Ask HN: What skills will be useful during an upcoming recession/depression?

It's a recession, not an apocalypse. These are kind of old news:

1. Budgeting. Know exactly where your money goes and what dials you can turn.

2. It's less about skills than products and services. So it becomes a better time to be a Costco or a cobbler (which helps people save money) than to be a Tesla (which helps people spend money).

For software, my suspicion is infinite monthly SaaS subscriptions will come under more scrutiny. And it might be a bad time to run a money-bleeding self-driving car startup. But that's my only firm guess at this point.

We may be okay if COVID is our only real threat. Self isolation won't be impeded, and hospitals will not over saturate. If anything disturbs self isolation, like a massive earthquake, drought, Australian like fires, or like you say a war, there is no chance of a quick rebounding economy.

That being said, as an aside, imagine slipping into a 3 month coma from a heavy Christmas 2019 party and waking up to eight other people on ventilators in your room. Imagine finding out Kobie Bryant died, that the USA assassinated a top Iranian military figure, and that the world economy dropped 35% in 1 month.

You'd think there was a war.

Maybe I can help convince you to make the change...

It might be useful to -- consider that your information is... not useful.

By this I mean that you should be interested in how people react to new information in general. In some cases, people take this information and act on it. In most cases, they don't. It's very hard to convince someone, especially a stranger, to do something differently just by providing them new information.

Don't take my word for it. You don't even need to look to others to find the truth to this. Just look to yourself.

How often do you tangibly change your actions based on new information? I'm sure you have some less than desirable habits, and I'm sure you have know enough information to know that these habits are not helpful. Yet, even with this information, have you changed these habits?

I am similar. I sometimes struggle to engage in conversation... I'd rather just walk away and do something interesting to me. And this is fine, you don't need to always engage in conversation. But when you do, it shouldn't be to just dump information on people. This isn't effective. Even with people who you have close, intimate relationships with... it's even hard to change these people. Even if you do have the right information, it needs to be delivered with patience. You can't expect them to change overnight. You can't even expect them to change at all. If you want to tell someone something, you must do it with compassion, and expect that if they are going to take this information from you, it will be on their own time.

Yes, but perhaps not in the way that you might think.

There were a number of structural factors that led to the great depression: gold standard currency and restrictive monetary policy at the Fed, overly restrictive tariff laws, simultaneous drought that destroyed a lot of farmland, rampant financial fraud, lack of deposit insurance at banks causing numerous bank runs and failures.

Basically all of the above is different now. The modern Fed is organized around preventing the monetary mistakes made during the depression. We are on purely fiat currency now, not the volatile gold standard. Food security is hugely increased, and restrictive tariffs have not impacted the ag industry of Canada and Mexico, which are key supports of the US's food supply chain. We have the FDIC for deposit insurance and increased post-Great Recession capital controls on systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).

We have also learned from the Roosevelt interventions of the 1930's that it requires both a strong monetary and fiscal policy to address a systemic shock to the economy. So it might take some time for stimulus to arrive, but it should be incoming.

Finally, we have the internet. Not to oversell it, but it's a significant asset that can ensure a degree of continuity of supplies, services and employment in an event such as this. Yes - it's not perfect and many necessary jobs can not be done over the internet. But it's better than the alternative.

So, my feeling is that we are heading into the most significant non-wartime economic event since the great depression, but if cards are played properly we should be able to mitigate the terrible effects to a much better degree than was possible in the 1930's.

Sure, but one shouldn't feel obligated to provide value. Providing intellectual stimulation when unasked for immediately marks one (to the lay person) as the proverbial know-it-all. Their body language will speak magnitudes; just watch the direction of their feet. Anything more than 30 degrees away from your direction will indicate they are not interested in the service you think you may be providing.

You must gain confidence. Have confidence in yourself, and you will find others will do the difficult conversational parts for you. The quickest way to gain confidence is to learn to lift compound weights and to increase the weight over the years.