News

There's so much I could say about this topic. It's obvious that the "unemployment" numbers, like so many metrics, don't reflect the reality of our economic situation even if those numbers are accurate & to be believed. This is a statistic born of anecdotes, as everybody involved has their own story, but I personally don't find that number shocking or surprising at all. In all my life, I've never known this many "working aged" people who are unemployed all at the same time.

Obviously the boomer and older generation being such a large cohort and largely being retired weighs heavily in this number. But even those folks have a story. Many of them expected they would get a post-retirement job "just to get out of the house" or "for some fun money", only to find out that they aren't healthy enough, the jobs are too risky for their health, the jobs don't pay enough to be worth it, their healthcare access and quality has declined, and so on. Better to stay home and just try to live off whatever they already have.

For me, I had a great job with a purpose, then DOGE destroyed all that. Then parents' health declined and I found myself in a position of having to be a caretaker. The job market for my skill set is abysmal and I live in a rural area so local job market is even worse and I don't think I can juggle a 1+ hour trip to work each day (and back) on top of everything else right now. Fortunately I saved for a rainy day and boy is it ever rainy. Obviously not everyone is/was able to.

But not a third of the workforce. This is maybe 40ish% of the workforce.

“Disruptive technologies in the past have been really great for people who have had skills,” he said. “Their productivity and incomes have gone up a lot.

Ehh.

I mean, I do think that people tend to underestimate their ability to adapt using their existing skillset. And it's certainly the case that if you know, say, statistics, to grab one skill, there are a wide range of fields where you might use that knowledge.

But you can clearly also find examples where that's not the case, where a skillset wasn't very easy to repurpose.

When the horse was phased out as a means of transport, a lot of people had a skillset around dealing with horses, and as demand for horse-related work declined, people need to switch careers, and some of that skillset isn't going to be terribly transferrable. And because there were many jobs with that skillset that were phased out at one time, there will have been a glut of people on the market with that skillset all looking for new jobs. Not much call for even more expertise in dealing with horses when the existing few slots are already allocated to people who really know their stuff.

That said, it might be that there can be interesting perks for society as a whole, even if it's not great for the people who are unemployed. I do remember being frustrated a while back as to why there were so few good technically-sophisticated late Cold War milsim games out of the West. Most of the good stuff came out of ex-Warsaw Pact states. I went digging. Finally found some discussion on it. Basically, when the Cold War ended, Soviet defense spending dropped precipitously. That meant that you had a lot of people with a lot of knowledge about military hardware looking for work (this is also, incidentally, why the US purchased Russian space launch services for some time, to subsidize the industry, because the US didn't want a lot of unemployed people with a skillset in doing things like making ballistic missiles running around on the global job market). But, anyhow, a lot of military simulator video game developers were able to hire really outstanding ex-Warsaw-Pact defense people as consultants for a while, who really knew their stuff. That's a rare situation. I doubt that we'll ever have a period with that level of quality milsim video games again, not short of another breakup of a huge military power. :-/

I don’t believe in a UBI but I definitely people we are not getting paid fair market value for our labor. UPS is proof of that. They negotiated a massive wage increase in 2024 and still making billions of dollars in revenue/profit.

Yeah, I’m sure all those people have dropped out of the workforce entirely on their own choice, because living without an income, without healthcare, without a future is such a vacation. Imagine how many would choose this if they also didn’t have to worry about starving.

NOT

So the NYPost is now gonna point out that it's bad that AI is openly sold as an idea that will take jobs from people and make them obsolete right? Right? Next they'll have some empty piece on how nobody can afford to buy things and the economy is teetering on the brink of collapse but it can't be the fault of the handful of individual hoarding all the money. It must be the poor people's fault, they should just git gud.

There is a BIG difference between being neither working nor looking for work without UBI and being neither working nor looking for work with UBI and that difference is knowing that you'll be able to pay bills next month too. If you're scared and depressed and can't afford basic shit, of course you're less likely to be "engaged in society", to be "helping around the house" (what house?), to be "getting out of the house". Amazing that some people cannot understand that.

Welcome to the fuck pit white collar mfs. Sincerely a poor person.

We should have it because of that. Some will not work but shouldn't. They are likely incompetent. Some might actually start businesses or get involved in charity or good works. They don't because they see no future. Stability can really change people.

I.e. the low unemployment numbers that the Trump regime have been releasing are complete fabrication.

Make America Depressed Again!

NILF is certainly an acronym

Isn't this just boomers retiring?

UBI in America is just a Trojan horse to turn social security numbers into social credit scores to deny non-magats banking and services. It’s why the trump accounts creation is pushing to be automatic and retroactive.