The biggest problem that increasing housing supply can solve is the gap between minimum and median apartment price. In places with very constrained housing markets the cheapest slumlord apartments are very expensive (~70-80%) compared to the price of well maintained apartments. Increasing housing supply doesn't do much to the median housing price (since new houses are expensive), but it lets the price of shitty apartments drop a ton.

> increasing supply isn't going to solve our many problems leading to widespread homelessness and financial insecurity

Why not?

(I guess I'm a "dunce", but I'm one that's ready for that conversation)

There are extractive and inclusive economic institutions. democracies tend to guarantee the latter, we are rapidly pursuing the former.

I guess I'll be the one to point out that the richest American demographic is the 50-95%. And the ~75-85% are the actual backbone of the economy, with their relentless spending.

If there is a reckoning, the most pain will be the demographic here on HN, living in the suburbs. Not the billionaires living in the Hamptons or Napa.

The fuel of this fire is white collar high earners. Its also why not much is probably going to change, because these people also vote a lot. It's not billionaires and Black Rock driving up home prices, that's for sure...

Isn't basically every decile getting richer (i.e. able to afford more things) thanks to economic growth?

I would say aversion to allowing economic growth is the true cause of inequality.

It creates austerity which means the wealthy do just fine while those with less suffer and overpay and transfer what little they do have to the wealthy.

Degrowth is a fundamentally unequal program which causes massive inequality and suffering. Only with growth does power lessen for those with the most.

There's a huge disconnect between perceived amount of building and actual need for housing, in my experience. People are used to seeing nothing, so when even a single building goes up they think it seems like a lot.

In my downtown area, there has been a trickle of a new building with a few hundred apartments per year for the past four years, and people are freaked out at that tiny amount of new housing in a city of 50,000 people. in reality we need at least double that amount of housing per year, but that small amount has people shocked and thinking we're building way too much.

It's been far too normalized that we shouldn't build housing, and it's hurting society at a very deep level and causing massive inequality while blocking access to opportunity.

I don't know where you live but if you look at the statistics this is very clearly a regionalized problem in the US. Big coastal cities like SF, NYC, etc are building almost nothing but Texas is cranking out new suburbs by the square mile.

"We" in GP was the previous generation, not a nefarious evil cadre. The prior generations followed jobs to highly desireable areas, affordable only because they had the expertise and education to get the high paying job in the first place. Every person that moves there lifts the ladder a little higher behind them just due to market factors.

I feel that only works so long. Without new emerging areas offering high wages and decent cost of living, the new grads look at the old areas like SF (no hate just e.g.) and see a financial bridge too far and a tight job market anyway.

So there’s tons of empty housing? Why are people building new housing then, is it just that much better quality that the empty housing is the old crap?

Yeah.. In Texas, there is loads of housing, and loads of affordable housing.

In Canada - not so much

This is a big part of the problem; in the past when you had these situations the "kids" would move to new cities where new activities were happening and build them up (hell, Silicon Valley is basically an example of this).

That seems to have dried up, nobody is building massive employment centers far from the existing major cities.

That would unfairly couple the success of their students with their own success /sarc.

The government has a history of inflating anything they offer cheap money for. Housing, healthcare, education.

In our area parents can get several thousand for opting out of public school. That can be used to offset private school tuition. What happened? Private school tuition rose by about the amount the government was giving. It’s no more affordable, the government is on the hook for money, and the private schools have less incentive to compete since they got a 50% bump for doing nothing.

Any time the government offers handouts fraud, waste, and inflation will follow.

Anytime you see a lot of media claiming there is a shortage of some career it's a negative signal. The field will shortly be flooded

Not being directly in cybersecurity, is the situation there different from, say, CS grads as a whole? That is, not sure if the point is that hiring for entry-level tech is a disaster across the board and cybersecurity is one particular manifestation of that dynamic, or if cybersecurity is for some reason specifically worse than overall new grad employment in tech.

> Universities, local governments, local legislatures, the federal government, and whatever industry lobbying orgs that pushed for this are at fault.

It’s an industrial complex that uses students as fuel and when the winds shift, they get left holding the bag. Schools want revenue from student loans, employers want the best talent at the lowest cost without expending any resources to train and develop talent. Colleges are also desperate for students due to structural demographics and an ever shrinking pool of potential student customers, so they’ll sell whatever dream students want to buy. Cybersecurity? Sure. AI? Sure. Whatever gets you into the pipeline. Give us your money and we’ll give you a piece of paper of little to no value.

Edit: If you need a sure thing, go into healthcare. The world is going to keep getting older, and the demand for care will not end in our lifetime.

(day job is cybersecurity and risk)

This is broadly true for all concentrations in cyber. There is no entry level. Your first job should be learning how what you want to focus on works… be it networking, sysadmin, devops, vendor risk management, etc.

Unfortunately, cybersecurity was a hot topic in the education market and people got sold on the idea that they could get a six figure job with nothing but some theory and an entry level certification.

This is true for most sub-fields. The average person in them is either a failed dev or more of a pencil pushing box checker. The quality employees are devs with extra specialized expsrtise

Security, qa, devops, data emgonerkng, the list goes on and on.

Infosec also adds the angle that you want someone with actual grey or black hat hands on experience

Kind of funny, my cousin studied software development, then she pivoted to cyber security last minute because she was uncomfortable about finding work, she's been through a few different companies so far, so I guess it worked out for her.

100%. I started out in cybersecurity and was complete shit. I gave up and went into software engineering and devops instead. Now returning to cybersecurity again and things finally make sense

The Contract On America as many of us called it. And Newt's legacy has metastasized into even more virulent forms.

