US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February | Hacker News Reader

US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February

bbc.com

570 pointssmartbit783 comments

I do not see the tourism industry mentioned here but I have to imagine that is a huge loss right now.

Most of the world is not visiting the US right now which means projects and planning that was made in anticipation for summer has probably been halted or heavily reduced.

A lot of the US isn't visiting the US anymore either. For normal personal recessiony reasons but also I know word of mouth several large companies have cancelled planned recurring events in texas, florida, arizona, and not necessarily moved them anywhere else either.

That is a much bigger deal than international arrivals.

There is a significant majority of people in Canada who not only vocally decided to not go to US but discourage their friends from doing so too. People have judged me for driving through the states.

Last year we cancelled a planned US vacation, this year we didn't even think about it. Going back to Europe two years in a row. I don't give a fuck about tariff policy of our supposed "friends" but when our "friend" repeatedly threatens our independence and sovereignty, no thanks. Not going to step into the USA for a long time.

It's not the government that's the problem per-se, it's the fact half the US supports that government

This administration has terrible approval ratings. https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/donald-trump...

Totally a case of “gee, who’d have thunk”

Approval ratings should be far lower than this.

Yes, and a major reason they aren't lower is because of tech executives that control the media and mass communication in the US.

Agreed but we also have to stop saying "the majority support this" or "half the country supports this" it ain't true and leads people to feel hopeless.

Yet, if we re-did the election today, we'd have the same outcome. People might not support what is happening but they will never "vote for the other guy." I personally know people who disagree with everything that's going on, but they'll still vote (R) next time "because I'm a (R)," as if it's their intrinsic physical trait like hair color.

This is a good analysis but I’ll say at least for me, it has been a lesser of two evils scenario. Both parties have some really crazy ideas and platforms. I loathe the two party system for this reason.

Yea that's a fair take

Like you will go to an election, and your choices will be

Republican candidate: "I support deporting your family, I will not only not support cleaner energy but will actively work to increase coal usage, and I think your trans cousin should be forced to transition back even if it makes them commit suicide."

Democratic candidate: "I think all of that stuff the Republican candidate said is crazy and wrong. If elected, I will strive to make all your guns illegal, so that eventually Republican-supporting institutions like the police and military, and Republican states, are the only ones with guns."

  “I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.

  “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/376097-trump-tak...

I don't doubt that Trump would take guns away from people who don't support him. It's kinda right out of an authoritarian playbook.

Not sure what that has to do with what I said though.

Kinda goes against gun rights as being part of his platform at all. At least with the "gun control" laws they still try to maintain some gun rights. Whereas the Republican playbook now is just "oh you shouldn't be allowed to carry unless I think you're a cool person." Like that guy that got shot in MSP. He had a concealed carry permit and he was disarmed. People in Trump's administration were still saying "he shouldn't have had a gun at a protest." Where were they when we saw hundreds if not thousands of guys with AR-15's and plate carriers flanking the BLM protests?

I don't think trump has gun rights as a big part of his platform. I guess they got rid of tax stamp fees but that doesn't really mean anything.

But again, that doesn't really have much to do with what I said?

However minimal Republican support of gun rights may be, they don't have increasing gun control as a major part of their platform like the Democrats do.

Because you presented a dichotomy in which the Democrats are a party intent to "make all your guns illegal", yet that is not their position as a party. Indeed the last Democratic presidential nominee made very clear she owns guns and likes the 2nd amendment.

The opposite is true of Republicans: their party platform is literally "whatever Trump wants", and Trump has actually articulated circumventing the second amendment entirely by "taking guns first".

Moreover, his current administration's stance is that lawfully carrying citizens protected by the 2nd amendment who are obeying the law are at risk for summary execution if his agents feel threatened enough. This makes the 2nd amendment inoperable (no need for a second amendment at all if they can just say they were scared and kill you for having a gun).

If you're going to characterize Democrats as (a lesser) evil, at least be honest about why.

Ah yea sorry, I meant literally my guns, as in the ones I use for service rifle competition. Those guns specifically, like the practical ones, are definitely on the docket. In fact if I moved to my current state today, I wouldn't be able to bring my guns.

Yes they will allow me to have a deer rifle with a 5-10rd capacity.

Nice try, but you went on to say "eventually... police and military, and Republican states, are the only ones with guns."

So you were not talking about your guns, you were talking about all guns. You can amend your position if that's really what it is, but that's not what you said.

Ok I will endeavor to be more precise when I'm talking about modern/practical rifles, and not just like literally any gun at all.

The relevant point is that the line for gun ownership pushed by the Democrats (at least where I am) is way far away from the line for gun ownership pushed by Republicans.

And when stating that line, it strikes me as an odd position to take when I'm also simultaneously being told that Republicans are going to go even farther hard right / authoritarian/ take-over / w/e, while also keeping the fairly pro-Republican police armed to the teeth (again, with modern rifles).

Trump supporting red flag laws or not seems kinda like a distraction. Trump supporters saying they can shoot protestors is exactly what I'm pointing out - if that is what we're scared the future will hold, why push for giving up modern rifles?

If only they were willing to change their affiliations as easily as they do change their hair color.

Elections are decided as much by who shows up as who each individual supports.

If the election was held tomorrow it’s likely many people that voted for Trump wouldn’t go, and many people who didn’t care enough to show up would.

Right, turning out your people is huge, and it becomes more rather than less important as margins are thinner which is a consequence of trying to gerrymander a thinner majority.

If Republicans turn 2 places they win by 130:100 plus a big city they lose by 100:130 into three they expect to win by 120:110 then if on the day Democrats turn out as usual but about 10% of the Republicans stay home across the board they lose all three 108:110.

My concern in the 2026 cycle is that there just won't be fair elections, and so this doesn't end up mattering.

I am not confident that is as cut and dried as you are putting forth, there have been massive swings in heavily red districts the other way for special elections in the last few months and Republican polling is abysmal.

> if we re-did the election today, we'd have the same outcome

Doubtful. The faithful will always be idiots. But around them are vast seas of folks who change their minds and even switch parties. Between foreign policy, vaccines (weirdly, not being nutter enough) and Noem turning ICE into a pageant show, a lot of Trump voters feel betrayed. It’s why the House flipping is almost a given.

The special elections that have been happening don't agree with this hypothesis. Dems are currently outperforming Harris by 30+ point margins even in places like Texas

Right. I realize Australia is not perfect, and from my visits back there to visit family, I know it's gotten more polarized, but when I moved to the US at 28, in the early 2000s, there was still the prevailing opinion that you could go to the pub, argue all night long with some bloke about politics while drinking beers together and still be mates, while here...

"I'd rather be dead than friends with a liberal", and such tropes.

44% is "about half"

If you had 1000 coins and put them into two piles one of 440 and one of 560 it would be "about half"

But if your argument is that only 154 million people support this government and that's fine because if it was 174 million there'd be a problem, then sure.

"The majority" I'll grant you, but I'd say 43.4% is close enough to "half" for these purposes. It's only a touch lower than his poll numbers right before the election.

Compare with Kier Starmer, who as of this writing has not sent armed goons into his own cities, wrecked all of his international trade and tourism, alienated his allies, or once again invaded the Middle East. His approval rating is about 20%!

Well Starmer giving away the Diego Garcia military base has certainly alienated at least one ally.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-calls-uks-chagos-...

Yet nobody in the UK gives a stuff, other than those who thing the Chagosians are being done in

And a few months ago America was endorsing the plan

Worth nothing that this was a Tory inititive -- Truss and Sunak did pretty much all the work, it was their idea.

There are hard and soft approval ratings. The soft number is the count of how many people will vote for/against in the next election. The hard number is how many want a change today, how many will support recalling thier representatives in order to force change today. In that number, the current administration has widespread support.

There is no mechanism for recall of Congressional officers.

Plenty of state-level reps can be recalled today. That noone is even trying sends the message that the population is generally OK with waiting until the next election ... an election that will be run/managed/counted by those representatives.

I specifically said Congressional representatives.

No legal ones anyway.

These are shockingly high.

I love the copium. If I have 10 friends and ask all of them where they want to go for dinner and 6 say let’s have Chinese and the other 4 say let’s kill Bob and eat him, I still have a shitty friend group.

Those are MUCH higher than they should be by now. It makes me wonder what the approval rating of a ham sandwich would be, and I would not be surprised if it was higher.

A ham sandwich has some strong qualities. I’m not kidding.

The president would do basically nothing for four years, which would cause some things to move slowly. But it would be a very stable environment. No random tariffs via executive order, no random wars or invasions, no governing via tweet.

Ham sandwich would maybe be one of our better presidents. Top 50%, probably.

Controversial opinion, it's way more than half: 1/3 voted for the orange man, 1/3 didn't bother go to vote because "BoTh SideS ARe thE SamE!" and 1/3 tried to do the right thing.

It may surprise you, but it’s generally accepted that 1/3rd is less than 1/2.

1/3 explicitly approve and 1/3 implicity approve. If my math is mathing, that's 2/3 and it's larger than 1/2.

It’s a large and incorrect assumption, and not mathing, to lump non-voters into supporters, especially when the administration is purging eligible voters.

Eligible voters should absolutely be lumped in as implicit supporters. Disenfranchised voters have been made ineligible so should not have been in the statistic.

An eligible voter who chooses not to vote makes one unambiguous statement: "I'm fine with either outcome"

That’s an assumption, jumping to a conclusion. It is true for some people, since some people say it out loud, but it is not true for everybody, and calling it “unambiguous” is an unsupportable claim.

To the degree some non-voters say they don’t care, that’s still deeply complicated, enough that even taking someone’s word for it is a bad idea. Non-voters in the U.S. are not uniformly distributed, and thus there is evidence suggesting that not caring is already a function of class, race, education, gender, and age, among other things.

If you actually care about voting and about the truth, it does yourself a disservice to jump to a assumed conclusion that all non-voters are saying something unambiguous, that they’re all saying the same thing, that they all have informed choice, that they understand all the tradeoffs and implications, and that they really are fine with any outcome regardless of what they say.

I'm in one of the many states where my vote doesn't matter. Deep red. Doesn't make me a supporter

This is extremely lazy and unrigorous reasoning that could be extended dishonestly to any number of things. Oh, you aren't protesting genocides? You must support them then. Oh, you're not helping feed hungry people in poor countries? Guess you support child starvation. Oh, you're not contributing to the Rust ecosystem? ...............

None of those are comparable to the simple and quick act of voting against a treasonous candidate for US president.

This wasn’t a bad candidate vs worse candidate situation, it was someone who supports breaking apart the trust and foundation of the country solely for personal gain versus someone who at least believed in providing a veneer of civility.

signing an online petition is also a quick act, and the same reasoning you’re using would follow. you’re almost getting at what’s wrong with your specific voter argument though - in many, many states, 1 or more of the following can apply:

big states that always vote one way like CA where a non vote is the same as a blue vote

states where voting is such a tedious process that opting out is a reasonable choice, even if it doesnt place a big burden otherwise

states with voter id laws, often large chunks of the eligible population do not have an id

disabled people, people with hardship, etc., felons

It’s really weird logic to lump massive chunks of the general population these things apply to in with the same people that explicitly support this. It also ignores the fact that these elections often come down to a few thousand or fewer votes in a handful of battleground states. Not voting in those places, I would tend to agree more with the gist of your point, but it is no where near a big chunk of the population.

Rhetorically: why is it "implicitly approve" instead of "implicitly disapprove?"

The only thing you know about them is that they did not vote. Even using your assumption of their beliefs ("both sides are the same"), that position is generally affiliated with disapproval, not approval.

It's "generally accepted", at least in America, that 1/4 is bigger than 1/3

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fr...

I upvoted you because I think the current culture is too "blameless" with regards to voters themselves.

"But the party just ran a bad candidate!"

"Egg prices were too high!!"

"Kamala would've been just as bad for Gaza as Trump!"

No, sorry, voters don't get a pass because they're apathetic or love being the "enlightened centrist" that lets fascism takeover.

Don't forget the evergreen "it's just politics it doesn't have to affect our relationship".

Oh yes, that's a classic line. They pretend as if we're just debating what the tax rate should be or some other benign talking point.

The democrats are complicit in genocide. Trump is attacking allies too, but they’re both criminal. The main difference is “worthy and unworthy” victims.

> Trump is attacking allies too, but they’re both criminal.

In other news, a mouse and an elephant are both mammals.

If only there was some obvious way to tell the difference between them.

I don't really know how to respond politely to downplaying genocide. What I can say is that it is becoming accepted that Kamala Harris lost in part because she refused to change genocide policy. If you want to win, you should start taking it seriously.

My swing-state vote was stupendously easy to get. (a) don't commit a genocide (b) give voters something big and material like free healthcare (c) don't cover up COVID and Long COVID

They didn't even try.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaz...

> My swing-state vote was stupendously easy to get. (a) don't commit a genocide (b) give voters something big and material like free healthcare (c) don't cover up COVID and Long COVID

So they voted for the side committing genocide and who sees free healthcare as an atrocity in itself to everything the US stands for? What did the Dems do to "cover up" COVID? You know versus "It's nothing worse than the flu, it'll be over in two weeks" while privately being aware that neither of those things were true?

I mean, they didn't do that (and I think the DNC, DWS and their ilk have a lot to answer for the current state of affairs), but your "swing state, stupendously easy to get" decided instead to vote for the side that openly doubled down on those things, not really a ringing endorsement for expectations of voters there.

That's before we even get to the general issue of an electoral populace so ignorant of the political landscape that the number one search on Election Day on Google was "Did Biden drop out?"

I voted third party. If the Democrats want my vote, they have to represent something resembling human values.

Look around you, COVID is still everywhere and the scientific literature is pretty dismal. The Democrats lagged about 6 months behind the republicans, now most people believe what was far-right in 2020. It's true fewer people are dying, but most people do just think it's a cold. The democrats shut down reporting, didn't fight for worker protections, and basically were most invested in the economy over health. They also were never clear about the airborne method of transmission and so people ended up believing masks didn't work because they would wear a surgical mask and still got sick. They didn't "follow the science".

https://docs.house.gov/meetings/VC/VC00/20220302/114453/HHRG...

> I don't really know how to respond politely to downplaying genocide.

Sorry. I don't intend to downplay genocide and I don't want to come across that way.

What I'm trying to critique is (so far as I can read it from your post) your inability to see that two things can be the same in one respect - but apparently not notice that one is much bigger than the other.

If it helps, I'm not American and don't have any option to 'win' as far as US politics goes. I think you are right that Kamala Harris was facilitating genocide. But I also think you are wrong to not take into account that Donald Trump is a whole order of magnitude worse.

Because of the electoral college, it doesn’t matter if more people voted in California, NY, Alabama, Mississippi, etc

If someone looks at (admittedly shitty) candidates like Harris and decides she's as bad as Trump it means the implicitly approve of Trump. You need a mushy brain to not see that there's shit (Harris) that there's Trump, orders or magnitude worse.

American here. I have to agree with this sentiment (without getting into the math of our deeply flawed election system).

The administration could not do any of this without the support of Congress, which has not wavered. That support is unwavering because those elected officials are not getting negative feedback from their voters and donors, so they have every expectation that staying this course will work out just great for them.

This administration's actions only continue with the approval of their party who put them and keep them in power.

Congress has received plenty of negative feedback from their voters. The intensity and frequency of Republican voters confronting their representatives over many administration policies (e.g., Medicaid cuts, ACA subsidy cuts, tariffs, Epstein, influence of unelected officials) when those representatives hold in-person town halls has led to representatives greatly reducing in-person town halls, replacing them with tele-town halls so they can cut off people.

If that isn't reflected in the midterms then it's just theatre. Time will tell.

It won't be. Even if the house swings to the democrat side it will be a marginal swing only, not a massive change. Who knows if the Senate will even flip at all.

Half of America loves what's happening and the other half doesn't believe the first half loves it.

Can't blame you. Coming from the US I have been making a point to vacation in Canada, fwiw.

Short of voting, protesting and getting into arguments with MAGA people I don't know what else I can effectively do.

Look into your state's recall procedures. Waiting for the next election is effectively acquiescence to the current situation.

No sitting member of Congress has ever been recalled and it’s almost certainly unconstitutional. Article I only outlines one way to remove a sitting representative or senator, and that’s expulsion by a vote of the chamber in which they sit

Congress is one power structure. States and cities are others. 19 states have recall procedures. The fed is much less powerful domestically without state-level support. And pulling down even a couple state reps would send a chilling message to the fed.

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/recall-of-state...

Very few red states in those 19...

My State has no recall procedures, that doesn't exist, the same is true for the majority of states.

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/recall-of-state...

Beyond that, my state is not the problem.

>getting into arguments with MAGA people

>effectively

these are mutually exclusive

You're getting downvoted, but people should be aware that arguments like this sometimes only reinforce the other party's position in their minds. My recommendation is also not to bother with those debates (unless you're doing it to find deficiencies in your own position).

There are elements of truth to this, but then there's other elements (here) who have said that we somehow owe it to people to argue in good faith with them when they are talking of (the ones I've personally had mentioned): post-birth abortion ("in several Democrat states, abortion is legal up to one month post birth!"), adrenochrome harvesting, etc.

That it was my/our fault such views propagate because we're not "willing to understand their perspectives".

The thing is, their perspectives are a lie. And in many cases, they know they're a lie, they just don't. fucking. care.

So they can go online and whine about being dismissed or criticized, or pat each other on the back for "knowing the truth". There's a subset who, I'm sure, see such things as actual literal truth, and that's a different issue altogether, but not sure it's my responsibility to solve, or that failure to engage on my part makes the current situation "my fault".

> It's not really a choice but a demonstration of intelligence and empathy. Still, if you deliberately decide to remain ignorant, or simply fail to understand the opposition's position even despite your best efforts, it shouldn't surprise you when you also fail to convince people your position is the correct one.

Like huh? It is okay for them to be objectively dishonest, and have zero shred of empathy, curiosity for my position, but refusing to engage on a good faith basis is a failing of mine?

> Once you reach this stage, your commentary pretty much just becomes elaborate whining, which makes a poor impression of yourself and actually pushes people away from your position.

This is literally Idiocracy in the making.

If I make a poor impression on people by repeatedly shutting down their horseshit about doctors performing "abortions" up to a week or a month after birth, or that babies are being harvested in the basement of a pizza parlor for their adrenachrome, and you're more concerned about how I should be "understanding" of that perspective, again, you're also supporting the idiocracy.

So this. A year ago my wife and I did a road trip up into Canada (Kelowna BC region). It was a new experience. I’ve been up into Canadian provinces many times (20+ over the years), but because of the anti Canadian rhetoric that Trump and company were putting out at the time, I was embarrassed and eager for people to not actually know I was from the states. I was hyper aware of the Washington state license plates on our car. I have never felt that way before. Ashamed to be an American. Afraid of the association it implied. Anxious that people would be reductionist, unable to realize that I was not just an American, but a frustrated helpless American.

The Canadian people I met as we travelled were all amazing. I was humbled that they took time to talk. And were less interested in identity than issues. One older gentleman, who saw us pull into the McDonalds with Washington plates approached us in the foyer and wanted to tell me that despite what others might say, I was welcome there. It was on one hand kinda weird and at the same time really touching.

This is true in most scenarios, and the opposite is also true – that Americans are famously friendly, and even though Canadians may not want to visit to make a point, I think even they would agree that most day to day interactions they'd have would be warm and welcoming.

There might be a bit more hockey ribbing for the next few weeks, but I know there's a ton of respect for Canada's team.

At the end of the day, the idea of "My problem is with the government, and not the people" is as old as time.

I am also a Canadian who has decided not to visit the US until further notice, and honestly, I'm sad about it.

In my 20+ years of regularly travelling to the States, I've almost always had great interactions with the people I've met in all parts of the US I've visited, and I've been all over. "Warm and welcoming" is a very good description.

I hope to be able to visit again in the future.

Same has been true the 2-3 times I've visited Canada. I don't think that'll change. I remember how things got pretty heated during the run up to the Iraq War. And we hope that the friendship will endure.

But I'm a pretty optimistic person anyway.

I think you’re all within your right to keep your distance from us. Our disgraceful leadership, even if it doesn’t accurately represent our people, we must suffer under it but no reason for you to do the same. We just hope you’re aware it’s only a few more years and we can begin to heal the whole relationship with more sane leaders that hopefully do see the strength and value in a positive relationship with a northern neighbor.

If not, please send help or accept our political refugees because we will have become permanently screwed if this behavior continues past our current orange phase.

> [...]even if it doesn’t accurately represent our people

I beg to differ, seeing that the US had free and fair elections - media bias aside.

Most Canadians are visiting Hawaii and California, not Arkansas and South Dakota, so the point still stands for the states most people are going to. (Although Florida and Arizona are both pretty popular destinations too, which somewhat contradicts my point)

South Dakota actually has a few decent tourist attractions west river: (Mt Rushmore, Badlands, Crazy Horse).

With its proximity to Canada, and relative cheapness, likely pulls in quite a few tourists from up North.

One additional South Dakota attraction (although lessening interest as of late) is how much hunting/fishing is available, and how much the community is interested in the ‘visiting’ hunter.

https://sdvisit.com/sites/default/files/2026-01/2025-Economi...

