Tech companies apparently made a New Year’s resolution to slim down, because the first two weeks of 2024 brought a jarring number of layoff announcements that have tech employees feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day after 2023’s sweeping job cuts.

The numbers: Fourteen days into the New Year, 46 tech companies have laid off ~7,500 employees, per layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Some notable announcements:

• Google confirmed it was axing about 1,000 employees last Wednesday across its Google Assistant, core engineering, and hardware teams that work on Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit.
• Amazon cut hundreds of people working in its Audible, Twitch, MGM Studios, and Prime Video units.
• Discord, the messaging app with IPO ambitions, slashed 17% of its staff.
• Apple, which avoided the mass-scale layoffs of its rivals in 2023, is shutting down a 121-person team working on AI in San Diego, Bloomberg reported.

It’s not just tech: In finance, Citigroup said it will slash its global workforce by 10% (20,000 employees) over the next two years, and BlackRock plans to lay off 600 workers—about 3% of the total.

Still, this probably isn’t 2023 all over again

Last year, tech companies cut nearly 263,000 jobs after acknowledging that the supercharged growth they experienced during the pandemic mainly was a Covid/low-interest-rate anomaly. And tech employees whose teams just got gutted are probably wondering whether this reckoning has not yet run its course.

Despite the wave of layoffs so far in 2024, experts told Wired these job cuts are materially different—and less ominous—than those in past years.

Rather than sweeping cost-cutting efforts, many of the early 2024 layoffs reflect relatively healthy tech companies shuffling their priorities as the generative AI fever only gets hotter. That may not be reassuring to anxious employees, but it is something we’ve seen before: Layoffs have historically jumped around the fiscal year-end in December and January, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, hiring across the US economy remains strong: The unemployment rate declined to 3.7% in December.—NF

Maxed out by meetings upon meetings? You’re not alone. According to Slack’s Workforce Index, more than one in four desk workers (and over half of execs) say they spend too much time in meetings—and their performance is suffering because of it.

Of the 10k desk workers Slack surveyed, those with meeting fatigue were more than twice as likely to say they don’t have enough time to focus.

Meetings matter, but peak workday performance comes only with plenty of focused, uninterrupted time. And that’s not all—Slack found that collaboration, connection, and rest are all key to employee productivity and satisfaction, too.

Get the breakdown on protecting your productivity with Slack’s Workforce Index.

Election season officially kicks off in frigid Iowa. The chase for the Republican presidential nomination begins today with the Iowa caucuses. A Des Moines Register/NBC News poll showed Donald Trump, polling at 48%, holds a wide lead over rivals Nikki Haley (20%) and Ron DeSantis (16%), two candidates who will be looking to prove they can claw back support from the former president in upcoming primaries. The weather could play a big factor: The state is shivering under ridiculously cold temperatures (wind chill could dip to between –35 and –45 degrees Fahrenheit), which could affect turnout in a process that requires in-person voting. Fun fact, courtesy of CNN: Only two nonincumbents who won the GOP Iowa caucus have gone on to be the party’s nominee; all the others have won New Hampshire.

Tensions expected to rise following Taiwan’s election. On Saturday, Taiwan elected Lai Ching-te as its president—the third consecutive victory for the Democratic Progressive Party and a decision that will rankle officials in Beijing, who have called Lai a “troublemaker.” In response to Lai’s election, China, which claims the self-governing island as its own territory, is likely to ramp up the military pressure and enact trade restrictions against Taiwan to get it to back off notions of independence, analysts told Axios. Taiwan ally President Biden appeared to attempt to placate China by telling reporters Saturday that the US does not support Taiwan’s independence. Though it’s a remote possibility (for now), a full-scale invasion of Taiwan by China would have a $10 trillion impact on global GDP, Bloomberg estimated.

Business Insider says Neri Oxman reports were fair. Business Insider and its parent company, Axel Springer, said they stand by BI’s reports of plagiarism against Neri Oxman, an academic and the wife of hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman. After BI reported that Oxman had plagiarized paragraphs of her MIT dissertation, Ackman attacked the publication’s reporting process and accused it of political bias, prompting an internal review. When that review was completed yesterday, BI CEO Barbara Peng wrote in a memo that “there was no unfair bias or personal, political, and/or religious motivation in the pursuit of the stories.” Ackman responded on X, “Business Insider is toast.” (Disclosure: Axel Springer is the parent company of Morning Brew.)

