US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://finviz.com/calendar/economic/detail/UNITEDSTAJOBOFF?...
> Job openings in the US fell by 303,000 to 7.146 million in November 2025, the lowest since December 2020 and well below market expectations of 7.60 million. The number of job openings decreased in accommodation and food services (-148,000); transportation, warehousing, and utilities (-108,000); and wholesale trade (-63,000). On the other hand, openings increased in construction (+90,000). Meanwhile, hires were little changed and total separations were unchanged at 5.1 million each. Within separations, both quits (3.2 million) and layoffs and discharges (1.7 million) were little changed.
(heavy trucks sales collapse is a recession indicator)
more trucks on the road - more goods flowing - heavy machinery included, things getting built etc. less trucks - trouble
Job openings are still very high, ~30% higher than the average for the last few decades.
But the statistics are selected in a way that if a society maintains a low headline unemployment for a long time, it's correlated to an increase in the quality of the jobs¹. The correlation is still not perfect, and authoritarian countries love to redefine the date so their absolute value changes.
1 - More clearly, a constant low unemployment correlates to a positive derivative in quality. And a constant high unemployment correlates to a negative derivative in quality.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1Q95B&heig...
Growing up to an estimated 342 million.
It also has an estimate for the working population (ages 25-54, so called "prime workers"): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00000060
Mostly flat from 2010-2021, with a recent uptick to 131 million. The discrepancy is likely due to the boomers aging out of the category, and a smaller generation coming in.
Therefore, it is cope.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
OK, how about employment, if the jobs are fake, this should be down:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS
"Cope" is ignoring every stat that disagree with what you want to believe. We aren't in a great economy, It looks like it is flattening, but not bad, not shrinking, and there is an abundance of jobs.
> JOLTS defines Job Openings as all positions that are open (not filled) on the last business day of the month. A job is "open" only if it meets all three of the following conditions:
1. A specific position exists and there is work available for that position. The position can be full-time or part-time, and it can be permanent, short-term, or seasonal, and
2. The job could start within 30 days, whether or not the establishment finds a suitable candidate during that time, and
3. There is active recruiting for workers from outside the establishment location that has the opening.
The job market is AWFUL for my generation, and pretty much always has been since we entered the workforce.
Unemployment might be low if you think that folks with advanced STEM degrees can go and get a part time gig at McDonald's.
If you look at meaningful employment - where one can make enough to live near where they work, save a bit, pay food/rent, and spend a bit for their leisure or health, well....no we are not over-employed. We are in a death spiral.
It's almost like anecdotal reports are meaningless, and we should rely on well sourced data to determine how things like the economy are doing.
Spoiler alert: there is no indication we are in a death spiral, though in my opinion Trump seems to be doing his best to correct that. Fortunately, I don't think he's up to the task.
I was doing terribly. Honestly, I still am. I've just been fortunate enough to have conceived a product some people in my city want. Will the business scale and succeed? I hope so, because I'm fucked if it goes south.
And yes, anecdotal data sucks. But I'd take that over whatever bullshit the Trump administration says. Especially after they fired the BLS statisticians.
I do have a degree albeit on not in STEM. Also have an advanced degree (also not STEM) that helped the company I was with from 2018 until 2021.
In far more words this entire position is simply "let them eat cake" but without the excuse of a royal court distorting reality.
Willful ignorance is worse.
This has become common enough that it has gained it's own term: "ghost" postings/listings.
[0] https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/insights/podcasts/inside-ec...
If US workers can't compete then vote for less immigration. It's not the corporates or the foreigners fault, it's the government that's putting those groups first over US workers.
the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans. i am not overly educated on this but it seems like a lot of countries, europe specifically, are extremely protective of their jobs.
i don't think americans are somehow inherently more worthy of employment and opportunity than people from other countries, but it does seem like it may be a playing field that isn't very level if a lot of other countries are protecting jobs but the US isn't. in addition to our cost of living being tremendously high compared to the countries we outsource our work to, it isn't even an option for an american to go get a job in (for example) india and send home paycheck to support family in the US.
I recently finished Peter Zehan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning and in it, it explicitly says that the American economic order was created in such a way that the loss of American jobs over time was by design.
Basically, as the American worker and consumer expects more and more, we need a larger international system to support that ("a rising tide..." analogy). However, we let the profits derived from such a system wind up in a smaller and smaller group of self-interested people who don't give a damn if the whole system goes belly up, because they've "got theirs". Such short-sighted thinking.
I personally would like to see some sort of system where we account for discrepancies in regulations related to worker protections, government subsidies, and environmental standards through taxation (e.g. Chinese crap is no longer as cheap as it is right now because we account for the substandard worker conditions and environmental damage being done), but I think restricting the labor market too much would be incredibly damaging.