Oh, I wasn't aware of that, thanks! I guess I was only thinking of warmer places, since that's where I tend to travel to. I personally live a bit too far north to drive to the US (in a reasonable amount of time), so I completely forgot that the US is close enough for a summer road trip for most Canadians.

Elections are not good sample of our collective values. The approval rating is quite low and is probably a better measure.

But when it comes to elections, first, somehow “we” get 2 bad choices every time. This last time, I personally feel they were 2 incredibly terrible choices. Then the fumbling from the other side basically assured orange man’s victory. It was a disaster of an election (but sadly appropriate as it seems like every thing we do is a disaster now.)

We also have a low voter turnout. So the result isn’t really complete and probably has some bias.

We also have an electoral college which means the winner can have less than 50% of the popular vote and win.

I could probably go on but I feel the point has been made that election outcomes are not the proxy you think

https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

If "both sides" are equally bad, then both sides equally represent the people, no?

> I could probably go on but I feel the point has been made that election outcomes are not the proxy you think

The purpose of a system is what it does. There are not many grassroots efforts to change the many negatives you listed. Tacit approval - whether through nor voting or not fixing what is broken - does not lessen culpability. The outcome is still accurate representation on the aggregate.

If 4 housemates always have a dirty kitchen, it's a reflection on all of them. It may fall short of their ideals, or they can blame Bob for not doing dishes, not fixing a problem whose root they know is an indictment, not an excuse.

Ironically in my experience anyways, this is true more so in parts that are more strongly "Canada should be the 51st state" politically. e.g. the south, where I find day to day interactions with people there are much more friendly than say California.

I just saw this recent survey about whether or not people view their fellow citizens as morally good. Canada ranks first, with 92% respondents answering affirmatively.

It's not hard to imagine people like these extending their good will to foreigners, even "hostile" ones.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...

In contrast, "The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%)."

Washington has more in common with BC than with Alabama or Florida. Except for the Pig War, which was more of a disagreement between neighbors over their fence line.

maybe northwestern washington. the rest of the state is basically kentucky.

I’ve been making an effort to visit Canada and Europe more instead of domestic US tourism. I used to go to Florida multiple times a year. Not anymore and you know, Canada is such a great place, am there right now on vacation.

So I live in Florida. People leave Canada this time a year because of the weather. If anything, go further south to Central America. Costa Rica and Panama are safe countries.

They leave it because they have probabled lived in a winter climate their entire lives and want a change / have gotten older and it's harder on their bodies.

If you've never experienced a real winter or done neat things like winter sports then visiting Canada in the winter is a great travel experience.

Until agent orange decides they should have the canal back.

Don't miss Algonquin park. It's amazing.

Encouraging more people to go to protests together perhaps. While also taking care of yourself, these things can be tiring.

I surprised more US folks dont visit Canada, its amazing, much safer, and cheaper for them because of the exchange difference. Im guessing they see prices in CAD ($), and think its more expensive, but not realizing that $1 of theirs buys $1.35 CAD.

> I surprised more US folks dont visit Canada, its amazing, much safer, and cheaper for them because of the exchange difference.

1. A lot of people can't afford vacations right now

2. For people in the US, socially and culturally, there's not much of a "drive" or desire to visit Canada. I've worked for Canadian companies, etc. I've never once in my entire life heard somebody talk about visiting Canada. It's always someplace warm and tropical or it's Europe or Asia.

Visiting Quebec from the East Coast is great. Driving distance, plus Montreal and Quebec City are both different enough to feel like you’ve gone somewhere different. Plus the people are just really nice.

I love the food in Montreal, but not the roads!

If you mean North East US, that whole area is a different thing. You guys (US NE + Eastern Canada) are practically neighbors compared to Miami, Houston, or Los Angeles folks :) Also probably more used to the cold!

With a few possible exceptions, Canada isn't really cheaper for US tourists. They get more CAD for their US dollars, but most prices in Canada are scaled up accordingly, so it ends up being pretty much the same or more expensive.

It's probably just that it doesn't feel like there's much to "get" there.

If you go south you get sun and beaches. The coastal regions of Canada will be comparable to the coastal regions of New England and the Pacific Northwest, so there's no need to go all the way there if that's the sort of beach you're looking for.

Likewise your outdoors, your cities and restaurants and museums are all going to be about the same as the options available in the US, just further away. It's not really "exotic".

We don't really have the same emigrant relationship with Canada; my grandfather's family spent a couple generations in Canada, but my mother only found out about it after he died. He considered his family to be Irish and to have come from Ireland; that they came to the US via a couple of generations spent in New Brunswick was never a part of the family lore.

So there's no real "visiting the home of my ancestors" sort of feeling you'd otherwise see.

Museums and public art galleries are notably worse in Canada, honestly.

But, I think there some unique things worth seeing for an American: The old parts of Montreal/Quebec city, and the Alberta Rockies, especially the corridor between Banff and Jasper.

Sure, yeah, but you say "Alberta Rockies" and I think "Ah, yes, because the US is notably lacking good scenic parks in the Rocky Mountains."

I'm saying this after having seen the Rockies in both countries.

Banff is much better than Vail or Jackson Hole though. I would even say better than Tahoe, if not for the lake.

It's not so much what's better as whether it's different enough to attract a significant tourist group from areas with similar attractions nearby.

Like, if you want to see a rain forest or a thousand year old Buddhist temple or a pyramid, there's not really a substitute in the continental US.

But if you've two options, where you can go to the pretty good option domestically or drive past it and continue on to the much better option in another country ... most people will be happy with the closer option, even if there's some small number of people who want the best or have seen all the closer options before and want something different or just whimsically like the idea of going to the further-away one none of their friends have been to.

> if you want to see a rain forest or a thousand year old Buddhist temple or a pyramid, there's not really a substitute in the continental US

Minor nitpick, but there are temperate rain forests in the continental United States. What we don’t have are tropical rain forests.

Spent a delightful weekend in Quebec last month. Beautiful city, great culture, friendly people, best damn duck I have ever eaten in the a resteraunt they must having teleported from southern France

> It's not really "exotic".

I don't know about "exotic", but for anyone living in the northeast of the US, the easiest way to visit Europe (sort of) is to drive up to Montreal/Quebec.

Or they can go to St Augustine, New Orleans, or mid Manhattan to also get that Euro-Architecture feel (sort of).

Having been to Europe, no comparison.

Nothing prepares you for walking along a city street then “oh fuck, a castle…” and learning that it is now, the city’s government building. Cool… (Stuttgart, you’re awesome)

New Orleans is pretty far from the northeast, and Montreal has the 18yo drinking age if you're in the 18-21 age bracket.

New Orleans has had about a 20-30% falloff at least in receipts

Not the same due to language. Any US city is still US english, so will not feel very international.

Well... they have to interact with the ICE and similar US-Gestapo shit at the border.

Not surprised they want to keep safely within their "East-USA" territory and go nowhere. No one wants to be disappeared in Ecuador.

I don't visit Canada for the same reason I don't do a whole lot of touristy stuff here in the US: The travel costs aren't really _that_ much cheaper vs going somewhere more exotic like South America, Europe, Asia, etc, and it feels a bit too much like "home".

Living on the west coast, Vancouver's the easiest to get to -- I love Vancouver (and Victoria), and I've been both places several times, and I've gone to Whistler a handful of times as well, but, again, it's a lot like where I grew up in Seattle.

I really do want to visit Montreal sometime, but I also want to visit Chicago and Memphis and a lot of other "domestic" locations that I somehow never find the time for.

Also, when you grow up in a country you have a lot of local knowledge from culture, friends, television, education, so we just know a lot more about domestic places we haven't (yet) visited. Plus, a substantial number of people don't have passports. We used to be able to visit Canada easily without one, now we cannot.

Montreal is the exception to the rule about Canada not being differentiated enough from the US to encourage tourism. It really is quite different than anywhere in the US, it’s more like going to a funny speaking part of France without having to travel so far. They also mostly speak English, which makes it a bit less exotic but more convenient.

I think there are some parts of Canada worth visiting from the US:

* Montreal - it's a big-ish city, without piss in the subways. Also the restaurant scene is good, and the old town is worth seeing.

* Quebec City - again, the old town is worth seeing. There's not much else in the US/Canada like it.

* Alberta Rockies - The corridor between Banff and Jasper is beautiful. Also, Waterton is decent. It's right across the border from Glacier NP in Montana, but less crowded. And for skiers, the Alberta Rockies also probably had the best snow in North America this past year.

Canada is great. Montreal feels like a stylish and fun European city.

As a film lover, I've been to the Toronto film festival many times, it's an unmatched experience--so many things to see, and watch films with a very engaged festival crowd just makes them better. (In the same way, even if you don't love Star Wars, going on opening weekend, with the most enthusiastic fans, makes the experience better.) And given that nearly half of Toronto's population was born outside of Canada, it makes even New York feel a little parochial.

Quick question about US folks traveling to Canada: are cars with US plates being vandalized in Canada? I was thinking to drive and stay in Vancouver for a few days but I would not want to get a graffiti on my car (or worse)

As long as you don't have a MAGA bumper sticker, I doubt it. Most Canadians have some American friends, so we're usually pretty good at separating "Americans" from "the American government".

Especially in Vancouver, most people should be pretty aware that anyone with Washington/Oregon plates (which I'm guessing is what you have) probably hates Trump more than they do.

I can’t imagine that happening almost anywhere in Canada. Seems like some sort of old wives tale.

No, most people recognize a government isn’t reflective of individual people and are kind. If anything you’ll be more likely to be let in on the road if you are in the wrong lane assuming you don’t know where you are going. Having said that I wouldn’t wear/sticker political messaging, namely Trump and MAGA given current realities, but really of any type.

> but really of any type.

I've never understood why somebody behind me on the road would care at all about what my political views were anyway. I guess I get it during an election, maybe (in a grammar school "inventor contest" which happened to be during the 1980 US presidential election, I invented a bumper sticker sleeve that attaches to your car, so you could swap out political bumper stickers after your candidate lost. I didn't win the contest.) But in the end I don't really understand putting any sort of social signaling of any kind on my cars, though it seems hard to avoid even by just the kind of car you drive.

Closer to topic, I've always thoroughly enjoyed my trips to Canada, and can't imagine why people think "it's just like the US, so why bother" as seems to have been expressed ny some in this thread. I somewhat recently drove up to Roberval, Quebec from my home in New England, and it was absolutely nothing like the US. I find the rural Quebecois very odd, refreshingly direct, and enjoyable to hang out with.

I'd take that election atmosphere and then recognize Canadians are living in a charged environment with cost of living/quality of life/economy changing and uncertainty. Many Canadians see Trump & his with the de facto support he has (in that nothing has been done about it despite posturing) as a threat and root cause of much of it. Not all of that's true or due to him or the US. But it means nobody down there will meaningfully protect Canada with his threats/economic war if they can't even block his domestic chaos. Folks are happy to see other folks and appreciate visitors but they also recognize a threat. Just like in America. So agree why publicize foreign political views.

Perhaps in the white vs black experience lens that most of my US friends seem to see every world conflict through to relate to their own history (wild conversations about Middle Eastern politics there being racial), it's like wearing something racially inflammatory to the wrong neighbourhood. If one's blowing $$,$$$ on bespoke fly in tourism you can probably get away with it with a polite topic change as tourism keeps food on the table, but park a Trump sticker on a residential street I'd be surprised if even in the nicest neighbourhood there isn't some damage to it. Likely from a teenager goofing off with friends in the current environment.

To the second individually most Americans are nice in my experience, if you are seen as a person and not anonymous in the crowd. I've had a family member get a rifle leveled at them for stepping over a property line in the US where clearly they weren't seen as a fellow human... what can I say to that or the normalization of it.

In Vancouver specifically, they'd have issues distinguishing your car from any others on the road, because there's lots of foreign (US/Alberta) plates there for some reason (I understand it's some insurance thing). At least, that seemed to be the case when I was there recently.

We recently went to Niagara falls on the Canadian side and it was fun. Canadian sales taxes and fees took some of the currency difference, but yes we had a decent deal on a steak dinner in the tourist trap.

> Short of voting, protesting and getting into arguments with MAGA people I don't know what else I can effectively do.

Also:

Give money to organizations that are doing the work on your behalf. Lawsuits are still important.

Call or write your reps *frequently*. They use software to automatically tabulate voter positions. (And they look at it--they want to keep their jobs!)

Considering every US president sans van Buren has been related to one another, I'm not sure voting is very effective either.

Same. We had two month-long trips planned and canceled them both. I realize California is not exactly “enemy territory” or whatever but we’ll spend our money elsewhere.

I mean you say that, but as someone with family in California the issue isn't the general citizenry it's that ICE and border people aren't general citizenry.

If the system decides to screw you over, that your average Cali resident disapproves doesn't stop you being in a holding cell for weeks.

Going through CBP is such a nightmare, even as a US citizen, I also think twice about going on international vacation. I hate entering my own country, every other country is so much easier, a deep sense of dread enters every time I have to go back to the USA because I know I will be fucked with by the border police.

I try not to let them influence my behavior too much, but at the end of the day, getting thrown in immigration jail on false accusations (yes happened to me despite presenting US passport) or detained for 12+ hours (also happened several times) puts constraints on vacation plans.

Really depends where your entry point is. They’ve moved to digital gates which have made actual cbp interactions basically a thing of the past. Last couple times I didn’t even have to take my passport out.

As you said, depends on your gate of entry. At some of them, they took the digital gates out after installing them.

Most of my flying back into the US has been through ATL and once through LAX. It wasn’t bad.

We just had to wait 3 hours in line to get into Costa Rica.

Americans don't understand that words have meaning. Canadians are supposed to just shrug and laugh.

It’s not even just about threats, you as an individual are in potential danger of being detained without due process by ICE

We had a great candidate for a job decline to relocate to the US for precisely this reason. I really do not blame anyone for making that decision

For me it's not about politics at all. Just the thought of going through TSA and immigration is enough to discourage me, especially when I can hop on a plane to Spain, Italy or Cyprus and face 0 inconveniences along the way.

Cyprus is probably best avoided right now.

Yeah I mentioned it because I have semi-permanent home there. Luckily we left before the war started. I am just getting government SMS with warnings now.

Gah that must suck. I hope you all ride this out without mishap. It's got to be so frustrating, it's like a bunch of gangsters having it out in the street where you live.

The whole social media history and phone searching thing makes me nervous, you're one bad-taste meme about Charlie Kirk and a butt-hurt CBP agent away from a very long and painful detention process.

you don't want to give up your DNS to visit the USA? /s

> For me it's not about politics at all. Just the thought of going through TSA and immigration is enough to discourage me

The conditions of TSA and the immigration system are...not independent of politics (or even independent of the top tier of most divisive partisan political issues in the current American context.)

Seems like many people here in Germany also don't want anything to do with the US any longer as well. I myself wouldn't go to the US, even before Trump, and recently also heard from someone else, who wants to travel around the world, that they will not be visiting the US, due to what is going on over there. Just 2 anecdotes, N=2 of course, but I can imagine many people sharing the worries or concerns about visiting the US.

edit: The truth hurts apparently.

Statistics Canada has over the last year shown that tourism to US from Canada is down by a lot and it's not getting better. Hell, as an anecdote, I keep seing ads on TV like: Come to Disneyland! We got rebates for canadians!

Edit, didn't realise it was this bad:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260223/dq260...

Las Vegas hotels are currently offering to take Canadian dollars at par.

> Edit, didn't realise it was this bad:

It's probably not bottomed out yet, some of those trips were booked months in advance and not cancellable without taking a financial hit.

I go to Disneyland nearly every weekend and the increase in foreigners is insane. Clearly a lot of people visiting that would have been going to Florida decided on California instead.

As a Floridian who owns a unit in a condotel [1]. The property management company is outright saying that tourism is down affecting income. All of the other owners who were dumb enough to buy them as “investments” are complaining.

We don’t care because we are the only people who live there mostly year round and only leave during spring break and the summer when domestic tourism is high.

Likewise, I used to live in Germany, now in California, I used to get a fairly steady stream of old friends in town to visit, but not anymore, they essentially to a person refuse to come to the U.S.

I took a taxi ride from Niagara (ON) to Buffalo. The Canadian driver really was leery of Americans and I apologized for everything. It's a dang shame, and I don't blame you all for feeling this way.

Bit off-topic, but how easy was this to do? We need to do the same crossing to pick up a rental car from Buffalo.

I couldn't arrange it via app, so it seemed impossible at first. However, I asked the bellman at the hotel, and he called his taxi driver friend. I kinda overpaid from what I can tell, $100 american, but he just drove us across the bridge, passports were checked super quickly by the American side, and we continued on to Buffalo in about 40 minutes total.

Thanks! I'd seen Uber etc. won't cross the bridge, so looks like talking to an actual human is required :)

Do you Americans realize it means absolutely nothing to us when one of you "apologises for" Americans? You do that for you, not us. It's weird and gross. You don't speak for Americans. Americans speak for Americans, and the message is loud and clear.

Well in the taxi or seemed to be the right thing to do.

My mom's condo complex in Hawaii used to have many owners from Canada. Over the last year, the number of units for sale has probably 10x'd from previous years.

Are people from Qatar and UAE now buying these? Seems these are our new allies now

They were our new allies for a few weeks there and now they’re cannon fodder for Iranian shaheeds.

Probably not our friends anymore.

No idea who is buying them, but it's dropped the price of buying one by over $100K.

I'd understand the face value lack of roi. I go to europe.

But to judge?

Okay

As a Canadian, most of those people stating this, are broke and can't afford to travel, so the anti Trump thing is a face saving excuse.

Just a observation from my personal life, my friends who aren't broke, are still going to Florida, etc.

yeah dude people definitely just stopped being able to afford going to Florida when Trump decided to turn his back against it's closest ally

The ones I know that have money stopped going there and went further south or in Europe.

Some even go as far as booking a trip to Europe for a music concert instead of going to the US.

The line between "it's expensive" and "the current situation in the US sucks" is blurred.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11075088/canadian-snowbird-couple...

Ridiculous take that Florida is expensive like it's some kind of luxury trip.

Florida was always a budget option for us. It's always been a quick, easy (you can drive), low risk break to get away from the cold. I just don't feel like dealing with CBP and random MAGAs right now to be honest. Wife is low-key stressed about the idea. I mean at best it's a hassle... so why bother?

90% of Canadians live within 100 km of the U.S. border, it's not much different than traveling elsewhere in Canada.

Granted, as someone who lives ~40 km from the border, I'm broke and can't afford to travel, but I'm also avoiding the U.S. and have been further than 100 km from home on a number of occasions in the past year.

Absolutely, my partner would love to visit national parks south of the border this summer but we decided we'd much rather spend our money in our own economy for the time being. That's not even considering the risk getting snatched by immigration anywhere in the country.

"spend our money in our own economy" - a common fallacy about economies. Spending money is how you take/consume resources from an economy.

If you spend money in Canada, then you are taking stuff from Canadians. If you spend your money in the US, then you are taking stuff from Americans.

You might wonder what happens at the limit - why don't Canadians just spend all their money in the US and take all America's stuff (just a thought experiment)? Because currencies adjust. Canadians would need US Dollars to buy stuff in the US, and as more and more Canadians try to do that, the exchange rate would change to devalue the Canadian Dollar against the US Dollar, effectively making things more and more expensive for Canadians until they are forced to get their stuff elsewhere.

This is not true.

When you spend Canadian dollars at a business owned by a Canadian, you're sending that owner and the Canadian government your money, in exchange for their goods or services, normally at a surplus of value for them. You are 'helping' them; you are 'investing' in the Canadian economy. You are justifying the existence of their business and the jobs of the people who work there.

Especially insofar as you're making this choice versus American options, you are putting money into the hands of Canadians rather than Americans. This is the underlying concept behind boycotts and voting with your dollars or feet.

There’s a decent chance the national parks will still be there in a couple years anyway.

Well, I guess, they might have been auctioned off to some billionaire at that point so… the tickets will probably be pricier but the facilities should be shiny and new.

If they choose to open them to the public, that is. Hopefully that billionaire doesn't just open it to their friends and us commoners don't get to use it.

Not just Canada. Everyone is wondering if they'll be arrested and thrown in the gulag. Obviously the chances of this happening are fairly small, but if you have an alternative non-fascist country to visit, why take the chance?

I think the "elbows up" rhetoric among boomers is kind of stupid, but for safety reasons I have avoided going to the US. Otherwise I probably would have travelled 5-6 times in the past year.

It's smaller than you'd think, but more than enough to make a real dent.

December 2025, statscan calculated that cross-border auto traffic was down 30% (mostly same-day trips).

Air travel is only down 11%, and air travel to other countries is up 13%.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11679293/us-canada-travel-rates-d...

They didn't break down how much of that was tourism vs work.

I was surrounded by Canadians in Arizona (BC, Calgary) and Florida (Ontario) this winter. I could not tell a difference in the RV world (2021-present) which I thought was odd given all the boycotts I read about online.

Canada? Count most of the world, and whole western world (minus US for the pedants but oh boy do US expats have juicy opinions on their homeland).

I live in Switzerland, and literally everybody I talk to in our circles - bankers, doctors etc. despises US right now. The idea of going there as a tourist is immediately laughed at or met with puzzled look. Professional reasons or conferences are not even brought up, its automatic no and employers usually don't even try suggesting those.

