it's almost telling how Super Bowl commercials tell the mood of the country's population and economy
latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners
the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured [to] speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
> I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured from speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
Basically the finance industry is pivoting away from actually investing in real businesses to more and more elaborate paper pushing schemes (that make them money, but actually weaken the economy):
> Unlike Dawes’s Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, a modern investment bank mostly earns its money in a way that not even the bravest lyricist would set to music: providing advisory services, executing complex financial engineering schemes, trading stocks and bonds, managing other people’s money, issuing credit cards and so on. Assets get bought and sold, divided and packaged, and the bank collects fees at each step.
> David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, could not sing to young Michael about the many productive uses to which he might put the tuppence because Goldman Sachs rarely invests in anything at all. Fostering economic progress appears to be beside the point.
> Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.
> These are symptoms of financialization. That’s the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.
Why do you think large companies refinance debt? So they can invest in productive areas of the business.
If debt refinancing became illegal or widely impractical due to an interest rate spike, you’d quickly see how much of the productive economy it’s fueling!
Yup, it's the tragedy of the system we have set up.
There's a potentially civilization-ending disasters looming over us (the climate crisis, increasing escalation between the major powers, rising risk of insurrection due to mismanagement and inequality) and what are the smartest people of our time doing?
Making sure you click that damn ad or create technology that lets you create slop ads more easily.
Ad tech is annoying at worst, it doesn't take literally your job and most of job market with it. Without any seemingly easy way to move to fields which are booming so overall it would stay the same.
I hate ads with passion for past 20 years and (very) actively avoid them at all costs, but I'd take those over what world llms seem to be bringing in soon.
Money follows ROI. Making those speculative or detrimental industries less profitable is the answer.
Regulations on micro-targeting, data privacy, algorithm transparency, legal liability for content, etc.. all push back against the externalities of ads/social media.
Regulations on energy and land use can make eg data center build outs more expensive, pressuring back against speculative AI trash.
Taxing big tech companies, subsidizing manufacturing education, and judicious import tariffs.. would all create incentives for investing money and labor in hard capabilities
If you're asking me? Workers revolution and a complete systems change, towards something that aligns incentives with the good of humanity, not of a money-grubbing few.
I have a feeling most folks here will disagree though.
Those are two sides of the same coin. The "sky is falling" narratives and invasive advertising are both employed by the same elite to control your behavior through fear and suggestion.
Noam Chomsky is one of the loudest doomsayers and "critics" of the system (war, climate, politics) and yet simultaneously was good buddies with post-conviction Epstein. That ought to stimulate a reassessment of what you've believed about how (American) politics and society works.
That's not surprising. Post 2000 Chomsky is worthless, he couldn't defend his original thesis without ad hominems and used his fame to put pressure on universities (it didn't work every time, but enough), he pushed a decade backward part of the linguistics field (after pushing it up maybe two decade forward, but that's not an excuse).
Especially in humanities where you don't have hard data, contradiction is the only way to advance, and he forgot that. He became too full of himself and too confident.
But are you actually against inequality because not every industry is getting its fair share (whatever that might mean), or simply that you don't like the winners under the current system? In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power, would you be like "darn, the inequality under the capitalist system is luring talent from enterprise SaaS (or whatever) and that makes me sad"?
"In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power"
For that to be true, there would have to be a ridiculous amount of money at a massive scale for those, which would imply that consumers are being gouged for it. That's really true of almost any bubble. This is still a negative situation.
That's more of a moral question. The best and brightest are the ones running the casino. Why would someone spend 8 years in expensive schools becoming a doctor when they can work as a developer or marketer for an online sports book? Morals on the consumer supply curb demand. Morals on the provider side can help curb innovation and expanse.
Because the former is meaningful and the latter depresses you if you think too much about it, so you found strategies of not thinking about it that ultimately eat away at your soul and anything that makes a life worth living?
Yes, but the realization of this comes from experience or age. There are always new hires to fill the positions when the pay is high enough compared to the alternatives.
GLP-1s target humans who need a pharma intervention to assist in making their reward center in their brain more defensive against the system they are forced to exist in.
We don’t need ads for it, we should hand it out over the counter to anyone who wants or needs it, but I digress.
Which evil system do they live in? Veggies are the cheapest stuff I can find in supermarkets anywhere. I agree their reward systems are fried, but thats a result of decades of over-eating on the worst junk mankind ever produced, while this whole 'evil system' screams on them from all sides how stupid and suicidal this is, how sugar is same as cocaine and so on.
Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland this is general consensus among doctors and I have one for wife), and an attempt to solve it anywhere else down the decision line apart from the head is just (temporarily, in case of glp) fixing the consequences.
The last times so many tech ads made their way to the Superbowl was during the crypto craze and the dot-com bubble. These are symptoms of an overly speculative economy.
I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". People trying all sorts of moonshot ideas in crypto, day trading, live streaming, etc. The idea of slowly chipping away and climbing the social leader seems very distant from what I see.
Can't climb the social ladder when management is filled with H1Bs that practice nepotism and caste-based hiring and DEI hires that can't recognize competence.
Yes, in theory. But, there are at least three problems with that...
1. Tariffs are frequently not targeted/precise enough, so come with lots of side effects.
2. Other countries retaliate, leading to trade wars and economic disruptions in both places.
3. Lower prices are usually better for local consumers - it leaves them with more money to buy other stuff. And tariffs do the opposite, as they are rarely 100% absorbed by the manufacturer.
Yeah, tariffs can be one part of it, especially things like anti-dumping. But there is no tariff for outsourcing virtual work. The US outsources something like 300k jobs per year, and tariffs won't fix that.
