Oh my god do not trigger me about the news reporting “points” for the DOW or the S&P, I have seriously considered calling news stations about this.

Or not providing inflation adjusted values when referring to historical financial reference points.

I have to go find a happy place now

Something the best data scientist I ever worked with was adamant about... there is almost never an inherent "speed bump" at 0. If error bounds expand on both sides of 0, we have no idea if the true sign is positive or negative. There is no "directional" read in that case. There are some areas where 0 has a special meaning, but that's rare and the cause of that needs to be understood before assuming that's the case. Everywhere else, 0 is just another point on the number line.

> the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless

That is often the case, and being truly data based requires acknowledging that. We can then act based on other data, or admit that we're falling back to intuition and abandoning data based decision making for now.

hah. it's true. no interest in uncertainty except when forced.

Not in their primary news release. A footnote says it is "generally conducted at the 90% interval", but the individual numbers do not have their actual computed error bars.

Yes, they do publish them, but it is disappointing their primary releases do not have them.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

NBC wouldn't know how to navigate bls.gov if you put a gun to their head. And it's all downhill from there

Yes! I am aware of this and they are really great. Problem is nobody will ever read that, but they WILL watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never even point out that there are errorbars/uncertainty. Then I hear things like outrage when BLS revises numbers up or down (facepalm).

> The numbers are as good as they can get

That doesn't mean they don't warrant error bars.

Error bars aren't there to show that you didn't do a good job collecting the data, they're there to show your level of uncertainty.

That's true for the establishment survey, but the population survey, where they contact individuals, is what is actually used to calculate these numbers.

It is literally calling/writing 60,000 people and asking "are you employed? did you look for a job? Etc."

"How the government calculates unemployment" [0]

| Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm? | Last week, did you do any work for (either) pay (or profit)? | If the answer to question 1 is "yes" and the answer to question 2 is "no," the next question is: | Last week, did you do any unpaid work in the family business or farm? | For those who reply "no" to both questions 2 and 3, the next key questions used to determine employment status are: | Last week, (in addition to the business) did you have a job, either full or part time? Include any job from which you were temporarily absent. | Last week, were you on layoff from a job? | What was the main reason you were absent from work last week? | For those who respond "yes" to question 5 about being on layoff, the following questions are asked:

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

What makes you think it's small businesses? I would assume most businesses doing any reporting at all are using a payroll system. Mine handles the reporting automatically. The kinds of payroll systems used by small businesses can be set up in a day. If anything, small businesses that make even a small effort to stay on top of things have an easier time than big ones with complicated systems and processes.

I think you say “as good as they can get with [the] hard manual work that goes into compiling them” as a way to respect the challenge of the BLS and say they’re doing the best with their resources, but it’s worth pointing out they could be better with more resources.

Oh I’m well aware the BLS knows what they’re doing and publish error bars, they are great. The problem is news articles, no one ever reads BLS reports but they do watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never ever get into uncertainty.

2.30 × 10⁴ or bust

Exactly. I'm somewhat surprised someone's give-a-damn wasn't broken enough to do a cursory filter. Not like it isn't plainly obvious in other statistics, however.

The cost to municipalities/towns for medical insurance has skyrocketed which I think is a contributor (not to mention pension obligations for retirees).

> ..rise in political interference?

I haven't heard it phrased like that before hah. The truth is when a school district is bad enough the state comes in and takes it over to try and get things back on their feet. Fort Worth is just embarrassed because FWISD is so bad the state had to take it over.

My wife is a HS teacher in Richardson and one of her friends was hired as a new principal at one of the FWISD schools. She said the situation is pretty bleak and most teachers should be fired but they likely won't be able to get rid of all the bad ones. That's pretty typical unfortunately in public education.

https://www.fwisd.org/about/tea

/the same thing happened to a school district in Houston

no they didnt

Apparently there were healthcare strikes in February that depressed the numbers there, which were resolved by March. Also maybe data center and World Cup hospitality hiring. But hard to say. As others have noted, there are big error bands on these numbers.

Some of these offers may be part of visa or green card processes. Some require a labor market test in the form of a job ad and recorded response to it. If a suitable candidate applies, the visa/immigration process fails. Still, most companies don't intend to actually hire in this case as far as I understand it.

> but many openings sit for MONTHS which just does not line up with the anecdotal evidence of people going 6-12 months without an interview much less an offer

Neither of these things are evidence of “ghost jobs”.