We ourselves with kids wanted to do the trip either this or next summer, but hell will freeze sooner. Some meager +-10k from us, I know just a drop in the ocean but there could have been many such drops. Other, less hostile economies deserve these way more.

Someone mentioned how they had to go to America for the job, and everyone worried for his safety. His answer: Don't worry, it is South America. Everyone felt better for him, then we all wondered how 1 year could cause such a flip.

That's all fine and good until your plane has to land in the United States for a medical emergency. If you are really concerned about this fly Air France through Bogota.

The power of media influence over people's minds. People will think whatever they are told to think by their media rulers. They will feel whatever they're told to feel.

So there's not much mystery to it.

Anecdotally, my in-laws used to visit the US a couple times every year to spend time with their daughter and my nephew who live in the US.

Now instead they pay for the plane tickets to bring my nephew up to Canada.

Same here in Europe. I've had people volunteer to tell me they had canceled their trips and that 'as far as they're concerned that includes the rest of the future for them'. I think a lot of people were willing to forgive the USA for 'Trump 1' even if they did not understand it. But this is different.

Less people visit the US because it's do damn expensive. That's the biggest reason for most people. Most people don't have any principles, they go where they can afford. Last year I was in NYC and Miami beach and was shocked how expensive everything was. (I know these are expensive places but that's where most tourists go - they don't visit Kansas)

Those people didn't already come to the USA for starters, NYC has been crazily expensive for years.

There are many reasons people might have, none are good. There is for instance also a risk factor of being harassed and detained by ICE. Cruelty and incompetence are a feature of authoritarian governance, not a coincidence. So anyone going there takes a kind of risk. As has been shown, even Europeans aren't safe from the whimsical paramilitary.

EDIT: I don't think that tourism is a big factor, but as I said elsewhere, it could well be the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Well, my business would be paying the trips, and everybody still refuses. So it's not the money.

We did not travel to the US during Trump's first presidency either.

That said, I do think some people are doing things for the wrong reasons and there is some manipulation of the masses at play here. One example is I expect most people don't really understand the tariff situation between Canada and the US and that most goods are still exempt from taxes and the agreements hold. I think some people want to punish the US for tariffs that don't exist.

As a Canadian we should push back strongly against attacks on our sovereignty. We should also be somewhat concerned about the direction our neighbor is going in general. But it's also a reality that the US is very very close to us both geographically, culturally, and economically. That's not going to change. It's not an "enemy country" despite their very questionable choice of leaders. I think the correct long term direction is open borders and open trade, somewhat like the EU, and we shouldn't lose sight of that because a bad leader is in place today.

It's very weird to me to see all the focus on US policies in the Canadian discourse while not enough focus on Canada. That feels like political distraction.

> I think some people want to punish the US for tariffs that don't exist.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the Gestapo. What a lovely time to be a foreigner travelling in the US...

Believe it or not but there are some Canadians still going to the US.

Gestapo is ... bullshit and FUD.

Yes, we see the news about ICE.

https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/border-crossing-data-annual-rel...

In 2025 there were about 18M personal vehicles and about 300K pedestrians crossed from Canada into the US. So yes, it's down (like 10%) but it's still a lot of people. Out of those the number of people that run into problems with the "Gestapo" is approximately, within rounding error, zero. You're a lot more likely to die in a car crash or get robbed or something.

Why does everything today have to be about hyperbole? You don't want to visit the US (like me) ... well don't. You don't like Trump ... fine. You disagree with the immigration policies, enforcement whatnot... fine. But enough with this bullshit fear mongering.

Well - if you are canadian and give money to the USA then you kind of also help sustain Trump's hostile anti-Canadian rhetoric and agenda. Most Canadians live in the southern part of Canada, aka close to the USA and depend economically a lot on the USA, but increasing that economic dependency more than it already is, is not a good strategy for all Canadians. I also think Canadians should get a small nuclear arsenal, probably 25% compared to what France has (France has about twice as many people; Canada only needs a small deterrence that would drive the cost of any country being hostile against it. Not many countries can be really hostile to Canada.)

I hope a couple of U.S. tourists won't find any trouble driving through Alberta. Would a "We Love CANADA" bumper sticker help?

(Asking for a friend.)

Your chances of running into trouble are pretty close to zero unless you're wearing a 51st State t-shirt or something.

I work with a a decent number of Americans who either moved here or are here temporarily, and I can't say there has been any tension. I think most Canadians who are staunchly anti-US are also aware that plenty of Americans aren't happy with their government. I can't say I've seen any vitriol towards the average American person.

I doubt you would have any issue at all travelling in almost all of Canada. Alberta might be a bit more US friendly.

You don't need the bumper sticker, or to apologize. As long as you aren't wearing MAGA gear or being bombastic about Trump, people won't really think much of it. I assume anyone visiting Canada isn't a Trump supporter anyways, as most polling shows they've decided they don't like Canada.

> People have judged me for driving through the states.

Meanwhile it's perfectly acceptable, if not a point of pride, for Canadians to go to Cuba, which is not only run by an actual, kleptocratic dictatorship that imprisons dissidents for decades at a time, but is also the number #1 destination in the Americas for sex tourists, including child sex tourists, with the industry even tacitly sanctioned by the dictatorship ("jineterismo").

Cuba hasn't recently openly discussed plans to annex Canada by force, and to punish Canada economically for not acceding to this desire.

> Cuba hasn't recently openly discussed plans to annex Canada

Neither has the US. Trump specifically disavowed that every time he was asked (by the CBC). Meanwhile Cuba sent thousands of mercenaries to kill Ukrainians on behalf of Russia.

> punish Canada economically

Frankly, even as someone who opposes tariffs as uneconomic, given Ottawa's long-standing "constructive engagement" with the regime in Havana, even after they hosted Soviet nuclear weapons pointed at the US, even while they put AIDS patients in concentration camps, and even while they ran the island as a giant, open-air prison refusing to allow anyone to leave, it's really speaks to America's forbearance that it hasn't attempted to punish Canada economically, until now.

You can't be serious. Did you miss all that talk of 51st state and "governor Trudeau" or "governor Gretzky?"

> A reporter asked if he was "considering military force to annex and acquire Canada."

> "No," replied Trump. "Economic force."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/donald-trump-canada-51st-st...

"The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians’ taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the world will be bigger, better and stronger than ever."

"If Canada merged with the U.S., there would be no Tariffs, taxes would go way down, and they would be TOTALLY SECURE from the threat of the Russian and Chinese Ships that are constantly surrounding them."

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-canada-annex/

We're into "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears" territory here.

I meant to quote the entire clause, including, specifically, the

> by force

part, which is the part Trump repeatedly disavowed (as your own post demonstrates).

The hotel booking websites show pricing trend data and rooms are largely “low price” currently. March isn’t exactly high season for California but it’s an interesting indicator.

While the effect was real, arrival numbers mostly recovered since august last year: https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20250830_WOT...

I'm not Canadian, and I usually visit the US for business. While being a Muslim often means enduring the humiliation of being singled out because of my name by CBP, I'm comfortable enough that I could travel private for my US trips, which means the entire CBP experience is completely different (friendly chitchat and conversation as the CBP officers check our passports inside the aircraft itself). But with ICE roaming the streets, I'm not taking any chances of being deported to Libya or El Salvador or something. Which in turn means that we have severely halted all of our US investments, simply because I am unable to visit the country (!).

Everyone not in the US, help us: boycott, divest, and sanction everything USAian to limit the power of the criminal regime and expedite regime change.

Any business which exports especially to Canada (because oddly between tariffs and repeated threats of invasion US products and services are not seen in a positive light), likewise any business up or downstream of mostly immigrant workforces.

I have some Euro friends that went to Dubai instead because the USA is “too dangerous” right now. I wish them safe passage back, but yeesh talk about irrational perspective.

I mean yeah, that's a dumb choice, for sure - but our company rescheduled all work events from their normal location in US to Montreal, Canada. Hundreds of people each. Sure, a small drop in the ocean, but I'm sure we're not the only ones.

Yeah, my company delegation to a Vegas Conference (i don't know what they really do there tbh) got cut from 18 to two, with newly calibrated phone and empty laptops: no biometrics, no private keys, nothing, they don't even have access to their usual mail and have special addresses created just for the occasion. I think trust is _very_ low.

Yeah tough choice right now, don't know which one is more autocratic and oligarchic.

Are you implying they knew that Iran would get bombed and would in retaliation bomb everyone across the Persian gulf?

They definitely should have been aware that it's a significant risk. It can't be predicted with certainty, but it was pretty obvious that there's a good possibility of something kicking off. I occasionally take trips where flights connecting in Dubai would otherwise be a good option, but I won't do it. Partly because I'm the wrong ethnicity (yeah, UAE is buddy-buddy with Israel now... so was Iran before the revolution), but the risk of war breaking out is a big part it.

It's not like this is the first time in recent history that region has been somewhat unsafe for travelers. Or the second time, or third, or fiftieth.

There were rumours about those things, and some western countries issued travel advisories a few days before. Either way, Dubai is not a good place to go, no matter what bribed influencers tell you.

I’m implying that going anywhere in the Middle East (or a good deal of the world) has far more risk than going to the USA.

Maybe they mean dangerous as in the opposite of “emotional safety” - the greatest actual, real-life danger of coming to the US as a tourist (who isn’t trying to do crimes or sneakily overstay your visa) is still being offended. Compare this to Mexico where you might be kidnapped by cartels, or the Middle East where… things aren’t as safe right now. You can definitely blame us for that in the most immediate sense, but a case can be made that if Iran does choose to be different the region will be more safe eventually.

I'm not a big fan of Dubai, but it used to be a really safe travel destination, at least for male travelers. A month or two ago there was no reason to assume it would be otherwise.

BTW, the irony is that they decided not to go to the US, but they are victims of the danger caused by the US anyway.

I enjoy Dubai, but it’s is part of a state where showing a stranger the middle finger is punishable with jail and deportation, nevermind an expat criticism the emirs. It’s pretty telling to consider that safe but to be afraid of showing your passport to CBP.

All we gotta do is show passport to the CBP and that's it, we get in? All people avoiding travel to the USA are doing so because they have a bad photo in their passport? :)

Statistically, yes. Take a boogeyman from this thread - electronic device searches.

Less than 0.01% of travelers to the US have their electronics screened. A similarly small fraction of travelers get turned away at the border. It's remarkable how big of a story it is for how much of a non-story it is, especially when you consider the fact that similar laws exists in the UK, France, most of the Middle East, East Asia, and more. The only story here is that America is (regretfully) becoming more like the rest of the world.

I'm not defending their regime or implying that they have more freedom than in the US, but from the purely practical perspective of a traveler, the fact is that it's much easier and less disruptive to avoid showing anyone the middle finger or criticize the local government during a short trip than to go through social network profiles, IM conversations, etc. to remove any memes or negative opinions about Trump or the US.

In short, the thing is that countries like UAE are predictable. Follow their laws and don't mess with them, and they won't mess with you. The US has become unpredictable, hence more dangerous.

Dubai is predictable evil. You know what to do to avoid trouble.

The Trump admin acts like it is on cocaine. Many people - and I think this can be a highly rational preference - prefer predictable more evil of chaotic less evil.

To me this seems pretty rational? I still don't think the US is more dangerous in an absolute sense than many places, but there's reason to hope that in a couple years the US will stop putting random unlucky tourists in ICE torture facilities. So if you don't have a strong preference about when you visit you might as well wait. Dubai is unlikely to stop being a conservative monarchy with harsh criminal laws in a volatile region.

You're a great friend to your friends. FWIW: Dubai is unsafe because of the USA. They thought they were out of that sphere of influence unfortunately right now all bets are off, even Iceland and Cuba are not safe.

>Most of the world is not visiting the US right now

Only right now? The US touristic cities have been and continue to be the most expensive places in the world to visit by far, so most of the planet will never visit the US out of cost reasons alone, regardless of their views on $CURRENT_POLITICS.

Foreign tourism probably isn't large enough part of the US GDP to be making a dent in the US economy as a whole.

@WarmWash: where is the dollar collapsing? USD:EUR and USD:GBP are on par with where they were 10 years ago. Hardly a collapse. The people who can't afford flights and boarding in Vegas, Santa Monica or NY won't get any massive benefit from current currency fluctuations.

Well the dollar collapsing does make it much cheaper, for better or worse.

It accounts for 3% of the economy and provides around 15 million jobs. That’s absolutely going to make a dent.

And international tourism supports local tourism. I think Las Vegas will continue to be a shell of what it was until international tourism rebounds.

BEA used to have these cool interactive tables on GDP by industry, but they’ve now been discontinued. It really feels like our current administration just does not like public data.

How much of that 3% is from foreign tourists versus domestic Americans?

And what types of jobs are those 15 million? High paid high skilled or low pay low skilled?

Because from what I can tell you about EU tourism jobs, most jobs tourism creates over here are low pay, hard labor, unskilled jobs, mostly filled by minimum wage migrant seasonal workers who then send the money back home, meaning the biggest beneficiaries from those jobs are the wealthy land/business owners who exploit cheap mirant labor, and not the local workforce who mostly suffers gentrification as they don't work in low pay tourist jobs and have to deal with increased rents from tourism on top.

Plus, the massive black economy tourism creates where a lot of the money is under the table and avoids the tax man further compounds to the problem. So I doubt much of the US working class will suffer from a tourism stagnation.

@HEmanZ: Did you read anything I said? Who's losing their job when almost all tourism jobs are done by foreign seasonal workers? The locals mostly aren't losing any job because they don't work in tourism due to pay and work conditions.

Are you using the same logic to cry for the western workers making clothes and sneakers who lost their jobs to Asian sweatshops? Do you think they miss that type of jobs and would want them back?

Ok so if that labor was someone’s job, that implies they couldn’t get something better for them. If you’re straight eliminating those jobs and now they have to take something even worse for them (lower pay, worse hours, worse personal satisfaction, etc)

Did you read anything I said? Who's losing their job when almost all tourism jobs are done by foreign seasonal workers? The locals mostly aren't losing any job because they don't work in tourism due to pay and work conditions.

Are you using the same logic to cry for the western workers making clothes and sneakers who lost their jobs to Asian sweatshops? Do you think they miss that type of jobs and would want them back?

> How much of that 3% is from foreign tourists versus domestic Americans?

Probably all of it since tourism was 11% of total GDP in 2023, a third of that being international tourism would be on par with european averages.

Where did you get 11% GDP from. Google says 3%.

nvm i'm dumb, i can't read a chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/292518/contribution-of-t...

2023: 2.36T (i misread and took 2024 prediction)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/188105/annual-gdp-of-the...

2023: 27.7

2.36 / 27.7 * 100 ~ 8.5

so 8.5 percent, not 11

I don't have a paid access to the website since 2021, so i can't look at the primary/secondary data, but it never failed me, and doesn't have the bias more political economic institutes has, so i mostly take data from there. If you have different data i will take them.

Edit: I do think it’s fair to say our economy is much more diversified and resilient to a drop in tourism then a country like Spain where it’s closer to 20% GDP.

But maybe the right way to frame it is it wouldn’t be felt as much nationally, but international tourism drops are pretty catastrophic to local economies of some of our biggest cities like New York Miami and Los Angeles Angeles.

An acquaintance had his phone taken away at a US airport by a border guard (or whatever you call them) for inspection. The guard went through his messaging apps, read chats. I understand the necessity for occasional physical searches for contraband or what have you, but reading private conversations is beyond what I can stomach. That, together with the infamous case of some guy being forbidden entry to US because he had the wrong meme on his phone, feels like Soviet Union bullshit. Actually, now that I mention this, reading my messages is fine compared to looking through my photos. I find it insane that this is happening in a first world country. I'm not a fan of hyperboles, but, man, this is just like what I'm told Soviet Union was like. I think I'll be skipping events in US for the next decade or so.

Even a single CBP employee scrolling through your texts feels like too much to me. But when they take your phone, they're making copies of all the content in the phone and as much as possible from any apps/websites you're logged into. And that permanently lives in a database which doesn't afford you even the very thin veil of protection against misuse that a US citizen might be granted.

It does all seem to be too much.

Curious, how do they make copies of everything? Do they just film the phone as they're scrolling it?

They connect it to a little box that hacks into the phone and downloads everything. Search for "Cellebrite Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED)" or "Grayshift GrayKey". The border agent doesn't have to know anything about phones/computers, it's just "plug in, press button". With modern phones, they really only work if you unlock your phone before handing it to them, and they'll make you do that. If you don't unlock the phone and let them walk off with it for awhile, they'll refuse you entry into the USA and send you back.

US citizens are, of course, allowed in even if they refuse, but they will confiscate a citizen's phone in exchange for a custody receipt (Form 6051-D) and they are supposed to return it to the US citizen after they break into the phone / crack the encryption. If they can't crack it, they can choose to never return the phone to the US citizen. And it can be a very stressful situation in which citizens may not know what their rights are in the moment (or can't afford to replace their phone or lose access to it because how would you even get an Uber from the airport or coordinate a pickup if you don't have a phone).

You can choose to bring burner phones or make sure your phone is freshly factory reset, but if you're a non-citizen that can also be a reason to be refused entry, and if you are a citizen that can "get you on a list", leading to getting "SSSS" stamped on every boarding pass for every flight you take, in every country in the world, for the next many years. If your boarding pass gets "SSSS" written on it, you will get pulled aside by security and all your bags get individually hand-searched prior to every single flight (even transfers/connections/layovers).

Non-citizens are also sometimes asked for a list of your social media accounts and the passwords to their social media accounts. Refusing to provide your passwords can be used as a reason to refuse entry to the USA. If the USA believes you have a social media account that you failed to tell them about, that can also be a reason to refuse entry.

Also, as of recently, visitors from 38 countries have to post a ~$10,000 bond just to be allowed into the USA.

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2023-09/Test_Results...

https://cellebrite.com/en/products/ufed/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayshift

I tried entering without a phone or anything other than the clothes I was wearing so they didn't have anything to search. So instead they got a warrant for a cavity search (I'm still chased by debt collectors for this, as I was brought by prisoner van to a private hospital) , because they can't stand to not have anything to look at. They will fuck with you ruthlessly if there isn't something for them to scrutinize upon entry.

This post alone should be a reason for tourism to the USA to drop to ~0%.

I've visited a lot of countries in my life but I've never been treated as rudely as on the US border.

Sounds like every citizen should come through with a burner phone until ICE doesn't have time to search everyone's bags.

They plug the phone into a computer and use software to literally clone it, so everything on the phone. All logs, emails, messages, photos, contacts, deleted files if they’re recoverable, passwords, everything.

Would an iphone in lockdown mode have any resistance to this?

I don't think we have access to all of the functionality of the devices, and all of the devices themselves, that are sold to governments.

The latest iPhone model in lockdown mode would be super resistant. Lockdown mode is specifically engineered to protect against Cellebrite / Pegasus-level threats.

However, if you’re a noncitizen you might be refused entry, and if you are a citizen you might never see that phone again. The phone will be stored for years until/if Cellebrite finds a vulnerability in that iPhone model, and then it will be searched. Also the government might target your future phones for Pegasus-style remote attacks, so if you present your phone to CBP in lockdown mode, you may want to leave lockdown mode enabled forever.

Modern iPhones are very, very hard (impossible) to crack today if they’re locked down properly: strong password, biometrics disabled, and/or lockdown mode.

Very interesting. Are there any technical hindrances that prevent Android being the same ?

I don't think so, I use GrapheneOS and I think I can't even use the USB-C port for anything other than charging (which should be configurable).

It is configurable. It can be used to charge (either way), for data transfer, or for remote control. You can set it up with a fixed behavior, or to request permission everytime you plug a data cable.

Slightly out of my depth, hopefully others weigh in.

Getting a very good lockdown mode requires both owning the entire stack (Apps + OS + Silicon) and being willing to sacrifice repairability (swapping chips/cameras/displays/touch controllers is a good way to help hack into a phone), and willingness to spend a lot of money on something that few people would actually pay for. Apple is the only company that's even positioned to take on this challenge.

AndroidOS has to work with a bunch of core functionality chips that Google/Samsung don't make. Having a bunch of different code paths/interfaces for a bunch of different SoC's, cellular modems, touch controllers, and cameras is not a winning recipe for security. Both Google and Samsung also use their own SoC's (Google Tensor G5, Samsung Exynos) but Samsung also uses a lot of Qualcomm Snapdragons ... and if you're using someone else's SoC there's no chance in hell of coming up with a proper "Lockdown Mode". Samsung or Google might be able to come up with a fully integrated solution someday, each have invested in parts of this. Beyond SOC's, Samsung has their custom silicon which helps them lock down security for their combo touch/display controller. Samsung has also invested a lot into customizing their Knox Secure Folder solutions (and everything else branded "Knox" as well, which is all mostly industry-leading for Android options). Google has the Pixel with their own Titan M2 security chip, and obviously they own the OS.

But it's a lot of work when so much of your engineering is dealing with changes that other companies are making. Google has to keep up with Samsung's hardware changes, because the tail wags the dog there, and Samsung spends a lot of engineering time figuring out how to deal with / customize / fork changes to AndroidOS that Google pushes (while the dog still wags the tail, too). Both have to deal with whatever Qualcomm throws at them for cellular modems, and it required a monumental effort/expense from Apple to only just recently bring up a replacement for Qualcomm's modems.

