ProgN said:

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Stmichael said:

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ProgN said:

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Stmichael said:

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And for the record, this isn't my first rodeo with job loss. I got furloughed from Fluor the day I finished the work I was assigned on an ethylene cracker. I was only there 2 years, and because I only had 1 job under my belt they decided I didn't have the specialty expertise to keep around and was an acceptable casualty after losing 25% of their stock price in a bad earnings miss.

Then I spent 3 months looking for a job, found the one I just got fired from, and only spent 9 months there before the new CEO decided that they would rather replace me with someone who had more industry experience rather than just finding more work for me to do.

If that's all I'm worth to corporate America, then I'm rooting for the reckoning that it's long overdue for. And if the supposed adults in the room can't be bothered to fix anything about it, then I hope they get theirs too.

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Instead of raging about Republicans and wealth, why not tell us what your professional skills are and see if our Aggie Network might be able to help. Or just rage drink and blame wallow in your TDS.

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I do, in the job network. I'm a process engineer with 8 years experience: 2 in manufacturing support, 3 in process scale-up, and another 3 in engineering design. And that's apparently too expensive for American companies to pay for, so they'd rather off-shore the work or bring in H-1B's and **** up the job market.

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What field? I'm not an engineer.

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I've worked in manufacturing engineering support (construction materials for my first job, asphalt based waterproofing. Moved to a biopharma facility doing much the same thing for my second job.) From there I moved into process development at the same company designing scale-ups of biopharma manufacturing processes based on bench scale proof of concept. The pay was terrible though, so I left and went to Fluor doing detail engineering design on an ethylene cracker for Dow. Spent 2 years doing that before getting furloughed, looked for a new job for 3 months before going into midstream oil and gas doing the same EPC type work I was doing at Fluor. Just got fired because I don't know the oil and gas industry at the same level as the person they hired to replace me.

That's the truly infuriating thing about the job search these days, at least for the engineering world. They hold out for a unicorn who has a decade in the exact job they're hiring for. Don't have it? We'll just overwork our existing staff until we find someone who does. Anything but invest resources in training people to be better employees. That's just money down the drain, we can't have that.

We let our house keeper go after purchasing a robot. Guess she and her crew can blame Elon as well for losing a job.

deddog said:

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Bull Meachem said:

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This is not a political statement:

If you made $1,000 dollars a day, it would take you 2.74 years to be a millionaire.
To be a billionaire, it would take you 2,739.7 years.
To be a trillionaire, it would take you 2.7 million years.

If you had started at the dawn of human civilization, you'd have around $107,000,000,000.

This is a political statement. I hope that he reads Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth and takes it to heart.

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The US government spends $7 Trillion a year.
If they confiscated all of Elon Musks wealth, they could fund, maybe 2 months of Government spending.
2 months. And there woud be no more Elon money going forward.

And yet we have the Bernies and Warrens of the world demanding we take more of Elon's money and give it to them.

THAT is a political statement

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The US has inflated their currency recklessly to spend on various forms of welfare, whether personal or corporate, for decades.

The investor class are sitting on a bubble of paper wealth that cannot remotely justify its valuation and is propped up by 401k plans and pension funds automatically injecting money into ETF's. This bubble allows them to borrow money from banks backed by their paper wealth so they can avoid even being taxed on said income, and spend like drunken sailors driving inflation.

Popping the bubble will immediately crater that gravy train, both allowing prices to fall again and forcing investment funds to reallocate into sectors other than tech and AI rather than just chasing momentum.

That is also a political statement in which I can root for the bear market to take y'all for everything you own and be rid of these insanely inflated prices.

Stmichael said:

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deddog said:

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Bull Meachem said:

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This is not a political statement:

If you made $1,000 dollars a day, it would take you 2.74 years to be a millionaire.
To be a billionaire, it would take you 2,739.7 years.
To be a trillionaire, it would take you 2.7 million years.

If you had started at the dawn of human civilization, you'd have around $107,000,000,000.

This is a political statement. I hope that he reads Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth and takes it to heart.

---

The US government spends $7 Trillion a year.
If they confiscated all of Elon Musks wealth, they could fund, maybe 2 months of Government spending.
2 months. And there woud be no more Elon money going forward.

And yet we have the Bernies and Warrens of the world demanding we take more of Elon's money and give it to them.

THAT is a political statement

---

The US has inflated their currency recklessly to spend on various forms of welfare, whether personal or corporate, for decades.