How are AI and GLP medications in the same category as Kalshi or sports betting? One is (economically at any rate) a tool to produce code and the other is a weight loss drug that actually works. Neither are a “casino” in any meaningful sense.
I don't gamble to become a winner, I gamble to keep myself break even desperately trying to hold to some asset that isn't inflated into oblivion by misinformed economic and fiscal policy.
>the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
> because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
Just a weird, completely unscientific personal metric I've used to note that the economy seems like it's shrinking - last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Nintendo indicated when the Switch 2 was launching that they were going to do their best to ensure a large supply and make sure actual players were prioritized. They did not want resellers to be profitable and did not want to create a situation like the PlayStation.
It still sold out and was a little difficult to get on release, but consoles came out at a pretty quick pace and resellers basically could not unload their stock for a profit. It became a bit of a joke about the resellers not being able to unload their stock because stores were getting replenishment stocks so often and Nintendo was constantly sending out emails to players saying they had been selected to buy directly from Nintendo.
I had my personal Switch 2 from the store within about a month of casual checking around and got one for a Christmas gift directly from Nintendo the next week.
Gaming technology is kind of stagnant, and there aren't the sort of technical leaps between generations anymore. Games today look and feel like games from 2014 with slightly better graphics (and more aggressive monetization).
The Switch has been out since 2017 and has probably reached market saturation at this point. Keep in mind that consoles are pretty durable and lots of people buy used. The Switch 2 isn't selling well yet since it has the PS3 disease (no games).
Anyways, the economy is probably bad but I don't think Nintendo Switch sales are much of an indicator for that.
>last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer.
Don't you expect demand to taper off as more people get their hands on it? It also doesn't help that the switch 2 is basically "the switch, but better".
This never happened with the switch. I am not kidding. 2023 I was trying to buy one for my sister, and it took me months of waiting for target to open and beating the resellers to it, because I didn't want to overspend online (plus online stock frequently sold out). It was released in 2017!
Nintendo is notorious for under producing their consoles vs demand in recent years - the worst example was the mini NES or whatever they called it, they could not keep it on shelves for that one either.
> last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Well, I remember the same thing happening with the Wii for a long time, and then eventually it was easily available.
But now I can't find a Wii at a Target anywhere, so the economy must be booming?
Either people are waking up that Nintendo is selling nostalgia or the economy is not doing well.
I hope the former, there is something that feels sick to think Nintendo force fed corporate mascots to me when I was under the age of 1. To this day, I religiously buy Zelda games, even though I haven't enjoyed them since N64. FOMO mind control.
> One bright spot was last month, when hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists.
But that's 2026 hiring, and the article's about the 2025 revisions. (And the January number, as they all do, may get revised in a few months.)
It would be quite hard in the long run to make faked BLS numbers line up with other independent data points, like ADP's payroll reports and the IRS's revenues.
>>> "Still, Wednesday’s report also shows that not nearly as many jobs were added in 2025 as thought and last year will go down as the worst year for hiring since 2020, or since 2003 outside of a recession."
Almost no jobs were added net and the few that were, were all in health care, 131K i think the article said.
what i find interesting is that unemployment percent still looks low. is it accurate? even if it's wrong, shouldn't it be correct on a relative basis? why isn't this number climbing?
US Unemployment statistics have a number of flaws, including not capturing people who are underemployed (taking any low paying job to try to make ends meet instead of working in a higher paying field they are qualified for) and not capturing those who are no longer searching for a job
I agree that the most-commonly reported 'head-line' numbers can be misleading, but more detailed statistics are available. One of my favorites is the labor participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
The second point is hard to quantify. If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job. But if I am choosing not to look because I won't take a job, I am technically unemployed by the strict definition of the word but I don't count for what most people care about when thinking about the unemployment rate.
Underemployment is already reported and is distinctly different so I don't think it's fair to say that not counting someone at Burger King who has a Master's degree as unemployed is a "flaw."
>If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job.
The current definition makes sense because it's linked to an overt action that can be objectively determined. "Not looking for a job but theoretically would like a job" gets into all sorts of issues like "I want a job as a king if it landed on my lap...".
The US tracks six different unemployment metrics plus overall
labor force participation rate. You’re talking about U6 and/or labor force participation rate.
Just because U3 is the measure typically quoted doesn’t mean the others don’t exist.
But I think in this case an aging population can hold down the official unemployment rate, even when there are no new jobs outside services for the aged.
They separately report people who are on unemployment insurance, but the headline unemployment numbers come from a survey of potential workers, which will capture recent graduates.
Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they surveyed. Every month for a year they called me, once a month, to ask what my employment status last week was, if I was actively looking, etc. (It was all synchronized around one week a month, but I don't remember which one it was they cared about.)
What stops it from being a more useful metric is that it doesn't account for someone who was employed with benefits five or ten years ago, but today has some crappy gig economy job with no health insurance. They show up as employed either way.
Native population is declining (and prime-age workforce is retiring), and the Trump admin has been extensively working to reduce the size of the immigrant workforce.
So the unemployment rate is staying low, but the absolute number of workers is flat or declining.
> Almost no jobs were added net and the few that were, were all in health care, 131K i think the article said.
I wonder what those folks in health care are doing, because (once again) after dealing with the US healthcare system, it seems like it's about 1% doctors, 10% other staff and 90% useless billing/scheduling/collections, designed to extract the maximum possible amount of money from a patient and provide the minimum amount of care.
More jobs being added in health care seems to be an indicator for it getting even worse.