Thanks for replying. Such a comprehensive and well thought comment ought to have been a top standalone comment.

Yes, all Android phones except for GrapheneOS are vulnerable to something, so they'll just copy the flash storage and hand it back to you.

Yes it’s resistant but then they can just deny your entry into the country.

Presumably not if you’re a citizen but then, who knows

Right this was in the context of Canadians visiting - they can’t deny entry if you’re a US citizen but they can certainly make the entry uncomfortable.

You wish, they might just put you in a detension centre for a few weeks and take their own sweet time sending you back.

You are in legal limbo before you enter the country.

Do a search for Cellebrite

They use a specialized device like Cellebrite, there's a whole industry for this

That happened to a friend of mine in 2010 so it's not a new thing.

Yeah I've never travelled internationally with my regular devices. I keep my last gen phone, a cheap LTE/5G tablet and a Chromebook as travel devices with limited data that I wipe/reload before/after crossing borders.

This is one of the big reasons I won't travel to the US anytime soon, even for work events. I really don't want to be put in a situation where you have to give a border guard access to your phone or risk detention or a future travel ban.

Allegedly the biggest package tour operator in the UK has seen a 72% drop in holidays to the US for 2026.

The number of promotional emails I get from Virgin and British Airways, offering pretty big discounts for US destinations, suggests this is true.

That can't be right, the real figure is probably closer to 7%.

LOL. Why not? I wouldn't want to travel here. We're arresting people off the streets for no reason. It's fucking horrible.

I don't think it's entirely due to US politics. The strength of the dollar against the pound, the perception of the US as not being a fashionable place to go, the fact that most news about the US in the UK media is either war, Epstein, or ICE, measured against some very competitive offers for other destinations that don't have those problems, makes me believe it's certainly a high percentage. FWIW in my teams (approx. 100 people, all in the UK) I can only think of one person who travelled to the US in the last year, and that was a trip to Disney they'd had booked in for a while. The rest have all been going to southern Europe, Japan etc.

72% is just not a believable figure. I assume we're talking about TUI here, and they haven't announced anything about this 72% as far as I can tell.

TUI is German rather than UK-based, and they're not a package operator (although they do own several.)

On top of the stringent border checks and Minneapolis, Brits are now seeing things like this and thinking twice: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...

US tourism declined in 2025 but the number has been relatively flat since then.

These recent job losses are probably not attributable to tourism since that’s unchanged year over year.

I’m not saying tourism is not a factor or denying anecdotes about people not visiting the US, but I don’t think it’s the explanation for the February 2026 job losses.

> I’m not saying tourism is not a factor or denying anecdotes about people not visiting the US, but I don’t think it’s the explanation for the February 2026 job losses.

This is accurate. This thread is people emoting. I get it, might as well let it out. Tourism being major part of the US GDP feels like countries whose GDP depends on tourism, projecting. I get that too, if that is the paradigm you live in every day, that is the lens you view things through.

Tourism is probably affecting local economies at the margins, and there is a real loss there for those communities. The US GDP as a whole? Not even a rounding error.

Most US tourism is domestic, the effect of a 12% drop in international tourism arrivals is a rounding error even for the US tourism industry as a whole, much less the US economy overall (tourism is 3% of total, compared to ~10% in other major tourist destinations like France).

Emoting and wishful thinking is exactly right, and I say that as a Canadian who is participating in this boycott. I'm not doing it to hurt the US economy, because I know it won't matter one bit even if we all stay away. It'll hurt some border destinations, but will hardly register in most places. Facts are facts.

Tourism is a rounding error. Euros buying US arms are a rounding error. The benefits of a relationship with XYZ country is a rounding error. Any change we want to make to improve healthcare affordability is a rounding error. Everything around discussing improving housing affordability is a rounding error.

The US economy is driven in part by coal which employs 40,000 people. Rounding errors have impacts and are part of policy discussion all the time. It only gets shut down with 'rounding error' when it's referring to average people issues without clout.

Calling things rounding errors is the US equivalent speech as russian style apathy propaganda.

It's not just tourism. Economically, the US does not depend on the rest of the world nearly as much as any other developed country. Trade (exports and imports) as percentage of GDP is the lowest of all major economies, by far. This is not up for discussion it's a fact you must ground everything else in.

Having established that, you know the firm upper bound on economic (not cultural or political or podcast-topic-generating) impact that international tourism boycott will have on the US. Same for putting tariffs on US goods. If you ignore this, you'll be surprised by how little this matters in the end, economically. Conversely, if you keep yourself firmly grounded in reality you can still in fact be against these policies on different grounds - on the fact that over time their cumulative economic and non-economic effect will hurt, on the fact that a lot of the reasons for these policies are fanciful nationalist bullshit (no, manufacturing jobs aren't and won't be coming back). But don't expect us staying away from your country, or putting a tariff on your shitty cars or cucumbers or whatever, to make a difference. Why is that controversial?

The foreign tourism segment is 20% of the size of the US ag industry. Saying this is a rounding error is ridiculous. 10% of US tourism employment would be 1.5 million people employed as a result of foreign tourism (total tourism employment is 15 million).

To say this a tiny unimportant segment that isn't worth talking about is ridiculous. Again especially considering the consideration the Republicans give tiny industries like coal which employs 40,000.

It's worth talking about a segment that employs 1.5 million in a discussion about 92k job loses.

It’s not a big deal that you think this, but it isn’t nearly as important or poignant for the US economy as you’re wanting it to be.

My bad talking about employment on a thread about job cuts and giving background that a rounding error that doesn't matter is still 1.5 million US jobs. The US isn't 'too big to fail'. Death by a thousand cuts is still death. Ignoring each cut because they aren't important enough (only 1.5 million out of the 15 million travel workers) or poignant is dumb.

Nobody claimed the US was too big to fail. Now that I understand your goal, I can fully grasp your frustration.

I suggest not dying on this hill, it isn’t worth the emotional turmoil.

GDP being affected negatively by reductions in tourism, with the loss being offset by increased business for Raytheon as well as the human centipede-like economics of big tech companies buying stuff from other big tech companies, sounds about right.

I would indeed be cautious about attributing economic downturn to holiday spending, but I don't think Las Vegas can breathe freely now. It could be a canary in the coal mine. Some might say, the death of a canary is a rounding error. Others might say: what else is at risk?

St Patrick’s day folds into March madness folds into nba/nhl playoffs folds into Memorial Day folds into Independence Day, Vegas is about to get slammed.

Perhaps so. But also, the other thing is that this administration has been stalling on releasing monthly numbers on employment for several months now, either releasing them very late or even not at all.

If you believe the administration, it's been because BLS "has the wrong numbers" or that they need "interpretation" or "adjustment"...

... or it's because they've been garbage for a while now and trending in this direction because, shocking, I realize, maybe Trump isn't the economic mastermind he likes to cosplay as inside his head.

I agree that there are other factors likely impacting job losses in 2026, but it is possible that the impacts of a tourism downturn are only now being felt.

One thing worth noting is that the tax structure of American cities can be more based on sales taxes than property taxes, and so if tourism is down, and sales is down, this will begin to impact city budgets, which can have rippling effects elsewhere. For example municipal cutbacks to landscaping budgets could impact private contractors etc.

I just flew to us from Euro, plane only business class was full, rest was half or even more empty... It's usually full.

Reminded me of COVID time...

Even tourism aside stuff like Tucson's Gem and Mineral show, basically an international commerce meetup, will suffer under the current situation and probably fade away for a different overseas alternative.

The BBC quality of reporting is down the drain. BBC World on the TV version is now unwatchable, specially since they got sued.

Here is much better quality reporting from NBC News with a breakdown per industry at 02:01 in the video:

"The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, stoking labor market worries" - https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/2026-labor-market-s...

The most hysterically funny take on this is Cramer..( who else) and CBNC saying its AI...its NOT.

Conversely, I live in the Netherlands (though I am originally from California) and my entire summer is booked full of either family or friends visiting from the US - the friends are mostly here to get a feel for the place and see if they want to emigrate.

I wonder how many Americans of means are vacationing abroad instead of domestically just to get some respite...

I had never vacationed abroad in my whole life, then last year I traveled separately to Amsterdam (with 2 nights in Groningen) and Paris. Both trips ended up being cheaper than similar domestic trips. Both times I was extremely sad to return home.

I would love to emigrate to Europe. One of the nights in Amsterdam, I couldn't sleep and spent the night frantically researching how to legally emigrate.

It’s getting insanely popular but the Dutch American friendship treaty is worth a look.

That's a bit ironic.

If all of the undocumented people in the US spent this much time trying to emigrate legally, the US wouldn't need ICE and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Most illegal immigrants could spend the rest of their lives trying to immigrate legally and never make it, so that doesn't seem rational. Being undocumented is their best bet, as long as they don't break the criminal law once they're past the border and they make it 100 miles past the border their odds of being caught are next to nil. ICE is mostly catching people that either turn up in the legal system or are documented somewhere where they can be found.

Uh. Most of us will spend our whole lives trying to earn money but never make it to being billionaires. So are you saying it's rational to disregard the legal system and steal?

The irony is rich here. Country X is bad for enforcing its immigration laws. So let's run off to country Y and dutifully follow its immigration laws.

That depends if it's more practical to steal a billion or earn it legally. I suspect the most practical way to get to a billion is to legally steal it, perhaps with some form of regulatory capture or a government franchise granting a monopoly. Whether you think this is right or wrong is immaterial to what the practical approach is.

It is definitely easier to immigrate illegally for a large portion of the world population, and probably most illegal immigrants. Rational actor then would immigrate illegally.

I think this also very much depends on the country. Only a total idiot would try to "legally" immigrate to Argentina as their constitution essentially grants citizenship just for surviving for two years, and meanwhile there is essentially no immigration enforcement and fairly onerous visa process to do it "legally." On the other hand, you'd have to be an idiot to illegally immigrate to China in anything but the most dire circumstances, as they have an Orwellian surveillance apparatus and getting a legal business visa is fairly straightforward particularly in some special economic zones. On the Argentina<->China scale I would rate America as further towards the Argentina side, albeit with no path to regularization of status for most illegal immigrants.

Having a dogmatic adherance to the law leads to irrational actions. But also having a dogmatic disdain for the law also leads to irrational actions. Everything has to be considered in context. In the context of the USA you mostly have to be an idiot to try and immigrate legally if you are low skilled poor person from a 3rd world country with no connections. In the context of an educated American going to Europe, the rational choice is probably to immigrate legally.

From this lenses I don't really see any logical inconsistency in the fact the same person might pick illegal on one path and legal for another. Although yes if they are leaving the US because they hate immigration controls and dogmatically following immigration controls overseas in someplace like Argentina where it doesn't even make sense to do so, then they are definitely hypocrites.

Our immigration system is broken. Reagan realized this in the 1980s and gave amnesty to millions and Republicans were going to reform it. But businesses being able to abuse an unprotected 'undocumented class' won out instead.

> If all of the undocumented people in the US spent this much time trying to emigrate legally

Many of the "undocumented people" (what an Orwellian phrase) that have been rounded up by ICE are picked up during court hearings or immigration interviews. An easy way for agents to meet their quota without doing any actual investigative work. Say what you will about them but there's no denying those people were by definition "trying to emigrate legally." This has been widely reported.

No. If you're "trying to X legally", that means you don't just do X anyway no matter what the legal system says. Next you'll claim that robbers are trying to earn a living legally".

> no matter what the legal system says

I appreciate the way you phrased that, "what the legal system says" rather than "the laws," since it's important to keep in mind a lot of what we're talking about is mercurial executive branch policy rather than statutory law. (which is why US immigration has been such a shitshow for such a long time)

On the other hand, you're apparently ignorant of what's actually happening, and it's making you write stupid things. The Trump administration's policy changes when he took office immediately made a lot of people, not my choice of words, "illegal" immigrants instead of "legal" immigrants. Maybe you support that, that's your business, but to claim those people were not "trying to emigrate legally" because the new administration changed the rules is simply dishonest.

> Many of the "undocumented people" (what an Orwellian phrase)

Yeah. Also "Illegal aliens" used often by US government officials is even more Orwellian.

There are 2 separate topics that seem to get bundled together a lot.

1. Should we deport illegal immigrants? While there are some debate here (sanctuary cities, immigration reform etc), it's not the primary cause of the current ICE repulsion.

2. How deportations are done currently. Mass round ups, targeting everyone, including those with no criminal record, the violence involved. This is what most people are against.

ICE has been regularly picking people up at their asylum hearings and deporting them. That is precisely people trying to emigrate legally.

As someone who immigrated here, legally, from a low-risk country, I can tell you it cost the best part of $35,000 going through the process, and byzantine weirdnesses and requirements that included things like my mother-in-law signing surety on my usage of Social Security and Medicare and other financial commitments because US immigration is in some ways so broken that it cannot at all comprehend a world where the immigrant might be the breadwinner, and not the USC (I was working as an experienced senior IT person while my US partner was back in college).

Ultimately, it would have been quicker, easier, and cheaper (and in the end, just as legal as my immigration) to come here on a tourist visa or the VWP, marry her in spite of the prohibition thereon, and ask for forgiveness and apply to be able to stay anyway.

When it's those three things versus "legal immigration", and other factors, I rather empathize with many of those people.

And as for your comment, it's more and more apparent that Trump intends for ICE to be his cudgel for all manner of opposition, not just immigration issues (witness the attempts to extort Minnesota into handing over state voter rolls, "We will move ICE enforcement out of the state if you do") so no, we'd still be having it.

> the friends are mostly here to get a feel for the place and see if they want to emigrate

As a US citizen who has daydreamed about moving to a Dutch city like Ultrecht I'm curious what they found, and how it feels to be an immigrant in the Netherlands.

I live very close to Utrecht and I adore the city. We literally have kids in groups biking to the canal with fishing rods.

Sounds lovely. Our kids enjoyed the local bikepacking trips we did this summer, perhaps our next will visit the area. (In the off chance you have personal recommendations for bike touring companies/routes, let me know.)

I’m afraid I don’t but that sounds very nice!

It's not so easy to do. You can't just daydream about it. A friend of mine spent 18 months just with the paperwork. He's now making half of what he might make at home, but he's happy. The people are definitely friendly and welcoming, but the legal system makes it hard. And the businesses know this so they underpay because they can.

What visa takes 18 months?!?

I have a general sense of the difficulty based on preliminary discussions with an immigration lawyer, but the Netherlands seems like one of the easier routes we're considering.

The reason it's "daydreaming" is that we're not yet ready to give up on New England, but I'd still like to start getting our ducks in a row in case there's a rush for the exits and we have to move quickly.

> He's now making half of what he might make at home, but he's happy.

Sounds like what we're looking for.

it pays less but it's very nice.

I am a US citizen living in Portugal. I have the right to go to the US, live there, etc.

I recently went back for a funeral, and I had to spend a moment reminding myself that it would be fine for me.

For people who don't have my passport, I wouldn't feel comfortable telling them "it will be fine", though I would still tell a European "the odds of a problem are relatively low." But I couldn't in all honesty say "there's nothing to worry about."

I’ve read some horror stories already that are enough for me to decide that I will not go to the U.S. until sanity returns. Here is one: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...

Being a USC is no assurance, I've sat in immigration jail cuffed and legs bound where every other person but me was brown and spoke another language. It is rather bizarre when it happens because none of them empathize with you because at the end of the day you know you have the right to enter and they are just fucking with you out of sadism, while for the others they are wondering if they'll be deported. Although generally after a shift or two they forget why they were fucking with you and you get released.

I have a US passport. I'm avoiding the US. ICE has already openly killed US passport holders. My Irish accent could get me in trouble or create a misunderstanding. Why risk anything like that?

Just this week we had yet again someone in German TV telling their pleasure to be put into jail and sent back to Germany, due to her tatoos.

Unfortunely my home country has too many fanboys of older times, aka Chega, so I hope you still manage a good time there.

Probabilistically speaking, the entire thing is fine.

But seeing my engineer freak out about flying in a plane, despite passing Diff Eq and knowing the probability of a crash... Feelings/emotions do matter.

This is why populist demagogues win elections... ugh...

> I recently went back for a funeral, and I had to spend a moment reminding myself that it would be fine for me.

Your passport does not matter, the colour of your skin does:

"US citizens jailed in LA Ice raids speak out: ‘They came ready to attack’":

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/us-citizens-...

"A U.S. citizen says ICE forced open the door to his Minnesota home and removed him in his underwear after a warrantless search"

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-u-s-citizen-says-ice-f...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop

This reminds me of an incident with a friend of mine. He flew to the US and entered through Texas. He is white with blond hair and he was wearing a t-shirt very reminiscent of the Confederate flag.

A security guard picked up his bag from the carousel, handed it to him, and very emphatically said "Welcome home, sir!".

How would a guard know who a bag belongs to?

It must have been the x-ray conveyer belt, not the carousel.

Pretty sure you don't go through an x-ray conveyor belt when you exit a plane.

I think something was lost in the telling. I could see a kiosk worker saying this or similar.

On intl flights thru Houston I’ve had to exit, grab bags, carry them to security again, then proceed to the next leg of flight.

That’s actually not an example of someone with an American passport being prevented in because of their skin color.

What is the incident? The security guard being nice?

Don't put words in my mouth, don't say silly things.

I'm well aware the color your skin matters a lot, but your passport also matters, especially at the border.

You're better off with white skin and a US passport than with white skin and a British passport, but you're also better off with brown skin and a US passport than brown skin and a British passport and that's still better than brown skin and a third-world passport.

And yeah, even if you're a white man with a US passport, you still might end up shot by ICE if you're in Minneapolis (doesn't mean you're less likely to be targeted).

>You're better off with white skin and a US passport than with white skin and a British passport, but you're also better off with brown skin and a US passport than brown skin and a British passport and that's still better than brown skin and a third-world passport.

Tell me you're not an American without telling me you're not an American.

I hate to say it, but to many (racist) Americans, brown skin < anything else ... and ICE has a disproportionate number of those people, because they deliberately hire them.

1. A few messages upthread, I note that I'm an American, and I'm from the South. Quite familiar with how racist folks can be.

2. Reread what I wrote, it's not contradicted by what you said.

There is no evidence for any of this.

hell of a typo in that last sentence, and I can't edit.

I meant to say "doesn't mean you're not less likely to be targeted".

> I'm well aware the color your skin matters a lot, but your passport also matters, especially at the border.

The way things are currently operating, the border is probably the place you have to worry the least as it's staffed by CBP folks which have probably had training: it's the rest of the country with ICE randos running around that seem to be the worrisome areas. Just ask the South Koreans:

* https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/sep/12/s...

> You're better off with white skin and a US passport than with white skin and a British passport, but you're also better off with brown skin and a US passport than brown skin and a British passport […]

Are we talking at the border or the rest of the country? At the border with CBP a US passport would probably be best. With the rest of the country, with ICE, white skin and a British (or any) passports would probably be 'best'.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black

Good observation, I meant at the border. Your passport won't matter that much if you get stopped by a cop.

But also, look carefully at the comparisons I offered. I didn't include all the combinations, because I only was including comparisons that were obviously true without any room for ambiguity or nitpicking.

As you noted, a black citizen might be treated better at the border and worse during a traffic stop compared to a white foreigner.

Our president is abusive, he hired other abusers ("stephen miller", etc), and they are spreading abuse.

I WISH governments would be for the people and not for the powerful who can buy "justice" .. for themselves.

I'm really anticipating what the World Cup will look like.

Sure, there will always be die-hard fans that will show up not matter what, but with so many teams, I bet we'll see empty stadiums for some matches.

I'm curious about the Iran match.

Most probably Iran will not take part at the tournament.

> empty stadiums

You mean full of AI spectators.

Nope. As someone who has tried to get tickets, most of the matches are sold out, and even the least desirable matches are quite expensive.

I'm 46 years old, this is the first world cup in my life that I will not watch.

I think the opposite, US is safer now with less crime/illegal immigrants so tourism is probably up, also with the 250th birthday and World Cup it's likely to be a record breaking year.

Some are not willing to visit US, but some, like me, are more willing to visit US. I will probably going for a business trip but I am willing to extend my stay to visit Florida for the Nature, Montana and Wyoming because I enjoyed the atmosphere in Yellowstone and Longmire TV series and Texas because I like the Texans.

How many months are you planning on visiting? Traveling between WY, TX, FL, and MT represents hundreds and hundreds of miles, and many hours.

Also of note, all four of those states are ‘Conservative’ havens…

I will stay a few weeks. I will be visiting what is possible in that amount of time. I will probably be flying as driving would take too much time.

I am interested in seeing some natural scenarios and also experiencing the American culture and way of living in mostly middle and small cities.

This article mentions that leisure and hospitality are down: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/economy/us-jobs-report-februa...

My partner and I were planning a West Coast trip for the World Cup this year for my 40th, but we decided to solely do Canada instead. Can't see how it won't end up being the best decision we've ever made.

The vast majority of tourism in the US (around 90%) is domestic. The total drop of inbound international tourism is about 12%. The effect is noise-level compared to larger economic forces at play. The US is just not an international tourism dependent country in any way.

Most industries take notice when they lose 12% of a market. This is Russian style propaganda to say 'ignore this it's nothing'. We have an insane amount of policy/policy discussion around coal which only employs 40,000 people.

