Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 836 posts

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#511

Post by Analemma_ »

h2zizzle wrote: post #504
Analemma_ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find it now because Bluesky's search function is so dreadful, but after the January jobs report was better than expected, a bunch of people were assuming the BLS must have fudged the numbers. Then the person who was actually fired from the BLS by Trump actually showed up and posted saying that, as far as they can tell from talking to "surviving" colleagues, the blowback after that firing was so intense that t…

>There is a separate issue where for the last 2-3 years, the BLS's later revisions to jobs numbers have been almost entirely downward, instead of evenly distributed like they used to be, indicating some kind of systemic methodological issue, maybe some secular change in how labor markets work post-covid The Biden administration pulled out all the stops (without resorting to outright corruption, like Trump) to get ahe…

I actually do pay reasonably close attention to how inflation and unemployment are calculated, and read the BLS and Federal Reserve reports beyond just the headlines from mass media outlets, and I can say this confidently: nothing you just said is true, you made up that whole paragraph out of nothing. It reads like a copypasta from RW Twitter reply guys.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#512

Post by joshuaheard »

larkost wrote: post #456
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare was carrying the economy. Any commentary on why that’s failing?

I can't find a reference for this, but listening to NPR this morning there was an offhand mention that last month there were significant strikes going on, and that those are now resolved, but showed up in the employment numbers for last month. So that part could just be a blip. The rest seems on-trend.

I read that temporary striking workers were considered a lost job and accounted for 30,000 of the jobs. Plus another 27,000 in health care from the loss of business due to the strike. And the federal government shed 10,000 jobs. That accounts for nearly half the job losses.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#513

Post by rootusrootus »

h2zizzle wrote: post #481
mschuster91 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues. The thing is, bad and expensive health issues can literally come upon you over night. You can get hit by a vehicle or get beaten up with no perpetrator to be held accountable, you can develop an aneurysm, get food poisoning, get pregnant unexpectedly (with all the risk that comes with, including healthcare not being accessi…

Seems like something that shouldn't be left up to a consumer market.

What percentage of the market actually pays it this way? IIRC, somewhere north of a third of Americans are already on a form of single payer healthcare. Most of the remainder are getting it through their job, subsidized to varying degrees. The fraction of the population that actually pays the full premiums out of their own pocket is pretty limited, AFAIK.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#515

Post by JumpCrisscross »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #494
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like someone who is on social media too much. The counterpart is an American in Paris convinced the banlieu are war zones. The actual problems: we’ve made it impossible and insulting to get a tourist visa. And we’ve made pissing on our tourism partners our foreign policy.

Your head's in the sand. Where I live we have bounty hunters kidnapping people into unmarked vans. For six months or more now. Would visitors likely be safe? Sure, but not necessarily and I can't blame people for being cautious and there's so much unpredictability around it, even for those of us who are familiar.

> I can't blame people for being cautious and there's so much unpredictability around it

I can. Again, this is like refusing to visit CDMX because you heard about gang violence or avoiding Sicily because there is crime. Those singular events aren’t false. But they don’t make up the majority of the context. Someone refusing to travel because of these low-probability events (note: because of fear of them, not out of protest, which is separate) is almost certainly behaving irrationally.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#516

Post by dehrmann »

kasey_junk wrote: post #488
dehrmann wrote: post #474

What are the current theories about why the perceived(?) healthy unemployment rate is lower post-covid? 4.4% is spectacularly good by historic standards. This has also been the slowest medium-term upswing in unemployment since WWII. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE I'd ignore the headline number and wonder what the longer term trend means because this isn't normal.

Macro demographics. Boomers are retiring and requiring healthcare in historic numbers.

That doesn't show up as unemployment, though. It might mean the economy is getting worse faster than that graph, but boomers retiring is dampening the increase.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#517

Post by airza »

angiolillo wrote: post #253
CalRobert wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, I live in the Netherlands (though I am originally from California) and my entire summer is booked full of either family or friends visiting from the US - the friends are mostly here to get a feel for the place and see if they want to emigrate. I wonder how many Americans of means are vacationing abroad instead of domestically just to get some respite...

> the friends are mostly here to get a feel for the place and see if they want to emigrate As a US citizen who has daydreamed about moving to a Dutch city like Ultrecht I'm curious what they found, and how it feels to be an immigrant in the Netherlands.

it pays less but it's very nice.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#518

Post by JumpCrisscross »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #494
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like someone who is on social media too much. The counterpart is an American in Paris convinced the banlieu are war zones. The actual problems: we’ve made it impossible and insulting to get a tourist visa. And we’ve made pissing on our tourism partners our foreign policy.

Your head's in the sand. Where I live we have bounty hunters kidnapping people into unmarked vans. For six months or more now. Would visitors likely be safe? Sure, but not necessarily and I can't blame people for being cautious and there's so much unpredictability around it, even for those of us who are familiar.

> I can't blame people for being cautious and there's so much unpredictability around it

I can. Again, this is like refusing to visit CDMX because you heard about gang violence or avoiding Sicily because there is crime. Those singular events aren’t false. But they don’t make up the majority of the context. Someone refusing to travel because of these low-probability events (note: because of fear of them, not out of protest, which is separate) is almost certainly behaving irrationally.

Where your argument might have purchase is in America having previously been a good tourism destination for someone with such anxieties. But the truth of the matter is folks like that don’t tend to travel in the first place.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#519

Post by mothballed »

mschuster91 wrote: post #476
yonaguska wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take is that it's just hit a breaking point where people have finally decided that it's not worth the money. Im not the only person I know with an uninsured wife, and only coverage for my kids. If it weren't for my kids, I wouldn't have enrolled in insurance either. The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues. And with the government cutting back spending, w…

> The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues. The thing is, bad and expensive health issues can literally come upon you over night. You can get hit by a vehicle or get beaten up with no perpetrator to be held accountable, you can develop an aneurysm, get food poisoning, get pregnant unexpectedly (with all the risk that comes with, including healthcare not being accessi…

Catastrophic health insurance for most those things is very inexpensive, relatively, but you have to re-buy it every 3 months and then "pre-existing" conditions reset. The expensive insurance is for covering ongoing expenses, as predictable expenses or at least those known 3+ months in advance are the vast vast majority of health care costs.

Realistically catastrophic revolving temporary insurance plus managing what you can in Mexico, plus occasionally paying out of pocket would mitigate the vast majority of yours risks while keeping expense relatively low.

Re: US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

#520

Post by newfriend »

epistasis wrote: post #509
newfriend wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mass deportations are being conducted mostly on the basis of race. Care to share your stats? This sounds like more of "I don't like this president, therefore what he's doing is wrong"

I have what I stated in my comment. You are free to dismiss the experiences of whoever you want, of course, including Trump-friendly police chiefs, by dismissing them as "they must not like Trump and therefore lie." But that is quite a biased way to experience the world. Especially when Trump's own words about which immigrants he wants to get rid of. It's bias in service of a "fairness" that even the benefactor doesn…

So nothing. Just anecdotes. At least you admit it.
Post reply on HN