Look into Doomspending. Excessive spending is actually a psychological response to hardship for 1st world countries. It's a documented phenominon that has happened in the past and is exacerbated by social media, gamification of wealth, and general incompetence (all of which are on the uptrend).
I don't think "U.S. Jobs Disappear At Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession"[1] is vibes.
The future picture on inflation also looks bleak[2]:
> Taken individually, lagged tariff pass‑through, tightening labor supply, looser fiscal policy, and accommodative financial conditions would each push inflation modestly higher. Taken together—and interacting with increasingly fragile household inflation expectations—they create a macro environment in which inflation rising above 4 percent by the end of 2026 is not only plausible but arguably the most likely scenario.
It's common knowledge that the spending in the current economy is very K-shaped: the top 10% are the only ones staying above water.
Obviously not a macroeconomic analysis but if you watch YouTube channels like Caleb Hammer it seems people are literally spending their life away. No planning, no asset building, just hedonistic stuff. The kind of people you see there have the mentality of: "I'll never pay this debt down anyway so I'll max out my loans to do what I want before I die". Not very optimistic, even if it inflates the consumer market.
A great example of what seems to be the current ethos for the generation (I realize Handey isn't of this generation). Very much "nothing matters as we'll all die anyway, who cares about what comes after". I don't fault the sentiment, to be clear, it's just an indication of the socio-economic situation that fostered it.
If most of the capital is in the hands of tech bros who live out their fantasies from 1980s SciFi novels, it is going to be misallocated.
The fake economy is now about AI, gambling and cryptocurrencies. It does not help that the current administration contains several Epstein disciples when Epstein was into these tech fantasies as well.
The misallocation of capital claims to grow the pie, but it dilutes the pie with fake growth so people that own the fake parts have more money to buy up the good parts.
Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand. The value in making it easier to make computers do things for you is plainly obvious. People all across the tech literacy spectrum are seeing benefits, from coding projects that took days or weeks taking minutes to hours to finish to soccer moms telling their phones to fix up family photos and find them the email from the doctor's that's buried in their inbox. Competent doctors are getting help catching things from scans/symptoms that would take House MD to connect but are a breeze for an LLM, and there are numerous reports of people figuring out their own longstanding obscure medical issues by asking an LLM to speculate on their symptoms after a hundred doctors failed to diagnose it. Someone who can't afford to get ripped off by a mechanic and doesn't have the spare hours in the day and technical knowledge to Google it the old-fashioned way has a decent chance of solving simple car problems instantly on their own by asking ChatGPT or Gemini. It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from.
On the other hand, it’s not clear if any of it is sustainably profitable. Zitron has done a lot of reporting in this area, but since he’s “controversial” let’s stick with Forbes and the case of Sora (2025):
As far as I can tell, the math isn’t getting any better. The financial costs of running an AI service are enormous and it’s not clear where sufficient revenue is going to magically come from once the aggressive loss-leading ends.
"Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand."
I disagree. While some AI related stuff is promising, much of it is consumerist or data harvesting. Many people are basically gambling on any sort of stock related to AI (vs diversifying). Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.
"It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from."
Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle. It's just an expanse on neural nets and the other predecessors from 30 years ago. In my experience, it has trouble following basic directions such as keeping a summary to a single page.
> Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.
I highly doubt this will be the case. This common viewpoint is almost certainly no more than another iteration of Plato decrying the invention of books.
Books and calculators still required knowledge of concepts and application. That's vastly different from students today asking AI to write a book report for them and retaining no knowledge from it.
I don't consider AI to be outstanding. Maybe that bridge they're talking about was. Seems that this comes down to opinion.
> America’s economy added 130,000 jobs in January, almost double the number that analysts had been expecting, indicating that the labour market might have picked up after months of apparent stagnation. Unemployment also fell to 4.3%, a slight dip from the previous month. The figures may put off the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates as quickly as Donald Trump would like.
Yeah not sure where the 600k figure is coming from. But that 130k that's being reported is almost certainly not correct, and will be revised down.
The ADP is only reporting 22k for January. Which lines up very closely with the monthly pace of job creation for 2025 (~15k, on average).
The downward revisions on the BLS numbers for 2025 are the largest on record. There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
> There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
Jobs data (which comes from a survey of employers) is always subject to revisions, and the revisions have gotten worse. But it's not necessarily political. Back when Trump unprecedentedly fired Erika McEntarfer (former head of the BLS) I looked into this and tried to understand where the data comes from, how it works.
Basically, the BLS surveys 50k out of the several million companies in the US. But response rates have dropped rather strongly since the Pandemic in particular. If you give them 3 months, it gets up to 90%, but after 1 month it is only 50%. This would be okay, except that the response rates turn out to be skewed: large companies almost always respond quickly, small companies respond more slowly. And small companies tend to be much more responsive to the state of the overall economy than large companies- for good and for bad. And even the response times of the small companies turn out to be sensitive to economic trends, for good and for bad: the companies that respond more slowly to surveys, it turns out, tend to be the most sensitive to the broader economy, the first to fire in a recession, but also the first to hire when the economy is getting better.
The final thing is that these companies can be highly correlated with each other and the broader economy. So there are always corrections, but in placid economic weather the corrections cancel out- some of the extrapolations are high, some are low, it ends up being close to 0. And the financial markets understand how to read these corrections. They understand that when the economy is shifting you will get all of the misses in the same direction- either high or low- and to pay attention these corrections data.
All of these misses low in 2025 are a very bad sign for the economy overall, not necessarily a sign of political pressure. That would probably show up in large, sustained differences to the ADP numbers or other privately reported numbers, rather than revisions announced by the BLS itself.
