Live data from Hacker News

U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

nbcnews.com

251–260 of 377 posts

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#251

As a data scientist it is very frustrating to see a consistent lack of error bars on these numbers or any discussion about the magnitude of uncertainty around them by all news reports every time these numbers get released

This should have nothing to do with data science but basic math literacy. Quantities without context are meaningless. Reporters should know better but if when headlines have to catchy day in day out … shrugs. Stock market reporters are the worst: a 1000 point drop in the Dow meant a lot more when it was 7000 than it does at 40,000.

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#252
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tough to trust job openings. It is a fact that some number of job postings are ghost jobs that don't exist. Either they're scams from impersonators or the companies are trying to keep a good public face, but many openings sit for MONTHS which just does not line up with the anecdotal evidence of people going 6-12 months without an interview much less an offer

True, but is there any reason to think this dishonesty varies over time? The trend could be informative even if the raw numbers are nonsense

Yup, and my data only captures a part of professional job market which itself is small part of labor market. I'd use this as additional data point to other sources to correlate etc. However, the experiment is mostly to test my own thesis that unless there is a major event like covid, these trends are really hard to spot.

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NBC wouldn't know how to navigate bls.gov if you put a gun to their head. And it's all downhill from there

Based on the discussions in this thread, they aren’t alone

I don't think most of the people in this thread are journalists

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#254
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only works until people try to withdraw money that doesn't exist. The less people believe the earlier that happens, but it will happen sooner or later.

Never withdraw money, only take out loans! the survivors will sort it out, or not... we'll be dead so who cares.

Promote this man immediately to the head of our new megacorp Walmart-Exxon-Lockheed-Yum.

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#255
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, maybe not. And when a vast majority of the population isn't working what do these numbers really tell us? If we have fewer jobs, but then the people doing those jobs are paid more and thus paying more in taxes, maybe the jobs numbers don't even matter (I'm not sure that's true, just for arguments sake). And let's say they were covered up. Ok and what does that change? Are people who already hate Donald Trump g…

> thus paying more in taxes If the taxes were being spent to help those who were not working (unable to or for whatever reason) maybe that would be fine. We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent? > Democrats are by and large aligned with his economic agenda. Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago,…

> We might take in more taxes, but when we cut funding for childhood cancer research, and build more missiles... is this really the way we want our money spent?

Well we all have our opinions on how our money is spent. I for one think we need a lot more missiles and a lot more folks working instead of living off of taxpayer dollars (labor participation rate is the lowest ever), broadly speaking. But we don't really have to have an either-or scenario here and it's unfortunate that politics has gotten this bad in America.

> Perhaps there was more overlap 10 years ago, but... that "both sides are just as bad" doesn't seem to ring true.

Well, I'm not suggesting both sides are bad (though they are in their own ways - we should eject all communists and fascists from this country and planet).

I'm suggesting that Democrats agree with Donald Trump's economic policy even if some are politicking otherwise. If you look back to Trump's first term he began instituting tariff-like policies and other economic agenda items around restoring manufacturing capacity. Biden continued those policies, and then Trump has taken them a step further. Democrats today are campaigning on high inflation, but recall that inflation was also very high in 2022 and so forth, gas prices were even higher than during our support for Ukraine (I strongly support Ukraine), and so forth.

But if/when Democrats are elected it is unlikely they will roll back the Trump tariff scheme though perhaps negotiate more favorable deals with less bickering with our European friends and partners, and will maintain tariffs and other economic measures against countries such as China and perhaps others like Mexico and Canada.

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#256

Meanwhile Canada is up 75,000 jobs in July. Can't wait to see the next tantrum America throws our way. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-jobs-july-2026-9.729...

One of the saddest parts of the current era is the wedge that has been driven in the US/Canada relationship. Canada is in the process of removing as many dependencies on the US as possible, because the US has destroyed trust in it, resulting in the need to turn to countries like China to be bigger trading partners. I'd say there's a possibility (as in > 30% chance) that Canada and European nations enter a post-NATO defense organization that excludes the US, something that seemed absolutely ludicrous even two years ago.

Sadly, the people responsible for this in the US have no clue it's happening, no clue of the negative consequences they will face because of it, and show a general disregard for understanding things or relationships in general. The information environment in the US has been rewarding ignorant selfishness for too long, shifting the entire nature of about 30%-50% of the population in negative way.

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what's the connection here?

That looking at monthly numbers is stupid? The US has had significantly more job growth in 2026 than Canada has. The July numbers are convergence to a roughly common mean.

Looking beyond the monthly numbers, it came out today that the prior "good" numbers in the US were a mirage, and actually very very low.

So if you think looking at monthly numbers is "stupid", the only thing more stupid would be to take past good monthly numbers at face value, but then disregard the corrections that come later.

Re: U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If honest, the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless. Certainly, both jobs growth and jobs loss are within the CI. What's actually being tracked by people using this data is the delta from previous years -- which, conditioning on the same collection methodology etc -- is more reliable. The actionable piece of info is sign(delta)

[flagged]

Estimating the number of jobs lost is very different than estimating the sign of a difference of a fixed "error-prone method for measuring jobs lost"

The former is asking "are my weighing scales accurate?" the latter is, "do I look like i'm loosing weight?"

Post reply on HN