The investor class are sitting on a bubble of paper wealth that cannot remotely justify its valuation and is propped up by 401k plans and pension funds automatically injecting money into ETF's. This bubble allows them to borrow money from banks backed by their paper wealth so they can avoid even being taxed on said income, and spend like drunken sailors driving inflation.

Popping the bubble will immediately crater that gravy train, both allowing prices to fall again and forcing investment funds to reallocate into sectors other than tech and AI rather than just chasing momentum.

That is also a political statement in which I can root for the bear market to take y'all for everything you own and be rid of these insanely inflated prices.

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You're going to 100% get your wish soon, but I don't think you're going to like the result.

The centrally controlled Ponzi scheme is going to crash very very hard, and our government overlords are going to attempt to print even more fake money to protect their donors and corporate owners. And we will continue to move toward Europes big government nanny state economy. It's going to be terrible for middle class Americans.

I agree with you that it's already fairly bad now, but it's about to get a whole lot worse. It's why we need to shrink our government by 90% today, or none of it matters anyway.

Find it funny you claimed the government sabotaged you of your potential prosperity by taking away the model that was going to provide it while simultaneously claiming AI has created an unjustifiable bubble.

Funny thing is that Musk isn't doing anything that violates what Carnegie advocated for in that essay.

What it says:

-Inequality is natural.
-Wealthy people should pursue wealth.
-Indiscriminate charity that facilitates sloth and drunkenness is bad. (i.e. don't build homeless shelters, don't try to solve world hunger)
-Most charitable donations are inefficient. That 95% of money given to charity is wasted.
-Wealthy people should utilize their wealth in their lifetime to do public good.
-Wealthy people should not leave their hoard of money to their children so they can be sloth like drunkards.
-Wealthy people should live modestly.
-The government should tax up to 50% of the estate upon their death.
-Wealthy people should build institutions that persist after their death. (Parks, libraries, art)

What has Musk done with his wealth? He made money from Zip2 (money making pursuit), put it into PayPal (money making pursuit) and has since exiting PayPal spent the majority of his funds on building institutions to benefit society. That they are now profitable businesses is not the likely outcome of their inception.


Was SpaceX an obvious way to get rich in 2002? No. He built it to benefit society.

Were electric cars an obvious way to get rich in 2003? No. He built it to benefit society.

Is tunnel boring an obvious way to get rich? No, he built it to benefit society.

Is Neuralink an obvious way to get rich? No, he built it to benefit society.

Was buying Twitter an obvious way to get rich? No, he bought it to benefit society.

Was OpenAI an obvious way to get rich when started as a non-profit? No, he funded it to benefit society.


Carnegie's wealth doubled between the time he wrote that essay and when he sold his company. Laborers were killed at one of his steel mills 3 years after he wrote it while striking. Carnegie threatened to reduce their pay despite his business' profits increasing during the period.

I'll take Musk, his technology, his businesses, his making his employees rich over Carnegie and his public libraries and attempts to suppress his workers' wages.

FWTXAg said:

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Stmichael said:

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deddog said:

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Bull Meachem said:

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This is not a political statement:

If you made $1,000 dollars a day, it would take you 2.74 years to be a millionaire.
To be a billionaire, it would take you 2,739.7 years.
To be a trillionaire, it would take you 2.7 million years.

If you had started at the dawn of human civilization, you'd have around $107,000,000,000.

This is a political statement. I hope that he reads Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth and takes it to heart.

---

The US government spends $7 Trillion a year.
If they confiscated all of Elon Musks wealth, they could fund, maybe 2 months of Government spending.
2 months. And there woud be no more Elon money going forward.

And yet we have the Bernies and Warrens of the world demanding we take more of Elon's money and give it to them.

THAT is a political statement

---

The US has inflated their currency recklessly to spend on various forms of welfare, whether personal or corporate, for decades.

The investor class are sitting on a bubble of paper wealth that cannot remotely justify its valuation and is propped up by 401k plans and pension funds automatically injecting money into ETF's. This bubble allows them to borrow money from banks backed by their paper wealth so they can avoid even being taxed on said income, and spend like drunken sailors driving inflation.

Popping the bubble will immediately crater that gravy train, both allowing prices to fall again and forcing investment funds to reallocate into sectors other than tech and AI rather than just chasing momentum.

That is also a political statement in which I can root for the bear market to take y'all for everything you own and be rid of these insanely inflated prices.

---

You're going to 100% get your wish soon, but I don't think you're going to like the result.

