If it’s federal government employment that is dropping, or illegal alien jobs dropping, then some will view it positively (I’ve seen this perspective advanced on x.com).
As it turns out, no one wants to invest in infrastructure when all the inputs are going to be tariffed to oblivion. All else equal why invest in USA when you could invest somewhere where you can import the needed inputs much cheaper? Protectionism isn't enough to overcome losing access to world markets.
Eventually the protected industries will be totally disconnected from global markets causing them to lose global competitiveness, to the point they cannot even compete with the black market markups. And then you are maga, er mega, fucked.
I foresee something closer to a proportional increase of investment in all the remaining accessible markets, as US relative attractiveness decreases, rather than it moving to a specific other place.
So basically, everywhere else, proportionally. Even markets that have worse import/export restrictions, will still have relative changes in their attraction.
For a rough approximation non-US world index ETFs, which are available to retail investors.
These perspectives bother me a lot, because I want to invest passively, but if people are out there thinking like that, maybe nothing is priced right...
Priced right if money is moving from the bottom 90% to the top 10%. Stock market growth is because theres excess money and people need to invest the money. Supply and demand. There's reason why you can buy any ultra luxury car right(look at ferrari's revenue growth) and private jet industry is booming.
The market is only "right" in the very long term, and probably not in a way that's useful (companies that die eventually price to 0...but not a useful signal if its riding high all the way before it crashes).
What does "priced right" even mean? For whom? When a public company makes billions in profits by selling insanely overpriced hardware, then that's "priced right" for the shareholders.
When a supermarket gives out 25% discount stickers to use, then the price of the good is closer to being priced right for the consumer, as long as you apply the sticker. There is, of course, no reason to assume that the supermarket would operate at a loss or close to cost. These 25% are already priced in and anyone not using the stickers is paying extra.
Nothing has been priced right ever since they've (the collective of anyone willing to sell something) figured out that they can ask for however-much people are willing to pay, which is quite more than what MY FELLOW HUMANS would need to pay.
For everyone else, who aren't willing to pay deliberately inflated prices, there's usually always some form of discount for some product, somewhere to be found.
In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present. There is one remaining parameter (the exchange rate between future payouts on different dates, the "discount rate"), but all the subjectivity reduces to that one number.
However if everyone is deluded about what the future payouts of different insturments will be, you can get $10 for $1 in one place and $0.001 for $1 in another (given that in both cases the influence weighted participants think they're selling you a dollar). That invalidates the picture of reducing the unknowns to the discount rate.
In your examples, you're talking about goods and services, which have different values to different people. They have an equilibrium price but as you say, that's not the "right price for everyone," like there is for say a bond.
> In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present.
This doesn't make sense though. The only reason I would buy an investment is if I believe it will grow in value from the point that I bought it. That means I'm pricing it at its future ccost.obviously other people are doing the same, so the actual cost of the investment will always rise above current value if people believe its a good investment.
The reason the stock market is generally "priced right", which we see in the strong long term returns of index funds, is because the winners get more money and get more influence, and the losers get less.
So you have a self selecting system, that have (over time) proved itself. Whatever you might think of the effect of certain effects (such as immigrant labors) you can end up reflecting in your investments, as others do - and if you end up being correct, you'll have more power to influence the price in the future.
The Challenger report contains large companies' announced future cuts. Not government, not small and medium business, not actual job losses. So neither, really.
Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?
The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
Looking at salaries, senior developers working for the government get paid about the same as entry level software engineers who get return offers at BigTech. Well actually senior developers in government only about 10%-20% more.
And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?
I know how much senior cloud consultants working at AWS make working in the WWPS. I was there as an l5. Amazon is a shitty place to work. But I doubt it’s any worse than the government right now. GCP and Microsoft (not just Azure) both also pay their consultants a lot more than government employees make.
I’m not saying the government isn’t needed. But the best and the brightest aren’t going to give up the amount of money they can make in the private sector - especially now that government jobs are far from a secure paycheck
> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
Healthcare.gov was primarily developed by private contractor firms, not government employees.
> And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government?
Some people are motivated by factors other than pay, a concept that seems to be foreign to many FAANG corporate mercenaries.
And you are going to tell me that some people would rather work for the government now where they are constantly insulted, had to desk with DOGE and every year there is a threat they might not get paid?
You are arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time.
Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact.
In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.
Yes I’m sure your anecdotal bubble is more statistically valid than telling a 22 year old if they have a choice between working at BigTech making $160K+ a year or work in government and make $70K, they are going to choose to work for the government.
Myself personally, I worked on the other side of the consulting - government divide. I saw a lot more people jump on the consulting side than the government side. I never heard one person say “I would love to take a 40% cut in pay and go into the office and deal with government shut downs. Sign me up!
