transportation, warehousing, and utilities being a headlining loser here is the most striking.... perhaps?

I'd say personally it's worthwhile for Americans to know where to get the canonical data directly: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.a.htm. Everything else is some sort of spin, interpretation, or at best selective reporting of the underlying primary data.

Gift link costs me nothing :)

We also have the unemployment numbers, and they are low. If job openings were largely ghost listings, and we were in a stealth recession, we'd see it in rising unemployment. Now unemployment HAS been creeping up, but still is low. If it hits 5% then I'd worry about a downturn.

The data in the FRED link doesn't come from online job postings but rather from surveys that businesses complete about their open positions. They don't really have much reason to lie in those surveys (or at least not any more than they have in the past?)

You want to look at info broken down by sector and wages yeah. Look into "underemployment" for more

Yes, employment statistics rarely tell you anything about the quality of the jobs. And when they do tell something, it's the simplest information possible.

But the statistics are selected in a way that if a society maintains a low headline unemployment for a long time, it's correlated to an increase in the quality of the jobs¹. The correlation is still not perfect, and authoritarian countries love to redefine the date so their absolute value changes.

1 - More clearly, a constant low unemployment correlates to a positive derivative in quality. And a constant high unemployment correlates to a negative derivative in quality.

Cash is king. Look at change in income by quintile (or preferably decile, but I was too lazy to check mark all those and make a graph)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1Q95B&heig...

FRED lets you control for population actually! It does flatten the change a bit but it's still a bump: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Q8J6

Is that still true? I would guess net immigration is 0 or negative at this point.

It comes from surveys based on this criteria:

> JOLTS defines Job Openings as all positions that are open (not filled) on the last business day of the month. A job is "open" only if it meets all three of the following conditions:

1. A specific position exists and there is work available for that position. The position can be full-time or part-time, and it can be permanent, short-term, or seasonal, and

2. The job could start within 30 days, whether or not the establishment finds a suitable candidate during that time, and

3. There is active recruiting for workers from outside the establishment location that has the opening.

Very likely which is the point of the ghost jobs and gives the illusion that the OP is falling for. Companies (especially publicly traded ones) do not want analysts at banks or hedge funds using their careers page as a good / bad signal.

Therefore, it is cope.

The government has spent decades figuring out ways to lie about this. Are you actually shocked? The number of men who can buy a home and have a stay-at-home-wife on a random job they got out of high school is nigh 0% when this used to be the norm.

I'm young-ish transitioning to middle age (36).

The job market is AWFUL for my generation, and pretty much always has been since we entered the workforce.

Unemployment might be low if you think that folks with advanced STEM degrees can go and get a part time gig at McDonald's.

If you look at meaningful employment - where one can make enough to live near where they work, save a bit, pay food/rent, and spend a bit for their leisure or health, well....no we are not over-employed. We are in a death spiral.

Because it measures open job listing. All of the job listing i've apply to and never hear back from still exist too. Take from that what you will.

> Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier.

This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.

When I was younger, I did a bunch of short-ish stints at various companies (I think average tenure was a hair under 2 years) because someone else would offer more money, more exciting work, etc. It was incredibly inefficient for the employer. "Waiting for my laptop/credentials to be issued" was like a full percentage point of my time there. I barely cared whether the company did well because I wasn't going to be there long enough for my RSUs to swing wildly either way. I never got to the point where I knew offhand who to talk to about niche parts of the product, and never became "that guy" for anyone else.

Frankly a lot of our stuff was higher risk and took longer because of the revolving doors. People important to a project would leave in the middle, or the person who wrote an important system would quit so we were left with whatever tribal knowledge we had.

