The recession has an upside, right? As consumers cut back, austerity trend pieces told us chicken was supposed to supplant beef as what's for dinner. But Pilgrim's Pride, the large poultry producer, has gone bankrupt right after Thanksgiving.

What little hope I had was crushed by the WSJ this morning. Under the non-alarmist headline, "Tech Shares May Fall Further," the Journal lists every single reason the tech industry is screwed. If you can make it through the first fourteen stomach-churning paragraphs, there's this one ray of semi-hope:

Brad Stone blogged the bad news: "During the first 23 days of November, according to a report to be released later on Tuesday by the research firm comScore, consumers spent $8.19 billion online, a 4 percent drop from the same period last year. That marks the first annual decline since e-commerce took off." You can read the rest of the tragic stats in ComScore's press release.

I could spend all day unspinning Henry Blodget's hyperbolic headlines. "eBay Traffic Plummeting" actually means "eBay traffic gradually declining." Unique visitors for October were off 10 percent from a year ago. That's a much smaller slip than the traffic at my local Starbucks. But still, yeah, we're all gonna die.

The Wall Street Journal's website traffic doubled in October as nervous-wreck investors tracked the economy's nosedive. But the usual WSJ advertisers — banks and luxury items such as watches — aren't buying ads to go on all those pageviews. Usually, advertisers confirm their planned holiday spending level to the Journal by October, so the paper can be sure to make space for them. This year, silence. It's the same at many other business publications. Good thing I already got laid off, so I don't have to worry about it.

"15 people laid off there today," says a tipster via email. "On a FRIDAY... Ouch. Have confirmation it’s across the board (sales, product, development etc.)" Our tipster didn't get it quite right — a company official says it was actually 10 out of 89 employees — just above the fashionable 10-percent cut high-profile VC firm Sequoia Capital established with its doom-and-gloom memo. Dear Buzznet employees: Please email us.

A tipster tells us that Palm, the troubled smartphone maker, is laying off 10 percent of its staff. I called a spokeswoman at the company, who confirmed the layoffs but not the number of employees affected; Palm, at last count, had about 1,050 employees. She also said the company would make "program cuts" — Valleyspeak for dropping some future products. Palm has been hammered by competition from Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry; it is in the midst of a turnaround led by its chairman, Jonathan Rubinstein, a former Apple executive and Steve Jobs confidant. Rubinstein, left, has hired many former Apple employees at Palm — so much so that, rumor has it, Jobs called Rubinstein up to scream about it. But the layoffs and program cuts suggest he may not be able to complete his ambitions for a complete revamp of Palm's product line.

"There should be no Business Group, Technology Group or Business Unit-funded holiday parties." That's the extra bullet through the heart in an email being sent around Cisco. I've screencapped only part of it, because I promised not to provide any pointers to my leaker. Here's the ASCII text version:

It's the grand irony of Wi-Fi, a remarkably useful way of connecting to the Internet which has nevertheless proved to be a tough business to make money in. Aruba Networks, a maker of Wi-Fi equipment, is rumored to have twice spurned Cisco's advances. Its shareholders will likely regret that; the company, which went public last year, has seen its shares plummet more than 90 percent from their peak. And it is now laying off 10 percent of its staff, we hear cutting costs by 10 percent, including some layoffs. Aruba's equipment was designed to withstand war-zone explosions — but not market implosions. Update: The company has reported earnings and confirmed costs cuts of 10 percent, though not all of that will come through the elimination of jobs.

Sooner or later we need to slam shut the door on technical have-nots. Pew Research found that nearly half of adults surveyed need help setting up computers and cell phones. Ars Technica notes what follows: Kids are always fixing their parents' PCs. But they don't take these insights to the logical conclusion: It's time to fire the IT support team.Imagine how much progress we could make as a society if we just dropped those who just can't merge onto the Information Superhighway. I will never get back those lost weekends I spent formatting my mom's Filemaker forms or troubleshooting my aunt's wireless router via cell phone. But I can spare my kids from ever having to face the same fate. The same goes at work, where the bosses have headcount to trim. They can no longer afford to pretend that it's okay that you don't understand Excel, since they have to pay to have someone on site who can explain it to you. Every dollar spent paying an IT guy is a dollar not spent doing whatever it is that makes the company money. That's why it's time companies everywhere get out of the handholding business. Oh, sure, that means more people out on the street. But they can — and should — get reemployed making systems that are so solid they don't require tech-support calls. There's an unpleasant converse: Desk jockeys will have to face the fact that part of their job is to understand the tools they're being paid to use. People will never take responsibility for learning about their computers as long as it's easier to pick up a phone and whine to someone.