But why in the heck would anyone want to work for a government that constantly insults them, forcing RTO and making people move to South (where I am from).
Because they want to build cool things or tasteful things or things that actually help people.
I'm ex Lockheed, where I worked alongside the NASA software engineers building and testing and verifying software for human spaceflight in the ITL. 70 to 80 hour weeks happened quarterly, and people worked with it. Because an important thing is actually being built and deployed and billions of dollars and human lives depend on it. I jumped ship because things progressed slow AF, but there was no shortage of people who wanted to build cool things at reasonable salaries (yes low for software, but not low salaries generally).
This same thing is what has driven SpaceX and Blue Origin in the private sector. The same thing drives the whole nonprofit sector. The government is a similar employer, though in the past couple of years obviously not as good.
Big Tech self selects for money grubbing and willingness to chase it at expense of everything else in your life. Many others are happier at smaller companies with lower pay scales and healthier work/life balances, or where they get to work on interesting problems with huge scales and they are paid enough to not worry about money anymore (this is possible in most non VHCOL places).
The entire “BigTech doesn’t have work life balance” is copium and the DMV isn’t exactly a low cost of living area. How many departments outside of what NASA are doing anything exciting? Maybe in medicine the CDC.
> The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint.
Well, that's not the worst that can happen - Oregon had the idea to let Silicon Valley company Oracle do the job...
In the aftermath of what was likely the most spectacular failure among state-run Affordable Care Act health exchange site launches, the state of Oregon has filed a lawsuit against Oracle America Inc. over the total failure of the Cover Oregon exchange.
As a result of the ongoing problems, in April 2014, the board of directors voted to close the state-run exchange and adopt the Federal HealthCare.gov exchange beginning in 2015.
Turns out Oregon even got some money out of Oracle in the end?
Gov. Kate Brown announced today the settlement of the six lawsuits the state and the company filed against one another after the failure of the Cover Oregon health exchange website.
The settlement, valued at $100 million, includes cash payments to Oregon as well as a six-year license agreement for products and services that Brown said can be used to "significantly modernize state government's IT systems."
Also a good bs indicator: 'illegal alien jobs'. As if the demand vanishes with the poor souls to uganda. It just framing in hope of twisting a win out of it, because if you would have stated that sub-minimum wage jobs are in decline, this would be a terrible economic indicator for the US.
I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke".
I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.
Estimates of criminal activity, for example, are frequently counted as GDP in places like the UK. And even if you’re working in violation of visa rules, the IRS will still expect and enforce taxes.
The larger point that they may be omitted on reports like this may still stand, but it’s not because every single one is unable to be tabulated in the count by definition.
Reminder that the X11 based x3270 client can be used to communicate with mainframes, including the "Hercules" IBM mainframe emulator that you can run on Linux/Windows/MacOS .
The reason I don’t agree is that moot banned any Gamergate discussion and those people then went to 8chan, a site which moot had no control over.
And it was Gamergate that put some fuel on the fire which (IMHO) increased support for Trump. The 8chan site grew a great deal from it, then continued from that first initial “win”.
From moot's perspective, it can be as simple as being convinced by some rich guy you've never heard of to bring back the politics board. He doesn't need to have an intent to start a fascist coup, that's Epstein's job. GamerGate is just the point at which moot realized he'd fucked up and destroyed 4chan imageboard culture by letting /pol/ fester.
I’m aware of two large telecom companies that use Perl extensively, but in-house and internal services only. They don’t have anything “public” to point to.
I will say that the extensive backwards compatibility is a big reason why Perl remains; there’s no pressure to change or get rid of “old” programs when they just keep working year and year.
His name is Jon and he seems to be a compassionate American citizen that cares for other people even if they are not having the same passport or skin color. Show some damn respect for the man, he is not a thing and has a name.
In return for a reasonable and simple plea, Jon got targeted by the government that is clearly overreaching in this case.
Everything Jon did was all protected under the First Amendment.
If you do this to an American citizen making use of his rights, you are no better than the guys the D-Boys blew up, shot, stabbed, drowned or ran over with an old Toyota every Friday in Iraq who gathered intel on Iraqi citizens in the shadows and then later were directly responsible for the capture and torture of them and their families, simply because they stood up against the terrorists that were treating their friends and neighbors like dogs.
Why should you be tracked down (with the cooperation of a large tech firm) for sending an email to a public official exhorting them to consider a policy issue?
I would understand this if he had made some sort of threatening communication, but that's not the case. Please explain why you think this is appropriate in any way.
Excellent point, and I think those bombings are not as well remembered as they should be. However, none of those bombings happened at the encouragement of and with the tacit cooperation of state government authorities.
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