It seems increasingly likely the U.S. is running full hog into one of the worst economic disasters we’ve ever seen with no contingency plan or strategy for resolution. [1]

[1]: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20...

I can’t think of a single angle this administration isn’t destroying America from.

  The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion. 

- Contract role, seemed to have run its full course. Didn’t plan ahead?

- Laid off from a startup. Startups are inherently volatile, should have planned ahead.

- H-1B (it seems), needs to find a job AND sponsorship, far more difficult than what the average US citizen will face

- Contract work again, ran its full course

- Communications degrees are difficult to find employment with anyway

These examples are egregiously bad considering HN has loads of great examples for proving this article’s thesis. At least we can be sure ChatGPT didn’t write this article because it surely would have urged better examples.

> Official numbers about the job market show a relatively stable labor economy with stronger than expected job growth in January — more than half of jobs added were in health care — and a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 4.3%, or 7.4 million people.

This is why people keep hearing "the job market is fine" and believing it. The headline numbers are misleading.

Look at last year: official figures reported 600K+ new jobs, which were later revised down to 181K. It's not statistical noise. That's a systematic pattern of overstating job growth that's been happening since the Biden administration, with virtually no accountability. Of course current admin is going to like it.

This month is no different. The report shows strong hiring concentrated in health care, which already seems odd and it directly contradicts ADP data showing only modest job gains. That gap almost certainly means another revision is coming. But here's the thing: revisions rarely make headlines. The inflated original numbers do.

tl;dr: The job market isn't strong. The numbers are cooked.

People are going to flame me for this, but it's the end of the line because of a confluence of AI, bad planning, offshoring, and a few other things. But this is the end of capitalism as we know it because the value of labor is plummeting globally, it's not going to happen overnight, but this is kind of the logical end of things. Education no longer implies employment - I did my masters a few years ago and promptly got scooped up, but the undergrads that graduated around the same time did not - and I was different, I had prior relevant work history.

Nah, this is the end of it. It's going to convulse a bit and hurt as we get this sorted out, but we're literally in the midst of both a political, social, and economic revolution right now, and everyone seems to mostly be doomscrolling through it.

What we get on the other side? I have no idea, but it's kind of funny to watch people gnash their teeth at this stuff. I mean, it sucks if you can't find a job, I get it, but the only real play is to "embrace the chaos" and adapt to the changing times. This might be the first time "we" have had to deal with this sort of uncertainty and chaos, but historically we're regressing to the mean.

Personally, I bought land in the woods last year when I saw this starting to occur, my "startup" (read lifestyle business) is vibe coding apps while people still bother to pay for that and doing hydroponics.

The main reasons it's much harder to get a job are:

- higher interest rates

- section 174

Them starting their graph at 2021 made me look up the actual data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703

It's heavily cyclical for reasons I don't understand. It skyrocketed to 45% after the housing crash. It tends to peak in the low to mid 20s. We're currently at 25%. Definitely yellow journalism for now. And as for the article - if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.

The classic phrase for this is the "reserve army of the unemployed".[1] That goes back to Engels and Marx, around 1845. That's surprisingly early for industrial unemployment. The Industrial Revolution was still starting up.

Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

I've seen this with several friends.

One of the issues with tech is that if you make $250k in a good year, you are taxed on that. Whereas if you're then unemployed the next year, you don't get anything back as if you had only made $120k. It should work that you can recuperate paid taxes if you're laid off so that those in volatile industries (which tech is) actually pay their average salary. The tax code is set upon the belief that income is consistent for individuals, when it is not today. This is just an example of things I've seen that seem unfair to me. It's crazy someone can go from making $600k and taxed to their teeth to making nothing for the next two years, and if they had instead made $200k per year, they would have ended up better off (not due to spending, just due to taxation).

* Tariffs are hurting most real-world jobs - you don't know what your inputs will cost in 6-12 months and so can't plan

* Political Corruption - you don't know if your permit, M&A, or regulatory rule-change will go through without a bribe to the right person

* Tech, which makes up most of the market, is all in on AI - these companies are late stage and the AI narrative is the only growth story so the market doesn't reward them for investing in anything else

* Cheap globally accessible labor

* Lack of enforcement of anti-trust means stodgy uncompetitive markets with players that make their margin through rent-seeking rather than increasing production or quality of goods and services.

* Poor investments and corruption in our healthcare system make it really expensive to hire Americans

* Poor investments and corruption in education make many Americans unsuitable for high skilled work.

> He’s also noticed the interview process getting longer as companies get “more picky,” he says. One recent company required eight rounds, and he still didn’t get the role.

No one can truely understand how grueling this is until they see this happen. My girlfriend recently had a hard time finding a new gig. Entry level office jobs are doing >7 rounds. Phone, recruiter, HR, manager, manager + team member, manager + skip level, ... etc.

Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.

I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

This is cyclical. There is nothing particularly onerous about the current situation compared to previous cycles at this point. An adult will experience a few of these cycles over their career. You should be prepared for it to happen.

I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it.

The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.

On a bright side it feels that for once the situation is quite uniform from America, through Europe, to Oceania. Official unemployment numbers are artificially low, people are without healthcare, no one is getting hired, and pointing out any of these publicly one hears "you're lying because you are supporting the other political party".