Both Trump I's appointee to head the BLS, William Beach (who served from 2019-2023) and Biden's appointee Erika McEntarfer (whom Trump fired in 2025) wanted to modernize the survey system, make it easier for companies to respond, and get better and faster data collection. But, because this system is so incredibly important to the markets, they wanted a larger budget to run the new system and the old system together for a significant portion of time (several years) so that everyone would be comfortable understanding the intricacies of the system, what revisions would mean, etc. And since they didn't get that budget (in fact it got cut) they decided to prioritize the old system rather than throw it away and experiment with something different.
Good explanation. I think it's sad that people find it easier to adopt imaginary theory of why labor statistics are flawed than they are to simply go read their methodology. People don't want to believe that there are BLS statisticians working the phones and knocking on doors. They don't want to know that there are hundreds of USDA employees tasked with writing down the retail price of carrots in every major American city every day. They aren't interested in how Census takers judge the population by counting gas and electric meters. They'd rather believe that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent.
I'm assuming this is talking about the revised numbers for 2025? And if that revised so heavily downward, hard to imagine the latest numbers are somehow more stable?
The same way that anyone would: they conduct a statistical sample and report unemployment numbers based on that. Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they contacted. As I recall, a letter came to our apartment, asking for the adult (18+) who had their birthday closest to that date to contact them and provide a phone number and some basic demographic data. That was me, not my roommate, so for the next 12 months I got a call once a month asking me for my employment details about a specific week that month- had I been looking for a job, was I still employed, etc.
it's almost telling how Super Bowl commercials tell the mood of the country's population and economy
latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners
the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured [to] speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
Edit: clearer word choice
> I think this illustrates another pernicious effect of excessive inequality: where does it lure talent? The best and brightest, lured from speculation to ads to blockchain to AI to...
Or finance. There was a pretty brutal takedown published recently: The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/capitalism-indust...).
Basically the finance industry is pivoting away from actually investing in real businesses to more and more elaborate paper pushing schemes (that make them money, but actually weaken the economy):
> Unlike Dawes’s Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, a modern investment bank mostly earns its money in a way that not even the bravest lyricist would set to music: providing advisory services, executing complex financial engineering schemes, trading stocks and bonds, managing other people’s money, issuing credit cards and so on. Assets get bought and sold, divided and packaged, and the bank collects fees at each step.
> David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, could not sing to young Michael about the many productive uses to which he might put the tuppence because Goldman Sachs rarely invests in anything at all. Fostering economic progress appears to be beside the point.
> Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.
> These are symptoms of financialization. That’s the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.
All that is old is new again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
Why do you think large companies refinance debt? So they can invest in productive areas of the business.
If debt refinancing became illegal or widely impractical due to an interest rate spike, you’d quickly see how much of the productive economy it’s fueling!
> Or finance. There was a pretty brutal takedown published recently: The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/capitalism-indust...).
What’s pleasant to see is that the take-down and opinion piece is coming from the conservative side.
Oren Cass isn’t a conservative by contemporary standards; he’s a right-leaning centrist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oren_Cass
Ex-Romney staffer, pro-union, and his organization is self-described as "what the post-Trump right-of-center is going to be."
That’s a persona non grata in the current Republican party.
Yup, it's the tragedy of the system we have set up.
There's a potentially civilization-ending disasters looming over us (the climate crisis, increasing escalation between the major powers, rising risk of insurrection due to mismanagement and inequality) and what are the smartest people of our time doing?
Making sure you click that damn ad or create technology that lets you create slop ads more easily.
To be fair, I'd rather have smart people pursue AI and LLMs than ad tech.
They're one and the same. https://openai.com/index/testing-ads-in-chatgpt/
That's mixing up the tool with what it is used for.
Ad tech is annoying at worst, it doesn't take literally your job and most of job market with it. Without any seemingly easy way to move to fields which are booming so overall it would stay the same.
I hate ads with passion for past 20 years and (very) actively avoid them at all costs, but I'd take those over what world llms seem to be bringing in soon.
So, how do you fix it? Can it be fixed?
Money follows ROI. Making those speculative or detrimental industries less profitable is the answer.
Regulations on micro-targeting, data privacy, algorithm transparency, legal liability for content, etc.. all push back against the externalities of ads/social media.
Regulations on energy and land use can make eg data center build outs more expensive, pressuring back against speculative AI trash.
Taxing big tech companies, subsidizing manufacturing education, and judicious import tariffs.. would all create incentives for investing money and labor in hard capabilities
Right now we allocate capital to those kinds of companies. We're on a page for that and all.
If you allocated capital to other stuff, the jobs go there with it?
If you're asking me? Workers revolution and a complete systems change, towards something that aligns incentives with the good of humanity, not of a money-grubbing few.
I have a feeling most folks here will disagree though.
we need an opposition party.
Those are two sides of the same coin. The "sky is falling" narratives and invasive advertising are both employed by the same elite to control your behavior through fear and suggestion.
Noam Chomsky is one of the loudest doomsayers and "critics" of the system (war, climate, politics) and yet simultaneously was good buddies with post-conviction Epstein. That ought to stimulate a reassessment of what you've believed about how (American) politics and society works.
That's not surprising. Post 2000 Chomsky is worthless, he couldn't defend his original thesis without ad hominems and used his fame to put pressure on universities (it didn't work every time, but enough), he pushed a decade backward part of the linguistics field (after pushing it up maybe two decade forward, but that's not an excuse).
Especially in humanities where you don't have hard data, contradiction is the only way to advance, and he forgot that. He became too full of himself and too confident.
you're so lost
But are you actually against inequality because not every industry is getting its fair share (whatever that might mean), or simply that you don't like the winners under the current system? In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power, would you be like "darn, the inequality under the capitalist system is luring talent from enterprise SaaS (or whatever) and that makes me sad"?
