Comment by shrubble
20 days ago
The big question is “whose jobs”?
If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).
20 days ago
The big question is “whose jobs”?
If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).
Mostly Transportation, Technology, and Healthcare [0].
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/layoffs-unemployment-jobs-econo...
As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.
Eventually the protected industries will be totally disconnected from global markets causing them to lose global competitiveness, to the point they cannot even compete with the black market markups. And then you are maga, er mega, fucked.
> why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper?
What markets do you have in minds? Can retail investors invest there?
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These perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...
Priced right if money is moving from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. Stock market growth is because theres excess money and people need to invest the money. Supply and demand. There's reason why you can buy any ultra luxury car right(look at ferrari's revenue growth) and private jet industry is booming.
The market is only "right" in the very long term, and probably not in a way that's useful (companies that die eventually price to 0...but not a useful signal if its riding high all the way before it crashes).
> maybe nothing is priced right
What does "priced right" even mean? For whom? When a public company makes billions in profits by selling insanely overpriced hardware, then that's "priced right" for the shareholders.
When a supermarket gives out 25% discount stickers to use, then the price of the good is closer to being priced right for the consumer, as long as you apply the sticker. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the supermarket would operate at a loss or close to cost. These 25% are already priced in and anyone not using the stickers is paying extra.
Nothing has been priced right ever since they've (the collective of anyone willing to sell something) figured out that they can ask for however-much people are willing to pay, which is quite more than what MY FELLOW HUMANS would need to pay.
For everyone else, who aren't willing to pay deliberately inflated prices, there's usually always some form of discount for some product, somewhere to be found.
In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present. There is one remaining parameter (the exchange rate between future payouts on different dates, the "discount rate"), but all the subjectivity reduces to that one number.
However if everyone is deluded about what the future payouts of different insturments will be, you can get $10 for $1 in one place and $0.001 for $1 in another (given that in both cases the influence weighted participants think they're selling you a dollar). That invalidates the picture of reducing the unknowns to the discount rate.
In your examples, you're talking about goods and services, which have different values to different people. They have an equilibrium price but as you say, that's not the "right price for everyone," like there is for say a bond.
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Ahh, yes, all the undocumented people working in tech...
The people looking to view this positively will find or imagine a reason to do so, regardless of which jobs it is.
The Challenger report contains large companies' announced future cuts. Not government, not small and medium business, not actual job losses. So neither, really.
Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?
The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
Looking at salaries, senior developers working for the government get paid about the same as entry level software engineers who get return offers at BigTech. Well actually senior developers in government only about 10%-20% more.
And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?
I know how much senior cloud consultants working at AWS make working in the WWPS. I was there as an l5. Amazon is a shitty place to work. But I doubt it’s any worse than the government right now. GCP and Microsoft (not just Azure) both also pay their consultants a lot more than government employees make.
I’m not saying the government isn’t needed. But the best and the brightest aren’t going to give up the amount of money they can make in the private sector - especially now that government jobs are far from a secure paycheck
> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
Healthcare.gov was primarily developed by private contractor firms, not government employees.
> And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?
Some people are motivated by factors other than pay, a concept that seems to be foreign to many FAANG corporate mercenaries.
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You are arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time.
Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact.
In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.
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> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
Well, that's not the worst that can happen - Oregon had the idea to let Silicon Valley company Oracle do the job...
In the aftermath of what was likely the most spectacular failure among state-run Affordable Care Act health exchange site launches, the state of Oregon has filed a lawsuit against Oracle America Inc. over the total failure of the Cover Oregon exchange.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/oregon-attorney-...
As a result of the ongoing problems, in April 2014, the board of directors voted to close the state-run exchange and adopt the Federal HealthCare.gov exchange beginning in 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_Oregon
Turns out Oregon even got some money out of Oracle in the end?
Gov. Kate Brown announced today the settlement of the six lawsuits the state and the company filed against one another after the failure of the Cover Oregon health exchange website.
The settlement, valued at $100 million, includes cash payments to Oregon as well as a six-year license agreement for products and services that Brown said can be used to "significantly modernize state government's IT systems."
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html
Also a good bs indicator: 'illegal alien jobs'. As if the demand vanishes with the poor souls to uganda. It just framing in hope of twisting a win out of it, because if you would have stated that sub-minimum wage jobs are in decline, this would be a terrible economic indicator for the US.
I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke".
I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.
You think illegal aliens working - by definition- illegally, show up on reports like this?
sigh If only the department of education was as well funded as the department of war.
It’s a non trivial question.
Estimates of criminal activity, for example, are frequently counted as GDP in places like the UK. And even if you’re working in violation of visa rules, the IRS will still expect and enforce taxes.
These people don’t have an SSN. You can’t pay taxes without one
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A big part of the job losses were driven by Amazon and the end of their UPS contract.
Yes, the illegal alien jobs that are being reported to the government by big corps are dropping. You're spot on /s
Mostly SWEs (especially the type who act pissy on HN).