The real tragedy is that the design is going to be so tacky we'll be obligated to spend more money in four years to fix it. This is the state equivalent of getting a tattoo of anime porn on your face.
“The French, have you seen the castles The French have? They say it was revolutionary, the castles, started a whole revolution, isn’t that great?”
There's no way "Trump's gaudiness" cracks the top 100 things the next administration will need to clean up. It'll take 6 months minimum before they get to something like this. After the mass arrests and the seizure of assets and whatnot.
Trumps such a narcissistic bitch. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pres...r-july-jobs-report-disappoints-182118416.html
It appears that the FBI has redacted Trump's name from the Epstein files. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...dent-donald-trump-s-name-in-the-epstein-files One of y'all will have to read that for the details, because it won't open on my phone.
Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with anemic July job growth, and at the same time revised the June and May numbers downward. The result is a conclusion that there has barely been any growth for the last quarter. Trump promptly fired the commissioner of the BLS.
Kind of. Growth was 3%, up from -0.5%, which is a probably a short-term bump from tariffs. In normal times, there's about a 2-3 month stock of most consumer goods sitting in warehouses, docks, etc., but those dry up usually in 1 or 2 quarters. The numbers tells the story that there aren't mass layoffs outside of tech, but that companies just aren't hiring. The labor force participation rate dropping is a somewhat dire metric. That means people have stopped looking altogether. Most of the new jobs are based on government spending, which is ironically carried forward from the Biden admin in terms of job creation policy.
I don't know about all the different sectors, but the tech job market is pretty brutal right now. Lay offs, ghost job postings, scam postings. Last year when my husband got hired after a loong search.:
Since it's my world, I notice that collision shops slow down when the economy dips. I think it's a two pronged reason. The obvious one is that people don't drive to work if they don't have a job. Less people on the road equal less accidents. The other reason, IMO, is that when people are tight they either don't have the $1000 for the deductible or if their car is drivable, they'll pocket the insurance money and not repair the car. What's more important; fixing the scratch on the bumper or paying rent? The company I'm working for now has a handful of shops and less than 25% of them hit sales goal last month. Some barely hit 70% of goal. It has slowed WAY down.
It’s almost like the economy has gone in the shitter. I’m surprised tariffs didn’t fix all the things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the stock market is at all time highs!! Heard something the other day that I think rings true. 10% of the people own 90% of the stock market. 40% of the people own 10% of the stock market. The other 50% of people own debt.
Stock market is a scam. Company lays off 10k staff and their stock price goes up. That is not good for the economy, that is good for the investors. Investors are not representative of those that make up the vast majority of the economy.
Wife and I were discussing this early today. C suites work for investors who's only interest is immediate profit. Investors have zero interest in long term company viability...they want record profit this quarter. As soon as profits drop, investors move on to another company to invest in. Meanwhile, the company employees get to deal with the wreckage. What else explains the CEO'S who run companies into the ground and then move on to ruin another company?
It's really a shame because even well-meaning companies without shitbag CEOs end up in a really difficult situation trying appease the shareholders' desire for immediate growth while planning for the future. Investors only have so much of an appetite for, "we're taking short term losses to invest in ourselves." And since the system actively incentivizes CEOs to engage in shitbag behavior to temporarily boost profitability, and executives tend to have short shelf-lives and large stock options, there's no real reason for them to not do the bad thing. I've always wondered if this is also fed by the increasingly short employee retention. If employees only work at a place for 3-4 years, there isn't even really a big employee revolt against bad CEO behavior - most of the people there either won't have a memory of better conditions, or will be on their way out before the crash. Not that it's the employees' fault at all, I just wonder if it's a compounding factor. You end up in a situation where there are a few unicorn companies who have leveraged themselves into a situation where they can execute strategically (e.g. Apple sitting on a dragon's hoard of cash), but the large majority get punished for it. I'm not going as far as to say the stock market is a scam, but it's certainly capricious and represents the short term thinking of the average person.