The existing workforce is literally the most expensive in the world. And if you add to that its toxicity, what specifically surprises you?
Assuming they're referring to litigation risk. Anecdotally, laying someone off in San Francisco basically means paying a $30k settlement.
> if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing
This isn't just corporate America, it's all of America and all of humanity. Anything that's not plug and play has higher costs, higher risk, higher delays, and less chance of success.
Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier. Increased uncertainty always decreases investment, because there's higher risk.
These are very very basic management considerations to anybody that runs a group, a lab, a small firm, or a large firm.
This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.
When I was younger, I did a bunch of short-ish stints at various companies (I think average tenure was a hair under 2 years) because someone else would offer more money, more exciting work, etc. It was incredibly inefficient for the employer. "Waiting for my laptop/credentials to be issued" was like a full percentage point of my time there. I barely cared whether the company did well because I wasn't going to be there long enough for my RSUs to swing wildly either way. I never got to the point where I knew offhand who to talk to about niche parts of the product, and never became "that guy" for anyone else.
Frankly a lot of our stuff was higher risk and took longer because of the revolving doors. People important to a project would leave in the middle, or the person who wrote an important system would quit so we were left with whatever tribal knowledge we had.
Things worked well when the lady that wrote our invoicing system 20 years ago was still around but in security now. Things went poorly when she quit 6 months ago and now I have to reverse engineer it to figure out why I get stack overflows on invoices that contain an image.
I'm not "ignoring" that, and a retrained workforce is also a revolving workforce.
When I run teams or companies I invest heavily in giving employees opportunities to train for new skills, level up on their existing skills, and grow into greater responsibility and knowledge domains. But that always needs to be balanced with the rest of the needs. When my runway is uncertain, that reduces the ability to plan for adding training for existing employees rather than bringing in a consultant or a new hire.
No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)
[2] 31% of Wealth Owned by People Over 70 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-... - December 7th, 2025
[3] The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025 (4 comments)
[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")
[5] Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025 (15 comments)
(think in systems)
I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].
[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.
The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.
This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.
The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.
How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
Or is this more of an imaginary preference you're expressing right now?
> How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
This is a tired argument. The electorate was told "not to worry, we're offshoring the low value work so we can focus on high value work." Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
> Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
Huh? American workers are more productive than ever, and vastly more productive than workers anywhere else in the world.
So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.
America’s missing manufacturing renaissance - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/01/06/a... | https://archive.today/3qQUq - January 6th, 2026
The U.S. is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs, analysis finds - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobs-manufacturing-trump-tariff... - October 1st, 2025
Trump’s Trade War Squeezes Middle-Class Manufacturing Employment - https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumps-trade-war-sq... - September 5th, 2025
USA Facts: What does the US produce? - https://usafacts.org/articles/what-does-the-us-produce/ ("Over four-fifths (83.3%) of value added to the US economy in 2024 was via services, for a total of $24.3 trillion.")
USA Facts: The diminishing role of manufacturing in the American economy - https://usafacts.org/articles/diminishing-role-manufacturing... - October 16th, 2020
Why?
I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.
Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.
It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.
I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.
There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...
Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.
As someone who owns quite a few American made garments (and has paid the price to do so), I'm amazed you got such a long response that basically dodged the question.
For years, I’ve tried to buy only American-made denim. When the Cone Mills plant closed, I bought a bunch of dead stock jeans. There was one attempt since Cone Mills closed to open a new US denim factory, but it failed. Unless you’re buying whatever’s left of that increasingly rare stock, you can’t buy American-made denim.
Another example — I’m currently in the market for custom-formulated silicone and acrylic products. Every US manufacturer I’ve approached just sends an email that says “no we don’t do that”. I have like 5 Chinese suppliers on Alibaba trying to make a deal with me.
I would much rather source domestically as soon as someone tells me how to do it.
You could buy US-made garments in the 80s and 90s. Just like you could buy American TVs, vacuum cleaners, computers, and everything else. In fact Americans had a great quality of life back then, arguably a better one if you go by the attainability of things like housing, affordability, and economic inequality.
Where I'm sitting, the only manufacturing that exists in the USA is, for subassemblies or components that are purchased by larger companies on a contract basis, and manufactured by lower-middle class citizens. Boeing and GE is an example. And the reason Boeing buys domestically is only because they have to in order to limit their liability, reduce labor costs, and protect their IP. If the America you're looking for existed, Boeing would happily pay twice as much for labor to make components in house. If that America existed your television would be made here too, by people who weren't being subsidized themselves by Food Stamps.
There are no consumer commodity manufacturers in the USA who provide gainful employment without significant consideration towards corporate profit. There is basically nothing at Wal-Mart that you can buy that is made in the USA by people who are living in financial comfort. That's just not how late stage capitalism works.
