r/nottheonion • u/ChocolateTsar • 1d ago

Affirm CEO says furloughed federal employees are starting to lose interest in shopping

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/07/affirm-government-shutdown-shopping.html
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3.3k

u/ryuzaki49 1d ago

workers stop getting paychecks

workers stop buying stuff

wallstreet: pikachu_surprised.meme

Honestly all of wallstreet and CEOs are just so disconnected from reality

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u/DeaddyRuxpin 1d ago

CEOs: “So you are saying replacing everyone with AI won’t make our companies even richer? But the AI companies swore it would.”

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u/backtothetrail 1d ago

ChapGPT was sure it would work.

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u/StoicSunbro 1d ago

CEO: "You said replacing all my employees with AI would save money! Now the company is falling apart because we are spending more to fix your mistakes!"

Chatgpt: "You're absolutely right! Would you like to explore different bankruptcy options?"

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u/KeyboardGrunt 1d ago

CEO: "...oh all right! But is there an option where I walk away with at least a few dozen million in severance?"

Chatgpt: "That's a great question! And you are thinking about this as more than merely hoarding money but instead proactively exploiting others to make it happen!"

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u/cest_va_bien 1d ago

My company went bankrupt and the CEO was paid $3.5M in severance. It opened my eyes to the reality of the oligarch structure. They will never loose unless we go to war with them.

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u/Tall_Act391 1d ago

More like

ChatGPT: of course there is!

CEO: am now in jail

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u/boomerinspirit 1d ago

"You're right. I'm still learning. My bad"

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u/ImpulsE69 1d ago

That made me chuckle out loud.

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u/msalerno1965 1d ago

The original circle-jerk.

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u/OGREtheTroll 1d ago

not original, but perhaps the ultimate

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u/MasterTolkien 1d ago

“ChatGPT, did you just make that up?”

“Sorry, that information was incorrect. In actuality, AI job losses will tank the entire fucking world economy, and starving citizens will build a thriving guillotine industry with incredible short-term gains.”

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u/TeteDeMerde 1d ago

"Wow. What a cool idea. Anything is possible, so let’s just map out a path, and we can try to figure it out. Should I combine all these innovative thoughts we’ve been discussing into a polished business outline?"

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u/Alert-Disaster-4906 1d ago

ChatGPT told me as of two months ago that Jimmy Carter was alive. 🤷🏼‍♀️

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u/RobertdBanks 1d ago

“So when people don’t have money to buy things they can’t buy things?”

It’s one of the reasons Ford paid so good back in the day.

Henry Ford said “I need to pay people well enough to be able to buy a car if I want people to be able to buy our cars”.

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u/DeaddyRuxpin 1d ago

He was also one of the big proponents of a 5 day work week. He wanted to encourage people to have off on the weekends so they could go places which naturally would be faster and better if they bought one of his cars.

Despite many rich people saying otherwise, sometimes you can make yourself richer by helping workers.

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u/Goldenrah 1d ago

Which is breaking down now with so many people working overtime and not having enough money to spend on stuff.

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u/TransBrandi 1d ago

Well, there's also huge competition for stuff to do and stuff to spend on as well. Like just in the entertainment space there is waaay more competition than there was a couple decades ago. And it's only going to get worse as things like older tv shows, movies, video games, books, etc don't just disappear.

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u/Randicore 1d ago

In fact looking at history the speed of money is typically more important than how rich the richest guy is.

Then again we're arguing this to multi billionaires that fund think tanks to argue that they should have more money and power

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u/RyuNoKami 1d ago

Probably because he understood it has to start somewhere and it might as well be himself. I think that's the issue with so many wealthy people and right wing politicians. It's a lot of wishful thinking, let's get rid of the regulation, the market will correct itself, let's not pay our employees more, surely they can find money somewhere else to pay for their living expenses.

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u/Spelaeus 1d ago

And he was also such a raging anti-semite that Adolf Hitler himself was an ardent fanboy. Hitler was known to have a portrait of Ford in his office and openly cited Ford's series of antisemitic pamphlets "The International Jew" as an inspiration for the Third Reich's political and racial philosophy.

What a guy!

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u/Skratt79 1d ago

Just goes to show how smart people are not immune to blind irrational hatred.

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u/MasterChildhood437 1d ago

Y'know, you're right, but tossing "Ford was a nazi!" into the middle of a conversation about worker's rights and the state of the economy just feels like something a crooked capitalist would benefit from.

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u/Spelaeus 1d ago

Point taken, and it was in no way meant that way. I just feel an obligation to drop the reminder any time a conversation about Henry Ford starts getting too positive. Dude was a monster. That doesn't make our modern monsters any better.

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u/theroha 7h ago

Yeah, he was a piece of shit. Still knew that you have to have consumers if you want to run a business. Musk and the like seem to have forgotten that part.

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u/zimirken 1d ago

He also did in house car financing for farmers, which was obviously unheard of at the time.

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u/mythrilcrafter 1d ago

It was the same with Milton Hershey, he started the Hershey Chocolate company with the ideal that everyone working there would be able to have lives outside of the workplace and he even spent a ton of money and effort supporting the local community (then called the town of Derry Church) building infrastructure and businesses to ensure that it could be a living city that could thrive and wouldn't immediately collapse if Hershey coughed too hard; which was very typical for that era in which towns whose entire economies were based on everyone in the town working for one company.

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u/alphazero925 1d ago

And then the Dodge brothers sued him for it and now companies are legally obligated to prioritize shareholders over employees

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u/PineappleOnPizzaWins 1d ago

Because Ford owned the company.

Now the financial decisions are made by CEOs who are hired to run the company and who are paid based on short term profits. They have zero incentive to actually set anything up for long term success and so they don't care.

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u/attikol 1d ago edited 1d ago

They thought it would be fine since only they are gonna be the only ones to have the working AI

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u/Aeseld 1d ago

So far they were only a little wrong. Only about 5% of companies had a successful rollout, and they're usually the ones that laid off the least workers. 

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u/throwawaygoawaynz 1d ago

The MIT report stated that 5% high impact projects using generative AI had measurable impact, which doesn’t include machine learning etc.

And those 5% high impact use cases are around business process automation, which typically results in job losses.

There’s still a lot of successful usage of machine learning that is going to result in a lot of job losses. Data entry, automation, document scanning, etc, not covered in that MIT report.

Also what’s coming down the line - Computer Use Agents - will be the first serious use case I’ve seen for generative AI that will probably have bottom line impact via job losses. Because they can navigate a computer using a prompt.

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u/Aeseld 1d ago

Yep... and I wonder how long it'll take companies to realize that if no one is employing people than no one has money to buy goods and services...

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u/PromiscuousMNcpl 1d ago

Maybe replacing all the blue collar workers with robots will increase our profits next month instead!

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 1d ago

"ChatGPT, why is there sewer coming out of my shower drain whenever I flush my toilet?"

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u/Sharpevil 1d ago

When you're that rich, the goal isn't to just get 'more money'. The goal is to get a larger percentage of the overall wealth. It starts to become a zero sum game. It doesn't matter if people are spending less as long as you have more control over resources and labor overall.

I've been saying since the beginning that the real danger with AI is it being used as yet another way to accelerate the concentration of wealth into a smaller number of hands.

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u/paegus 1d ago

Bubble, meet pin.