I live in a border state with Canada and this is having a huge impact for my community and those around us. I can't imaging it not impacting at least 40,000 Americans.

It's not 12% of the market. It's 12% of 10% of the market. As I said, a Canadian boycott will hurt some (close to the) border destinations, but will hardly register in most places. I'm personally not crossing that border because it doesn't feel safe to do so, and because of the threats to our independence, but I know for sure it won't have a noticeable nationwide impact even if we all stay away, and the French and the Germans and the Japanese do too. Noticing objective reality and economic facts is not "Russian propaganda".

Sure, if there's potential for using this situation for political gain it'll maybe make a political impact, but there will not be an economic one, not above the SNR of what else is going on.

Edit2: My bad if you felt attacked by me. That was my frustration with the current world presenting everything as too big to address, just give up and leave it be.

It's 12% of the international market. That is the segment. Any business is going to pay attention when they lose 12% of a market segment. Travel is 2.5% of GDP, above agriculture (0.9%), mining (1.3%), and utilities (1.5%) so a very outsize industry. Straight 10% of that (international travel) makes the rounding error market segment 20% of the size of our entire ag industry.

That is your 'rounding error' a segment that brings in 20% of the entire United States ag industry.

Tourism is also 15 million jobs so a 'rounding error' to such a large industry isn't necessarily a 'rounding error' to our population. 10% of that would be 1.5 million jobs. The entire US agriculture industry employs 812,600.

Again, the party that makes ridiculous claims for political impact is the one so concerned over 40,000 coal industry jobs but unconcerned about the fate of 1.5 million US workers because it's a small 'rounding error'.

https://www.squaremouth.com/travel-advice/us-tourism-statist... https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Farming-Fishing-and-Forestry/Agricul... https://www.trade.gov/feature-article/december-2024-internat...

Edit: My bad if you felt attacked. Everything just gets hand waived away as too big to do anything about nodays. I don't buy it. I'm a software developer. I was mentored on the montra 'how do you eat an elephant? one bite at a time'. It's the only way to create complex software solutions, and it's the only way to address our complex world. We shouldn't waive things away as rounding errors when they are part of a complex system. Especially when you consider the US Federal system. If you lose all the border states (most tourism comes from Mexico/Canada) you can easily lose control of the Federal government.

Las Vegas tourism is experiencing a significant downturn in early 2026, with 2025 finishing with a 7.5% decline in visitors—the sharpest drop outside the pandemic since 1970. - Google AI

interesting video I recently watched about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJcyDOjFLwQ

tl;dw - They say Vegas visitor numbers are down, but profits are actually up. This is because the tourism industry there has refocused on higher end clientele

definitely, except that shedding jobs in february is unlikely to be tourism related. that's not typically a month in which tourism operators would be either hiring or firing.

My partner works for a small, foreign-tourist focused hospitality company in the US. She says their numbers have fallen off a cliff in the last year. Apparently everyone is hoping that the World Cup will make up for the decline in tourism, but the are way below expectations of where they thought they would be by now.

I talked to someone who is hosting an international academic conference. Usually they have about 40% international attendees. This year it is like 3%.

> I do not see the tourism industry mentioned here but I have to imagine that is a huge loss right now.

“Tourism” is not a separately-tracked sector in the data, but would be reflected in several of the tracked sectors ("Leisure and hospitality” particularly, but slices of the tourism spend would be in several of the other tracked sectors.)

Many of those losses have been included in past numbers. Be mindful this is February numbers and many of the events that would cause big changes to tourism have had time to settle.

With that said, I’m sure the US Iran conflict is going to have all kinds of fun effects.

True, but that loss has been in for a while. Tourism began hemorrhaging a year ago from a combination of tariffs and ICE policy and Trump's bizarre obsession with Greenland (and associated alienation of former allies).

I see statistics like "inbound international tourism is down 8%" but I can't tell without context if that is just a typical drop or a cataclysmic decline.

That said, I do see a lot of ads for domestic tourism to places that ordinarily would really have no need to advertise. Disney buying YouTube spots to persuade me,a US resident, to visit Florida seems remarkable. I suspect things are not rosy?

1. -92K is a drop in a bucket. It's not what moves the needle for anything here, except looking at the trends. Revisions are the big swings now and those are not something the market likes -- which is why many are calling for a quarterly or even bi annual releases.

2. International Tourism in the US is not that big. Total international visits were expected to fall from 72.4 million (2024) to about 67.9 million (2025). https://www.ustravel.org/press/us-travel-forecast-2025-modes... So visitors to the U.S. dropped about 6% in 2025. I've seen some crazy numbers in this chat. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fewer-foreigners-visited-us...

More than 1.5 billion tourists spent $11.7 trillion on hotels, cruises and flights last year, according to the data from the World Travel and Tourism Council.

A fall of $12.5 billion is a lot but not something that will alter anything significant.

The majority of the people that are declining to travel to US are Example drops recorded:

Germany: ↓ 28% Spain: ↓ 25% UK: ↓ 18% Canada: ↓ 17% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_States

3. Some states and some countries are going the opposite (Argentina, Israel, two examples). https://skift.com/2025/12/29/us-international-travel-which-s...

4 .There is an offset by Americans traveling inside the US as well. https://www.thetravel.com/how-and-why-us-international-touri...

Overall, this is a small macro impact.

Here is the official source: https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/economicdata/empsit_03062026.pd...

Some of the main categories (page 8 of the pdf):

  - Construction:                          -11.0k
  - Manufacturing:                         -12.0k
  - Transportation and warehousing:        -11.3k
  - Private education and health services: -34.0k
  - Information                            -11.0k
  - Leisure and hospitality                -27.0k

It seems to go down in lots of different sectors.

Healthcare was carrying the economy. Any commentary on why that’s failing?

There was a strike. That particular number is probably worth ignoring.

Ah, this makes sense [1].

[1] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/hr/31000-kaiser-worker...

Sad/funny that your comment is at the bottom.

Workers on strike are classified as not employed, so yeah we should ignore that category

It's one of the challenges with data. It's technically accurate, and it's useful for trends like productivity and output, but only marginally useful as a gauge of the health of the economy. You also have to remember it for the next jobs report.

> Private education and health services

I'm probably missing something here, but those seem quite unrelated categories, and I'm not sure why anyone would pay for private education these days when we all have access to free AI private tutors?

Children have no frame of reference to understand when AI is totally making things up. 1:1 instruction is more valuable than ever to teach children to be critical and verify misinformation that AIs subtly interleave.

> when we all have access to free AI private tutors?

The parents that stuck their kids in front of a TV in the 80s or handed them an iPad to shut them up in the 2010s think this is a great idea today. Namely, it’s not an AI tutor. It’s an AI babysitter. That’s fine. Parents need breaks, particularly ones who can’t afford childcare. But branding it as anything but a way to mindlessly occupy one’s child is dishonest.

The notion of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" remains firmly in the realm of science fiction. Maybe it will exist someday, but not today.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/172835/the-diamond-...

The free chatbots I have access to make factually incorrect statements very often. Of the falsifiable statements I've seen come out of them in areas where I know enough, it seems like at least 1 in 10 is objectively wrong in some way. They'll walk it back if pressed. ("you're absolutely right")

I know human teachers aren't perfect, but they seem much better than these things.

My personal take is that it's just hit a breaking point where people have finally decided that it's not worth the money. Im not the only person I know with an uninsured wife, and only coverage for my kids. If it weren't for my kids, I wouldn't have enrolled in insurance either. The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues. And with the government cutting back spending, which you can see that hitting big insurers like UNH directly, the market is getting a little tighter.

> The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues.

The thing is, bad and expensive health issues can literally come upon you over night. You can get hit by a vehicle or get beaten up with no perpetrator to be held accountable, you can develop an aneurysm, get food poisoning, get pregnant unexpectedly (with all the risk that comes with, including healthcare not being accessible because of anti-abortion BS), or you can simply fall over a step in your own house.

Seems like something that shouldn't be left up to a consumer market.

"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

Aneurin Bevan

That's true to an extent, but the majority of US healthcare spending goes to treating chronic conditions caused more by lifestyle choices than misfortune. There's a fundamental issue in public health policy about individual responsibility and whether to charge people more (or potentially even deny care) over factors at least partially under their control. For example, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) allows health plans to charge tobacco users higher premiums. Is that fair? Should we also charge higher premiums to alcohol users or those with sedentary lifestyles? There are no clear right or wrong answers here.

> There are no clear right or wrong answers here.

Absolutely, but there are lots of working, existing models that are better than ours in practice, so this isn't much of an excuse.

That's a meaningless statement. You can find many examples of "working" national healthcare systems (for various definitions of working) and they're all different in how they allocate costs to consumers.

For one example there are some positive aspects to the Japanese system in that they achieve good outcomes (on average) at lower costs. But that's partly due to the "Metabo Law" aka "fat tax" which voters in other countries might see as punitive or discriminatory. I'm not necessarily arguing for any particular approach to lifestyle-related health conditions but any choice involves trade-offs.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/07/japan-solved-obe...

> That's a meaningless statement

Is it? An existence proof multiple times over actually seems extremely important in debates about the future of healthcare in the US.

That topic should be a non-starter as long as US government policy is to keep shitting in the food bowl. There's way too many communities living under the toxic spill or waste of some unregulated industrial process -- and the country seems perfectly ok with that kind of "lifestyle". I really don't see why we should villify individual lifestyle choices when the entire country is happy with intentionally harmful policy choices.

So, if health insurers want to start charging premiums I suggest they send their bills to Superfund sites first, then to regular toxic cities like Flint, Camden, Hinkley or Picher, then to producers of known-carcinogenic substances (like Chrome-6 or Roundup), and then to advertisers of known-harmful products like alcohol or tobacco. Only when they run out of those targets can we have a discussion on individual lifestyle choices.

OK cute rant but do you have a realistic proposal? I absolutely agree that we should do more to reduce exposure to toxins but there's no legal mechanism for health plans to shift costs that way. Ultimately some of the money spent caring for others with lifestyle-related chronic conditions is going to come out of your pocket through insurance premiums and taxes. This is inevitable. Are you willing to pay more for people who choose to smoke and get lung cancer / emphysema / heart failure / etc? Yes or no?

There's very little tobacco advertising anymore so we're not going to squeeze many dollars out there.

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/products-guidance-regul...

>do you have a realistic proposal?

Realistic in this administration? No. They will keep taking and taking from the working class and pitting them against one another. There's no solution there when the government is actively looking to sabatoge the system.

Arguing over tobacco premiums is pennies on the dollar. Pretty much every other civilized country has figured something out with regards to universal healthcare. I'm sure there's dozens of solutions out there to choose from. The only real steps to take right now is to have Americans stop licking the boot and actually push for something that helps them.

Desk jobs like programming are nearly as bad as smoking based on some of the research I’ve seen. We could just make smokers and programmers pay higher taxes. I guess smokers already do; learned recently that cigarettes are like $10 a pack, a few thousand per year for the average smoker. Not sure how best to tax programmers though.

Socialized healthcare means that the State has a direct financial incentive to reduce or ban consumption of poisonous goods, and crackdown on pollution.

Why do you immediately call charging the worst polluters for the bad health effects of their pollution "unrealistic"? Having a sufficient answer to that question seems like a good basis to start your proposal from.

In practice everyone has vastly different preferences, expectations, and desires different levels of care then.

For example Some people want to see a specific doctor they know in a private session to discuss life and family stresses. Others only go to urgent clinics if they need an immediate medication.

What percentage of the market actually pays it this way? IIRC, somewhere north of a third of Americans are already on a form of single payer healthcare. Most of the remainder are getting it through their job, subsidized to varying degrees. The fraction of the population that actually pays the full premiums out of their own pocket is pretty limited, AFAIK.

> What percentage of the market actually pays it this way?

The only way this can make sense mathematically is if you're including children, seniors, and/or the ill—populations who are unable to work. What is your reference?

Pew Research says just under 7% of the population uses the exchanges to buy insurance. Overall, about 36% of the population is on public healthcare, according to Census.gov. KFF says that about 80% of the working population, plus or minus, gets insurance through their employer, with an average of $570/month out-of-pocket for premiums.

Thanks for pulling up data!

These numbers are incommensurate in a way that may not be obvious.

7% of the population doesn't tell you what population fraction is covered by such policies.

36% coverage is even harder—every child in the US is eligible for Medicaid, and such children may not always need it, or may move states after using Medicaid, in a way that makes them doubly counted.

80% of the working population is also less clear; is that 80% of policy-holders get their own policy through their own job? Or 80% of working-age people have a policy through some workplace, even if they are not working?

I think it's also worth considering that taxpayer funded US government spending on health care is about the same as in a typical single-payer European country. Then many tax payers still have to pay for private health care on top, to actually get health care for themselves.

Yeah, doctors get paid way more in the US. There's a number of changes beyond the payment method that we'd have to make if we wanted to have costs on par with a typical European country.

Markets are how our society allocates all its most important resources.

What I think we have now is the most non-market like sector of the economy, with 1/3 of all citizens already receiving government funded healthcare.

All those things could happen but the healthcare provider will mug you once a month.

There has to be SOME point where the constant muggings aren't worth it vs the risk, otherwise they would simply demand all our money, knowing we won't say no with our life on the line.

Agreed and generally insurance would be a value bet between you and the insurance providee with a slight operation overhead. In the US the market is basically circular as the insurance provider also has hands in all related pies so the bet odds are in such awful state that some people take the risk and rely on crazy stuff like gofundme for survival. I'm not an american but this doesn't look like something that can be solved with more market - the odds are just so broken in many cases.

Catastrophic health insurance for most those things is very inexpensive, relatively, but you have to re-buy it every 3 months and then "pre-existing" conditions reset. The expensive insurance is for covering ongoing expenses, as predictable expenses or at least those known 3+ months in advance are the vast vast majority of health care costs.

Realistically catastrophic revolving temporary insurance plus managing what you can in Mexico, plus occasionally paying out of pocket would mitigate the vast majority of yours risks while keeping expense relatively low.

Sure, those things can happen. A lot of younger people will decide to just accept the risk, and then if they get hit by a bad and expensive health issue then they'll go to the ER anyway. Due to EMTALA, most hospitals have to treat them regardless of ability to pay. This is one of the factors causing the US healthcare financing system to collapse.

> Due to EMTALA, most hospitals have to treat them regardless of ability to pay. This is one of the factors causing the US healthcare financing system to collapse.

They'll only treat you until you're stabilized, though. They won't give you chemo or routine care. If you need to be admitted you're also not covered by the EMTALA.

All emergency medicine, not just that triggered by the EMTALA, is 5-6% of all healthcare spending in the US, so while it contributes, it's not collapsing the healthcare system.

The real problems with it are that it's an unfunded mandate by Congress, just adding to the financial tangling of the healthcare system, and that it's way too often used to treat things that could have been much more cheaply treated in a clinic, but then there are no clinics nearby that take Medicaid and are actually open, so instead, like with so much of our health care system, we choose to solve it the stupid way instead.

Hospital costs attributed to EMTALA are relatively low today. My point is we should expect those costs to grow as more consumers become uninsured. This is one of several factors that will eventually wreck the current healthcare financing system.

don't you get a tax penalty if you aren't insured for 100% of the year?

That got remove in Trump's first term.

US voter math: remove penalties/taxes + increase benefits = everything is fine

Thus solving the problem.

The penalties were extremely unpopular and affected poor people the most.

I know the economic idea, but it is not a good mechanism for society.

The expanded Medicaid was supposed to take care of poor people, but several states refused to implement that.

All of that is true. But insurance agains that risk is not worth an infinite amount of money.

I can't find a reference for this, but listening to NPR this morning there was an offhand mention that last month there were significant strikes going on, and that those are now resolved, but showed up in the employment numbers for last month.

So that part could just be a blip. The rest seems on-trend.

I read that temporary striking workers were considered a lost job and accounted for 30,000 of the jobs. Plus another 27,000 in health care from the loss of business due to the strike. And the federal government shed 10,000 jobs. That accounts for nearly half the job losses.

In a healthy economy there would be hiring in other industries, helping to offset those numbers.

A little under half of US healthcare spending is public programs, the President’s signature “One Big Beautiful Bill” made massive cuts to the federal component of that which started impacting in July of last year, consequently....

OBBA as the cause requires intermediate steps to show up in this jobs report versus last year. The other comment’s guess at strike effects seems more parsimonious.

Why? Up till the end of last year, congressional Democrats were trying to get the ACA expansions extended, triggering a government shutdown in the process. Even after that plan fizzled out, they were promised a vote to reinstate it, so for hospitals or whatever there was still hope that there would still be funding. There's no real reason why you'd expect everyone to get fired the day that OBBA was passed.

the intermediate is that the cuts took effect in January.

No, the major healthcare employers are trying to adjust their staff sizes immediately to avoid later crisis caused by this draconian hack and slash approach to federal funding.

Healthcare is a cost not a profit in the economy: the Healthcare sector consumes what is produced by other parts of the economy. Similarly government can't exist without businesses. And a large part of healthcare is dependent on taxation.

> Healthcare is a cost not a profit

It’s both. Like transportation and construction. And whether you think it’s a profit or cost center doesn’t change that it contains paying jobs.

What do you do about the modest amount I spend on blood pressure medicine making me feel better all the time, which probably makes me more productive at work?

I'm getting more benefit than the cost of that healthcare (I'm asserting that this is true, I feel a lot better with the medicine) and that ends up feeding into the economy.

Good point.

I reckon I'm trying to think about the dependency graph of necessity. I suspect you are too.

A monetary economy has productive sectors and non-productive sectors. Most healthcare is non-productive from the point of view of an economy. Healthcare for workers and future workers is economically productive (from an economy's point-of-view). Maybe my conceptual cleaving is poor (black n white binary splits are usually misleading).

Of course ultimately most of what an economy delivers to us individually is monetarily uneconomic (is art or entertainment necessary?). Me confused.

Now I feel bad that I've wandered off into philosophy (which I usually find interesting but non-useful).

>Healthcare was carrying the economy. Any commentary on why that’s failing?

The fact that it's such big part of the economy is a really bad thing because it's "overhead" or "broken windows" for the most part.

And it's falling because people are stretched thin so they're not going to the engaging healthcare unless they truly NEED it. Even if you have "great" insurance contacting that system still costs you money if not every time then on average.

I don't think the "broken windows" metaphor is very accurate for healthcare. A lot of healthcare spending is along a gradient of elective vs necessary and some continuum of quality of life improvements.

For instance, I could live with allergies, and all my ancestors just had to, but I have the option to spend money on allergy testing services, medicines, treatments, etc. People spend money on in-home professional care to get better treatment than going alone or relying on family, or spend money on care facilities as appropriate for their circumstances.

We have medicines for depression, anxiety, restless leg syndrome, ADHD, birth control, acne, weight loss, low testosterone, ED, poor sleep, eczema, psoriasis and a million other issues which people in the past, or people in developing countries today, simply had to live with that we have the privilege of having access to treatments for to improve our quality of life.

I know people who are affluent and outwardly "healthy" who spend thousands of dollars per year in the "healthcare" category that's entirely discretionary, but lets them keep looking young and playing tennis at 70 years old, or helps them juggle work, family and fitness at 40.

Having a 70 year old play tennis is much more expensive than letting him die off and instead have an up and coming 17 year old play tennis. 17 year olds stay healthy and young, and are able to have meaningful life experiences at no extra cost.

Humans weren't designed to last forever, and it's inefficient to push against that constraint, you run into fast diminishing returns, and it leads to maladies and stratification when done at a societal scale. It doesn't matter how much we spend on health care, we're not going to live forever.

I come from healthcare staffing.

Contracts were heavily affected by cuts in federal programs that are critical to some rural regions, and uncertainty caused by inconsistent messaging about the future of such programs. Some areas are very dependent facilities that can only survive with public funding.

For example in nursing categories, CNOs (Chief Nursing Officers) would be requesting more staff, but CFOs would block those requests due to changing budget forecasts. The unpredictability of the fed is causing chaos downstream.

There is also a continuing trend to "realign" staff levels post-COVID, but that now is much easier to forecast for compared to the political chaos. In 2026 healthcare, that would not be a reason for attrition at these levels.

Thank you. Is there a good reason this is showing up now versus in the 2025 data?

The cuts didn't happen the moment OBBB was passed on July 4 (ew). Here's a timeline:

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/implementation-dates-for-2025-b...

It looks like some of the big ones landed Jan 1 2026.

I can't speak to the time frames for the article, but I know that the current administration and its policies had a significant negative impact on our business across CY2025.

I ran the team that maintained our business analytic data, and was also on weekly calls where feedback from our clients about the situation was discussed. There was direct correlation between uncertainty and both a decline in new job postings, as well as a lack of renewing existing job contracts.

When comparing our numbers to those of our publicly traded competitors, all the data showed the same trends.

I don't see why we should believe any of the data in the first place. At best, I assume good people have been let go and proper procedures are falling by the wayside. At worst, it is being manipulated (even perhaps incompetently).

Reality tends to be inconvenient.

I'm in publicly funded mental health...federal cuts are starting to cause states & counties to either immediately slash what CBOs thought was solid funding for essential services, or to let us/them know to expect significant cuts starting in the next fiscal year.