Just make sure you have a degree and a service sector white collar job though.
Regional headquarters. That helps with their taxes in Europe. It wouldn't work to avoid taxes on money made in the US.
Of course the four morons of the broken winds don't see this as a failure, but merely an excuse to normalize that violence until it reaches the extent that they will face little to no consequence when they push it to the logical extreme and attempt to exterminate the many opposing groups rather than simply subjugate them.
Here's a report: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-lawmakers-scruti.... Is it factually wrong that "In the first half of 2025, Amazon and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta had more than 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each" and that they did layoffs?
What has changed is that they are or will soon be allocated by pay level instead of randomly. That's going to bias hiring toward Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Meta and away from body-shops like Infosys and Wipro.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Another thing to keep in mind that these are also the largest and most innovative companies, and that’s in part due to having access to the best available talent. Those H1B workers cost the companies MORE than American workers. These companies have standardized compensation by job and level and it isn’t different for immigrants. But immigrants come with the additional costs of the immigration process, on top of having the same salary. This isn’t a cost saving measure, it’s a path to continuing to stay innovative and relevant.
As for layoffs - these are mega corps so one part of the company may be doing layoffs in their business while another business within the same company is hiring. And you’re seeing the total effects (layoffs and hiring), and it seems contradictory, but it’s actually just a bunch of little decisions that aren’t tied to each other.
Most of these visas are likely these companies simply renewing their existing employees’s visas.
Yeah, probably because they're offshoring instead. Which is, you know, worse.
People need to understand that it matters how they spend. They can't expect everyone else to pay for things to be made in America when they're not willing to themselves.
Ok, given you can only tax stuff when it passes into your territory what you really have there is called a "tariff", it is paid by… the customer, when they buy the thing.
The seller has an entire planet to sell to. The US has about 25% of the money to buy things with, but even then only because we all like your money. Moment we stop liking your money, that probably drops to 20%.
For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!
Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.
Also, during the period you describe the US was a major export economy. Now the US economy is far more insular (even before Trump) than it was during that period (foreign trade was more than 50% in the late 19th century vs 7% today). Why would you assume that doesn't impact the effects of tariffs?
1. Making the same mistake as Trump et al.
2. Quick and easy reaction to other nation's tariffs, which we saw this year when Trump announced all his tariffs.
3. Targeted at specific industries to influence politics in other nations. IIRC, the EU is actually doing this to the US, specific states that have a lot of support for Trump, in the hope those voters will make the connection and get Trump to back off.
4. Targeted at specific industries to protect domestic industries from being undermined. The USA has accused China of this in various cases, any "anti-dumping tariffs" would be perfectly reasonable where this happens. China was accused of trying basically the same thing Uber was accused of, spending (VC|tax) money to corner the market then raising prices when all the old (taxi drivers|PV makers) were gone.
5. Sin taxes. Singapore doesn't have their own car industry to protect, they make it really difficult to get a car just because they don't want lots of cars. I mean, it's more of a registration fee, but the effect there is much the same given the lack of local industry.
1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.
2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."
3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.
The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.
On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.
It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.
>>The seller has an entire planet to sell to.
For a lot of goods US is responsible for 50% of profits. It was for me for a long time when I was selling software. Quick googling suggests some EU automakers make close to 50% of their profits in US as well.
US is the premium market everyone wants to sell to. There is nowhere else like that, especially for high margin goods.
They really don't there is a reason the EU pretty much instantly caved in the last trade "negotiation" and it's most of the world frankly doesn't have much money. There certainly isn't enough untapped demand to fill a USA sized hole anywhere.
They’re basically downsizing the technical sides through attrition while hiring heavily abroad.
Manufacturing firms seem to be doing really well, here (midwest US).
Analysts use packaging companies as a canary for manufacturing in general.
A multi-million dollar company I help start, in the Midwest USA, had manufacturing, customer service, R&D, and shipping all in the same state. After being bought by Texas VCs, everything moved out of the area. They don't want to run and build a business, they want to make X millions in Y years.
To do this, manufacturing moved to South Korea, customer service to some Asian country, slashed R&D by removing QA, and shipped the other jobs to a more _cost effect state_ not in the Midwest. Everyone that had institutional knowledge was fired to reduce cost of employee salaries.
Note you want QA because it is a life safety solution. Speaking with former colleagues, the quality of the solution went down hill while the price kept rising.
In my current company, all assembly jobs were removed from in-state and shipped to a more _cost effect state_ before the end of 2025. This also affects the end user because I can no longer go to assembly and test software changes or custom hardware changes before the product ships.
Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
Indeed, imagine you're part of the wealthy elite. What you want is to be able to move your cash around the world, chasing cash growth. You also want yourself to be able to travel wherever you wish with your Gulfstream. Why would they care about local midwest job growth ?
Solutions exist, but it's too communist.
An business mentor of mine bootstrapped a highly profitable enterprise software company, growing it to 400 employees. When it was time to sell/retire, he vetted buyers not just for the money they could offer, but for the impact they would have on his team and community. He accepted an offer from a conservatively-run competitor and proudly told me that 5 years later, 90% of the original staff were still happily employed with the new owner.
These arrangements are simply not an option if you're beholden to VC, or entertain offers from Private Equity. You cannot preserve what you do not own.
Expect cash flows to dry up as Europe, Latam, Canada and Korea/Japan diversify away to more reliable suppliers. It's already happening.
This lead to the 1981 automobile voluntary export restraint.
There's been so many EOs from Democrat presidents that cause hugely negative disruptions in the industry.
Is this something Republicans have simply never done until now?
Noting the political party was just a detail.
But yeah plenty of examples of R presidents for other sectors in the past I'm sure too.
Also, I'm curious, what you feel you're getting out of your support of the Trump regime?
Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
Would have been thousands of jobs, Canada wanted it too, it's safer than trucking/transporting by train. All just cancelled on a whim.
Then there's EO 14008 that put a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters. (fed land is 25% of oil production)
Regardless of your position on oil (I'm sure you have one), the point is those are two examples of disruption of an industry by EO from a previous president.
> Biden cancelled it with EO 13990 when it was pretty much done.
I'll admit to not being an expert on the Keystone XL Pipeline, but at least according to the timeline on wikipedia[1], the reason Biden was able to cancel it with an executive order was because Trump had approved it with an executive order, after people had tried and failed for years to get it approved the proper way (through the legislative and executive branches).
And even when Trump personally tried to make it happen, there were still years of court battles stopping construction, so when Biden came into office and ended it, it was in fact not "pretty much done" but apparently 8% done[2]
Seems like it again comes back to Trump just doing what he wants, and it was in fact him trying to unilaterally make it happen that caused that last four years or so of disruptions?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline#History
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-keystonepipelinexl...
Nobody announces the largest tariffs since the 1930s overnight, and selectively increases or dismantles them from week to week. Just look at this line graph: https://www.usfunds.com/resource/americas-tariff-rate-hits-t...
A huge part of our power was that we were safe and predictable and that's gone forever.
But it’s not just Trump. This is what America wants.
Germany was reformed, Japan was reforms. These things take time
But the problem is the American people want this. This isn’t some dictator in Korea or Iraq or Venezuela, this is someone with full democratic support. There are many checks and balances in the American system to avoid a single person doing this amount of damage without having widespread support.
That is a big deal. The US has for a long time been seen as a stable economy that's easy to trade with because policy changes would take a long time to come into effect by which everyone had had the time to adjust.
Compared to the various stuff that was happening in Europe in the previous decades (at least here in the east) the US were a stable safe heaven where you could trust things wouldn't drastically change overnight.
Your US history teacher failed you if you think even for a moment that is true.
Even setting aside whether the changes are good or not themselves, no President before has thrown away laws mandated by Congress the way the current President is.
Further, this wasn’t even considered a possibility and is only happening now due to a confluence of events… - the Supreme Court passing rulings that essentially make the President unaccountable
- the SC passing rulings preventing Congress from delegating powers which in practice means a lot of laws Congress had passed in the past have essentially disappeared (since the agencies tasked with making decisions related to them are no longer allowed to)
- Congress becoming completely supine and giving away as much power as they can
- a President that has accepted and is operating on what was until now a fringe legal theory of unbridled executive power ie “unitary executive” theory.
This is difficult even under normal circumstances because you have to predict what carrier (trucker) rates will be in the future. You also have to predict fuel costs, because even though these are usually variable, when fuel costs go up so does your margin (so if you expect higher fuel prices you can lower your bid price). And you have to game out what your competitors are going to bid too. You can’t be too conservative (expensive) or you won’t get the bid. But if you lock in a contract with a certain expectation of rates and it swings the other way, you’re on the hook for millions in losses.
Now imagine doing that normally difficult task in this environment. Who knows what will happen. Wars, a revocation of trucker drivers’ licenses (already happening in Cali), deportations, tariffs, the collapse of USMCA…the uncertainty is near endless. Big tech companies are doing great, everyone else is getting absolutely destroyed.
> The decision comes amid pressure from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which announced in November 2025 that it would compel California to revoke thousands of what it calls “illegally issued” non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses.
[1]: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/california-cancellati...
Deportatios and the collapse of a free-trade zone are not mitigatable. De-leveraging from products that don't have a strong domestic alternative would be the only options there.