Maybe either would be an improvement. Like that cartoon, "what if climate change is a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
"In other words if the current bubble are for solar or fusion power"
For that to be true, there would have to be a ridiculous amount of money at a massive scale for those, which would imply that consumers are being gouged for it. That's really true of almost any bubble. This is still a negative situation.
That's more of a moral question. The best and brightest are the ones running the casino. Why would someone spend 8 years in expensive schools becoming a doctor when they can work as a developer or marketer for an online sports book? Morals on the consumer supply curb demand. Morals on the provider side can help curb innovation and expanse.
Because the former is meaningful and the latter depresses you if you think too much about it, so you found strategies of not thinking about it that ultimately eat away at your soul and anything that makes a life worth living?
Yes, but the realization of this comes from experience or age. There are always new hires to fill the positions when the pay is high enough compared to the alternatives.
What do AI or GLP-1s have to do with a casino economy?
AI, being a boom with a lot of companies trying to make something out of nothing.
GLP, not sure.
I don't really agree, but you could argue that GLP is targeting people who want a magic solution just like casinos.
GLP-1s target humans who need a pharma intervention to assist in making their reward center in their brain more defensive against the system they are forced to exist in.
We don’t need ads for it, we should hand it out over the counter to anyone who wants or needs it, but I digress.
Which evil system do they live in? Veggies are the cheapest stuff I can find in supermarkets anywhere. I agree their reward systems are fried, but thats a result of decades of over-eating on the worst junk mankind ever produced, while this whole 'evil system' screams on them from all sides how stupid and suicidal this is, how sugar is same as cocaine and so on.
Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland this is general consensus among doctors and I have one for wife), and an attempt to solve it anywhere else down the decision line apart from the head is just (temporarily, in case of glp) fixing the consequences.
But GLP-1's are a magic solution...
The last times so many tech ads made their way to the Superbowl was during the crypto craze and the dot-com bubble. These are symptoms of an overly speculative economy.
I agree. From the outside looking in the US seems to be in a very nihilistic mood, sort of "nothing I do matters anyway so I'll gamble away in the hopes of maybe hitting the only winning ticket out". People trying all sorts of moonshot ideas in crypto, day trading, live streaming, etc. The idea of slowly chipping away and climbing the social leader seems very distant from what I see.
Can't climb the social ladder when management is filled with H1Bs that practice nepotism and caste-based hiring and DEI hires that can't recognize competence.
It's like you took a coherent and reasonable comment and added the words "H1B", and "DEI". It's just nepotism in different flavors, all the way down.
"because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building"
Executives won't build on-shore capacity when they'll just get undercut by off-shore shops. It's less risky to just outsource.
Isn't that one reason for tariffs? VW, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, Subaru, Nissan, and Kia all have some US or Canadian factories.
Yes, in theory. But, there are at least three problems with that...
1. Tariffs are frequently not targeted/precise enough, so come with lots of side effects.
2. Other countries retaliate, leading to trade wars and economic disruptions in both places.
3. Lower prices are usually better for local consumers - it leaves them with more money to buy other stuff. And tariffs do the opposite, as they are rarely 100% absorbed by the manufacturer.
Yeah, tariffs can be one part of it, especially things like anti-dumping. But there is no tariff for outsourcing virtual work. The US outsources something like 300k jobs per year, and tariffs won't fix that.
Why isn’t there a tariff for outsourcing?
???
How are AI and GLP medications in the same category as Kalshi or sports betting? One is (economically at any rate) a tool to produce code and the other is a weight loss drug that actually works. Neither are a “casino” in any meaningful sense.
Nit: One is an appetite suppressant, not a weight-loss drug. It doesn't burn fat, your body does that part. You just eat less.
Incorrect, newer GLP's upregulate metabolism and increase insulin sensitivity by acting as agonists on GIP and Glucagon receptors.
Please don't comment on pharmacodynamics without a solid understanding of the underlying mechanisms.
I don't gamble to become a winner, I gamble to keep myself break even desperately trying to hold to some asset that isn't inflated into oblivion by misinformed economic and fiscal policy.
>the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
> because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
What you're describing is referenced to as Fictitious Capital in Marxist thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital
Brains turn off if you say Voldemort's name out loud. These ideas need to be rediscovered and rebranded.
In some of those circles, you can play a little game of using statements from Adam Smith, and seeing which ones draw knee-jeek criticism as "Marxist."
Same for Keynes.
Personally, I think it's better to normalize and point out there are a lot of valid points made.
But I suppose change needs both strategies.
Reading the Wikipedia article, it doesn't seem to fit at all, this concept is mainly about finance whereas here the money went into actual companies.
The AI companies really did spend every last cent (and more) of this capital.
Just a weird, completely unscientific personal metric I've used to note that the economy seems like it's shrinking - last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Unscientific indeed:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-17/nintendo-... [0]
They produced a record number...your observation should be the expected result (they are aiming to produce 25% more than are expected to sell).
[0] https://archive.is/RInO7
Yeah, Switch 2 sales are actually outpacing Switch 1 sales.
Nintendo indicated when the Switch 2 was launching that they were going to do their best to ensure a large supply and make sure actual players were prioritized. They did not want resellers to be profitable and did not want to create a situation like the PlayStation.
It still sold out and was a little difficult to get on release, but consoles came out at a pretty quick pace and resellers basically could not unload their stock for a profit. It became a bit of a joke about the resellers not being able to unload their stock because stores were getting replenishment stocks so often and Nintendo was constantly sending out emails to players saying they had been selected to buy directly from Nintendo.
