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

U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

barrons.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 514 posts

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#471

Post by unethical_ban »

dragonwriter wrote: post #422
TheBicPen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First-passed-the-post voting is fundamentally flawed, and so is ranked choice... What voting system so you think is best? None are perfect but IMO ranked choice is the best as it keeps the good attributes of FPTP without suffering from the spoiler effect

Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting) is the single worst of the very many seriously proposed ranked ballots method; it retains most of what is bad about FPTP. It is somewhat easier to tally than the best (in terms of the logic of who wins) ranked ballots methods (methods satisfying the Condorcet criterion), but not particularly good even on that among all ranked ballots methods, e.g., it can be improved i…

River method is better, but any ranked method is better than approval for sure, and literally any multiple-choice method is better than FPTP.

>adding all preferences of the next rank until a candidate crosses the maiority threshold without elimination

I don't follow, what method is that?

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#472

Post by BlackjackCF »

jghn wrote: post #215
rsynnott wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on the US tariffs thing, congress can put Trump back in his box and revert to normalcy any time it wants to; the threat of stagflation might make it do that. The previous stagflation incident was more driven by outside forces.

Don't worry. Congress will take back this power as soon as a Dem is in office.

If a Dem is ever back in office…

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#473

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

dgfitz wrote: post #407
kstrauser wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal circumstance would be to take out a loan you can’t really afford immediately before a round of hyperinflation. Bad time to have $100K in a savings account. Great time to owe that bank $2M.

I currently am this person. What exactly would one do with a 2 million dollar loan? Please don’t say real estate.

Outside of the standard theme park with blackjack and hookers, you could pick up a race horse. Those can start in the low six figures up to tens of millions. Although if you want to race, do not blow the entire amount on just the horse, because the training + food + maintenance is also going to have some hefty bills.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#474

Post by BlackjackCF »

vlachen wrote: post #333
mbfg wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will there be another election?

I've honestly wondered this too. But we cannot obey in advance. If they're going to try and take it from us, then there should be a fight every step of the way. That means our cynical perspectives, as right as they may be, could lead us into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I tell myself if there weren’t going to be elections or if the admin had a sure fire way to compromise them, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to push through redistricting in every single state there’s a Republican-controlled state house/senate.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#475

Post by ChuckMcM »

janalsncm wrote: post #467
ChuckMcM wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want you to think about, for a minute, the notion that you can have a number bigger than all of the atoms in the universe :-). From that, you can see that its possible to have more 'dollars' than there are atoms in the universe. Specifically, without defining 'growth' you can't reason about the limits on that growth. The other point that simplified analysis fails to consider is that you are inside the system so as…

> its possible to have more 'dollars' than there are atoms in the universe We are absolutely not printing money fast enough to realize this dream, unfortunately. I propose we mint a new bill, the 100 trillion non-Zimbabwe dollar, and 10x our printing speed.

Yeah, that would do it. Actually though it's important to remember that 'dollars' and 'currency' are two related but very different things. :-) I'm gonna guess you already know that too.

The Trillion Dollar Coin[1] was a real thing oddly. And I have always wondered if was the inspiration for Sam Bankman-frieid's crypto scam with FTX to mint your own crypto token that you could claim was worth billions so that your ledgers added up "in theory."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion-dollar_coin

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#476

Post by loeg »

mek6800d2 wrote: post #469
yepitwas wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Republicans, including some of the current crop, have been making noise about putting the money in the stock market, one way or another, for a long time, and if anyone’s gonna actually do it it’s these guys.

A reminder to everyone: Social Security is NOT a retirement plan, it is an insurance plan. When your 401(k) is cratered by the stock market or your pension goes the way of Enron, SS is supposed to be there to hopefully keep you from being dumped in the gutter. Tying SS to the stock market would not be a smart move.

You're drawing a semantic distinction that doesn't really exist. Insurance for retirement, retirement funding -- it's all the same thing.

A 100% equities (or 100% Enron) portfolio is not the only or best option available to the SSA. And the SS portfolio can't be panic-sold by the individual retiree in a market downswing. Using equities to achieve some additional upside for SS in one way or another is plausibly a reasonable idea.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#477

Post by mannyv »

Why doesn't BLS use data directly from Social Security?

Everyone with a W2 pays into SS. SS also has everyone's birthdate, so it's easy to bucketize everyone into "can work" and "can't work."

They can join that with Medicare/Medicaid data to find people with disabilities. The can compare pay periods to see who's unemployed etc. They can find people on disability with help from Medicare.

Why is BLS waiting for state data? To find the unemployed and collecting?

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#478

Post by mschuster91 »

janalsncm wrote: post #468
CursedSilicon wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the saying goes. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet

If I sell you a banana for $1, and you sell it back to me for $1, we have just created $2 of GDP. The trick is we need to repeat this process faster and faster over time. Luckily computers also get faster every year due to Moore’s law, so growth shouldn’t be an issue. In fact, every person in the country could take turns with the banana for a brief period of time (provided they quickly sell it to the next person) whi…

Yeah but there is no actual value generated by passing the banana through the population. It's fictional growth, backed by nothing, the same sort of swindle that shitcoin creators do to pump up their shitcoin's value ("wash trading").

There will be no broad prosperity for all from that banana trading, all it serves is to further pump the inflatable house, and it will eventually pop and leave people to realize they've been conned by "financial engineers". And then, the pitchforks will come out.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#479

Post by frugalmail »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #236
jshen wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe it's entirely the result of bad policies, but you also left if vague. Which bad policies are entirely causing this in your opinion?

For starters we have cancelling and ripping up clean energy projects, introducing serious uncertainty about tarrifs, increasing unease for any immigrant (and even non-white citizens).

Courtesy of AI

Avg monthly "clean energy" jobs so far: - 2023: ~3.38M - 2024: ~3.45M - 2025: ~3.42M

Any impact to the economy due to "green job project cancellations" wouldn't have surfaced yet.

Uncertainty about tariffs: it was already on the books to earn $2.3T (conventional) / $1.5T (dynamic) over the next 10yrs, and inflation is far more under control than it was last year despite the tariffs. Of course legal challenges have disrupted it now. This is also completely ignoring the massive investment foreign countries/companies are making on US Soil to employ US employees.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#480

Post by satyrnein »

wredcoll wrote: post #442
satyrnein wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was basically accepted truth? For example, the New York Times described it as: Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...

I can't find a chart that is literally just number/year, but the chart at the top of https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm... is about the closest I can find. If you look at it, you'll see that, yes, a million or two million or whatever immigrants arrived during the last year biden was in office. However, if you're not trying to use statistics to lie, what you'll also find is that millions came…

I think the graph you linked obscures the issue a bit by showing total immigrant population by year, which would change much more slowly than arrivals by year.

I found a graph of arrivals by year here: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-u-s-net-immigration...

It certainly seems to be a big increase under Biden, compared to the last 25 years. Anyway, I personally favor immigration, I just don't want to use statistics to lie to myself either!

Post reply on HN