211–220 of 1001 posts
Interesting perspective of an L7 who was laid off at Amazon https://xcancel.com/PlumbNick/status/2016500347053773198
We're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by circular AI deals and speculation.
From March 16, 2020 (Covid scare reality / market-drop), the marketcaps of Top 10,000 traded companies has doubled (from low $70 Trillion USD to low $140 T) But bullion has done even better (particularly past month). So — extrapolating — I'd recon the USD is inflating away its problems (mostly: itself).
No wonder, people are fed up with the US administration and its constant firehose of bullshit. But there are no viable contenders to the US Dollar as reserve asset - the Eurozone is too fractured, China is under currency controls, Germany on its own outclasses India, and Japan's economy is headed for some serious BS once it follows their population age graph.
That only leaves gold... the question is, is it physical gold? (And my opinion is: as long as it's not in a vault under your control, you're buying IOUs, not gold)
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> there are enough american job seekers in CS To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American. When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the a…
> When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. Its worse than that. when I lived in america, I found that being a software engineer was a dealbreaker when it came to dating most women. Imagine my surprise going to other countries and finding that my chosen profession made me high value…
What profession were those women looking for?
We're basically in a low-key recession that is being masked by circular AI deals and speculation.
From March 16, 2020 (Covid scare reality / market-drop), the marketcaps of Top 10,000 traded companies has doubled (from low $70 Trillion USD to low $140 T) But bullion has done even better (particularly past month). So — extrapolating — I'd recon the USD is inflating away its problems (mostly: itself).
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I'm not american, but it seems to me there are enough american job seekers in CS to justify not needing H1B. I'm not sure anyway what is the relationship between the potential difficulty of hiring new folks, and firing current folks in USA to offshore roles, are relates.
> there are enough american job seekers in CS To be blunt: Not enough qualified ones. Look at the names of all the top AI papers of the past 3 years, not too many are American. When you get bullied in American public schools for being a "nerd" and liking science and math, your country doesn't exactly produce a lot of state-of-the-art STEM professionals. You get a small handful of exceptional people who overcame the a…
There are plenty of Americans who don’t have a European names.
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Then the US companies will be outcompeted by more competitive companies located outside the US. Now the US lost the jobs and the workers' income tax and the corporate tax. America cannot eternally capture a disproportionate share of global wealth, even with such rent seeking moves. It's unsustainable. We had a golden age after WW2 when we were the only undamaged industrial economy but that age has ended.
Pretty much. America is destined for a decline. The billionaires can make money regardless of border by always moving things around and utilizing their expansive resources for any possible loopholes and escape hatches while manipulating public policy.
It's your fellow countrymen who are peddling the policies that, at the margin, push those investments overseas.
>Amazon axes 16,000 American jobs as it ... relocates to a larger campus in India https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/amazon-to-invest-additiona...
Once again the mask of "AI" is really just human labor underneath. I've personally seen founders raise millions of dollars because of "AI" that is really just manual labor. I know, I wrote the code that enabled the manual laborers. This was like 10 years ago; the lie is even easier to tell now. And that is so so important in an economy where gaining favor from those who already have money is far better than just sell…
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Since the administration have stopped releasing some data that usually is released, how fast would people be able to notice that the economy tanked, if it did?
Also wasn't there some BLS figure which was pushed by the Administration to try to have good numbers or similar. I mean speaking from a different countries pov, Personally I wouldn't trust the numbers the current administration gives.
I don't know if this is the same belief that Americans within America also hold though.
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There are people at my office who haven't really done anything since March 2020 when we all got sent home. They probably weren't doing anything before then either, but at least they were there eight hours a day.
I've never understood this meme. Maybe I'm naive, but why would a company hire someone to "not do anything?" How would they stay employed if their performance review showed they "weren't doing anything?" Everyone around me is busy doing 3x the amount of work they can sustain because we're so short staffed. Where are these companies that have people just sitting there picking their nose watching YouTube? I've never re…
I've been on 10+ projects at big companies and have begged to do work. Mostly it was showing up to 3-5 meetings/week while managers try and figure things out, and their VPs reconfigure budgets, priorities, and resources. Sometimes I do the work and hold it until someone wants it.
There's usually no standard top-down view about what happens when 3 VPs change the scope on 5 projects. But in reality, that usually means 10-30 people downstream are paralyzed. This is also where the tension between "new work" and "scalable processes" comes into play (need a consultant?).
Add regulatory compliance and approval gates, and then..
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It's very very easy to make stocks go up. Zimbabwe and Venezuela have stock markets that have gone up millions of times over for instance. The stock market is mostly just an inverse of currency health and tends to be inline or slightly above inflation on average, even when the economy is a complete mess. No one ever judges economic health by the stock market which you seem to be doing. You judge it be things like med…
You can use non-USD currencies to judge how the US stock market has fared to avoid the issues with currency health. You may argue that dollar-denominated returns aren't real, but SPY isn't down even when denominated in EUR https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXEUR >median wealth (currently below 2007 levels in the USA) This is outdated -- it surpassed 2007 levels in 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/datavi…
*SPX and no, it's down 2% when denominated in Euros while up 15% when denominated in dollars. I wouldn't say the USD has fared well so far.