A classic tech dream: Reinvent every facet of an existing business, from top to bottom. The personal computer industry was built on the impossible dream that there would one day be a computer on every desk — an example which inspires countless attempts to reengineer the virtual world. Most prove to be expensive busts. Like the air-taxi business. Eclipse Aviation, which made small jets which its backers hoped startup airlines would fly from point to point at a cost lower than private jets, failed to meet payroll last week, and only now has scraped up financing to pay its employees.Vern Raburn, the big dreamer behind Eclipse, left the company this summer — a condition without which the company would not have raised a round of financing. He had envisioned Eclipse building fleets for countless air-taxi operators, which would operate from new, small-scale airports — a whole new air-taxi economy, dreamed up from the ether, which he would monopolize. DayJet, the most notable air-taxi startup, shut its doors in September. But Eclipse failed not just because all the component pieces of Raburn's vision failed to come together. It would be easy, surely, for him to pin the blame on operators who didn't deliver on their part of the bargain. It's not clear that there ever really was enough demand for the service in the first place. As much as people complain about commercial air travel, the major airlines move millions of people a year, at a cost its customers pay, albeit with grumbles. Asked how large the air-taxi market would be, Raburn told a magazine in 2007, "The only thing you can say about predicting the size of new markets is that you will be wrong." Give Raburn credit: He was right about that. (Photo by AP)

The accompanying chart from TechFlash says it all: Online sales just aren't growing anymore. October's 1 percent growth over October 2007 is the worst performance measured by ComScore since they began tracking stats in 2001. TechFlash quotes Gian Fulgoni, chairman of the research firm: "We can only hope that the recent sharp drop in oil prices will cause a continued easing of inflation and a strengthening in consumer spending as [we] enter the critical holiday shopping season." We can only hope? Dude, we can get down on our knees and pray.

All right, all right: Perhaps it was a tad bit mean-spirited to begrudge young parents their first vacation to Disneyland with a child. Six Apart president Mena Trott, who spent the weekend in the happiest place on earth with husband and CTO Ben Trott, is hilariously unapologetic about taking a vacation right after laying off 16 staff members at the blog-software company they cofounded. Beating Valleywag to the punch, she's written the worst captions she could invent on pictures of her highly adorable daughter and way hot husband at the theme park. Not that this will be any comfort to the people she laid off, who will only remember how Trott followed up the cuts by announcing that she was going to Disneyland in the manner of an NFL player who just spiked a football in the end zone.

Hatteras Networks, as the name suggests, is in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The company bragged to the Wall Street Journal that they've laid off 20 of 80 employees, weeks after Denton and Calacanis beat them to it. Tough times, totally awesome decisions! I only hope you recognize this one-company trend story for what it really is: An ad. The message is at the end: "Revenue has grown more than 100% every year for the last three years." Now they're sure to get a decent acquisition offer. All they had to do was fire the 20 most problematic employees.

Six Apart, the San Francisco blog-software company which helped spark the blogging boom, just laid off 16 of its 200 employees. And its top executives took a 15 percent paycut. Such noble sacrifice! Except that those cutbacks have not crimped the holiday plans of cofounders Ben and Mena Trott. She surprised her husband with an irony-free trip to Disneyland. That they can so blithely afford the trip reminds me of persistent rumors that the couple cashed out some of their shares in the privately held company when it took an earlier round of venture capital. (Photo by Jackson West)

A tipster sent in word that Rearden — an e-commerce startup from Foster City — is rumored to have cut 72 people. We hear the actual number is closer to 50 out of 375. The company provides a "personal assistant portal" that streamlines travel planning, reservations, and general logistics within corporations. Or something. Our tipster's contention is that no one, especially customers, is quite sure just what exactly the company does. Rearden raised $100 million in funding back in April of this year and claims to have signed off service contracts with 1,700 companies. Let us know if there's anything more.

The revolving door at Facebook has been swinging less of late. Two top designers, Katie Geminder and Eston Bond, left in August and September. But the economic crisis seems to have scared the rest of the social network's staff into their seats, wondering when the ax will fall. There have been no layoffs, but we keep hearing tips from inside there's a hiring freeze on. In fact, there's not: Facebook's unofficial second-in-command, COO Sheryl Sandberg, asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg to institute a freeze, and got turned down cold.And yet Facebook will end the year with 750 to 800 employees, Zuckerberg has said — a far cry from the 1,000 employees he projected at the beginning of the year, when Facebook had only 450 employees. Call it what you like, but those are 200 jobs that have gone missing. One would think that Facebook, more than ever, would have the pick of the litter. But its potential employees can do math. Facebook's hiring managers do not have the hot hand they played earlier this year. The turmoil within Facebook has made an impression on potential hires. As have Facebook's financials. Facebook raised $240 million from Microsoft in a deal that valued the entire company at $15 billion. And the company is making real revenues, though they're small by comparison to MySpace; the most solid projection for 2008 is $265 million, down considerably from the $300 million to $350 million Zuckerberg once thought it could make this year. All the while, it is spending heavily on servers; Facebook's pages, which must chart a user's social connections to determine what news from friends to display, are more computationally intensive than, say, a trivially simple Web search engine like Google. That means, in essence, more money spent on servers per user. What that means: Facebook will have to make more money on advertising per user just to stay even with Google's cost structure, let alone exceed it. It's far from that point. Most importantly, it's hard for outsiders to see the upside in Facebook shares. Most assume Facebook will issue them options, and wonder how those will appreciate enough to make them rich. In fact, Facebook has been switching to grants of restricted stock — a maneuver Google and Microsoft, too, has used when a lofty share price made options less attractive. Add skittish candidates and skittish managers, and you get a very tough hiring process; Facebook executives might actually like to hire more people, especially in engineering, but they're having a hard time finding people who meet their requirements and are willing to take the job. Zuckerberg doesn't have to institute a hiring freeze; his lofty opinion of his own company is putting enough of a chill in recruiting to keep costs down.