All costs. None easy. But all doable. (Not saying it's good business.)
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/05/nx-s1-5667232/polymarket-madu...
So, uh, did business owners actually take any of these things, which very much were promised during campaign season, into account when voting? Or did they walk into the ballot box thinking, "no-one wants to work anymore!" and pull the lever for the guy promising to make applicants a bit more motivated to work at lower wages?
They actually are smug about a worsening standard of living. What makes them happy is "tough talk" on immigration, to them the brutality against suspected undocumented immigrants is a good deterrent.
It's not surprising but it's important to understand how important the brutality is and how unimportant economic growth is. It helps that they Silicon Valley tech workers who are already rich.
We're learning why government shouldn't be run like a business. Corporate governance, at least in the view of these people, arguably benefits from tyranny in some ways. You have a management structure where people have the ability to cut off your income and health insurance for an indeterminate amount of time for almost any reason. The reasons they can't fire you for are very specific and it's often on you, the now-jobless person, to prove their maleficence. Sounds pretty tyrannical to me.
They thought if they had someone who was used to working within a system like that - and Trump absolutely was, having his name on the building he worked in his entire adult life - it'd allow them to get rid of roadblocks to productivity and increase the value created by their businesses.
Well, as it turns out, an economy is different than a business, and needs to be run according to rules that were deliberated upon by the society at large.
We had people warning about this ten years ago. They were ignored. We had him impeached five years ago. Didn't convict. We had him convicted of 34 felony counts less than two years ago. Didn't sentence.
This is hubris manifest.
If they're centralizing economic planning on that, then there's probably at least some economic planning that they would be doing to keep a relatively stable regulatory regime in place.
Which, y'know, isn't the case.
Ultimately the world has reached a point where social systems in both business and government are run the same way. Probably because they're run by the same kind of person. Sometimes even the same people.
- A non-independent monetary authority
- A Department of Labor that uses data from a single private vendor instead of its own payroll tax records and surveys to measure unemployment
- A pro-monopoly consumer protection bureau scaling back unprofitable regulations
- A foreign service ready to threaten allies within its own sphere of influence to protect its tech businesses.
If it were calcified, you'd probably have a lot more willingness to bet on a business decision being profitable. There'd be a very obvious, solid understanding of market rules and there would be little likelihood of them changing.
The problem with Trump - well, in this regard; there are plenty of others - is that he is used to operating as an absolute monarch, with his previous "kingdom" being the Trump Organization. That kingdom existed purely for his benefit and there wasn't really any consideration of peers like you'd have with actual kings who rule over countries with societies and borders. The only decisions he had to make right were the ones benefitting him, and whether or not they did that was quite evident.
Now he's a leader of a country that does have borders and a society. There are parties with interests that he must satisfy. You can tell he's never had to do that before and part of how he handles that is to just bully those parties into submission, but the other way is to use his status to make proclamations that supposedly have some sort of force to them to placate the other interests.
An example would be the proclamation that institutional investors will be banned from buying single-family homes. That's meant to placate his working-class base, most of whom can't afford a home. Do we know how far he'll go in enforcing that proclamation? No. It directly contradicts some of the other positions he's been identified as supporting, and is unlikely to be enforceable on a mass scale, but if he does sign some sort of order telling the DoJ or SEC or whoever to investigate purchases of that sort of real estate by institutional investors, well, you could end up at the wrong end of a government investigation, particularly if you have somehow pissed him off. Which isn't particularly hard to do, either.
Thus, you can say the regulatory regime over single-family residential real estate market is now less stable than it was before. We don't know what will happen. And that makes it hard to make a business decision around it.
We can see that job openings have been declining since before the 2024 election and that hiring actually increased briefly around the time the tarrifs were implemented. This seems to suggest there are other factors at play, including macro trends.
The macro-level economic policies really only affect large corporations, unless a business is impacted by the tariffs. In general, hiring is fucked by immigration visas in large companies, which are still going strong and sneaking around the anti-immigration barriers. In some way, hiring non-U.S. workers for work funded by the USG is unacceptable, and economic theft.
If USG opens up funding more, then things will normalize, including for immigrant or non-U.S. contract workers in other places. As always, it’s the economy that’s the problem, but which part of it is always hard to pin down when other parts of it make up for it.
You have to be careful with statistics, and news in general. Remember that your life is your own, with a unique set of circumstances, and think for yourself.
We just use AI to justify doing all the same recession behaviors while making it sound like innovation
- not hiring this year > AI is making us productive!
- no wage growth > AI means we don’t need to raise salaries
- layoffs > with AI we can do more with less people
- spending less on offsites, work perks etc > we really need that budget for AI
- not spending money on that new business tool > AI can do it instead
"If I use, then everyone is probably using it".