The centrally controlled Ponzi scheme is going to crash very very hard, and our government overlords are going to attempt to print even more fake money to protect their donors and corporate owners. And we will continue to move toward Europes big government nanny state economy. It's going to be terrible for middle class Americans.

I agree with you that it's already fairly bad now, but it's about to get a whole lot worse. It's why we need to shrink our government by 90% today, or none of it matters anyway.

---

If they try to inflate that crash away with bailouts, then there needs to be dead politicians hanging from every tree in DC.

Shouldn't have skipped church.

Andrew Carnegie how much tax did he pay? Think how much you could give away if you didnt have to pay tax.

hph6203 said:

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Find it funny you claimed the government sabotaged you of your potential prosperity by taking away the model that was going to provide it while simultaneously claiming AI has created an unjustifiable bubble.

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Helping me code a side project without any coding background is a very different animal from whatever they're selling as. The total market cap of the companies staking their entire existence on AI is in the multiple *trillions* of dollars. The biggest players are either burning billions of dollars per year (open AI, Anthropic) or are literally paying those companies to buy their product (Nvidia.)

If you don't see any sort of problem with that, I don't know how to explain it to you.

backintexas2013 said:

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So since you are failing you want others to fail? Great attitude. Wow.

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Since I am getting robbed, I would like others to lose the ability to continue robbing me, yes.

How are you getting robbed? Who is robbing you? Are they in the room with you right now?

This engineer doesn't skip church. #Winning

Love you forever and always 💕

— Elizabeth Owen (@Liza_Owen_) June 14, 2026

backintexas2013 said:

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How are you getting robbed? Who is robbing you? Are they in the room with you right now?

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You're either trolling or willfully ignorant. If you don't understand that absurd inflation is theft from those who earn paychecks to those living off an investment portfolio, then you're clueless.

Nice deflection. Care to explain to me what exactly investors in Tesla and SpaceX got for their collective $75 billion dollars on Friday? Because they purchased a total of 5% of a company that lost $4.9 billion last year. In fact, they posted a loss of $4.3 billion in 2023, and only profited $0.9 billion in 2024.

Stack that up against companies like AT&T or Visa. See how they compare and tell me what, other than hype and promises, is keeping that bubble from popping.

Stmichael said:

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Nice deflection. Care to explain to me what exactly investors in Tesla and SpaceX got for their collective $75 billion dollars on Friday? Because they purchased a total of 5% of a company that lost $4.9 billion last year. In fact, they posted a loss of $4.3 billion in 2023, and only profited $0.9 billion in 2024.

Stack that up against companies like AT&T or Visa. See how they compare and tell me what, other than hype and promises, is keeping that bubble from popping.

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You don't invest in an IPO for today, you invest in it for tomorrow.

Teslag said:

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Stmichael said:

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Nice deflection. Care to explain to me what exactly investors in Tesla and SpaceX got for their collective $75 billion dollars on Friday? Because they purchased a total of 5% of a company that lost $4.9 billion last year. In fact, they posted a loss of $4.3 billion in 2023, and only profited $0.9 billion in 2024.

Stack that up against companies like AT&T or Visa. See how they compare and tell me what, other than hype and promises, is keeping that bubble from popping.

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You don't invest in an IPO for today, you invest in it for tomorrow.

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What's the PE ratio on the Mag 7 then? They've been at the top of the market for years, going on decades now for some of them. Are their revenues growing proportionate to their stock prices? Or is it inflated to absurdity because braindead institutional investors just dump retirement funds into ETFs without a care in the world and pray the bubble doesn't pop?

Starlink will ultimately make AT&T's subscriber base look quaint. They are about to surpass them in broadband subscribers (on pace to do so around October). Their Starship and v3 Starlink satellites will be able to double their bandwidth capacity in 15ish launches at a fraction of the cost. In conjunction with V3 they will launch Starlink as the backbone to cellphone providers across the globe, as well as compete for subscribers in their own right.

Take AT&T, double their subscribers, cut their costs, and exclude 90 years of bureaucratic bloat. That's the Starlink business long term.

Since their initial filing of their S1 SpaceX added $26 billion in annual contracts from Google and Anthropic. The amount they're receiving in a single year is more than the amount spent on building the compute capacity. The promise of SpaceX is taking what is a bespoke construction challenge with heavy regulatory burden, building data centers, and turning it into an assembly line process.