Things worked well when the lady that wrote our invoicing system 20 years ago was still around but in security now. Things went poorly when she quit 6 months ago and now I have to reverse engineer it to figure out why I get stack overflows on invoices that contain an image.

its not that they're putting people who are immigrants over US workers, they are putting corporate profits before US workers.

the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans. i am not overly educated on this but it seems like a lot of countries, europe specifically, are extremely protective of their jobs.

i don't think americans are somehow inherently more worthy of employment and opportunity than people from other countries, but it does seem like it may be a playing field that isn't very level if a lot of other countries are protecting jobs but the US isn't. in addition to our cost of living being tremendously high compared to the countries we outsource our work to, it isn't even an option for an american to go get a job in (for example) india and send home paycheck to support family in the US.

What toxicity is unique to the US labor force?

Why is the revocation taking place? Is it related to the federal government?

Typically companies use things like futures, options, and forward contracts to fix or cap their input costs for commodities like oil. This lets them bid on projects without needing to know the future price of oil.

> Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless.

So, uh, did business owners actually take any of these things, which very much were promised during campaign season, into account when voting? Or did they walk into the ballot box thinking, "no-one wants to work anymore!" and pull the lever for the guy promising to make applicants a bit more motivated to work at lower wages?

I work for an global company in the industrial automation space. Not only is there is a major effort underway to offshore jobs and manufacturing from the US, but our customers around the world are pulling way back on capital expenditures, citing US policy uncertainties as a primary reason.

also, future of USD-value is highly uncertain, dropped 10% last year, likely to drop more if interest rates keep dropping

I'm not a multinational, but that's what I've been doing since February.

It sadly doesn't work that well with tariffs in play again anything done outside the USA has to pay and frankly other nation just don't spend like American's.

The US needs an offshoring tax. If you want to sell to Americans you also need to hire Americans.

Investment monies have been tightened across the board, mainly due to high interest rates and the fact that investments in anything other than Tech/AI don’t match expectations of growth.

This is just Trump, not the USG as a whole. Congress approved a budget and Trump refuses to give the money out. People have to fight in court to get the money they're owed.

Money was free then, and hiring took off in software, which people were relying on a lot more during the pandemic. All of my friends who are performers or work in events were wrecked financially. The industry still hasn’t really recovered.

It took me so long to realize this but it’s completely true. What they want most is for other people to suffer

Seems to me like it's American businesses that are increasingly operating like governments. Acquiring media outlets to manufacture consent, bending the courts to deregulate their operations, trading political favors and engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI, funded with debt.

It's the rate of change. Things like NAFTA took many years to implement, and were debated and developed in the open. Everyone understood what would happen to the economy and that there would be a decade of transition.

Nobody announces the largest tariffs since the 1930s overnight, and selectively increases or dismantles them from week to week. Just look at this line graph: https://www.usfunds.com/resource/americas-tariff-rate-hits-t...

A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.

No, not even close. The basis for most of these actions requires novel legal re-interpretations to claim power from Congress for the executive, ignore time or scope limits, and remove expert judgement from what are often supposed to be consensus decisions. The courts cases over tariffs are highlighting the unprecedented claims for both the nature of the purported emergency and the scope of the response, but this shows up in many other areas such as inventing a “power emergency” to force coal plants to stay open over the wishes of the owners, communities, and state governments. We’ve never had anything like this level of direct economic interference in the modern economy - even things like WWII policies were at least targeted and based on a real threat.

No, every President does not declare tariffs by fiat using specious emergency powers that change day to day depending on who kissed their ass most recently.

Not really.

Even setting aside whether the changes are good or not themselves, no President before has thrown away laws mandated by Congress the way the current President is.

Further, this wasn’t even considered a possibility and is only happening now due to a confluence of events… - the Supreme Court passing rulings that essentially make the President unaccountable

- the SC passing rulings preventing Congress from delegating powers which in practice means a lot of laws Congress had passed in the past have essentially disappeared (since the agencies tasked with making decisions related to them are no longer allowed to)

- Congress becoming completely supine and giving away as much power as they can

- a President that has accepted and is operating on what was until now a fringe legal theory of unbridled executive power ie “unitary executive” theory.

Yes they do. Not sure why you're being downvoted.