When I was doing a lot of hiring it would often take months to find qualified candidates for basic roles. I would get 100s of applicants per month but only about 20% of the resumes I received were even close to qualified. I’d try to schedule intro and screening calls with the qualified ones who would actually respond, but you wouldn’t believe how many applicants would have unreliable communication skills. Some times I wouldn’t get a response from someone for weeks or more, but many just don’t respond to contact after applying to your company. If we’re using the lingo I think a lot are “ghost candidates”.

There’s further fallout through the interview pipelines as you discover how many people have lied on their resume or otherwise aren’t qualified. That self-styled C++ expert who can’t give an example of RAII or the self-proclaimed TypeScript expert who doesn’t know anything outside of vanilla JavaScript. It’s weird.

Then there are negotiations. Some candidates want to collect offers from multiple companies and will ask for delays in hiring so they can continue interviewing and getting other offers. It can take weeks for some candidates to accept or decline your offer. If they decline you have to go to the next candidate, which can take more weeks, and then on to the next. If there’s relocation involved it takes longer to decide and get it done.

Then some times we’re hiring multiple people for a row, so we leave the listing up and open to continue hiring. This really angers the “ghost jobs” people because they assume 1 listing == 1 hire, as if the company needs to close the listing and then copy/paste to a new URL for the next hire.

So job openings that exist for “MONTHS” are not evidence of ghost jobs.

The people going 12 months without an interview are almost always doing something wrong. You wouldn’t believe how inexcusably bad many of the resumes out there can be. Some people are hung up on applying only to jobs they aren’t qualified for and then wonder why they’re not getting interviews.

I think that is slightly blunted by this person looking at the week over week delta.

True, but is there any reason to think this dishonesty varies over time? The trend could be informative even if the raw numbers are nonsense

So perhaps we'll never get to a better healthcare+insurance market (nee "Free") through government, but eventually we will just all work in healthcare, and barter our nursing and dental skills in secret away from the insurance coders.

I've seen on youtube how people said a major reason housing is a big employer and housing has not fallen in price is due to their industry's attitude and resistance to introducing technological advancements.

in fairness also regulation makes it hard when it specificies the solutions not the parameters (just to illustrate the idea not an actual rule: you must have X thickness of PVC versus your pipe must withstand X pressure)

yeah but the size of the us healthcare sector (like 18%) is a policy choice, other developed countries have theirs at 10-12%.

U.S. healthcare is a giant predatory clusterfuck and seems impossible to meaningfully reform.

Yeah, but then the elderly population will start shrinking, which will cause a myriad of disruptions.

Most of the cuts were scheduled for after the midterms, you can guess why.

That has been the case for most of the year IIRC

They're also the target of a lot of campaigning, so politicians promise to give them even more services and fewer taxes.

It's not just boomers (though they are the biggest part of it).

Americans of all ages are spending more on healthcare, and seeking more healthcare interventions than in previous decades.

I know i'm just one guy but I'm 50 and the old people i know are very poor and supported entirely by their children. It would be interesting to see the median and mean wealth for people >70 and compare the two.

The Fed is not going to cut rates. Looking at Fed Rate futures they only predict increases:

https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...

It's not. 23,000 jobs is 0.01% of the workforce, so it's negligible in terms of lost sales (probably hurts consumer confidence more). But it is a signal that the economy isn't running too hot, so the company's much larger borrowing costs aren't going up.

Maybe we can finally reach communism by first getting together and all agreeing "the economy" isn't a science and if we all just believe really hard, numbers can go up forever, then we won't even need money!

Yesterday they were expecting the report to show 80k+ jobs added. So, this is much, much worse than expected. The market is up because they expect this will keep the fed from raising interest rates, and also because the market is increasingly detached from reality.

There is no good news. This is stagflation. Worst case scenario.

Bad news sells. There is always some bad news to print so you hear about it. That doesn't mean things are bad though.

For a selloff to happen, investors have to believe there is a better place for them to go. At worst, any bad news right now is making everything look equally bad, so there is no advantage to running away from Wall Street in particular.

skill issue. Solved by having the correct model of the world and forces acting on it given (appropriately weighted) current context and your usual variance.

It's usually people who don't understand the context or assign appropriate weights to events and allow randomness that complain about not understanding markets.