I had my personal Switch 2 from the store within about a month of casual checking around and got one for a Christmas gift directly from Nintendo the next week.
Gaming technology is kind of stagnant, and there aren't the sort of technical leaps between generations anymore. Games today look and feel like games from 2014 with slightly better graphics (and more aggressive monetization).
The Switch has been out since 2017 and has probably reached market saturation at this point. Keep in mind that consoles are pretty durable and lots of people buy used. The Switch 2 isn't selling well yet since it has the PS3 disease (no games).
Anyways, the economy is probably bad but I don't think Nintendo Switch sales are much of an indicator for that.
The Switch 2 is selling incredibly well.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/04/nintendo...
>last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer.
Don't you expect demand to taper off as more people get their hands on it? It also doesn't help that the switch 2 is basically "the switch, but better".
This never happened with the switch. I am not kidding. 2023 I was trying to buy one for my sister, and it took me months of waiting for target to open and beating the resellers to it, because I didn't want to overspend online (plus online stock frequently sold out). It was released in 2017!
Nintendo is notorious for under producing their consoles vs demand in recent years - the worst example was the mini NES or whatever they called it, they could not keep it on shelves for that one either.
I bought 2 switches without any issues. 1 around the time you did.
Months of waiting for target to open sounds insane and is so far from my experience that I think this is actually a case of you were holding it wrong.
Anecdotally I have bought 2 switches over its lifetime and never saw any of this ever. Just clicked “buy” on Amazon.
If we're bringing anecdata to the party: I bought OLED shortly after it came out and did not have any trouble.
Do you remember switch 1 or wii demand?
> last year was the first year I've seen since the release of the original switch where switch/switch 2 was not constantly sold out (usually poached by resellers early in the AM) every time I visit target. There's a full shelf of them since late last summer. Unless nintendo actually produced enough units for the first time in recent company history, I suspect it indicates something.
Well, I remember the same thing happening with the Wii for a long time, and then eventually it was easily available.
But now I can't find a Wii at a Target anywhere, so the economy must be booming?
It doesn’t help that the Switch 2 library is woefully inadequate.
This didn't affect Wii, WiiU, Switch or Switch 2.
Either people are waking up that Nintendo is selling nostalgia or the economy is not doing well.
I hope the former, there is something that feels sick to think Nintendo force fed corporate mascots to me when I was under the age of 1. To this day, I religiously buy Zelda games, even though I haven't enjoyed them since N64. FOMO mind control.
The content is the same as this article but the headline on Yahoo Finance is: "Jobs report smashes expectations as payrolls grow by 130,000"
There's no chance for survival just by glancing over the headlines.
That's noted in this article:
> One bright spot was last month, when hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists.
But that's 2026 hiring, and the article's about the 2025 revisions. (And the January number, as they all do, may get revised in a few months.)
Also 130'000 seems to be moderate. It beats expectations but is only slightly above what is needed to keep employment stable.
If all of 2025 was overestimated, possibly for political purposes, then why believe that the 2026 numbers are accurate?
Revisions are normal.
It would be quite hard in the long run to make faked BLS numbers line up with other independent data points, like ADP's payroll reports and the IRS's revenues.
Exactly. So we should not believe numbers posted ASAP to Yahoo and other for profit media to drive engagement. Wait for revisions from the source.
Cheap publishing that reaches across the world has created a race to the bottom.
Word on the street is that the January number is about to get revised down by a lot. Time will tell.
If I recall, the numbers almost always get revised down.
No. See the chart:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bls-jobs-report-revision-trump-...
Both directions are common.
ADP is reporting only 22,000: https://adpemploymentreport.com
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2026/02/this-is-the-trum...
whoever believes the jobs report coming out of this administration is a complete fool.
>>> "Still, Wednesday’s report also shows that not nearly as many jobs were added in 2025 as thought and last year will go down as the worst year for hiring since 2020, or since 2003 outside of a recession."
Almost no jobs were added net and the few that were, were all in health care, 131K i think the article said.
what i find interesting is that unemployment percent still looks low. is it accurate? even if it's wrong, shouldn't it be correct on a relative basis? why isn't this number climbing?
US Unemployment statistics have a number of flaws, including not capturing people who are underemployed (taking any low paying job to try to make ends meet instead of working in a higher paying field they are qualified for) and not capturing those who are no longer searching for a job
I agree that the most-commonly reported 'head-line' numbers can be misleading, but more detailed statistics are available. One of my favorites is the labor participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
You might want to look at the 'not in labor force' numbers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05026642
>One of my favorites is the labor participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
and also labor participation rate, but for 25-54 Yrs, so you exclude the effect of demographic changes https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Yes, moreover the whole-population participation rate is basically useless and nobody should look at it.
I find the overall population participation rate as being very informative with respect to the tax base, and more general changes over time.
These data are also reported by the BLS: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE.
It’s been creeping up for sure, but still historically low. And I’d attest that the headline rate is still the “real” rate.
The second point is hard to quantify. If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job. But if I am choosing not to look because I won't take a job, I am technically unemployed by the strict definition of the word but I don't count for what most people care about when thinking about the unemployment rate.
Underemployment is already reported and is distinctly different so I don't think it's fair to say that not counting someone at Burger King who has a Master's degree as unemployed is a "flaw."
The problem is how do we tell you from someone who retires early?
We determine unemployment using a survey, so presumably you just ask.
Same way we determine all the other inputs that go into the various unemployment rates? Ask.
"Marginally attached" and "discouraged workers" are already tracked and reported in U4, U5, and U6, so this is a strange hypothetical.