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Service guarantees citizenship!

Would this be: a chance to begin again, in land of golden opportunities?

But what if they plan to fail fast?

Massive wealth redistribution is just another word for Taxes.

When we taxed the rich we were happy. It’s literally all we gotta do.

My hotter take: We've been in a depression since '08 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cMV

this needs to be shouted from the rooftops. something drastic needs to happen or else we will be the harbinger of a large-scale societal collapse.

Yeah, there's absolutely a reason that we're not releasing a lot of key economic numbers and it's not because the government needs to clean house of people determined to sabotage things, and it's not because the numbers are so amazing that we have the "best economy the country has ever seen", either.

My even hotter take: This was always the inevitable result of shareholder capitalism.

The only outcomes left are either unchecked descent into fascism as oligarchs consolidate power and finish their government takeover before their current power base falls apart, or a successful socialist revolution.

This is what it's always been leading to.

I think parent comment was talking about hype vs reality rather than disagreeing with you.

"We're not hiring but AI is in the news" = "We're not hiring because of AI! Don't sell our stock!" It's independent of actual current or future AI adoption.

Maybe. I am likely not a typical HNer, but my company actually has use of AI our 2026 goals. I am not guessing. I know majority of people in this company have those goals baked in. Now, can I suspect other like companies do the same? No. But even if they don't, it does not matter. Because the companies that don't allow AI, have people who use it anyway..

yes, AI isn't penetrating those fields with high job losses at all

Bespoke AI has not gotten everywhere but generic AI absolutely has.

The workforce is happily making themselves more efficient by using AI on their phones for what used to be multi step look it up in the literature or your supplier's catalog or consult the instructions or read the rules process when performing cookie cutter tasks they know but don't remember exact specifications for.

Remove AI data center spending from that.

That is literally the nihilism that got us here to begin with.

I can only speculate, but many are going back to their home countries. China is also ok-ish from what I hear (at least in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen). Native born americans are also trying very hard to move to Canada, UK and EU.

But your question is what is a better country for them? A year ago, I would have said none. But I'm sure you're seen the same news that I am where even when immigrate legally, work hard, obey the law,etc.. even having real-ID proof is of no use, they get jailed. the threat of imprisonment alone, just for existing is scary, I'd say just about any other country that won't throw you in prison for existing is better. They're also talking about revoking citizenship of Americans so non-nonchalantly, hardly anyone cares. I don't even if the US is safe right now just for getting your degree at an Ivy-league school.

You said "especially for americans" - they're talking about getting rid of H1Bs right now, my comment is about the brain-drain from immigrants. The majority of the time, it isn't to save money, but the talent just isn't there in the US. Even in software-dev, there is a sort of flood of compsci grads right now, but it's only so because so much of these positions are filled with immigrants. Many other fields will have strong demand, and if the supply could be bootstrapped in a few years it isn't a big deal, but while americans get degrees (which isn't happening like before! it's really really bad right now) american companies lose their competitive advantage. Look at the CEOs of Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, they 're the type of people ICE would be eager to throw in prison were it not for their wealth and connections. Go to Arxiv.org to see pre-prints on research papers from various industries, look at the names of who's publishing.

You have to understand that the current environment and government in the US is specifically to drive out immigrants. There is a reason ICE has a higher budget than the US marines right now ($50B), they're not at the border arresting illegal migrants, they're hunting legal migrants in american cities. There are many countries where there are little opportunities for work, and population and government are very hostile to migrants (russia for example, or even japan in certain cases),but you will not have to fear being thrown in jail at-random, or constantly fear for your safety, especially for those who have family hear, I can't image what it must be like.

They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor. They didn't have instant comms and globalized commerce either.

Only tangentially related, the Nazis started the holocaust, in part, as a way to boost their domestic economy while making invasion supply chains viable. Less people to fight over resources, they were removing demand because of supply shortages, in literally the worst way possible.

Well, I was simply lying.

Who else is going to run the models?