That’s the question you might be asking now that four of the six dams corralling the Klamath River—which runs through Oregon and Northern California—are in the process of being removed by the end of the year, making it the largest dam removal project in US history.

The dam removal reached a watershed moment, if you will, on Friday when the water behind three of the dams was allowed to flow freely for the first time in a century.

Why are we tearing down dams? When regulators approved the plan in 2022, it was celebrated by Native American tribes and environmentalists, as the dams were decimating the salmon population relied upon by the Karuk, Klamath, Hoopa, and Yurok Tribes. In 2022, a study showed that 90% of juvenile salmon tested positive for a disease that widely occurs when river flow is low, which will no longer be the case.

Don’t go chasing waterfalls. In 2023, the advocacy group American Rivers announced a goal of removing 30,000 US dams by 2050 for reasons that mirror what’s happening with the Klamath River. The number of projects to remove the antediluvian dams should continue to rise as a result of 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which freed up funding for the removal of at least 54 dams.—DL

PJs and geopolitical anxiety reign in Davos. Top leaders in business and government will descend on the Swiss resort town of Davos today for the beginning of the annual World Economic Forum summit. This year’s theme is “Rebuilding Trust,” which sounds like a slogan Tom Wambsgans would have pitched for ATN, but is, in reality, intended to promote “transparency, consistency, and accountability” against the backdrop of a world in turmoil. Among other attendees in the top 0.0001%, OpenAI’s Sam Altman is scheduled to appear on a panel on Thursday about implementing AI technology equitably around the world.

At long last, the Emmys are back. Two lengthy strikes by actors and writers pushed the TV awards show from 2023 to 2024, but the Emmys will finally air tonight on Fox with Anthony Anderson hosting. As usual, HBO shows lead the way in nominations, with Succession, The Last of Us, and The White Lotus all looking primed to take home trophies. If you’re lucky enough to win an Emmy, check with your bosses to make sure you actually won that Emmy.

Everything else…

• Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will report earnings on Tuesday. Last week, other big banks kicked off earnings season with encouraging results.
• The Australian Open, the first tennis Grand Slam event of the year, is underway. Novak Djokovic and Aryna Sabalenka will defend their 2023 titles.
• The film world heads to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival that kicks off on Thursday. We’re going for the fresh powder.
• It’s National Winnie The Pooh Day on Thursday. This is not an excuse to leave the house without wearing pants.

Stat: The Buffalo Bills offered fans $20 per hour to shovel the snow out of Highmark Stadium when it got hit with a blizzard so fierce that the team’s playoff game against the Steelers had to be moved from Sunday to today. That’s a 33.3% raise from the $15 per hour the Bills offered shovelers after a snowstorm in 2022 and a clear example of how wage growth is outpacing inflation in the current economy. In November, nearly 60% of Americans were making more money than the year before—after adjusting for inflation—according to Brendan Duke of the Center for American Progress. And that includes the Bills’ shirtless shoveling mafia.

Quote: “It was accumulated because other people did the work.”

Marlene Engelhorn is an Austrian heiress who believes her government doesn’t tax the wealthy enough, so she’s decided to ask regular people to help her allocate $27 million of her inheritance. To find her trusted advisors, Engelhorn sent a survey to 10,000 Austrians and will select 50 from that group who appear most representative of the population. Upon completing that process, clearly designed to remove people whose suggestions are “Give me the money,” she will form a council to advise her on what to do with the $27 million. Engelhorn is a descendant of Friedrich Engelhorn, who founded the German pharmaceutical giant BASF, and she inherited a fortune when her grandmother died in 2022.

Read: The cheapest places to live in the world in 2024. (Cheapest Destinations Blog)

Book smart: Get a start on your 2024 reading list.

Let rice cook: The physics of cooking rice.

Visualize: Compare the sizes of the world’s rockets.

Emoji mashups: Hop in the emoji kitchen and create an entirely new one.

Last call for early investors: Autonomix is planning a Nasdaq listing, but you can invest while they’re still private. Invest in Autonomix now—there’s only a few hours left.*

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