>If I just give up searching for a job and live off savings or government assistance, but I would take a job if I could find one, I should probably count as unemployed even though I'm not actively searching for a job.
The current definition makes sense because it's linked to an overt action that can be objectively determined. "Not looking for a job but theoretically would like a job" gets into all sorts of issues like "I want a job as a king if it landed on my lap...".
The US tracks six different unemployment metrics plus overall labor force participation rate. You’re talking about U6 and/or labor force participation rate.
Just because U3 is the measure typically quoted doesn’t mean the others don’t exist.
But I think in this case an aging population can hold down the official unemployment rate, even when there are no new jobs outside services for the aged.
It also doesn’t capture those not on unemployment. Graduate undergrad or grad school and can’t land a job? Government doesn’t know that.
They separately report people who are on unemployment insurance, but the headline unemployment numbers come from a survey of potential workers, which will capture recent graduates.
Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they surveyed. Every month for a year they called me, once a month, to ask what my employment status last week was, if I was actively looking, etc. (It was all synchronized around one week a month, but I don't remember which one it was they cared about.)
There are flawed, however, as long as the calculations are consistent then the numbers are reliable across time.
US unemployment statistics capture both of those things very well and in great detail. BLS U-6 tracks "Employed Part-Time for Economic Reasons".
The idea that the BLS lacks detailed labor market data is just internet conspiracy slop.
What stops it from being a more useful metric is that it doesn't account for someone who was employed with benefits five or ten years ago, but today has some crappy gig economy job with no health insurance. They show up as employed either way.
Native population is declining (and prime-age workforce is retiring), and the Trump admin has been extensively working to reduce the size of the immigrant workforce.
So the unemployment rate is staying low, but the absolute number of workers is flat or declining.
> Almost no jobs were added net and the few that were, were all in health care, 131K i think the article said.
I wonder what those folks in health care are doing, because (once again) after dealing with the US healthcare system, it seems like it's about 1% doctors, 10% other staff and 90% useless billing/scheduling/collections, designed to extract the maximum possible amount of money from a patient and provide the minimum amount of care.
More jobs being added in health care seems to be an indicator for it getting even worse.
May as well call this what it is: stagflation.
The anemic employment market calls for lower rates, but inflation still persistently being 50% higher than it should be calls for rate hikes.
My prediction: this inflation isn't going away without viciously painful rate hikes. It'll probably get worse.
I personally think we'll end up in a depression.
Stagflation or vibecession? Surveys say people feel down about the economy, but their spending says otherwise.
Look into Doomspending. Excessive spending is actually a psychological response to hardship for 1st world countries. It's a documented phenominon that has happened in the past and is exacerbated by social media, gamification of wealth, and general incompetence (all of which are on the uptrend).
I don't think "U.S. Jobs Disappear At Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession"[1] is vibes.
The future picture on inflation also looks bleak[2]:
> Taken individually, lagged tariff pass‑through, tightening labor supply, looser fiscal policy, and accommodative financial conditions would each push inflation modestly higher. Taken together—and interacting with increasingly fragile household inflation expectations—they create a macro environment in which inflation rising above 4 percent by the end of 2026 is not only plausible but arguably the most likely scenario.
It's common knowledge that the spending in the current economy is very K-shaped: the top 10% are the only ones staying above water.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-...
[2] https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/risk-high...
Obviously not a macroeconomic analysis but if you watch YouTube channels like Caleb Hammer it seems people are literally spending their life away. No planning, no asset building, just hedonistic stuff. The kind of people you see there have the mentality of: "I'll never pay this debt down anyway so I'll max out my loans to do what I want before I die". Not very optimistic, even if it inflates the consumer market.
I hope that when I die, people say about me, 'Boy, that guy sure owed me a lot of money.'
- Jack Handey
A great example of what seems to be the current ethos for the generation (I realize Handey isn't of this generation). Very much "nothing matters as we'll all die anyway, who cares about what comes after". I don't fault the sentiment, to be clear, it's just an indication of the socio-economic situation that fostered it.
With Trump appointing himself Fed chair after jpow's term is over get ready for jazz hands more unprecedented times!
Even worse, look at white collar job growth among american citizens. It has been negative for years
Only a golden age for the uber wealthy.
Related:
U.S. jobs disappear at fastest January pace since great recession
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46925669
The US job stats were revised down for 2025 to 181k, but somehow the Country gained 130k in January?
Is anyone looking at this and the CBO figures and not just realising the government is straight lying about the figures?
Gonna believe Powell and Waller on this one.
If most of the capital is in the hands of tech bros who live out their fantasies from 1980s SciFi novels, it is going to be misallocated.
The fake economy is now about AI, gambling and cryptocurrencies. It does not help that the current administration contains several Epstein disciples when Epstein was into these tech fantasies as well.
The misallocation of capital claims to grow the pie, but it dilutes the pie with fake growth so people that own the fake parts have more money to buy up the good parts.
Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand. The value in making it easier to make computers do things for you is plainly obvious. People all across the tech literacy spectrum are seeing benefits, from coding projects that took days or weeks taking minutes to hours to finish to soccer moms telling their phones to fix up family photos and find them the email from the doctor's that's buried in their inbox. Competent doctors are getting help catching things from scans/symptoms that would take House MD to connect but are a breeze for an LLM, and there are numerous reports of people figuring out their own longstanding obscure medical issues by asking an LLM to speculate on their symptoms after a hundred doctors failed to diagnose it. Someone who can't afford to get ripped off by a mechanic and doesn't have the spare hours in the day and technical knowledge to Google it the old-fashioned way has a decent chance of solving simple car problems instantly on their own by asking ChatGPT or Gemini. It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from.