Of course, people actually good at security are rare and in high demand. This is totally aligned with OP’s statement. IMO you shouldn’t even be thinking of going into cybersecurity straight out of college. There’s just too much you have to learn about how software works for it to be a reasonable first job out of university. There will always be exceptional people, of course, but as a general rule I’m not hiring new grad cyber folks. Seems dumb

Companies have never cared about security, because there are almost no consequences to data breaches. A hospital network could get ransomwared for 48 hours, and no one cares. Critical data gets leaked? So what, pay a fine. You either pay a fine to the hackers, or you pay a fine to the government, or you pay a fine to customers, but no matter what its substantially less than a fully staffed security team, not just because security professionals are expensive, but because security professionals slow everything else down, they'll spend all day telling everyone what they can't do, which == lost revenue growth.

The only thing keeping security companies in the business is compliance/certification. If you've been around these compliance programs for long enough you know: they're box-checkers. But, sometimes you need to check that box, begrudgingly, annoyingly, so most companies will prefer to just outsource that security work to some managed security services provider, then think about it once a year when audit time comes around.

What is a cybersecurity professional going to do about a bunch of vulnerabilities in an app that someone else decided to deploy on a network they are responsible for?

99% of cybersecurity in the commercial sector is a box checking compliance exercise.

Most companies sadly don't care about security whatsoever.

There would not be such a proliferation if cybersecurity were a well-respected field.

Forget white collar. Figure out a career that makes use of your hands.

Or make enough money to retire in the next couple years.

AI’s coming for them. It’s impossible to predict what lawyering will look like in four years.

This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.

>as China's "lying flat" movement

No, you miss that "lying flat" is only possible when cost of food/living is low and housing is abundant.

Hah, I speed ran that process when I graduated with a useless degree back in the dotcom days. I graduated and gave up any hope within 3 months. I was working at the shopping mall selling suits after that. I've since told anyone who will listen that college degrees are worthless and school loan debts are the kiss of death. Not many will listen, but I try.

American parents on average may be less willing and financially able to support deadbeat adult children than their Chinese peers.

A bachelor's now is a high school diploma of 70 years ago. It doesn't tell you much and it delays your earning potential four years, and saddles you with debt.

Broadly, every company is on their own journey and makes their own discoveries in their own time, but Yes. I work with a swath of large employers in the midwest, workforce and economic development stuff, and there's a growing feeling among hiring managers that, the best way to put it is: the people they're interviewing out of college are, on the net, less equipped to succeed in the roles they're posting than their expectations on what level of capability college graduates should be at.

This doesn't mean there aren't great candidates.

This could be less on the individual and more on: colleges are getting worse at instruction/preparation (I'm bullish on this explanation among my colleagues; colleges never adapted to computers, let alone AI, the impacts of this just took a decade or so to shake out, which you should expect given the 16 year latency on education most students undergo) (though, again, ultimately its very complicated. multiple factors at play.)

For a lot of these companies this is all surfacing as: They're posting fewer entry level positions than they normally would (oftentimes not zero; just fewer), and if they have money in the budget available due to that, its going into AI.

> ¹ Not ghost jobs, not fakacancies, not agendas that are anything other than hiring as advertised.

Is there any hard data on the number of ghost jobs out there? Even estimates?

Which is why night school for someone in that position can be useful - just to get the keyword "degree" on there.

But the people you meet at night school are likely to be even more useful. Connections rule the world.

> medicine will always be the most secure and stable career, still has a shit life-work balance too.

It only is because it effectively has a guild\cartel system preventing an oversupply of doctors and that we have an aging population that increasingly demands medical care.

For those with a CS degree, I think the issue is that we aren't correctly using CS and AI to amass power as we rightfully should. We literally hold in our hands the power to delete many desk jobs from existence, also to offer various original new services, but somehow we're feeling crippled. This disconnect requires bridging.

How is that relevant? From TFA:

> By early 2026 recent grads sat at 5.6% unemployment

Which seems very far from your numbers.

That’s probably seasonal/part time/temp jobs given the age bracket, which is another something I noticed, there’s barely any deep studies across the ages. I think there are multiple reasons why females are more employed, but on top of them is the rise of service and nurturing economy (services healthcare etc) compared to other sectors, and these industries are dominated by women, and since there’s a general decline in general in say production or manufacturing, these economies boom, I mean, who’s gonna take care of boomers who dominate the wealth in general?

> Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.

This presentation of the stats sounds really misleading to me.

Let’s say there were 10 million quits and 10.369 million hires in that period.

5 million quits and 5.021 million hires among men.

5 million quits and 5.348 million hires among women.

In that case, yes it’s true that employment among women improved more than employment among men. No, it’s not true that an unemployed woman was 17x more likely than a man to find a job.

Thanks for sharing that! It’s something I noticed both online and IRL, it’s only guys (especially young ones) who are crying about the job market, I actually don’t know a single jobless female, all of them are working, and I know plenty who works two jobs!

Regarding the downvotes, I really don’t care about the fake online currency, I think their impact is negative in creating echo chambers in communities, and for some reason bringing men struggles is a taboo despite they suffer far more than women, suicide rates are clear example.

> or the entire industry gets sent offshore.

Assuming there are any seniors offshore either

Yep, I remember being told that it doesn't matter which major I pick because there would be jobs that wanted just any bachelor's degree.

I'm sure high school kids are still being told that today, and it might not be entirely false. Decent-paying jobs have certainly become more specialized for specific college majors, but I still see local job listings on the lower end of the white collar pay scale that ask for a BA/BS without expressing preference for a specific major.

How else would you sell it?