Who's the most popular guy in the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades? Why, none other than Nouriel Roubini, New York University's own Dr. Doom. He just got back from a world tour.

That's not a "major" layoff, as one Valleywag tipster maintained this morning. As Eric Savitz points out in Tech Trader Daily, Apple would have to file through the WARN Act if it was going to conduct major cuts. But the WARN Act does not generally apply to layoffs of fewer than 500 employees.

8020 Media hoped to revolutionize the magazine business. Instead, it has circled down the drain, ending up in the hands of shadowy investors after a new CEO with a Condé Nast résumé looted the startup.

For all the hoaxy drama behind Joaquin Phoenix's hip-hop ambitions, you can't say the guy isn't serious about effectively throwing his film career away after watching his spectacular self-immolation last night on The Late Show.

You've got pink slips: AOL axes 700 of 7,000. Memo!

John Battelle is the salesman for a host of indie sites, from the futuristic Boing Boing to the Web-obsessed TechCrunch to mommyblog Dooce. What does it say that his company, Federated Media, is canning workers?

The Magical Kingdom of Larry and Sergey has laid off 100 full-time recruiters, a tipster tells us. Inevitable, given the economy. But a crushing blow to Google's self-image as a kinder-than-thou employer.

The bubble in social networking has burst, decisively. LiveJournal, the San Francisco-based arm of Sup, a Russian Internet startup, has cut 12 of 28 U.S. employees — and offered them no severance, we're told.

Dotcom mogul Halsey Minor, the CNET founder, has spent freely on real estate, artwork, and startups. He's having trouble keeping them all. The latest bauble to run aground: San Francisco magazine publisher 8020 Media.

The first reaction of those who dwell in California's cradle of technology to the recession was blithe indifference — Wall Street's problem, not theirs. How swiftly they learned otherwise. A tipster sends in photographic evidence.

Sequoia Capital, the backer of Apple, Yahoo, and Google, ordered its startups to slash their payrolls this fall. We hear one CEO fired people so enthusiastically he had to retract some of his pink slips.

Times are tough at what was Silicon Valley's hottest startup last year. So tough that one Facebooker is auctioning off a company-issued Jack Spade laptop bag.

Everyone's ready for the Greatest Depression to be done. Economists think it will be over by the middle of next year. What if it isn't?

CBS is laying people off at CNET — no surprise, since the entire media business is fitfully contracting, and after a merger, cuts are a given. But it signals the end of CNET's grandiose ambitions.

Everything takes forever at Yahoo, the once high-flying, now famously sluggish Internet giant. Today's layoffs of 1,500 employees have been expected for months. And yet the strange thing is so many Yahoos seem unprepared.

Yahoo isn't firing people en masse — it's "getting fit." That noisome euphemism for today's layoffs of 1,500 people must have hissed forth from the brain of some overpaid management consultant. Likewise for pages upon pages of instructions on how to sack employees — which Valleywag has obtained.

Yahoo hasn't been able to do anything right lately. Why should Wednesday's job cuts be any different?

Many people ask us if Jason Calacanis, the Internet entrepreneur, is stupid. No, but he says stupid things. While he's an expert at timing the market, his plan to fix the economy is all backwards.

So much for Silicon Valley's latest get-rich-quick scheme. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has cancelled a plan to let employees cash out their shares early.

What, now they tell us? A recession is not a recession until the number-driven meritocrats of the National Bureau of Economic Research declare it to be one. And now they have. The current recession actually began a year ago, in December 2007. The past 11 months? Blissful ignorance. [MarketWatch]