Not everyone was laid off immediately in the government. Some people were given 6 months notices, etc. Then the local authorities started to discuss the gap in their budgets. In my town they stopped hiring first and then they decided to cut some positions starting from 2026.

Medicare rolled out prior authorization gatekeeping to kill more patients in 6 states: Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington to use the Orwellian-sounding "Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction" (WISeR) that is administered by unaccountable private corporations using AI to deny and delay care. Medicare is a corporate joke that people confuse for single-payer healthcare which it ain't, and so Medicare for all (M4A) would be awful. (Medicare "Advantage" is even worse.)

Pretty useless without knowing at least what % of the total they are per category and what type of jobs they are.

The distinction between + and - is useful even without either of those.

Not really. Is it -2% or -0.01%?

I saw a lot of comments trying to guess where the job were lost in other comments and I think this give a little more context. I put the original source, there are 42 pages of data, if you want more details.

Sorry, ofc, thanks for posting this.

I wonder why "Private education and health services" is down so much. My guess is because federal cuts to health services impacted jobs???

Trump has made coming into the US less attractive which is a source of a huge amount of money for colleges and other schools in the US. Foreign tuition is $$$.

Plus cuts to the department of education, non profit spending in general.

That’s just a guess though.

It’s almost like there are additional causes to consider outside of the latest Trump story.

Does construction include undocumented workers?

Not sure why you're being down voted, it's a legitimate question. In some places, illegal immigrants constitute a majority of the construction labor.

Wow but it’s hard to map this data from different sectors on to whatever political news story is top of mind.

Unexpectedly, if you've been in a coma for the past year.

Let's raise tariffs again.

Exactly, massive price increases with the fake tariffs, hiring freezes because 'AI can do it all', who knew these things might affect jobs?

"As long as it's just theoretical I don't have to feel bad. Just keep plowing ahead and breaking things."

Well it's about to turn from theory to reality very soon.

tariffs on goods are mostly noise. if there were tariffs on services, though...

What do you mean noise? American people pay 96% of them with an average cost of $1000+ per family over the last year. To the vast majority of people that's waaayyyy above the noise floor.

As an European, I would actually love tariffs on American services. Kick them where it hurts.

$0 * 1,000% still works out to be $0, unfortunately, so Facebook isn't going anywhere.

European advertisers would be the ones paying tariffs.

Just noise that puts people out of business and livelihood.

Do you buy goods? Have you somehow not noticed the huge increases in prices for those goods?

What a head-in-the-sand comment. Are you very wealthy? Congrats! You can ignore the flames for a little longer than the rest of us.

And indeed they are doing just that! On top of a war that will also affect energy costs.

Not only that, Iran is attacking Saudi and friends infrastructure so that they have to use their capital there and not invest in the USA's AI nor government debt.

The "unexpectedly" is because the people looking at more real-time (but more indirect) indicators were expecting jobs to increase by about 50k or so.

It's rather more like someone going "based on the daily footfall numbers in my store, I expect sales to be up 1% this month" and the actual data being down 2%.

If the government-approved numbers are this bad the real ones must be catastrophic.

hey I know lets spend billon per day on war of choice for no reason for rest of year and make gas $5/gallon so even people who don't drive have to pay more for trucks going to stores and delivery

oh and make old/ill people somehow work until they are sixty-five to get any food or medical assistance

that should fix things right up

xmas economic implosion inbound

But at least Russia can fund their war better, right?

Are you referring to where he just eased sanctions on Russian oil so they can sell again at high profit to fund their own war of choice?

I figured he was going to drop sanctions on them sooner or later but that was quite the ploy

The problem is zero consequences for anything he does now, completely isolated, so it's one country destroying choice after another

https://reddit.com/r/Keep_Track/comments/j6z8eh

I believe at least part of the rationale for allowing sales, short term, is to try and reverse the oil price increase, due to the Iran war.

Dear leader says prices are down. So they are down. He tells me I’m doing better than ever before. So I must be.

The state of the Country is fully on display here when comments like this one are getting downvoted consistently... quite amazing (and sad) to see

How can one downvote on HN?

You need to reach a minimum karma threshold (501, if I recall) before you get the ability to do so.

First rule of Fight Club is...

Some useful information not documented on HN [1] not my repo

[1] - https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Honestly, no. The administration is not subtle with its lies. If they want to fib, they do it out of POTUS's mouth at a podium, and it's a huge whopper that just dares the nasty liberal media to try to call it out. The strategy works for them, and they apply it repeatedly.

They don't just fudge numbers a bit. This is a bad number for them because it's probably the correct (or best available, really) number produced by the existing bureaucracy that does things via the same rules it always has. Doesn't mean it won't be revised later (note that there's also a big downward revision in this report of previous numbers). But it's likely trustworthy.

Along with Big Lie polemics, you also need to recognize that the administration is very sensitive to market motion (sort of a variant kind of democracy, I guess). And markets HATE when the government messes with the economic regulatory aparatus.

They quite publicly fired an official related to reporting these numbers, and they also decided not to publish numbers during the government shutdown nor backfill them. I have zero trust the administration isn’t fudging things.

Said official herself (Erika McEntarfer) has said that you should continue to trust the numbers, “You should still trust BLS data. The agency is being run by the same dedicated career staff who were running it while I was awaiting confirmation from the Senate. And the staff have made it clear that they are blowing a loud whistle if there is interference”[1]

[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/stayathomemacro/p/trust-in-num...

They absolutely fudge the numbers. Summary below, but in short every possible mechanism for keeping economic reporting numbers honest is being systematically dismantled.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5323155/economic-data-r...

My man this is cope and we're in hell, never trust anyone who gets off on lying and cheating

I'm just saying that subtle trickery isn't his M.O. And they're not any good at it, anyway.

Just watch, he'll address with with Big Lie politics like he always does. He'll stand up on a podium, throw his own Labor Department under the bus, and announce that they're lying and that the economy actually gained 200k jobs or whatever. But he won't dither on whether it's -92k or -112k.

Don't kid yourself. You're missing the part where the heads of departments who deliver bad or embarrassing news get publicly vilified and/or fired.

That's direct pressure now to fudge/push the numbers before they come out. At the department level, there is usually a long culture of objective process to overcome, so it will probably start off subtle/small, but once they clear the old guard away they will report anything they want.

> the administration is very sensitive to market motion

Not exactly. The administration (Trump) is sensitive to embarrassment and criticism from his own side. Tanking markets are such an embarrassment, and while he might back down when markets tank, he might also do the the other thing he does to deflect embarrassment and criticism, which is to perpetrate some new outrage so that everyone complains about the new thing instead of the old thing.

And, of course, the markets will adjust. Iffy government numbers will get priced in.

You might like to believe there's a rational actor there, but there isn't. It's a guy moving from one gut reaction to the next, where his gut reaction is often to push everyone's buttons.

In all seriousness, I’m unsure that official job numbers (even if they weren’t intentionally distorted, which is a big if these days) have caught up with the gig/creator economy. If a person making ends meet with food delivery and a few dollars of ad revenue is classified as “self-employed,” is that the same level of stability and ability to keep up with cost-of-living increases (which may outpace traditional inflation) vs. self-employed freelancers with clients? Which isn’t to cast shade on those paths, but it’s meaningful to the metrics we choose to follow.

Yes, they have. The BLS actually tracks a number of different "unemployment" numbers, whose definition you see here [0].

The "official" unemployment number, the one now reported as 4.4%, basically only counts the "percent of people actively looking for work that can't find it, who have been looking for work for more that 15 weeks.

The number you are trying to capture is what the BLS calls "U-6". That number is defined as:

> total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

In other words, anyone that would like more work but can't get it. I encourage you to read the entire definition and footnotes at the link I shared. It's very interesting!

Right now U-6 is at 8%. During the 2007 recession it peaked at about 17%. [1]

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

Thanks for bringing this up, and you're right that this is closer. I still think it's imperfect, because a gig economy worker who works 35+ hours per week would be considered "employed full time" (footnotes, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm) and as far as I know would not be included in the U-6.

I don't have a more recent statistic, but in 2018 half of Uber rides were provided by drivers working 35+ hours per week: https://www.epi.org/publication/uber-and-the-labor-market-ub...

So while I was perhaps too harsh on the work of the BLS, I do think that newer metrics are warranted.

I can't find it now because Bluesky's search function is so dreadful, but after the January jobs report was better than expected, a bunch of people were assuming the BLS must have fudged the numbers. Then the person who was actually fired from the BLS by Trump actually showed up and posted saying that, as far as they can tell from talking to "surviving" colleagues, the blowback after that firing was so intense that there hasn't been further pressure on the BLS and that as far as they can tell, the numbers are still good.

If someone can find this post, please link it here, because this person was no fan of Trump and I considered it a matter of considerable personal integrity that they looked into the matter and determined they still stood by the numbers, instead of taking the easy win on Bluesky and denouncing them.

(There is a separate issue where for the last 2-3 years, the BLS's later revisions to jobs numbers have been almost entirely downward, instead of evenly distributed like they used to be, indicating some kind of systemic methodological issue, maybe some secular change in how labor markets work post-covid. The February numbers could mean maybe they've fixed the problem, or maybe they haven't and this will later get revised to something even worse. But that issue predates Trump.)

>There is a separate issue where for the last 2-3 years, the BLS's later revisions to jobs numbers have been almost entirely downward, instead of evenly distributed like they used to be, indicating some kind of systemic methodological issue, maybe some secular change in how labor markets work post-covid

The Biden administration pulled out all the stops (without resorting to outright corruption, like Trump) to get ahead of the fact that we briefly entered a recession in 2022 (which would not have been as brief if it had been correctly identified as the recession that it was). They changed how they calculated inflation around this time, which coincided with headline staying below 10% even though it had been trending higher and likely was much, much higher for parts of the country. I have no issue with the notion that they also changed the way that they calculated job growth and then, surprise, numbers are good (but then get revised down later when no one cares anymore).

I actually do pay reasonably close attention to how inflation and unemployment are calculated, and read the BLS and Federal Reserve reports beyond just the headlines from mass media outlets, and I can say this confidently: nothing you just said is true, you made up that whole paragraph out of nothing. It reads like a copypasta from RW Twitter reply guys.

...Headline inflation, as opposed to core inflation. Not literal headlines. "Close attention," indeed.

Reading the reports "beyond just the headlines" implies that you're still just taking them at face value, when the problem is that the methodology was likely compromised by a desire not to see bad numbers roll out. Nonsensical susbtitutions in the CPI basket, which just happened to understate the price hikes most Americans saw c. 2022. Suspicious timing of changes in the efficacy of initial jobs reports when compared to later revisions, as you yourself brought up, in part because the Biden admin failed to better fund BLS surveys and better incentivize responses. Stuff like that.

So while I appreciate that you would like to dismiss, out-of-hand, the concerns about the Biden admin's economic reporting, it's not so easy. They're real and this lacto-ovo progressive is not the only one bringing them up.

Good Luke verbal cosplay, though. /s

>> If the government-approved numbers are this bad the real ones must be catastrophic.

Sadly my first thought was not to trust this report. The article even notes further down:

>> The US central bank would typically respond to a weakening labour market by cutting borrowing costs, in hopes of giving the economy a boost.

Our fearless leader has put enormous pressure on the Fed to lower interest rates from day 1. They keep refusing, and following the data so it makes sense (if you don't care about reality) to alter the data to get the desired result.

With oil prices now 90+, there is 0 chance of an interest rate decrease even with a new Fed chair.

Lol we will see... UE can spike real quick.

They always revise the numbers later after the headlines fade.

Some of the biggest revisions on record.

Please keep in mind two things with the NFP report:

1/ the confidence interval for the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 122,000

2/ the report is based upon a survey of establishments. There is no obligation to respond and many do not and ability/desire to respond may be impacted by company health as well.

Since the end of WW2, and especially since the end of the Cold War, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations.

https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.c...

Because The DNC actually is what the Republican marketing pamphlet claims to be, a mildly right leaning pragmatic pro-business party.

> mildly right leaning

This is nonsense even if we calibrate to North America and the EU (versus the American voting public).

Within America, Democrats are center left. Internationally it’s a hodgepodge of left-wing social, centre right-wing foreign and across-the-board economic policy.

It’s fine to say the part is right of your preferences. But it doesn’t help your argument to be delusional about where other Americans stand.

This is why I said DNC. That wasn't just a cool synonym for Democrats. The leadership of the party sits way further right of the average Democratic voter. Someone who is right leaning has more in common with an establishment democrat than the new Conservative-led GOP.

This is also why capital-M Moderate Republicans (who have a near circle overlap with the "Never Trump" movement) are so attractive to Republicans and Democrats alike in purple states.

He's correct internationally, compared to real socialists in countries like Australia/NZ, US dems are definitely mildly center right.

They're also the only party of fiscal responsibility, although Biden broke the pattern there. Nearly all deficit reduction over the past couple generations has happened under Democrats.

Even with Biden, the pandemic situation was handled relatively well compared to most of the world. We were due for a "soft landing", and then we voted to instead tax ourselves with tsrriffs and scare off the lion's share of our tourism. Oh, and give tax cuts to billionaires, of course.

This is misleading between Trump and Biden, 2020 saw huge employment cuts and Biden gets all of the positive growth of the recovery. Jobs #s actually grew quite considerably 2016-2019.

Yes if you ignore his failures, Trump is actually a very decent president.

Obama dealt with two pandemic-level threats: H1N1 2009 and Ebola 2014. He made it look easy.

Both the unemployment rate, at 4.4 percent, and the number of unemployed people, at 7.6 million, changed little in February. (See table A-1. See the note at the end of this news release and tables A and B for more information about the annual population adjustments to the household survey estimates.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (4.0 percent), adult women (4.1 percent), teenagers (14.9 percent), and people who are White (3.7 percent), Black (7.7 percent), Asian (4.8 percent), or Hispanic (5.2 percent) showed little or no change in February. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) changed little at 1.9 million in February but is up from 1.5 million a year earlier. The long-term unemployed accounted for 25.3 percent of all unemployed people in February. (See table A-12.)

Both the labor force participation rate, at 62.0 percent, and the employment-population ratio, at 59.3 percent, changed little in February. These measures showed little change over the year, after accounting for the annual adjustments to the population controls. (See table A-1. For additional information about the effects of the population adjustments, see the note at the end of this news release and table B.)

The number of people employed part time for economic reasons decreased by 477,000 to 4.4 million in February. These individuals would have preferred full-time employment but were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)

The number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job changed little in February at 6.0 million. These individuals were not counted as unemployed because they were not actively looking for work during the 4 weeks preceding the survey or were unavailable to take a job. (See table A-1.)

Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of people marginally attached to the labor force changed little at 1.6 million in February. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them, decreased by 109,000 in February to 366,000. (See Summary table A.)

There's a vibe in at least the PNW that feels like the tech sector is sloughing jobs and avoiding creating new ones courtesy of AI. I genuinely wonder if that feeling is backed by reality and whether it's large enough to be translating into national statistics across all industries.

I'm not sure how much of it is actually AI vs just like, the bags of VC money have dried up and most tech companies can't anywhere near justify their personnel or often even existence without it.

Like companies have been doing the RTO "stealth" layoffs for years now, it's not even news anymore, this was already well underway.

There is also the obvious priapism of owners and investors to finally do to the remaining white collar workers what they have already done to everyone else. Whether or not AI actually can replace all these workers is nearly moot, they have fantasized about business without labor for so long they can't tell the difference from reality anymore.

Where is the money that was going to VC investments going now? With increasing inequality, I figure rich people have more money than ever that they need to figure out where to invest.

Real estate?

Real estate is not doing well, it's "stalled" but not collapsing, but prices are staying steady and mortgage rates are not down to Covid levels.

If so, not commercial. Commercial has been in a slow collapse + shell game of shifting the debt burden.

Interest on debt; shoring up the financial vehicles and insurance through which they diffused the catastrophic losses of their bad bets from the past few decades; stockpiled for the inevitable economic collapse and the feeding frenzy that will follow; land.

I just want everyone to understand that part of why everything is so expensive today is because our elite funneled the surpluses from the electronic revolution into boondoggles that not only didn't make back what they cost, but that demand even more labor, to this day, to cover maintenance and interest.

>Yeah, screw DEI!

lmao I'm talking about wars; sprawl; advertising and consumerism; wasteful or gatekept luxuries; feet-dragging on any number of technologies and policies that could have mitigated the damage, just to please incumbents.

We temporarily made life spectacularly better for like 5-10% of the population, and doomed everyone to either generations of toil, or a hard reset in the form of a "burn it all down" revolution.

More money is flowing into commodities. Gold price going up feeds into more mining.

The big money is going to the OpenAI/Anthropic types producing foundation models that have to raise billions on a regular basis. This is money that would normal be spread across the startup ecosystem instead of concentrated in a handful of massive companies. When it finally hits IPO, I'd bet that you see it start to get freed up for new investments

Just to drive the point home, in 2019 the total VC market was ~$300 billion. To date, roughly $235 billion is tied up in just OpenAI ($168b) and Anthropic ($67b)

For a long time interest rates were incredibly low which led a ton of investors to put money into VC funds, despite their very high risk.

When interest rates go up, money floods out of higher risk higher return areas like company formation, and floods back into buying bonds, so investors can collect the low-risk interest that didn't exist before.

I don't know either. I do wonder if AI is just and excuse since saying "we have to let people go because the economy is bad and our costs are up." spooks investors while "We adopted magic AI and don't need people anymore" sounds like these companies are being proactive so investors don't dump their stocks.

Considering the first companies to claim AI has made many redundant are the same companies that overhired during Covid, I think it's pretty clear how the wind is blowing.

Companies move in a group, if you're the only company doing layoffs you look weak and predators will pounce and the board will ask uncomfortable questions, but if everyone is doing it, they'll ask why you are NOT.

They also want to get as close to a skeleton crew as possible. They believe developers can do everything while simultaneously driving down the cost of developers.

They've been boiling the frog with increasing job requirements since at least one or two decades ago, and AI is conveniently aligned towards this goal.

The idea doesn't really make sense to me. We know LLMs increase productivity, especially for coding, but increasing productivity shouldn't make you fire people unless your business has already exhausted any potential for growth. Instead we would expect the increased productivity to grow businesses further and increase hiring for all other tasks that LLMs are still not good at.

> Instead we would expect the increased productivity to grow businesses further

This assumes infinite demand which is not a good assumption imo. Especially if people are losing their jobs.

You're right. My point is that AI isn't at the heart of the job shedding, it's just a scapegoat for other structural problems in the economy.

> This assumes infinite demand which is not a good assumption imo.

Yes, but "AI replaces people by improving productivity by 20-50%" is clearly a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy. So maybe the "people are losing their jobs" is just totally unrelated to AI . . . but people keep repeating that "companies can do same work with fewer people thanks to AI" nonsense, so there will always be a need to remind them how actual economics work.

In a shrinking economy there isn't much growth. They can take the productivity gains to shrink their payrolls and get the same output with fewer people

That said I don't think there is a ton of productivity growth yet with LLMs that would show up in the numbers that are getting thrown around. Companies are just finally seeing that they have a bunch of people not doing much at all and cleaning house

Yep, no disagreements from me there. Ultimately, economic stagnation is what's driving job losses, not increased productivity (such that it is) from AI.

I personally feel that people are coming to realize that whatever they build can be copied in a short amount of time so its value is much lower than it would have been in the past. So what's worth building?

AI is killing the notion that SW companies are infinite money printing machines. The idea is that someday soon(in the next 5-10 years as markets are forward looking), someone will vibe-code a replacement for Photoshop/TurboTax/Office and if nothing else that will kill the profit margins. This changes the entire economics of SW and affects current hiring and spending.

Quite the opposite. I just spent the past month "vibe coding" a pretty serious program in C. The tldr is yea I can build faster but I'm still sitting there testing, debugging, and focusing on specific features as I go and that's still a human limitation. The AI productivity is pivoted directly into higher complexity of features. It's not a magic wand that immediately builds a program that works perfectly out of the box. The zeitgeist just hasn't caught up to the reality of that.

And that's cool but your experience is not what the market is trading. The vibe is that vibe-coding will come together in the next few years and SW margins will be hit. That doesn't mean it's the reality, just that it is what the market is thinking.

Yes. I'm saying the market is wrong.

I can only speak from anecdotal experience in that I just witnessed this week, dev team leads and architects “replaced” by Claude code, they kept the offshore junior-mid coders and are giving them $20/mo pro accounts… (doesn’t that seem a little backwards?)

This is absolutely backwards.

Always good to see an A/B test done.

There were definitely some companies that clearly overhired during Covid that are now "resetting" and blaming/crediting AI is certainly an excuse they can use.

In Washington it is much broader than the tech sector.

Washington is being buried in indefensibly bad legislation that is extremely hostile to large companies and tech companies of every size for openly ideological reasons. It has rapidly become one of the worst business environments in the country when it used to be one of the best. Many companies have stopped or reduced hiring in Seattle and are moving operations to other States; there is a new announcement in the news every other day.

I know several longtime residents that have recently moved out of State or are no longer domiciled there as a consequence. There was an article in the news just this week that housing prices are starting to decline rapidly in Seattle.

It is looking like they couldn't help themselves and killed the golden goose.

Seattle and Portland OR are ground zero for the burgeoning anti-AI movement.

Golden Goose? WA has a massive budget shortfall.