I think SpaceX is early to their $2T valuation, but also think people who buy today and hold for a decade will be happy with their purchase. Not too dissimilar to people who bought Tesla at its IPO price. Probably not quite as good of a return.

It's not a lie. He's ~30 with a resume that got him a $130,000/yr job. Bought a house. Has a wife. A kid. He's doing pretty well. Seems like it happened last week so it's new. Ya crazy if you think people aren't gonna bust his balls for behaving this way though. It is required of manhood.

Been in Fortune 100 a long time, and in that time have done a number of RIFs. That said, one thing that always holds true is that I've never fired any of our better people. You find a spot for those folks.

hph6203 said:

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It's not a lie. He's ~30 with a resume that got him a $130,000/yr job. Bought a house. Has a wife. A kid. He's doing pretty well. Seems like it happened last week so it's new. Ya crazy if you think people aren't gonna bust his balls for behaving this way though. It is required of manhood.

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Well if it gets any worse I'd recommend moving to Minnesota, he can at least get tampons in the bathroom.

hph6203 said:

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This engineer doesn't skip church. #Winning

Love you forever and always 💕

— Elizabeth Owen (@Liza_Owen_) June 14, 2026

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Absolute Nails, on the 2 biggest decisions in your life. Bad, non Christian spouses will more often than not, lead to bad outcomes.

Enrico Pallazzo said:

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Been in Fortune 100 a long time, and in that time have done a number of RIFs. That said, one thing that always holds true is that I've never fired any of our better people. You find a spot for those folks.

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As measured by what, the ones who sacrifice their family life and spend 60-80 hours a week in the office? If living in my cubicle is the measure of what makes a "good" employee, I'll take my chances with whatever rises out of the ashes of the post commie apocalypse. My responsibility as a father and husband is more than to be a bank account.

This keeps getting better.

Stmichael said:

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The whole discussion is still ridiculous. Convincing enough people to buy shares of SpaceX at about $165 that you manage to raise $76 billion is a *long* way from being a trillionaire. I want to see how many of those supposed millionaires Musk created in the IPO actually get to cash in their chips and leave the table.

It's all monopoly money. We've built an economy on a house of cards rather than actual solid foundation, and I can't muster even the slightest bit of pity for anyone who keeps shoveling everything into this bubble economy. You reap what you sow.

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Are you claiming they were prevented from selling on Friday once the shares went public?

A lot of the employee stock holders cannot sell for 6 months after IPO

Stmichael said:

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Enrico Pallazzo said:

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Been in Fortune 100 a long time, and in that time have done a number of RIFs. That said, one thing that always holds true is that I've never fired any of our better people. You find a spot for those folks.

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As measured by what, the ones who sacrifice their family life and spend 60-80 hours a week in the office? If living in my cubicle is the measure of what makes a "good" employee, I'll take my chances with whatever rises out of the ashes of the post commie apocalypse. My responsibility as a father and husband is more than to be a bank account.

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And there it is. You are pissed because you believed the lie you were told since childhood. You are owed something by society because you did what you were taught was the way. Go to college regardless of cost (get a loan not a job), you will get a great job with said degree. Buy a house, have a family and continue to vote Blue cause their promises always come true, until they don't and now it's the wealthy's problem (Sanders and Warren) will make sure you know who to blame. Vote for the party who "cares" and tax the rich. It amazes me that after 60+ years Dems continue to get suckers every election that buy into it and like clock work upon failure, make it the rich who caused all the problems.

I have 2 children, both Aggies who are 30 & 27 and honestly if above is true about your career then you are way behind, but yes being a father and husband takes priority, but if you aren't putting your absolute best into your job, then you aren't doing your job as a father & husband.

Stmichael said:

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Enrico Pallazzo said:

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Been in Fortune 100 a long time, and in that time have done a number of RIFs. That said, one thing that always holds true is that I've never fired any of our better people. You find a spot for those folks.

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As measured by what, the ones who sacrifice their family life and spend 60-80 hours a week in the office? If living in my cubicle is the measure of what makes a "good" employee, I'll take my chances with whatever rises out of the ashes of the post commie apocalypse. My responsibility as a father and husband is more than to be a bank account.

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As measured by your performance reviews? I have also had to lay off employees during 3 RIFs. I never laid people off that were not performing at lower levels than their peers, which can mean several things…….not understanding the technical part of their role, not being responsive or available when necessary, bad attitudes, not working hard during our busiest time of year, complaints from clients, etc. none of them were high performers.

If you were considered a high performer, you would not have been laid off by multiple companies.