim prediction, the University of Edinburgh's Professor Michael Thursfield criticised Professor Ferguson's record as 'patchy'. ADVERTISEMENT Read more: Lockdown saved no lives and may have cost them, Nobel Prize winner believes Share or comment on this article: Lockdown was a waste of time and could kill more than it saved, claims Nobel laureate e-mail 6.6k shares Add comment