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U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

wsj.com

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Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#91

Post by ghaff »

username223 wrote: post #49
codyb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're pretty good near me And of course, there's this idea everything needs to be done like the house is on fire, but I'm usually fairly happy if I see someone getting a break to look at their phone and doesn't notice immediately that I'm standing waiting or whatever. Or ambles over at a leisurely pace, that's fine, take your time, it's hard running around all day

> take your time, it's hard running around all day This. I've asked grocery checkers why they sprint through scanning my things, then relax as I bag them, and learned that they're subject to some dumb system that grades them on how fast they scan. Ask them if they're on the boss's clock, and if not, take a minute to chat and give them a break.

>then relax as I bag them

Around where I live (Boston area), there are almost universally baggers. This was something that went away for a bit but, while I will if needed, I almost never bag my own groceries.

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#92

Post by Glyptodon »

int32_64 wrote: post #17

The most meaningful American employment stat should be employed Americans with health insurance. What's the point of being considered 'employed' if you can be wiped out with one trip to the ER?

So I sort of agree that there's a narrower version of employment that we should care about more than the top-line number. I'd define as maybe "households with at least one dependent under 20 and ~hours worked by household members." I would then break that down into several groups: fine (have healthcare, make enough to cover typical costs for their area, household works 55 hours/week/adult, but can cover housing and most basic expenses), and the hopeless (income too low to cover basic costs or not employed). IE If someone is working 60/hrs a week @ $10/hr, and has a kid, maybe not "unemployed" but IMO categorically, almost the same. Same thing if they just do gig work to net $20k/yr. Or are actually unemployed.

All that said, the main issue with the health insurance metric is that it would end up being a forcing function for the continued coupling of work and healthcare, which is bad and toxic.

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#93

Post by Glyptodon »

jm4 wrote: post #54
givemeethekeys wrote: post #46

Most job listings are fake - keep the investors, competitors and other employees think you are hiring. And who knows, maybe the right resume will actually be worth a look.

I've heard this from other people. Is there any evidence of it though?

If you look at HN who is hiring threads sometimes the same companies post every time for very extended periods of time. And I've applied at some of them to never hear back. IMO they're just fishing for people who have specific profiles that they don't disclose in the job description, not actually hiring.

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#94

Post by Retric »

prewett wrote: post #85
Retric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s literally the opposite of what happened historically. Read up on the history of textiles for example and cottage industry created and then was supplanted by a capital class. Economies of scale require all sorts of things to get going like efficient transportation, but after a tipping point wealth centralizes not the reverse. Slowly clothing goes from something like 1/3 of all labor to a small fraction of our c…

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…

> to supplement what the household could not grow

Many women did this as their full time job. Spinsters became a viable option for women without a family or land to be self sufficient. Most women used to multi task a drop spindle as they went about their day. A spinning wheel was a massive improvement per hour but the lack of portability made it an independent job. As specialists could now make way more thread which enabled the transport of large quantities of relatively high value goods to one location for economies of scale. Which could then benefit from a positive feedback loop.

> manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing

Anyway, my point was factories came late in the process. Automation of thread making occurred at several stages before there was enough supply excess supply for any kind of scale. Without that factories could only really automate less than 5% of the total labor for making clothing.

So sure, eventually automation came for those home spinners, but that happened after the natural benefits from economies of scale alongside huge shifts in the land devoted to cotton etc. This ties into all kinds of economic activity, southern plantations depended on a relative increase in the value and demand of cotton far above its historic level etc.

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#95

Post by karakot »

FireBeyond wrote: post #88
karakot wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaaaactually, it's the other way around: the insurance is the only reason it cost $58K.

Hah, also yes. And then it's "negotiated" down to $15K. And then, if you pay cash, are you going to pay a portion of what they would have "charged" the insurer? Or what they "negotiated" with the insurer? Toss a coin!

There is an MLR (Medical Loss Ratio) rule; essentially, an insurer can keep 20% of premiums they collect. So in order to increase profits, they have to inflate premiums; in the end, 20% of $1,000 is much better than 20% of $100. And that's the reason hospitals charge $50 for an ibuprofen pill. There are other tricks like vertical integration (an insurance company owns a medical provider), quality improvements, etc... But in the end, it's an optimization game — max(users * premium_cost) — and that's why for-profit medicine/insurance sucks. (Now, spend 1% of all collected premiums for lobbing, to make sure the system keeps working lol).

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#97

Post by metadope »

reactordev wrote: post #9
petcat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a statistic that roughly 10% of the US workforce is in some form of "customer-facing service" role and I just have to wonder how many of those jobs are nearly gone, or already gone. Even if it's a 5% reduction, or 3% over the next decade, that seems catastrophic without a completely new category of jobs to replace them. I haven't talked to a cashier at a grocery store in years. It's all self-checkout. I stayed…

Uber and DoorDash are full… No, those people aren’t driving for Uber now. Let that sink in for a moment. Less hospitality jobs, less customer-service jobs, less retail jobs, no mall jobs, no manufacturing jobs, gig economy is full, corporate jobs being replaced by AI, trains going autonomous, trucks going autonomous, this is end game capitalism. Those who own, own it all. Those who don’t, own nothing, will never own…

This string of words made me shudder, gave me a chill.

Too true.

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#98

Post by readthenotes1 »

earlyreturns wrote: post #64

H1B abuse is rampant, so the headline is what we expect. Jobs are for the foreign born, just look at HN for evidence of that. They even hire lawyers to help the outsourced labor “navigate our system.”

My understanding is that after being nearly flat since 2016 with nearly all the jobs going to foreign born people, there have been job gains of nearly half a million citizens in 2025 "for whatever reason".

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#99

Post by duxup »

tdb7893 wrote: post #3

The article talks about how the Fed chair thinks we might be overestimating jobs and with the number of people I know who are currently struggling to find jobs I would believe that (not engineers, just people that had random jobs). Lots of people I know are out of work right now.

A few articles I've read note that there are indications that there has been a very strong "low fire, low hire" pattern. So while we don't see mass layoffs, those who are out, are really out.

Re: U.S. unemployment rose in November despite job gains

#100

Post by reactordev »

Buttons840 wrote: post #59
reactordev wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just one facet. It’s not just the gig economy is “full”, all economies are “full”. There are not enough jobs for the employable people.

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…

To be fair, it was true when they said it, it just didn’t remain true and they kept on keeping on.

The idea of not turning a profit was to keep reinvesting it into the company. Growing the business. This “eat it all and figure it out later” mentality grew Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, just to name a few.

The goal was to become dominant so that the world depends upon your existence. Without being labeled a utility.

You and I agree though that the moat has been carved pretty wide. The market is no longer a free market. It’s a “I must play to stay” market. Meaning that all these companies are depending on each other for specific goods as they have crushed competition to the point where there are, at most, 2 choices.

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