U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

Post by reactordev » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 5:19 AM UTC

jack_tripper wrote: post #67

Buttons840 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lack of competition. Watch and you'll see all sorts of things happening that shouldn't be possible in an economy with healthy amounts of competition. An example that has been on my mind recently is dynamic pricing [0], where everyone is charged a different amount based upon what an algorithm thinks the company can get away with. When healthy competition exists, you can't just arbitrarily charge people more…

>When healthy competition exists, you can't just arbitrarily charge people more, because they'll just go buy from a competitor. Competition is meaningless when they're all owned by Blackrock and Vanguard to an extent. They can easily sacrifice a brand to test the waters, knowing consumers will move to buy from their other brands which the also own.

Post by philipallstar » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 10:14 AM UTC

stvltvs wrote: post #87

prewett wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue su…

What happens when the jobs the migrant workers left the farm for are automated away? Do we expect other jobs to appear that won't also be automated? Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?