People get mad at me when I say we need to be careful of the official numbers, this is the second largest revision of job creation in US history. The largest revision was during the great financial crisis.
So… what was reported as a gain of 303k jobs for March, lowering U3 from 3.9% to 3.8%…
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2024/payroll-employment-up-303000-in-march-2024.htm
…was actually a loss of 818k jobs, raising U3 from 3.8% to 4.3%.
Which means they counted 1.121 million jobs that did not actually exist.
Checking my work based off of BLS numbers:
158106k nonfarm employed march 2024 * 0.038 (u3%) = 6008k nonfarm unemployed march 158106k + 6008k = 164114k total nonfarm workers march 164114k - 303k - 818k = 156985k adjusted nonfarm employed march 164114k - 156985k = 7129k adjusted nonfarm unemployed march 7129k / 164114k = 0.043 (adjusted u3 of 4.3%)
I wonder how / why they fucked up this badly.
Another question: If you lose your job, and do not receive unemployment… do you just not count as unemployed? BLS says they count job losses via unemployment benefits tax filings from companies, but companies will do whatever they can to avoid paying unemployment.
Every time in my life I have lost a job, I never qualified for unemployment.
I tend to think that right now we’re in an era of Soviet-style hyperrealism because things are actually getting much worse for the common man in many ways, and nobody wants to be the one holding the bag and having to tell people that things actually are as bad as they feel.
I’ve seen quite a few politicians say it outright: “Don’t tell people things are bad, they’ll start acting like things are bad which will only make things worse” – sort of like George W. Bush’s stupid “The economy is crashing, keep spending no matter what” directions to the people. It’s really irresponsible, and one of the reasons why both the people and the state have gotten so much weaker over the past 20 years (They’re expressing more authority but the clock is ticking). Instead of pulling back which hurts the economy in the moment but helps individuals be more resilient and prepared, and instead of pulling back spending when times are allegedly “good” so you spend in the bad times and you spend in the good times, both parties shotgun money into the economy during the “good” times and then also during the “bad” times.
Bread and circuses, and the fall of an empire… Much like 1991 I’m sure.
You are talking to a person who double majored in econ and poli sci, was making 80k a year as a data analyst for a non profit helping the homeless…
… who was made homeless when I was determined by my doctors to be autistic; my family rejected this and decided instead that i was delusional and needed to be thrown into a mental asylum in the middle of no where.
I opted to pack up my shit and leave, but they disabled my phone (family plan!), locking me out of my email, bank account… things went downward from there.
I have worked, in the past, for MSFT, for huge global import/export companies, at the top floor with a cubicle 5 feet from the CEO’s office…and now I have spent a year getting the shit kicked out of me by fentanyl addicts, getting robbed every week, starving, freezing…
I have seen, first hand, the unimaginable contrast between the lofty hyperreality, in all its intricate mathematical, mechanical detail, the function and purpose of its rhetoric… and and the grimy murderous foundation it is intended to anaesthetize us all to.
… I stopped trying to make sense of it all. Stopped trying to come up with some kind of way we can plausibly go forward as a society. Stopped caring about the big picture.
The immense physical pain is one thing. Losing all your belongings is another. Longer lasting is the trauma of watching good people die, being terrified all the time that someone will be waiting for you, someone will pull a knife or a gun.
But what I cannot reconcile is the hypocrisy of society at large, its indifference, its annoyance at a person with nothing even existing, and how just… nothing, no aid, no necessities for human life are possible in this society if you have no home, no address, no wallet, no phone, your tendons and muscles torn and your bones broken so you cannot walk or write.
I should be dead many times over. But I am not.
Thats about all the sense I can currently make out of this country.
That if you are all you can count on, you’re basically fucked.
Capitalist Hyperreality: Every possible thought or political stance is … not banned… but a managed market demographic. As close as you can get to literally selling your soul.