Yet AI penetration is so low right now that it probably has zero role in the job market.
And it keeps us distracted from talking about the real reasons behind job opening decline.
That said, once AI ubiquity picks up within the next few years, we'll have all of the existing problems we're not talking about... plus AI. And we'll probably be even less capable of talking about the complexities of the market intelligently.
But we've been blaming AI for a couple years now, yet I suspect it's still too early in the adoption curve to have a meaningful impact on hiring compared to more boring explanations.
Maybe we should do an "Ask HN" for those in HR or adjacent roles to poll for experiences there.
I think you are correct, but is anyone happy about the current situation? I suspect it will change and that change very likely will intentionally not involve AI. I suspect it will be an economic solution, not a technological one.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/21/ai-wall-street-big-tech
Have we forgotten this? It'll find its niche, but it isn't yet a truly transformative one.
That is a lot pressure to put on a conjunction. It is up there along with 'it will never be'.
In all seriousness ( and some disclosure ), I like this tech so I am mildly biased in my stance. That said, I almost fully disagree with yours.
As much as I dislike Nadella, his last blog entry is not that far off. Using LLMs for stuff like email summaries is.. kinda silly at best. The right use cases may have not emerged yet, but, in a very real sense, it already has been transformative..
Yea, at being a search interface. But what else? Not that it can't be, but the failure rate for AI is absurd right now. What happens if it collapses and all its used for is answering questions on your phone and maybe better search of your emails? That seems to be a real and probably likely outcome. What then? Ironically, I think it will improve the economy because there are a lot of decisions that are on hold until we know what LLMs will be used for. Probably isn't going to be good for SEs either way.
I keep a personal log of specific failures for simple CYA reasons. I do get some, but I can't honestly say it does not seem high to me. A lot likely depends on what is defined as a failure ( to me it typically is a clearly wrong result ). But those clearly wrong results do not seem to cross 10% of output.. so about the same as average human.
The workforce is happily making themselves more efficient by using AI on their phones for what used to be multi step look it up in the literature or your supplier's catalog or consult the instructions or read the rules process when performing cookie cutter tasks they know but don't remember exact specifications for.
I have no doubt that people who are having AI foisted upon them by admins at the behest of someone else hate it.
They use AI as basically a leveled up version of the summaries google used to provide for certain search types. Saves them a bunch of obnoxious clicking around on the internet or in software that was never designed for mobile or to make giving up the kind of info they're seeking easily.
An example I saw recently was someone asked for a modern equivalent of a grease that's no longer made/relevant and it replied back with some weird aviation stuff. The "real" answer wound up being "just use anything, the builders intent in specifying was to prevent you from using tallow or some other crap 100yr ago"
"We're not hiring but AI is in the news" = "We're not hiring because of AI! Don't sell our stock!" It's independent of actual current or future AI adoption.
https://fortune.com/2025/10/09/america-feels-recession-state...
The economy is completely fucked and we are in a race to steal and horde all the data before people catch on.
AI, when effective, is deflationary because it allows for similar productivity at a lower cost. That's what you're describing above, not a shadow recession that is being papered over by claims of AI use.
To my point: You could have replaced "AI" with "computing" for most of the last 50 years and been left with the same argument.
When we taxed the rich we were happy. It’s literally all we gotta do.
Although the top marginal tax rate in the 1950s indeed exceeded 90%, federal receipts hovered around 17% of GDP; this was nearly identical to current levels, because loopholes and high income thresholds (roughly equivalent to $2MM for single/$4MM for couples) meant almost no one actually paid that top rate.
The effective tax rate for the top 1% was closer to 42% rather than 90%, demonstrating that extremely high statutory rates on paper do not necessarily generate proportionally higher government revenue.
Maybe instead of looking at the ultra rich we could look at what GDP fraction the "bottom 95%" contribute to the tax burden - is that more or less than before. Not sure where to look for this data but sounds like a nice little exercise.
But the denominator isn't "income", it's GDP. That's far harder to "offset, boxed and off-shored ad nauseam".
Maybe the total tax take now is 17% of GDP, same as before, but when measured correctly, the overall tax rate for the super-rich has gone down, and for the plebs gone up.
To even identify who the super-rich are in this exercise, you may need to be careful with the definition of "rich". If eg you go for highest income earners, you might find upper middle class people instead, with the super-rich having no supposed income as such.
Right now society doesn’t look very good to so many people in the US it’s almost hard to talk about. Job growth is literally people saying, “hey, tomorrow, I can see it look better. We can spend time and resources to create something we all want more than today.” When job growth is low, that vision must also be low.
Taxation can turn that around in an industry. It can turn that around in aggregate. It does thay by both signaling to players, and by changing the game tree payout structure.