Good news! October videogame sales were up 18 percent to $1.31 billion. Most of the growth comes from increased game sales, but Nintendo sold a surprising 803,000 Wii consoles.

Those who fund young, growing companies love to tout their industry's role in job creation. Jobs — we could use some of those now, right? But with venture-capital firms like Sequoia Capital insisting on across-the-board layoffs, it's hard to buy that argument; jobs may be created at startups quickly, but they are just as rapidly destroyed. But startups aren't the only ones being pinched by venture capitalists — they're also taking their investors for a ride, according to an industry insider.That insider is Adeo Ressi, the lanky, geeky founder of TheFunded.com, a site which lets entrepreneurs rate venture capitalists on everything from smarts to etiquette. (One effect of the site: Entrepreneurs say they no longer see as many VCs rudely pecking away at their BlackBerrys during pitch meetings.) Ressi recently gave a presentation to faculty members at the Harvard Business School. His message: venture capital has crossed a line. That line is the amount of money venture-backed companies have generated when sold, either to public-market investors in an IPO, or to larger companies in an acquisition. Historically, that has exceeded the amount invested in venture capital by pension funds, college endowments, and other institutions. Put dollars in, get more dollars out: that's the magical money machine that drove a multibillion-dollar boom in venture capital since the mid-'90s. In the first half of this year, that ground to a halt: Venture capitalists raised approximately $22 billion from investors, but their companies only generated $19 billion when sold. The reasons are many, but they amount to this: Venture capitalists are clubby, insular, and unimaginative, passing up 9 out of 10 deserving companies. And as a result, hundreds of their funds return no money to investors. If anything, the situation is far worse than Ressi posits; some of the profits from startup sales go to their founders, after all. And a large chunk goes to the VCs themselves, who typically take 3 percent of the money they invest each year as a management fee, and 20 percent of the profits they distribute to investors. One venture capitalist I know estimates that the actual venture-capital deficit — the difference between money invested in funds and money returned — has been running at $6 billion a year for years. Not all of that goes into VCs' pockets; some of it is simply wasted on businesses which will never turn a profit. But still: $6 billion a year, up in smoke. What is this — the automotive industry? Where's the bailout for venture-capital investors? The truth is they haven't been that outraged, if only because venture capital is such a piddling business for them, compared to their other investments. Those larger investments are in peril, however, and are jeopardizing VCs' fortunes. Some pension funds are running short on cash, their money locked up in securities they cannot easily sell — and their managers are turning down venture capitalists' requests for more cash. That, in turn, is spilling over to startups, which are being told they cannot raise more money. The consequence: There will be a slow-motion bloodbath. Slow, because the partnerships which tie venture-capital firms and their investors together are notoriously tricky to unwind; slow, too, because the extent to which VCs' startup portfolios are worth less — or just plain worthless — will take years to unfold. The problem has been an excess of optimism. To a bullish venture capitalist, every investment looks like it might be the next Google; to a pension fund manager, every VC firm might be the next Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia Capital. That optimism has been turned from liquid cash into illiquid hope, to the tune of billions of dollars. Bleeding out that hope — finding the deep, despairing bottom — is a process which might take a decade. Ressi thinks that the number of venture-capital firms should drop from 4,800 to 1,000 — while funding a larger number of startups. This will require painful changes in how they do business. But the venture-capital industry has hid its sickness for a long time, making a recovery all the more prolonged. Ressi will no doubt watch gleefully: He feels VCs mistreated him at his last company, Game Trust. "I will not rest until there is balance in the force," he told The Deal last year. Revenge is a dish best served cold, via PowerPoint. Ressi's presentation:

The financiapocalypse? So 2008. The economy may start growing again in the second half of next year. July? That's practically next month. Too bad about your job, though: Unemployment is expected to peak at 7.7 percent in December 2009. [WSJ]