Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

the 35th Director of the United States Mint loves coins!

Got a very nice email and follow-up from former Mint Director @PhilipNDiehl, which I reproduce here with his permission, that provides useful context on the underlying legislative intent behind 31 USC 5112(k) and reinforces the case for #MintTheCoin. pic.twitter.com/FGIhSgtaoQ

— Rohan Grey (@rohangrey) October 6, 2021

ha i don't really understand all the context of this but it is super refreshing and pleasing to see a bureaucrat with a passion for their particular thing! have to assume this guy was a major numismatist (i admit i looked it up) before getting into it as a career

😘

Private quits rate 🚀 pic.twitter.com/sJb2ZrvAX9

— Conor Sen (@conorsen) October 12, 2021

pardon the dumb Q but what are "quits"?

people quitting their job

YES

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/12/jolts-workers-quitting-august-pandemic/

Jennifer Booth quit her information technology job at a national retailer in August, after months of working as many as 90 hours a week during the pandemic to help the company revamp its e-commerce system.

i mean 90 hrs a week is insane and borderline illegal in a lot of countries so it’s “good” that people are fed up but i’m not sure this is a story about progress

2 of my friends in low-level positions put their two weeks notice in on friday so SSS but yeah quit them jobs bros!

I quit a couple months ago myself. BS got made a supervisor over 5 people with 3 open positions in other states with no title and no raise - still having to do all had in my regular job. IT staff was down to 21 from 34 and ticket count went from like maybe a total for everyone of maybe 100 or so a day to pretty much hundreds open at all times. Literally some days I was having to update 100+ tickets in a day as there was so many device return tasks from the constant churn of people entering and exiting posts.

Had many days I would get up at 5am to get to work at 7am work 9-10 hours then have to go home and do BS billing work until like 11pm or midnight then wake up and do it again. Coup de grace was stupid offshore SCCM team had not tested shit for over a year and broke literally over 100+ devices that had never gotten updated to w10 on top of the mess. I thought I was going to have a breakdown by the end. Going through that last year at work pretty much had me wishing the f'ing sun would go supernova and wipe this grease stain of a planet out of the heavens. I'm a bit better now but have been busy as heck at home doing all the crap I never had time to do for the past year.

holy shit, i feel like absolute dogshit when i work more than 6 hours a day lol

unless i'm doing outdoor work, then i have no problem going for longer, because there's always some time to "rest" and take a nice long toke

but office jobs? fuck, i think the longest i ever worked at an office-type job was the week i pulled 37 hours, and that was because my manager had the flu. most weeks in my life i've managed to do about 32 or so. any more is absolute bullshit afaic, a job can go fuck itself.

yeah i have no idea how people do more than 40 hours in an office job, i would just completely fall apart

are people in low-level jobs able to quit because of pandemic money?

No just stopped buying lattes

i honestly don't know, sorry i don't pay much attention to this stuff.

i think it's great if workers have leverage but .... it kinda seems like workers don't really have leverage you know?

The only workers I know with appreciable leverage are those with highly specialized technical skills/knowledge in a rapidly expanding job category. Much rarer is the worker with skills/knowledge that is exclusive to their current position in a company, making them effectively irreplaceable without their consenting to train their replacement.

when i had an office job i was in the office 40 hours a week but only really working for 20-30 tops

I can’t speak to most industries but it’s really hard to find a paralegal right now and the ones that interview certainly seem to believe they have leverage and options.

Doing tax prep, I see what my clients made last year on Unemployment, and I was a bit envious tbh

I have to assume the paralegal thing is partly women with kids dropping out of the workforce due to childcare impossibilities (also couldn't find an after school babysitter btw, even offering what everyone told us was "above market"). In past interview cycles, 80-90% of our candidates have been women who either outright mentioned kids or were in the age range of someone who might have kids.

god is dead pic.twitter.com/JuBFlGk9Iz

— 𝒥𝑜𝑒𝓁, 𝒶 𝒻𝓇𝒾𝑒𝓃𝒹 (@joeljohnson) October 24, 2021

wow. and i thought it was bad when the chicken fingers shortage happened!

At a casino buffet that could lead to riots.

Monthly job growth has averaged 561,000 jobs a month in 2021. It's 612,000 a month since March. The average for June-July was 1.026 million jobs a month.