On the other hand, it’s not clear if any of it is sustainably profitable. Zitron has done a lot of reporting in this area, but since he’s “controversial” let’s stick with Forbes and the case of Sora (2025):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/11/10/openai-spe...
As far as I can tell, the math isn’t getting any better. The financial costs of running an AI service are enormous and it’s not clear where sufficient revenue is going to magically come from once the aggressive loss-leading ends.
"Anyone lumping AI in with gambling and crypto scams has their head firmly in the sand."
I disagree. While some AI related stuff is promising, much of it is consumerist or data harvesting. Many people are basically gambling on any sort of stock related to AI (vs diversifying). Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.
"It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from."
Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle. It's just an expanse on neural nets and the other predecessors from 30 years ago. In my experience, it has trouble following basic directions such as keeping a summary to a single page.
> Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.
I highly doubt this will be the case. This common viewpoint is almost certainly no more than another iteration of Plato decrying the invention of books.
> Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/miracle
Books and calculators still required knowledge of concepts and application. That's vastly different from students today asking AI to write a book report for them and retaining no knowledge from it.
I don't consider AI to be outstanding. Maybe that bridge they're talking about was. Seems that this comes down to opinion.
Word on the street is the January numbers are about to get revised down by a good bit.
The economy is getting one-shotted by AI.
We're living through an extended recession statistically masked by the AI bubble.
The US lost 600,000 jobs just in January. The future is bleak.
What?
> America’s economy added 130,000 jobs in January, almost double the number that analysts had been expecting, indicating that the labour market might have picked up after months of apparent stagnation. Unemployment also fell to 4.3%, a slight dip from the previous month. The figures may put off the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates as quickly as Donald Trump would like.
Yeah not sure where the 600k figure is coming from. But that 130k that's being reported is almost certainly not correct, and will be revised down.
The ADP is only reporting 22k for January. Which lines up very closely with the monthly pace of job creation for 2025 (~15k, on average).
The downward revisions on the BLS numbers for 2025 are the largest on record. There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
> There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
Jobs data (which comes from a survey of employers) is always subject to revisions, and the revisions have gotten worse. But it's not necessarily political. Back when Trump unprecedentedly fired Erika McEntarfer (former head of the BLS) I looked into this and tried to understand where the data comes from, how it works.
Basically, the BLS surveys 50k out of the several million companies in the US. But response rates have dropped rather strongly since the Pandemic in particular. If you give them 3 months, it gets up to 90%, but after 1 month it is only 50%. This would be okay, except that the response rates turn out to be skewed: large companies almost always respond quickly, small companies respond more slowly. And small companies tend to be much more responsive to the state of the overall economy than large companies- for good and for bad. And even the response times of the small companies turn out to be sensitive to economic trends, for good and for bad: the companies that respond more slowly to surveys, it turns out, tend to be the most sensitive to the broader economy, the first to fire in a recession, but also the first to hire when the economy is getting better.
The final thing is that these companies can be highly correlated with each other and the broader economy. So there are always corrections, but in placid economic weather the corrections cancel out- some of the extrapolations are high, some are low, it ends up being close to 0. And the financial markets understand how to read these corrections. They understand that when the economy is shifting you will get all of the misses in the same direction- either high or low- and to pay attention these corrections data.
All of these misses low in 2025 are a very bad sign for the economy overall, not necessarily a sign of political pressure. That would probably show up in large, sustained differences to the ADP numbers or other privately reported numbers, rather than revisions announced by the BLS itself.
Both Trump I's appointee to head the BLS, William Beach (who served from 2019-2023) and Biden's appointee Erika McEntarfer (whom Trump fired in 2025) wanted to modernize the survey system, make it easier for companies to respond, and get better and faster data collection. But, because this system is so incredibly important to the markets, they wanted a larger budget to run the new system and the old system together for a significant portion of time (several years) so that everyone would be comfortable understanding the intricacies of the system, what revisions would mean, etc. And since they didn't get that budget (in fact it got cut) they decided to prioritize the old system rather than throw it away and experiment with something different.
Good explanation. I think it's sad that people find it easier to adopt imaginary theory of why labor statistics are flawed than they are to simply go read their methodology. People don't want to believe that there are BLS statisticians working the phones and knocking on doors. They don't want to know that there are hundreds of USDA employees tasked with writing down the retail price of carrots in every major American city every day. They aren't interested in how Census takers judge the population by counting gas and electric meters. They'd rather believe that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent.
I'm assuming this is talking about the revised numbers for 2025? And if that revised so heavily downward, hard to imagine the latest numbers are somehow more stable?
How does BLS even know if each person in the country is unemployed or seeking a job?
The same way that anyone would: they conduct a statistical sample and report unemployment numbers based on that. Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they contacted. As I recall, a letter came to our apartment, asking for the adult (18+) who had their birthday closest to that date to contact them and provide a phone number and some basic demographic data. That was me, not my roommate, so for the next 12 months I got a call once a month asking me for my employment details about a specific week that month- had I been looking for a job, was I still employed, etc.
Mostly through payroll data/surveys.
Any jobs data coming from the government is worthless, because gov employees will be fired for anything that makes Trump look bad. See link below.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/why-firing-bls-commissioner...
US population has also barely grown so that us fine?
Newborn babies don't go straight into the labor market.
Newborn babies don't go straight into the labor market yet.
The children yearn for the mines.
Gotta drive that shareholder value.
What about working population? Did it grow?
I thought much of a slow population growth is due to lower immigration, not declining birth rates?
~400k workers leave the labor force through retirement or death every month, as a data point.