I think much of the taxation conversation right now is unfortunate because it keeps getting couched in terms of tax brackets, and that is almost a strawman at this point (even if many people think it’s important). I would say we need to tax the 1% differently. For instance, stock buy backs are currently a hugely distorting effect on the world economy. You can start by greatly taxing that.
The real thing people are talking about when talking about taxing the 1% isn’t just about tax brackets, it’s more about how taxes don’t materially effect people once they reach certain thresholds. It’s the same fundamental problem with traffic tickets. They are not proportional to general wealth so that means it’s a set of laws that apply less and less as one gains wealth which not only feels unfair, it is arguably a corrupting influence undermining the rule of law.
Shit, a few years ago Jeff Bezos got a tax credit for his kids.
Think of how absurd that is. Jeff Bezos, the founder of a multitrillion dollar corporation that already receives billions in government contracts and subsidies, who owns a $500m yacht and a multibillion dollar real estate portfolio, asked for, and was given, a tax credit for his adult children.
(Note: I am not GP, and am not necessarily saying you can draw conclusions from this one chart, just that the change in net worth cannot be attributed solely to inflation.)
The upper 0.1% largely owns things that are relatively safe from inflation (like expensive real estate in areas where increases in value have exceeded the rate of inflation for decades) while the lower 50 - 80% does not.
It's effectively impossible to prove definitively, but I find it hard to believe it's a coincidence that the share of wealth held by asset-heavy individuals shot up at the exact same time the money supply increased significantly, especially given that lower class wages were actually increasing faster than inflation and upper class wages at the same time.
I find that difficult to believe.
Why was this metric chosen? What does showing that current transfer receipts grew show we're "in a depression"?
The only outcomes left are either unchecked descent into fascism as oligarchs consolidate power and finish their government takeover before their current power base falls apart, or a successful socialist revolution.
This is what it's always been leading to.
Just capitalism. There's no actual or necessary distinction about what shape that capitalism takes.
A system where getting more money means you have more opportunity to generate more money by itself has all the feedback loop you need to consolidate over time, generate monopolies, and end up here.
Competition just doesn't happen in a free market. Actually competing, and trying to win marketshare or mindshare that way is too expensive, as there are much simpler and cheaper ways to impact a market.
Competition requires a fair market. This was fully understood by both Roosevelt trust busters, and both Teddy and FDR made big talk about "I'm not trying to kill business, I just want them to compete because that's such a force multiplier".
It doesn't take a socialist revolution. All it takes is like a gentle sprinkling of welfare and a fair and competitive market.
Granted, we have a lot of work to make the current market competitive. We've allowed so much consolidation that we would probably have to actively break up companies, we would have to nullify lots of contracts and IP rights and reduce the power a EULA can hold over you. Interoperability is necessary for competitive markets so we would have to roll back the DMCA anti-circumvention language. Improved customer rights would also help.
Adam Smith's term in "The Wealth of Nations" is "freely competitive market". The "free market" bastardization came much later.
The harbingers are already here and have been for a while now. Harbingers are signs that things are breaking down. More like "or else we will have a large scale societal collapse".
Sincerely, software developer turned fast food manager.
That's pretty silly. Just look at the unemployment rate, not at the headlines.
Personal-savings rate says we're heading into a recession, but aren't yet in one [1]. Labour-force participation, on the other hand, suggests we may be [2].
Assuming we go into another shutdown at the end of the month, none of this may be clear until well into the autumn.
Hardly a recession
This economy is in a bad and worsening state. But it definitely can get a whole lot worse.
My own personal example working at a small govt contractor in which we had a team of 12 working on an app for 10 years. We lost the re-bid to a smaller team (5 to 6)/budget using AI. We have been informed going forward the company will be following the competition (small teams using AI and bidding like the competition via smaller budget needs).
This impacts vulnerable people looking for jobs and makes job search highly inefficient.
I guess my point is that even if you think AI's displacement of workforce is vastly overblown, be scared of 5% labor impacts.
But I think right now there is a dreadful perfect storm of sorts.
- It's not just LLMs, the social/political environment just doesn't favor risk taking, which means less opportunities.
- The US will be alienated from all its good trade partners for a decade plus at best. They'll still do trade, but the era of relying on US companies, or relying on a stable US consumer base is over.
- The dollar will decline, by how much I don't know but it will. Less buying power for American companies.
- Education is in shambles, and skilled & educated immigrants who can leave the US are doing so in droves. Brain drain will be real, the pipeline to replace them will take a generation, and that is if it was fixed today.
- Historically, there is a natural re-balancing of powers that happens as a result of people getting upset and organizing change or some sort. But the ability of the population to organize meaningfully is curtailed because tech, moderation and surveillance capitalism.