There has been zero accountability for that massive budget shortfall. Revenue has increased 2x over the last decade with nothing to show for it. People are rightly skeptical of giving them even more money. And they have gone about trying to increase revenue even more in just about the most toxic ways possible, which will almost certainly erode the tax base.

That state desperately needs to restructure its finances but the legislature is almost complete captured by clueless ideologues. Washington isn't California. Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.

I've lived a large fraction of my life in Washington and I'm watching the State commit suicide in real-time.

“ Most of the attraction of living there historically was its extremely business-friendly environment.”

How old are you? What propaganda told you this? In my generation (young millennial/genz) the attraction of living in Seattle, which pulled me and almost a dozen professional friends at this point has been:

- high quality urban living in a temperate environment. Including access to great parks, waterfront, bikeability in the city

- access to great outdoors and regional amenities like skiing, ocean fishing, hiking, wine country

- liberal policies and general friendly society (it’s friendlier here than the east coast)

- no state income tax (we’re all very high tax bracket)

- a high enough income population that you can find a plethora of high-end products and services that cluster around high income earners (only a few us cities have this stronger than Seattle I feel)

Oregon ticks most of those boxes except the difference is that Oregon has very few jobs. People flock to WA because of jobs created by long-standing business friendly policies.

That doesn't explain everything, obviously, but I think you need to take it into consideration. For decades I've heard this in some form from people: "Oregon is amazing, but I had to leave when I couldn't get a job." Meanwhile the Sea-Tac region has had amazing growth, packed wall-to-wall with a range of companies.

I agree, difference between explosive growth and “consistent draw” is large employers setting up in the region.

Another interesting anecdote is that I know many people who work remote for companies all over the world who moved to the Seattle area once they had a remote job. I am one of these people who moved once I got a remote job. Im not sure what kind of impact this has long run. I think the flywheel drawing high skill people to Seattle is still very strong.

Oregon is on the other end of the continuum when it comes to income taxes ;-)

If you're not too high an income earner, the Oregon income tax is worse than California's.

And no, Washington's sales tax doesn't come close to the Oregon income tax.

Weather is worse in the Portland area, can be a good few degrees warmer than Seattle in the summer

For my demographic (Early genz), there are only 3 reasons to be here:

A. Their job is only available here

B. No state income tax

(C?). They REALLY love skiing/hiking

People have always regularly left for NYC/Bay Area, but I predict it will start to happen in droves over the next few years as A rapidly fades and legislation begins to threaten B.

Have you read about _where_ the budget is going? You are complaining about accountability without offering a diagnosis or showing any understanding for what is actually happening.

The budget expansion is almost entirely by medicaide.

Looking at 2019-2023

* Human Services: +~50% nominal → ~+22% real — biggest absolute dollar growth, driven almost entirely by Medicaid expansion and COVID enrollment

* K-12: +23% nominal → ~0% real — flat in purchasing power

* Higher Education: +~20% nominal → ~-2% real — slight real decline

* Government Operations: +~30% nominal → ~+6% real — modest real growth, headcount/compensation driven

* Natural Resources: +~25% nominal → ~+2% real — roughly flat

* Total Budget: +43.5% nominal → ~+17% real

For readers not in Washington, there is currently legislation being worked on that is essentially a millionaire's tax, (simplified as) 10% income tax on income over 1 million dollars, inflation adjusted.

There are a few very angry, emotional, and vocal opponents of this in most corners of the internet, although very few of them actually make a million dollars and there are many million+ income people supporting this.

Demographically, there are over 3 million households in WA, and only 20k of them would be affected.

The bigger news is that it would be WA's first-ever income tax, along with the tax on capital gains income they just introduced. You can look at any historical example of introducing income tax in the US to see that the rates always expand to lower brackets over time.

Ahh, another favorite talking point. Yes, because the tax burden is already carried by the people you claim to worry about

Those people you wanna tax will just wfh from another state. Then you'll wonder why tax revenue is down and why no one is hiring.

People aren't leaving Seattle to save a small amount in taxes every year

I lived in the Seattle area and would be affected by some of these taxes. I moved to California recently. WA lost its tax advantage, so If I’m now going to be paying the same taxes, I might as well enjoy better weather and schools for my kids.

So, you _already_ moved, _for non tax reasons_

Maybe the opponents consider it a foot in the door; a wedge that can be expanded gradually to include lower tiers at lower percentages AKA the beginning of a WA State Income Tax. There are not few 400k households in Seattle.

The majority of states have one so it's not that big a deal, but it'll be less often said "I'm going to turn down this higher SF offer for Seattle b/c of lower COL...".

I'm not sure where the next refuge will be. Austin? Memphis?

Similar thing in California. And good ol' fronttunner for president Gavin Newsom is actively trying to kill it.

Just to remind you that he's still indeed an Establishment Democrat. He won't drown us in fascism, but he sure isn't fighting for the working class.

And there is such small thing as state constitution that explicitly forbids any income tax.

Current government is using it as toilet paper, first by introducing capital gains tax, and now income tax.

I see in another comments though that you argue in bad faith by dismissing opponent arguments as “small amount”, “talking points”. If you don’t have anything real to say, don’t bother to answer.

The state constitution does not forbid an income tax. We both know it is more nuanced than that. Don't accuse me of bad faith in the same comment that you present an inaccuracy in the form of simplification that suits your argument

There is nothing nuanced about that. You look into 2 places and see read it for yourself. Stop spreading lies.

—-

https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=1.90.100

RCWs > Title 1 > Chapter 1.90 > Section 1.90.100

RCW 1.90.100

Personal income tax prohibition.

Neither the state nor any county, city, or other local jurisdiction in the state of Washington may tax any individual person on any form of personal income. For the purposes of this chapter, "income" has the same meaning as "gross income" in 26 U.S.C. Sec. 61.

——

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...

Gross income defined (a) General definition Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle, gross income means all income from whatever source derived, including (but not limited to) the following items: (1) Compensation for services, including fees, commissions, fringe benefits, and similar items; (2) Gross income derived from business; (3) Gains derived from dealings in property; (4) Interest; (5) Rents; (6) Royalties; (7) Dividends; (8) Annuities; (9) Income from life insurance and endowment contracts; (10) Pensions; (11) Income from discharge of indebtedness; (12) Distributive share of partnership gross income; (13) Income in respect of a decedent; and (14) Income from an interest in an estate or trust.

Which policies specifically? Certainly not the income tax on million+ income, seems pretty modest. We moved from TX. Property tax rate is low, no income tax sub million in income, schools are great (and almost all new), roads are fine and transit seeing massive investment. They definitely need to fix budget, but there's _ample_ wealth here to deal with it. I think they'll figure it out.

_Oregon_ has bad policies (10% income tax on all, upwards of 14% on high income earners at 400k); schools are in a rough place, their legacy pension system is a disaster. But Washington seems fine imo. TX and such states will always be a draw while their cost of living is low, if you don't mind the heat and general lack of outdoors (relative to PNW). IMO the weather and housing prices are the main tradeoffs between WA and TX.

When did blatantly unconstitutional laws become modest?

Why are income brackets unconstitutional?

You can add in the increasing B&O (revenue) taxes, payroll taxes, data center taxes, and the expansion of the extremely high sales taxes to things that effectively make Washington uncompetitive. The cost of doing business has become unreasonably high and is so badly structured that it creates perverse incentives for how you organize business.

And then you have a litany of new business regulation across every sector of the local economy. My recent favorite, which fortunately did not make it out of this session due to heavy lobbying by tech, was requiring data centers to turn-off power during periods of high electricity demand. It's insane that this is even being seriously considered.

Oregon is also a mess but it has always been a mess.

Texas isn't the only alternative. Turning Washington into California with worse weather even makes California relatively attractive.

>You can add in the increasing B&O (revenue) taxes, payroll taxes, data center taxes, and the expansion of the extremely high sales taxes to things that effectively make Washington uncompetitive.

None of this matters. We have been hearing how California is doing the same shit for years and people are moving out in droves, but turns out California house prices are still high because people are staying there and its still a very good place to live and work on the average, despite way higher cost of living.

So Washington is going to do just fine.

Oregon has some decent things going for it. Multnomah county is rolling out Preschool for All and it's wildly popular. I know lots of people who were going to move, but stayed in Oregon just because they got into the early lottery for it.

There’s no way preschool for all is broadly popular.

It soaks the “rich” with an income threshold that isn’t indexed to inflation and kicks in at an income level where preschool is still a major affordability challenge.

And then you pay PFA and don’t get preschool for your kid because we’re still years away from having enough seats for everyone.

So it is preschool for some (multco paying for seats in existing preschool, aka kicking your kid out of their preschool spot) paid for by the broad middle class.

Even Kotek was ragging on it.

2020’s 125k/200k thresholds should be today’s 150/250 thresholds. They are not.

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...

This is all a temporary problem. PFA will roll out to everyone, income thresholds can be (and are) renegotiated, and as someone who has a large PFA tax burden, I'm happy to pay for it even if my kids will age out before I get the benefit. I have never met anyone outside of ranting internet commenters who is actually mad about this situation.

Establishing free universal child care as the norm that everyone agrees we have to find a way to provide is the real virtue here. Detractors like you are missing the forest for the trees.

“Long term care tax”

I don't think they killed the goose at all.

The tech companies killed the golden goose that was handed to them. They got too greedy. Amazon basically got carte blanche to build in Seattle, and plenty of tax credits to do so.

Amazon and their founder then told WA gov that they were going to relocate to Florida. WA gov said "well, we paid billions for your infrastructure, so if you're going to leave, please partially refund us" and Bezos whined and whined and whined. Imagine, a guy worth (at the time) nearly half a trillion dollars being told that he should have to pay a few hundred million dollars for his broken promises.

Imagine being given incredibly generous tax incentives for decades that allowed you to build a multi trillion dollar company, and then whining when the giver of those incentives asks for a tiny portion of that to be paid back when you tell them you're leaving.

Will you elaborate on the “indefensibly bad legislation”?

Like poor people have always understood, assume taxes always go up. Time for the rich to learn this lesson as well.

I mean Dorsey literally just said publicly that he’s laying off people in order to utilize AI

like what more clear point do you want?

Whether or not you believe that this is a good or bad move, correct or lying move, whether AI is capable or not,

“AI” is the reason that CEOs are utilizing to cut roles

The timing of this is based on the fact that Capital is striking from deploying money to anything else outside of the largest deals that include AI as promise of higher profits

But ultimately it comes down to the fact that the people in control with all the money believe that the future is gonna need less human workers and is prioritizing giving money to organisms that will shed their workforces in order to run an experiment in AI capturing value on behalf of investors without having the additional overhead of personnel

Sure, a CEO has never lied before about the reasons for layoffs.

I think COVID ruined people's ability to critically think. The amount of people in both journalism and across the economy, people are just taking the words of others (often those with malicious intents) with zero critical thought being applied.

For Block's case they have had multiple layoffs over the last 5 years, hardly the sign of an AI apocalypse and more of a sign of a business leader that only survived because of free money.

I agree 100%. I think that many business "leaders" will use AI as a cudgel to control their budgets.

Dorsey is in a huge bind with runway and lack of revenue. Blaming AI for a massive cut needed just to get by lets investors trick themselves into believing that he has a plan that makes the company grow to reach the level of profitability that the stock prices suggests will happen.

And perhaps Dorsey has a long enough of a runway for something to come along to save the company from eventual collapse. Maybe not, since firing 40% of a company tends to put a damper on innovative efforts that would massively grow revenues.

Or it’s possible he was lying!

If Block is really so much more efficient, while doing well, they should invest that talent into expanded products and services. But that’s not what we’re seeing.

Some things:

- They acquired AfterPay for $29bn. Their market cap today, after the big AI bump, is $40bn. BNPL did not pay off the way payments companies thought it would.

- They have a weird internal combination of Cash and Square and AfterPay internally. They’re not as unified as they ought to be.

This feels more like Jack coming to terms with a company that’s hugely inefficient organizationally. It’s easier to clear out thousands of people and rebuild.

I think the point is that these tech leaders can be saying "AI" to appeal to their board/shareholders, but the truth is more mundane typical reasons for layoffs (bad economy, overhiring, offshoring, bad debt, etc).

AI isn't causing the job losses in health and hospitality.

I grew up in the US and lived there for 30 years, but now I live in Europe. Every single one of my friends in their 30's finds visiting the US absolutely terrifying (even those who have previously been). I have yet to meet a single friend in today's day that has expressed any interest in visiting.

I live in Europe and was in California in November. No issues.

California confirmed 100% safe.

That's not the point. The number of white European people arrested and shackled by CBP/ICE is very small. But it's NOT ZERO! So at the margin plenty of potential tourists would prefer to go some other place where that chance is effectively zero.

But other people did have issues. Examining a single person's experience won't work for this sort of thing.

What part did they find "terrifying"?

ICE agents shooting US citizens, the mass shootings, the school shootings, the crime rate and fentanyl 'bend' posture that makes loads of poor people look like zombies, the aggressive police with guns who sometimes shoot people, burglaries that involve shootings. A lot of the problems in America seems to stem from guns and drugs but also policy.

Even something as simple as crossing the road is unnecessarily complicated in America. Some roads you seem to need a car to get from A to B. It just doesn't seem peaceful but very chaotic and intense.

This sounds like someone who is on social media too much. The counterpart is an American in Paris convinced the banlieu are war zones.

The actual problems: we’ve made it impossible and insulting to get a tourist visa. And we’ve made pissing on our tourism partners our foreign policy.

Your head's in the sand. Where I live we have bounty hunters kidnapping people into unmarked vans. For six months or more now. Would visitors likely be safe? Sure, but not necessarily and I can't blame people for being cautious and there's so much unpredictability around it, even for those of us who are familiar.

> I can't blame people for being cautious and there's so much unpredictability around it

I can. Again, this is like refusing to visit CDMX because you heard about gang violence or avoiding Sicily because there is crime. Those singular events aren’t false. But they don’t make up the majority of the context. Someone refusing to travel because of these low-probability events (note: because of fear of them, not out of protest, which is separate) is almost certainly behaving irrationally.

> I can't blame people for being cautious and there's so much unpredictability around it

Where your argument might have purchase is in America having previously been a good tourism destination for someone with such anxieties. But the truth of the matter is folks like that don’t tend to travel in the first place.

It really isn't like that though. On top of the rogue paramilitaries with arrest quotas for getting their menial bonuses, there are multiple cases now where _tourists_ have been detained for weeks or more, even those with valid visas, arbitrarily. Multiple governments are cautioning people around travel to the US, and people from many countries are being outright banned from entering. Look at this map: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IN12631. Travel is already stressful enough without a rogue xenophobic force at the helm.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-travel-detentions-1.7489525

Guardian article https://archive.ph/lDwTA

> But they don’t make up the majority of the context. Someone refusing to travel because of these low-probability events (note: because of fear of them, not out of protest, which is separate) is almost certainly behaving irrationally.

Statistically speaking, it's very safe for a white American to go to Dubai/Doha these days.

Would you fault them for not going?

Why should anyone who isn't a citizen feel safe travelling to the US right now when this is how the federal administration brazenly treats people who are citizens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSbRBCyG72g

>The counterpart is an American in Paris convinced the banlieu are war zones.

This isn't a counterpart because nobody is trying to explain a significant drop in tourism numbers to Paris.

> This isn't a counterpart because nobody is trying to explain a significant drop in tourism numbers to Paris.

Actually there isn't much to explain. Every single person I know that has been to Paris has been disappointed by it and complained how there are way too many people everywhere. Maybe there were just too many tourists in Paris?

I have been to Rome and Taipei and Johannesburg, and crossing the road is terrifying lots of places.

Several Europeans have been detained at U.S. borders or during their stays, sometimes for weeks or months, even with valid documents.

Unsurprisingly, most people don't like hearing they might go to prison for no real reason.

A Senior Software Engineer in Stockholm can expect to make less money than a Graduate Software Engineer in the United States, and will pay more taxes.

It's simple, as a technologist, you live in Europe if retirement isn't important for you. Because you'll have almost nothing to show for it after 30 years in tech in Europe.

Except lots of vacation, travel, etc.

In big tech the benefits are the same, except you save more in 10 years in WA than people in London save in 30.

What about everyone else in society? What happens if your skill set is no longer in demand and you become one of "everyone else"?

Even working in "tech" but not FAANG this is so true, 10 days is still the norm at many white collar businesses for your first year of employment, sometimes 15 days if they're generous.

Skill up.

> In big tech the benefits are the same,

Depends on which big tech. 15 days of vacation, BTW, doesn't even come close to comparing with much of Europe.

And I didn't mention London. London is crap. Probably all of UK is.

Most Europeans I know in certain countries travel a lot more than Americans at big tech.

What if i told you some big tech jobs let you earn $300k+ a year, while take 4 weeks+ time off, and working 40hrs a week?

My first SWE job was at an older fortune 500 company where tech was not its main focus. You started with 14 days of vacation and slooooowly worked your way up to 4 weeks after like 20 years of service lol.

My point is, in the U.S. your experience varies WILDLY based on your employer. Not saying the U.S. is perfect or does things the right way. Just pointing out that you’re off base with your “15 days of vacation for big tech” comment. That’s a false generalization for big tech. Accurate for white collar jobs in general though!

> What if i told you some big tech jobs let you earn $300k+ a year, while take 4 weeks+ time off, and working 40hrs a week?

Acknowledged in my original comment. The key word is "some".

And my point is that people earning half that in Europe tend to go on more vacation travel than those earning the same amount in the US.

> while take 4 weeks+ time off

What if I told you, that even mentioning this shows how little free time people get in the US?

There is actually no SWE job (and I do mean actually 0 positions, I watch job postings way more than average person) in CZ that offers less than 5 weeks of paid vacation. When you look for companies that give actually nice benefits you can get 7-8 weeks, big chunk of it being sick days that you can claim whenever you want.

And that all is on top of MUCH longer parental leave, often shorter work week (lol @ 40h a week being noteworthy), much more leeway given to people with health issues and generally shorter commutes.

Not even mentioning difference in cost of living . . . The values are just different here.

understood. my point is it’s still pretty good by international standards, and if it’s 3x the salary, it’s not a “no brainer” like you claim. It depends on what your goals are.

That’s all i’m pointing out. I agree that the U.S. really lags in terms of taking care of its people. I am NOT recommending the U.S. as a great place to work for most people.

Then you'd be laughed at because apart from the salary, that's the legal minimum requirement in much of Europe. "Our company is so great, we do what other countries legally require all companies to do!" yeah okay buddy

laughed at for having benefits that are similar to the minimum in Europe while _also_ earning 3x? That means I can retire at 50ish if i am even a little bit frugal and financially savvy.

Yes i’ve run the numbers and that’s possible even in a HCOL city. Could probably retire at 45 if i moved to europe (i have dual citizenship). Cheap healthcare and college goes a loooong way…food is cheaper too.

so i’m not sure i understand the joke but that’s fine. I’ll continue enjoying my 4+ weeks off a year and retiring early. Cheers :)

The tradeoff with many EU countries would be that they enjoy their leisure time a lot more and sooner than Americans. Americans make more and save more statistically, but they spend it on cars, houses, and medical care, and generally have way less free time. So I think it's a wash.

>>you live in Europe if retirement isn't important for you.

Wouldn't the robust social safety net found in many European countries offer a dignified retirement for most people?

How does the cost of living difference work out? And quality of life?

“Unexpectedly” lol

We’ve been digging ourselves a giant AI-inflated hole in the economy for months and folks have just been playing musical chairs to grab as much money as possible before the music stops.

Hard to believe it’s taken this long. I never wanted to live through the late 70s / early 80s economically but I guess I’ll have my chance!

Unexpectedly is because it's a big miss from the projected job numbers. If you felt like the expected numbers were obviously wrong for this month, you should have traded on that information.

How can you trade on projected jobs numbers? The stock market seems detached from macroeconomics anyway.

You could do it directly in the various gambling apps like Kalshi, or indirectly through other types of trades in the market.

Projected by people who have no idea?

If they're bad at it, you could become obscenely wealthy by betting against expectations.

I hate to break it to, you but AI is not the reason why the numbers are down. AI makes everyone productive - for every engineer that is laid off due to AI from big tech, that person still has skills that when coupled with AI makes them eligible for slightly lower paying job.

The reason the numbers are down should be pretty obvious.

Where is the evidence AI makes people more productive?

Are you denying that the current administration dumbfuckery is the sole reason for poor job markets?

No he's pretty clearly asking you for evidence that AI improves productivity.

Mass deportation means economic contraction. The administration has promised to deport millions of people. Mass deportations on this scale will have a somewhat drastic effect, and the true mass deportation hasn't even started, because they haven't built enough concentration camps to facilitate the deportations.

Unless it is stopped the job losses will be absolutely massive, and a tiny tiny footnote to the massive human suffering that the stated mass deportation is intended to cause.

Mass deportation means economic contraction, and if done quickly it means economic disruption and loss of domestic wealth.

Indiscriminate tariffs means deindustrialization, unpredictable tariffs means stagnation (inability to grow).

Blatant corruption means stagnation.

Aggressive international relations means disruption of any market that touches the rest of the world (with loss of wealth). Active war means the same thing as mass deportation and non-productive spending, so more contraction.

Trump has an incredible ability to hit all the targets.

