U.S. job openings post biggest drop in more than four years

The effect of federalizing $3 trillion a year of the economy, raising corporate taxes to far above what Sweden has, and 70% marginal personal tax rates probably won’t be “no fault of their own.”

"Nobody knows nothing."

From a practical standpoint that means don't buy status symbol products (cars, fancy phones, etc) - stick to practical (I drive a '98 Civic that cost me $2400 - great, reliable car). If you buy a house, buy a very practical one in a more affordable neighborhood. Learn to do your own maintenance. Keep your expenses as low as possible. If you don't have a Roth IRA start one today and begin fully funding it. If your work offers a Roth 401k option put some money in there too if you can.

And of course, always be learning new things.

During downsizings, as groups got smaller, managers were let go along with workers. Survivors needed learn to mourn the loss of your colleagues who were downsized, and then pick up the important work they left behind. To survive, one needed a positive attitude. Keeping one takes work under difficult circumstances. I always viewed the task as taking lemons and making lemonade.

None of us liked this. This strategy worked for me until they finally cut 70% of the Research Labs staff, including most of my clients and many of my fellow analysts. The best an employee can do is to work with your family to design a budget that lets you live below your means, build an emergency fund with at least six month's living expenses, and to save as much as you can each month in a retirement plan. None of these tasks are easy. Few people actually do this because it requires you to say "no" to many of your desires. Those who do find it easier to cope when the shoe finally drops on you...

I'm guessing that for people this happens to, it's a combination of being in a place with not many tech jobs and also not keeping up with technology. Can you do cloud tech (aws, google cloud, azure?), c++, java, js, protobuffers? None of these technologies were invented when I got my BS in CS many many years ago and I've been learning continuously. Sure there were similar things or building blocks toward this kind of stuff. My last job search was a couple of years ago, I had 3 offers and stopped interviewing and I'm not unusual in my experience (going back to the above comment about negative employment in software engineering). I'm in the Seattle area. At the company I joined a few months ago half our small team of engineers are 45+. We just hired someone past 60 as a dev.

If you find yourself in this situation, all these technologies are available to try for free on the internet, you can teach yourself. Companies that won't hire older people are just stupid, on top of being illegal.

You can become an expert in a niche subject. The tricky part here is that it has to be a niche subject that pays well, with a lot of demand but not so much demand that newcomers are tempted to do the work to also become an expert in it. One example of this, that most on HN would like to pretend doesn't exist, is COBOL. COBOL programmers can command some pretty nice rates now, because nobody wants to work with COBOL but it still powers a lot of the world.

It's also a great time to start your own business. Maybe your kids are out of the house, hopefully you've become a seasoned industry veteran, you've seen other people make mistakes and you've gathered together a nice bit of savings and some excellent credit. Why not put those resources and that experience to use and start your own business? See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212409

Amplifying: Don't have kids unless you really want them--they're very expensive. Don't get married unless you really want to--being (and then likely not being) married is very expensive. Avoid those and a drug habit, and you don't need a lot of money.

I didn't realize how important networking is when I was young. It really is "who you know and not what you know". And to the degree that it's the latter, it's how well you interview, not what you know that actually matters. It's rarely possible to evaluate someone's skills or how they'll do in a company until you've had them on-board for a year or two.

I was much more idealistic when I was young, and often stood on principal. That was a mistake. If management wants to drive their train over a cliff, offer to sell popcorn. Or write a crash analysis tool that will look good on your resume. But smile the whole time, and keep your resume polished. You're playing for your team, not your employer's.

1) most people thinking that a crash is near means that they view the stock market to be overpriced.

2) this means they won't buy as much and inflate prices even further. in fact, many may start to sell.

3) this will tend to limit price increases and may even depress the markets a bit

4) Thus, while there may be a decline if economic conditions turn sour, there's a lower likelihood of a "crash" (large drop from current prices).

The current fetishisation of index funds - which I am entirely complicit in - seems to be based on drawing long-term extrapolations from a relatively short timescale in a relatively narrow market which didn't actually have funds that tracked indices, saw the rise of modern computing, and followed the most destructive wars in the Western world.

Fundamentally there is no difference is the debt at .01% or 15%, if one cannot make the payment, they are in trouble. If the holder of the debt cannot collect, they're in trouble.

1. It's larger than ever 2. It's growing faster than ever 3. T-Bill rates are at record lows

If 1. and 2. were false because 3. is true, you'd have a cogent point. But they aren't false. The debt situation is getting dramatically worse despite low rates, and those low rates on the perpetually recycled US debt are unlikely to hold. So when the $5T of debt Trump added is resold at 5%, and the sugar rush of his economic priming is over...yeah, it's not going to look so great.

But alright, so we can borrow. Can we pay for healthcare and schools now?

Click on the business section of Reuters, this isn't even a headline.

[0]https://www.pensionrights.org/publications/statistic/how-man...

And the pension market is ~140% of GDP. So that's a lot of cash in stocks. Too much if you ask me, but I'm just an engineer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/22/opinion/bull-stock-market...

A booming stock market is irrelevant to most Americans.

[0]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/the-average-401...

The people working 60 hour weeks comprised of 3 part time jobs that refuse to pay out full time hours and benefits just to share a bedroom in south LA while accumulating zero savings? These people are about to experience real pain, and news coverage and forums like HN generally have no concept of the working class.

However, the context of the discussion is over what term.

The markets are subject to boom and bust cycles. Over the 40 or so year term of retirement plans, there's not a whole lot that a 20 or 30-something can do to benefit from a clearly bull market.

I know that day-to-day, I'm not wealthier or better off because the stock market is doing well. My paycheck doesn't change. I can't sell any stocks to cash in.

And that is the context of the discussion: not that over the long term stocks go up and when you retire you reap the benefits, but rather that over the short term, 90% of the people don't suddenly get enhanced quality of life because the stock market is doing well.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf

https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2019/05/still-not-on-rece...

For an example.

My parents have literally been radicalized from normal moderate folks to "crazy conspiracy people" by watching Fox News and, I suspect, this is a broadly true statement amongst a very large swath of the elderly population.

How would one even go about defining what center is? And when we say "left of center," how far to the left are we talking about?

Also, more meta-analysis studies like this need to be created and reported _to everyone_.

[1] https://www.mrc.org/special-reports/liberal-mediaevery-poll-...

You mean like almost every treaty ever negotiated pretty much as far back as we have recorded history?

A treaty negotiation is a give and take. Each side goes in wanting to gain certain things, and being willing to concede certain things to get those things it wants. The purpose of the negotiation is to find a set of gains and concessions for each party such that the party will agree to the treaty for those gains at the cost of those concessions.

During negotiation, what is on the table changes as each party gives up on certain wants, or accepts certain concessions, to further its overall goals.

It would be nearly impossible to do this in public. Every time you go from draft N to draft N+1, anyone who had gains in N that are no longer in N+1, or who is part of concessions in N+1 but not in N, would be putting political pressure on the negotiators to go back. Everyone who got gains in N+1 that weren't in N, or had concessions in N but not in N+1, would be putting political pressure on negotiators to not cave to the pressure to revert.

The only known way to make it work is for each party to send negotiators who know that party's big picture goals, work out a near final draft, and then present that more widely for a yes/no decision on ratification.

George Bush lost because of Fed decisions. The economy went into a brief recession. Bush was extremely popular after the first Iraq War. Unfortunately, rates went up...

Paul Volcker was appointed by Carter. He really cranked up rates: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/2019/12/09/c...