Gross dude

That comment should be illegal

Send it back across the Diarrhio Grande

It's incredibly sad. It's such a lose-lose situation we're all in. We have enormous natural resources to share with an enormous industrial partner, we share an enormous land border, and are two of the culturally closest nations on the planet. China being the more palatable power to partner with is a horrifyingly bad sign that there's something deeply broken and in need of repair in the U.S.

Ah, so the class of people least impacted by the chaos happening down here. The class of people who couldn't care less about things like "civil rights" and "social safety nets" for the poor as long as they get their tax cuts.

How is this related?

As everyone knows, real gdp growth is the only metric of goodness. All other numbers and figures are meaningless, we all down before the might RGDPG

%Debt to GDP ratio is not a subject either country likes to focus on.

The magnificent 7 formed a large portion of the US growth numbers, but many have legally hidden >$1.6Tn in "AI" debt deep in the pages of their reports.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NufJ7g63KSY

The Shrek movie is due out in July 2027, and strangely these often correlated with market corrections in the past. =3

What’s the connection between the two most intertwined economies on planet earth?

That looking at monthly numbers is stupid? The US has had significantly more job growth in 2026 than Canada has. The July numbers are convergence to a roughly common mean.

Canada is currently on the short list of countries Trump throws into his usual mad-libs of grievance flavored policy making.

It doesn't need a connection (even tho there are many). The US/Trump is going after Brazil for creating a payment system.

I'm surprised by the conspiratorial comments here like this is some sort of 4D chess move. *It's not.*

This is chickens coming home to roost from US actions in Iran, with tariffs, and other things introducing economic uncertainty.

As you alluded to; this is terrible for Republicans in power. And quite useful for Democrats.

It doesn’t matter whether it is a good move; just whether they think it’s a good move.

The worse Q2 looks the bigger improvement a bogus Q3 will look.

Wish i had your optimism.

>Indeed. Something to note is the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. We’re down to 61.4%. It was 61.5% in June 2026, 62.3% in June 2025.

Yes, it's called people getting older and retiring. It's pretty obvious that's the cause if you compare the labor force participation rate overall vs for 25-54 year olds.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

The Fed just had an article on the labor force participation rate drops: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2026/aug/what-is-b...

> You don't see the irony here with what you're doing?

Sorry, is OP the POTUS, speaking with Presidential authority and threatening federal employees with termination of employment for their political beliefs? The fact you think they're wrong is not a reason to equate their comment to Trump's actions.

At this point it's fair to doubt just about any claim or number that comes out of the federal government. I'm sure there are still thousands of honest researchers and professionals at all levels of the executive branch, but over the past year so many of them have been pushed out and so many more have been under pressure to produce only politically-approved output, that the federal government is becoming increasingly unreliable as an institution.

Maybe, maybe not.

And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake).

And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump going to vote harder and then, what? Pursue the same economic policy? Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda.

Job numbers have always been reviewed down after being released every single time since 2022.

I would assume so, but these numbers are so cooked that who knows!

The deficit fell dramatically 2009-2015.

It does make you wonder if the July shedding of jobs could be lowered even further to ~100k+ jobs lost (since they revise down very consistently).

https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573 indicates they've been getting better over time.

I'd suspect better computing helps a lot here.

To be fair, revisions are very normal, because the more reliable data (tax filings, for example) comes in later.

https://xcancel.com/ernietedeschi/status/1951721848393105573

The jobs numbers are notoriously laggy. On the way up, lag means constant upwards revisions. On the way down, lag means constant downwards revisions.

ADP Payrolls are a lower latency indicator but not quite as broad.

This is how bls data has always worked. And the reason is that they don’t always have the full picture every month and need to account for new data in the stats.

If you can do economics without revision, that is, find the real number of jobs lost or gained or workplace participation in real time, you could make a lot of money. Probably win some prizes, too.

Economics is an imperfect science.

I suspect that even his proponents knew better, they just didn't care as much about the economy as they did culture wars nonsense and religious woo-woo.

When you line the government with yesmen,they will taylor or they'll get fired, so I would expect HN to catch on that fast

Just look at a graph from the last few years. It bounces up and down a lot, but there's a pretty clear downward trend line, and it's been around zero for over a year, with many individual months slightly above or slightly below. https://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers...

Yes, agreed.

Thanks you for your kind reply. Calling it nitpicking doesn't make it untrue and payrolls are not public. To come up with factual data, one needs do some investigative journalism, and nbcnews' not one of them.