This is actually why Trump won’t do them, by the way. He’s already changed his rhetoric to “criminals only”.

Trump is completely captured by business interests and is not America First. Mass immigration is the billionaire first position.

Younger generations understand this, so we likely won’t see some change for a bit, but it is coming. And it makes sense - they’re the ones suffering most from unfettered immigration. Their birthright is being handed out to cheap labor, because the billionaires running our society see us as cattle.

You can be anti billionaire and still not be a fuckass racist

Immigrant isn't a race.

Mass deportations are being conducted mostly on the basis of race. The accusation of blatant racism, come from police chiefs, from judges, as well as everybody experiencing the mass deportation. And the accusation of racism isn't that immigrants are a race, but the exact racial discrimination in who gets kidnapped and disappeared by masked men that are indistinguishable from criminals.

>Mass deportations are being conducted mostly on the basis of race.

Care to share your stats?

This sounds like more of "I don't like this president, therefore what he's doing is wrong"

I have what I stated in my comment. You are free to dismiss the experiences of whoever you want, of course, including Trump-friendly police chiefs, by dismissing them as "they must not like Trump and therefore lie." But that is quite a biased way to experience the world. Especially when Trump's own words about which immigrants he wants to get rid of. It's bias in service of a "fairness" that even the benefactor doesn't ask for. So why we exhibit such extreme bias in which evidence is admissable?

So nothing. Just anecdotes. At least you admit it.

Admit what? Trump is open about the racial nature of deportations, and witnesses say the same.

If you want to bring stats into it, the baseline is to try to disprove what everyone already knows.

Assuming something is false just because it makes Trump look bad, in your eyes, is a very biased take on the world. Just listen to his own words, he's not ashamed of the racial nature of the deportations, it doesn't "make him look bad" because its a feature not a bug.

Just going to leave this here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop

> You can be anti billionaire and still not be a fuckass racist

Genuinely, if you can't handle discussing a basic political disagreement without becoming apoplectic, you should take a breath and wait to respond. This is the opposite of what HN is for.

You've been downvoted for being reasonable (I gave you an upvote). The histrionics in these threads are way over the top, and it's sad to see.

I apologize for not wording things as pleasantly as the guy who wants people thrown in camps.

It was always "criminals only", but the problem is they have quotas for the number of immigrants to deport, and can't (at all) get to those quotas by just deporting criminals.

Well the clear implication is that the class of "criminal" has been expanded. It used to be that you had to be convicted of a crime by a jury to be a criminal, now it's just anybody that Trump dislikes. Execution without investigation has been normalized and accepted, and that's exactly the intent.

Trump fears the people, but if it were slightly more popular there would be even more people hired by ICE and we would be seeing the consitutional abuses that happen today in Minnesota in far more places across the country.

> It was always "criminals only"

This is absolutely false. It was always mass deportation of all illegal immigrants. The "worst of the worst" rhetoric is new.

Here's a source, but there are many: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/9/trump-lays-out-agen...

> Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump reiterated his intention to deport every person who had entered the US without authorisation.

Which birthright?

I'd have expected mass deportations to decrease the unemployment rate, since there are now a bunch of job openings.

Some of those jobs will just disappear (resulting in job losses, which is what the headline is about), but unemployment (people looking for jobs and not finding them) is up.

It does mean economic contraction, but that's yet another number. That would show up in GDP, but that number is really slow to collect. Data so far is actually pretty smooth, but that's to be expected.

It also decreases the consumption rate. introduction of immigrant populations has not been shown to increase the unemployment rate, rather the opposite.

https://www.epi.org/blog/immigrants-are-not-hurting-u-s-born...

> I'd have expected mass deportations to decrease the unemployment rate, since there are now a bunch of job openings.

Yes, for jobs that Americans don't typically want to do.

I expected it. I also expect it to get revised even lower, and the gains from the last couple months to disappear.

I really wish people would realize that prolonging this farce is not in their best interests. The energy potential of the inevitable blowback just keeps building.

At this point it seems absolutely intentional. Where I live they're trying to block multiple billions of dollars of already allocated money used to fund county hospitals. Accelerationists in office explicitly declaring intent to bring about Armageddon via official channels? Why would they care about keeping people employed when they don't seem to think there's room for everyone to even live?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran...

I would like to know how much contraction is normal. I assume there's always some contraction around that time, because the holiday season is ending and the temp workers are being let go. I didn't see any mention of this in the article though (or I missed it).

> US economy >> unexpectedly << sheds 92,000 jobs in February

Ok but was the expected loss 60k or 0?

Makes a big difference.

I believe it was expected to grow by 50k jobs?

Well the data says:

2022, gained 678,000 jobs in February (Doesn't really count, global economy was emerging from Covid shutdowns.)

2023, gained 311,000 jobs in February

2024, gained 275,000 jobs in February

2025, gained 151,000 jobs in February (This seems to be the point of discontinuity with gains only about half of what were typically expected.)

2026, lost the 92,000 we're talking about. (Obviously, we had expected a gain.)

We live in an infinite growth economy mindset - it's always expected to grow

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (2011) https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152646/th...

A loss wasn't expected at all.

But this is the full amount of jobs shed:

> Payrolls in the US dropped by 92,000 and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, according to the latest official figures, surprising analysts who had expected hiring to remain stable.

I'm not in any way suggesting the economy isn't taking a shit, but I'm curious about the actual expectation and reality. I know it says analysts expect hiring to be stable, but hiring isn't the same as job losses.

Looking at seasonally adjusted somewhat longer term trends, unemployment appears to be rising somehwat continuously for two years now:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/

I'd say the article overstates its point somewhat. The numbers (rise in unemployment) don't look to be caused by Trump alone (trend started before), but he most certainly did not improve the situation in his first year (numbers grew worse instead of better).

But the absolute numbers (<5%ish unemployment) are not especially concerning for now despite trending in the wrong direction (and all of Trumps policies seem to make things worse so far).

These reports apply a seasonal adjustment for the reported numbers. This is the fairly standard economics approach, but if you're interested in the raw - they are usually buried deeper into the report. The BLS or other government stat agencies have historically published their data gathering and reporting methodology in detail.

The numbers are seasonally adjusted- the reports themselves are not very difficult to read, I suggest you go to to the source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

The bigger question is the impact of immigration policies- the US population is smaller than expected due to immigration effects, so some of the extrapolation typically done may be skewed. I doubt this will make the numbers look better though. These numbers may be volatile for some time until the true effects of the lack of immigration are understood and modeled properly.

> It marked the biggest monthly job loss since October, when the US government shut down, and came amid concerns that a jump in oil prices sparked by the US-Israel war in Iran could threaten growth.

It seems like a stretch to say anyone was pro-actively fired on the speculation that a war could break out in the middle east; so the war is probably unrelated. That said, if the Strait of Hormuz stays closed for any length of time then something pretty drastic could happen to employment in the future tense.

Heh to be pedantic about language, it could be argued that "came amid" just means "happened at the same time as." In other words "we have more bad news!" Much less so that "this caused that."

Your usual reminder not to come to HN for macroeconomic analysis.

Why not contribute, then?

Because it's pointless and a waste of time.

I don't think we should actively stop people from discussing what's on their minds.

Every person has their own lived experiences, I think it should be common courtesy to at least give someone who puts in the effort into writing a, respectful non ai generated, comment a fair shot and being read.

Theres other forums for that, though.

For anyone who’s been paying attention, “unexpectedly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

What are the current theories about why the perceived(?) healthy unemployment rate is lower post-covid? 4.4% is spectacularly good by historic standards. This has also been the slowest medium-term upswing in unemployment since WWII.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

I'd ignore the headline number and wonder what the longer term trend means because this isn't normal.

Macro demographics. Boomers are retiring and requiring healthcare in historic numbers.

That doesn't show up as unemployment, though. It might mean the economy is getting worse faster than that graph, but boomers retiring is dampening the increase.

Boomers leaving (and being replaced) shows up in the jobs number, but not the unemployment number.

So job “growth” is overstated because much of that growth is macro demographic replacement.

But them being out of the workforce entirely shows up in the looking for work numbers decreasing. Therefore their leaving is accentuating 1 and dampening the other.

So more non-producers, who require non-productive health care means that lower unemployment doesn’t feel like a good economy. Thus their leaving healthy post covid number but other measures seeming bad.

The unemployment rate is somewhat useful in aggregate but has a limitation in that it doesn't account for people who have given up seeking employment. Essentially it is a measure of the percentage of the workforce that has a job.

This stat makes a lot of sense for the most part. A stay-at-home parent isn't really unable to find work so shouldn't be counted in unemployment stats (for example).

But sometimes you miss the folk that have become disheartened. I know a few of those folk right now in the tech industry who want to look but just aren't. Our stats miss "mood" in a sense (hard to quantify of course).

But right now the mood is bad.

On Point on NPR covered January numbers.

Apparently all 130k jobs came from the health care sector with everything else having no growth.

>> Apparently all 130k jobs came from the health care sector with everything else having no growth.

I wonder what a further breakdown of the data might show. The older (leading) boomers are starting to die off, so there might be a decline in needed care in the trailing boomers or something like that. Demographic change.

I’m not sure it is unexpected. Jobs dwindle when there’s uncertainty.

And we have a lot of economic, political, and geopolitical uncertainty.

So, if anything, I would be surprised if we don’t see this level of job reduction consistently for at least the rest of the year.

What is less clear to me is whether it will accelerate or whether it will continue for a few years.

Seems like a good time to enshrine human rights and the social safety net by ratifying the ICESCR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Covenant_on_Econ...) and giving human rights the teeth they need.

I used Anthropic to analyze the situation, it did halfway decent:

https://unratified.org/why/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47263664

I wonder if there is any evidence of the Iran war starting, in part, as a distraction from this. I recall reading somewhere that there is a long historical trend of countries and empires going to war - so much so that some of it can even be predictably modelled - once economic realities and discontent at home get too bad. War then acts as a form of national unity that helps keep the current elite in power.

Crazy thing is people will vote for this again. Some against their best interest. Others because they appreciate the divide that comes from this type of admin.

I don’t believe they will. They will be thrown out soon enough and hard - but the incumbents will fight like hell to make sure people’s voices are silenced, diluted, or not counted.

Through the magic of serendipity it just so happens that the states that decide for us happen to be MI, WI, and PA and so this concept of backlashes is quite amusing. Tech workers live in a bubble away from these states minus Philly.

Vote? Hopefully that's still possible!

My paranoia conspiracy theory is that somehow US will declare war on Iran at some point and elections will be postoned.

Your "conspiracy theory" is that the US will declare war on Iran...?

Yes, US did not declare war against Iran yet. The president has to request a declaration of war from congress which will vote to authorize it or not.

The conspiracy part is that after war is declared Trump will use this power to postpone elections and basically give himself a 3rd term.

> president has to request

... anything. Just does what he wishes without regards to legal limitations.

Calling bombing dozens of cities of a country anything but a war is being duplicitous.

No. At this rate, they’ll lose both house and senate and they’ll be unable to govern until they lose the presidency in 2 years. Polymarket is showing 56/44 today down from a top of 75/25 a half year ago.

The democrats lost the elections because of the economy. Gas prices were too high during Biden term.

And because they lied about Biden’s mental faculties - only forced by a horrible debate to put Kamala on the presidential ticket.

It was a disgusting self own. I wish the Democratic Party would accept responsibility for that duplicity.

It's the same mentality behind support for guns. Another school shooting? More guns in schools would have stopped it! The tax cut isn't delivering the economic returns promised? We just didn't cut them enough! Just keep doing these things that prove to not be working enough and everything will turn out exactly like we've been promising the last 50 years.

Expect to hear a lot about trans people in the upcoming months. Republicans won't wanna talk about tariffs, war, gas prices, inflation, unemployment, health care, or anything else that matters. But yeah, trans kids are playing in youth sports! ... And, unfortunately, it'll work. I'm not optimistic about the upcoming mid-term elections.

Since AI is taking a lot of the jobs and businesses are presumably generating just as much if not more profit due to lower wage costs, I think the world has to align to a new paradigm: a lot of people will be unemployed because the jobs just aren't there any more, but a higher tax on the rich companies can be used to pay for benefits for all the unemployed.

This is the new utopia.

Why is this unexpected? Seasonal sales hiring is over. Tech is cutting jobs (because AI). Things are generally bleak right now.

160,000 if you take the revisions into account

Makes sense. At the rate we're going, by 2028 the US is going essentially be Venezuela except AI instead of oil.

Ironically probably more like iran but with evangelical christianity instead of shia islam.

We extract like 12 or 13 times more oil than Venezuela.

As a fraction of the economy, though

With this perspective, it would make a lot of financial sense for you to short the US markets or bet on this outcome.

After all, you're certain it is true.

Jobs is one facet. But I’d curious to know about inputs and outputs.

Is the US producing more or fewer widgets? Are we generating and consuming more or less energy? How are imports and exports?

If inputs and outputs are staying the same then it would support the narrative of increased efficiency and elimination of BS jobs.

It's going to be 92,001 after they fire whoever reported something to make dear leader look bad.

I find this policy of "reduce housing prices by economic catastrophe" instead of just like making the army core of engineers build 2-4 million housing units to be like hitting a nail with a jackhammer

Current rationalization from right wing commentators:

'normal part of the business cycle'

It is not a bad one. You can definitely argue it both ways.

I personally think there is a lot of self-inflicted pain ahead and position portfolio accordingly.

And oil is at 90$ and rising... what is the Fed suppose to do at this point

The same thing it was designed to do and has always done: create unimaginable sums of money out of thin air that it loans to the government, with interest.

Raise interest rates so that economic activity concentrates in what provides real value.

And if they're saying 92k, just wait until the obligatory 3-months-later revision where they say "once again, oopsie, we miscounted, it's actually 50% worse".

Maybe intentionally destroying our own country is a bad idea.

Meanwhile, the ADP report[0]: +63k in Feb.

[0]: <https://adpemploymentreport.com/>

"we're all trying to find the guy who did this!"

But seriously, antagonizing all of your trading partners and visitors so that tourism dies, your booze industry gets severely wounded, and making things expensive so the world's most efficient kleptocracy can keep feeding itself has some consequences, I guess.

Definitely not AI. We all know about Jeeves paradox. It must be the taxes on corporations (tarrifs). Taxes on business are always bad.

That's a fine economic statistics operation you've got there. Shame if something were to happen to it.

The only people left defending the economic “policies” by the current administration are the people who are in a position to profit from all the confusion and chaos.

Add to that the people who don’t understand that they are being fleeced and who’ll continue to support theire heroes because of pride, hatred, nihilism or misinformed idealism.

There is a vocal minority in the last bracket, but I’m convinced they are being amplified by an army of bots.

the economy has been shedding jobs back to back now - since nov 2024.

however due to the incompetent and corrupt powers that be - a lot of the news has been suppressed, and even the head of BLS fired.

everyone is struggling - but I guess the economy is doing well coz of the "stock market" as we're told

"unexpected" only because the agencies responsible for forecasting are partisan yes men.

Nothing unexpected about it.

People were looking for the AI productivity metrics and here they are

How has today's AI meaningfully impacted construction and manufacturing jobs in the US?

By being a distraction to the administrations immigration and deportation efforts and lack of capital vehicles that can return extreme profits

Vaccines don’t cause autism

But Oprah and Jenny McCarthy spread enough bullshit that it led to more cases of children dying because they were out there distracting from the real problem which is not enough vaccination

Real job losses come from company heads fundraising on the promise of automation and then with that additional capital they lay people off

in the same way funding funds research and development or offshoring fund “efficiency improvements” and the externalities of that are higher unemployment

> "...unexpectedly..."

Really? Anyone here feel like the job market is thriving right now? Anyone surprised?

Bc I was like - yeah, totally, makes sense, not surprised at all.

If anything, I am waiting for that dreaded "business update" calendar invite from HR. I am already researching and taking notes on trade schools. Ready to punch that ticket any day now.

“Unexpectedly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence

Maybe they're all just tired of winning.

As a regular reminder, BLS employment model significantly extrapolates the broader economy from government employment, and ADP employment numbers reflect the private sector. These two numbers rarely line up because government employment and private sector employment are only loosely correlated. You need to look at both to have a coherent picture.

The longstanding heuristic is that the most important metric of how bad things are is if ADP < BLS. If government employment is declining it will make the BLS estimates look poor no matter what the rest of the economy is doing. I expect ADP will be negative too but it remains to be seen if it is higher or lower than the BLS number.

Absolute numbers such as 92k do not give full picture. About half million jobs get added every month and there are 165 million people employed in USA.

> bout half million jobs get added every month

Not sure what number you are referring to here? 92K losses does _not_ show the full picture but no number that I know of is saying the half a million jobs are being added to the workforce every month.

>Absolute numbers such as 92k do not give full picture

A full picture of what? The metric gives us a full picture on how many jobs were added or lost in the month of February.

I didn't expect a precise number of course, so in that way it's true, and frankly I expected this sooner, but those little acknowledgements out of the way I'd say I sure expected it and so did a lot of other people.

So the only golden age is the gaudy gold he added to the white house and the profits for all of his oligarch friends/defense contractors etc. while everybody else suffers.

Let them eat cake.

Unexpectedly?

BBC is really full style right wing propaganda machine now. This time propaganda by omission (like those articles about Brexit where they never gave "no Brexit" as an option).

Zero commentary on tariffs, zero commentary about tourism and ICE, nothing about other policies.

Bloody BBC, keeping to the facts again...

The OP was pointing out the rather opinionated use of the word "Unexpectedly".

There are lots of people who have expected these tariff and immigration policies to have a negative impact on the economy. Who wasn't expecting this? Right wing supporters of Trump. Thus the pretty reasonable claim that this is a right-wing slant.

Wasn't this always the idea behind combating inflation? At the end of the day you need to make people poorer to make the dollar worth more...

Trump hasn’t managed to adequately combat inflation though. Last I heard, it’s ticking up once more.

You heard wrong.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infl...

How rich or poor people are is only indirectly related to how many dollars are out there.

What a favorable headline. In reality everyone knows why the economy isn’t growing: Trump’s policies are paradoxically anti business given his public persona of this big bad amazing businessman. The guy failed at selling steaks in America. In America.

I think failing at gambling (especially at a time when like 2 cities had a monopoly on gaming in the US) is bigger proof of his lack of acumen.

You say fail, but that's because you're looking at it from a "running a business" viewpoint. Instead, you have to look at "enrich personal wealth" viewpoint. It's possible to run a business into the ground while personally gaining financially. A failing business has some beneficial tax purposes. So people that think these failed businesses are a negative just need to look at them differently. They succeeded in their true purpose. The "running a business" was just the facade.

I guess he did campaign on running the country like one of his businesses. A rare promise kept from a politician. :)

Yeah, the scam is to inflate the value of your properties, then claim a write-off when it fails. For "some reason" you can even use other people's money for the investments and claim the losses for yourself. Then you can use that as a deduction when you actually make money again. One scammer in particular pulled this trick for 10 years, rolling it forward and filing a $916 million loss with the IRS in 1995.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/d...

Oh don't worry, Trump and his cronies have been growing their wealth just fine.

His net worth has grown over $4 billion since taking office again, and that doesn't count his sons or other insiders that have been taking bribes and making insider trades.

The single most corrupt politician we've ever had, with a family full of criminals.

As always with these losers, the Biden Crime family was purely projection.

Add to that the myriad of people in his surroundings who profit of this chaos immensely.

But...Hunter Biden's laptop!!!

Unexpectedly… right

"Unexpected" Wow, BBC is a joke of a news organization.

but at least we're great again, right?

"Unexpectedly" to nobody with an actual job.

Even less unexpectedly to anyone without an actual job.

hah, point well taken. In hindsight, my use of "actual job" to mean "job that contributes to the economy rather than simply speculating on it or skimming off the top", wasn't very clear.

At some point, one should ask oneself, “is fully breaking the system the point?”

In the recent Epstein releases, Epstein told Thiel that the best deals come from a system on the way to collapse. I think at this point it’s reasonable to consider that this is what Trump and his allies are trying to do. Crash the US economy so severely that they might use their ill-gotten wealth to buy an outsized portion of it.

Bullish

“Unexpectedly”

Right…

this is my surprised face

"Trump being president" and "unexpected loss of jobs" does not fit together.

Blame it on Biden or "AI"? (should have made this into a poll... :) )

Based on the old soviet joke, the first time you blame it on your predecessor, the second time you blame it on your advisors, the third time you write 3 letters. Since Kristi Noem was fired yesterday, maybe we've moved into the second letter phase.

I figured there had to be some story behind this reference, and I found this "two letters" version on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/ussr/comments/1n7dips/soviet_joke_t...

Do you have a "three letter" reference?

That's the reference but I've always heard it as 3 envelopes:

1. blame your predecessor

2. blame your staff

3. write 3 letters...

I wonder how easy it is to create a polymarket bet

Worst president ever.

this was entirely expected. but americans accept the gaslighting from the orange administration.

Trump is too busy bombing other countries. All that money goes to the private military complex.

"unexpectedly"

Imagine running a company with any exposure to Trump's schizophrenic tariffs. I wouldn't hire either.

"unexpectedly"

Yes they forgot February is a short month and they expected more.

All even years are leap years ... aren't they?

It's almost every 4 years.

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