- I won't say too much about the current admin, but things are really scary. Not as in "i'm upset about this" or "so much for democracy" but more like "i'm scared for my life" levels of scary.
- Erosion of trust is huge, you don't take risks if you don't have some trust. consumer spending, loans, business spending,etc... and the erosion of trust is fundamental and hard to repair. Trust is also heavily asymmetric, it costs a lot to obtain, but it takes little to lose it. Once lost, gaining it again is usually orders of magnitude more costly.
let me stop there for brevity, but my point was how the US has never truly been in a situation where the economy is doing bad, and the politics is untenable. You have people who are in power and well incentivized to make things even worse, you can cancel elections and deploy troops better if things are really and truly "bad". When people stop having their basic needs met (and I don't mean health care and affordable houses - but food and shelter), I'm concerned there will not be many ways left where the rule of law and peace can be sustained.
It's one of those things, like "you can't unspill the milk". If things get as bad as I fear, right now, today is as good as it will ever get in the US. What scares me is that Americans aren't terrified enough, those that know better are in catatonic state of "what can i possibly do about it?" - and I mean all Americans regardless of politics.
Only tangentially related, the Nazis started the holocaust, in part, as a way to boost their domestic economy while making invasion supply chains viable. Less people to fight over resources, they were removing demand because of supply shortages, in literally the worst way possible.
Outsourcing manufacturing is new. But you are wrong about the other two.
Why do you think fascists (and proto-fascists and the unrelated look-alikes) keep losing wars all through history?
Italy was in an exception situation at the beginning of WWII, where they couldn't afford external goods.
1 - Mainly because they pushed their definition of "hated foreigner" to an extreme.
2 - They made a huge movement into replacing production chains, mandated by the government at the beginning of the war. But their lack of access to tech was still crippling at the end of the war.
Add on atomic bombs and biosphere collapse and I’m not just worried for the USA but civilization itself not making it many more decades
If y’all didn’t pollute the climate to the point things will be unlivable I wouldn’t feel that way.
But rn my political goals are to leave a more beautiful corpse.
Wars, economic crises and other turmoils however, that's a tough one. Even climate change alone will stress out too many things and exasperate those areas.
It's more like we've had it really good post-WW2 over all, and that will go away pretty soon. Even ocean currents collapsing and acidification of the ocean, as bad as it is, it won't yet be the worst or cataclysmic I'm afraid.
Widespread undesirable situations like that tend to result in humans coming up with solutions too. It took us WW2 to get nuclear energy. It took slavery and colonialism to get us the industrial age. Bad things and good things tend to come and go alike.
But your question is what is a better country for them? A year ago, I would have said none. But I'm sure you're seen the same news that I am where even when immigrate legally, work hard, obey the law,etc.. even having real-ID proof is of no use, they get jailed. the threat of imprisonment alone, just for existing is scary, I'd say just about any other country that won't throw you in prison for existing is better. They're also talking about revoking citizenship of Americans so non-nonchalantly, hardly anyone cares. I don't even if the US is safe right now just for getting your degree at an Ivy-league school.
You said "especially for americans" - they're talking about getting rid of H1Bs right now, my comment is about the brain-drain from immigrants. The majority of the time, it isn't to save money, but the talent just isn't there in the US. Even in software-dev, there is a sort of flood of compsci grads right now, but it's only so because so much of these positions are filled with immigrants. Many other fields will have strong demand, and if the supply could be bootstrapped in a few years it isn't a big deal, but while americans get degrees (which isn't happening like before! it's really really bad right now) american companies lose their competitive advantage. Look at the CEOs of Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, they 're the type of people ICE would be eager to throw in prison were it not for their wealth and connections. Go to Arxiv.org to see pre-prints on research papers from various industries, look at the names of who's publishing.
You have to understand that the current environment and government in the US is specifically to drive out immigrants. There is a reason ICE has a higher budget than the US marines right now ($50B), they're not at the border arresting illegal migrants, they're hunting legal migrants in american cities. There are many countries where there are little opportunities for work, and population and government are very hostile to migrants (russia for example, or even japan in certain cases),but you will not have to fear being thrown in jail at-random, or constantly fear for your safety, especially for those who have family hear, I can't image what it must be like.
this is very clearly demonstrably not true. i posted about this months ago if you want to see my arguments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45425031
i'm also not really sure why the budget the marines is relevant here. the DoD has a nearly trillion dollar budget. if we're going to randomly segment out expense centers why not focus it even more narrowly to something arbitrary like how much the military spends on flour for pizzas?
for ICE, total effective/enhanced funding for FY2026 is widely reported in the $28–30B from what I can tell.
not trying to be a dick but dont want to spend more time wording this more softly