Big upside revisions, never really covered, are part of why you aren't aware of this, but also because it's off narrative. https://t.co/4xjUZGVW8w

— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) October 26, 2021

Interesting. I probably understand less about economics than I do about epidemiology, but it does seem like the economy doing relatively well, or at least recovering pretty quickly, is what's causing at least as much of the bad stuff as good. The Great Resignation is real, but some people are taking advantage of it to get better or better paying jobs, and bigger paychecks leads to inflation. At the same time, people are spending more, too, which post ("post") pandemic is putting strains on supply and production, which is also causing prices to go up.

I find the elusive PS5 a pretty fascinating example. We get a next generation video game console launched in the middle of a pandemic, at a time of historic instability, at a pretty high price point, in the midst of a chip shortage, etc.. And yet, it continues to sell and sell out, and in fact is selling more than other consoles, iirc. So it's an illustrative conflation of lots of different economic concerns, supply and demand, discretionary spending, consumerism, supply chain issues, and all sorts of stuff that emphasizes the complexity of a global market that might be doing better than it seems.

I’m a paralegal. If you’re hiring in the LA area I will gladly accept a mountain of money in exchange for my labor.

Legal market been white hot recently. If I don’t get a bonus or a raise this new year I’m going to be looking around. Mostly because I had to buy a new car recently and I could use the money. =|

https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/10/job-seeking-advice-hiring-trend-tight-economy.html

My heart weeps for the hiring managers being ghosted left and right by prospective employees. It's all very
https://i.imgur.com/Rpq3yhp.jpeg

I’ve watched this 10 times and it somehow gets better each time. #fintok #stocktok pic.twitter.com/yQ0Ps0ujzF

— TikTok Investors (@TikTokInvestors) August 31, 2020

Those dudes are the best, I forgot all about their bits.

Hmm:

We took a look at the most recent earnings statements and earnings calls of the big meat processing companies, and here's what we found: they are raising prices far more than any cost increases they're facing, resulting in skyrocketing profit margins.https://t.co/NVboVeAvWT

— Bharat Ramamurti (@BharatRamamurti) December 10, 2021

The media's panic stories about inflation have given every corporation a green light to raise prices as fast as possible.

tin foil hat time but I feel like there’s probably a riff on a capital strike afoot. I got this sense when Obama was elected and Wall Street ghouls would parade through cable news whining about “uncertainty” well after their balls had been powdered by public funds and constant reassurance (rhetorically and policy-wise) from the admin

iirc this spiel went on for years after the crash where they were made beyond Whole

“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power.”

this guy has the right idea on inflation imo

https://www.tiktok.com/@meals_by_cug/video/7040146842071518511?

that guy otmfm

cug is a lot of fun

🧐 pic.twitter.com/XcZsNkiZxP

— Aaron Fritschner (@Fritschner) January 7, 2022

Maybe not the right thread for that really. Do we have a thread about the ontology of "the economy"?

"rolling us economy is a shitbin thread"

i've been reading Kate Soper's "Post Growth Living" and have been thinking about this kind of thing a lot.

Feels like we’re rolling into the shitbin again!

that's just the way it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adw772km7PQ

Stonks

lol

https://www.businessinsider.com/federal-reserve-inflaton-everything-bubble-economy-stock-market-debt-2022-1

The scary contours of what's coming was summed up well by a former Federal Reserve official Thomas Hoenig, who voted against the Fed's easy money policies before retiring in 2011. Back in 2016, Hoenig was warning about the very large and long-term risks that the Fed was piling up through zero-percent rates and quantitative easing.

"You had seven years of basically zero-interest rates. Now, what happens in an economic system over seven years? The entire market system develops a new equilibrium — around a zero rate," Hoenig told me in 2016. "An entire economic system around a zero rate. Not only in the US, but globally. It's massive. Now, think of the adjustment process to a new equilibrium at a higher rate. Do you think it's costless? Do you think that no one will suffer? Do you think there won't be winners and losers? No way."

Thomas Hoenig of the Mercatus Center. Koch funded, "engaged in campaigns involving deregulation, especially environmental deregulation. According to The Guardian in 2010, it "now fills the role once played by the economics department at Chicago University as the originator of extreme neoliberal ideas.""

im not co-signing his life work to be clear! its just grist for the shitbin mill