It’s easy to be an anti-modernist when you ain’t the one who’s gotta fetch the water, do the laundry, take care of the cooking and raise the children.
Political Economy
Uned
That chart is talked about all the time on this website, and it is wrong every time.
A better chart: https://t.co/TkY8NFFCS1 pic.twitter.com/AeVeq5QmP1
— Jeremy Horpedahl 🥚📉 (@jmhorp) December 7, 2025
Oh, fucking clown. Real product compensation is not a good measure of inflation or compensation as the average worker experiences it. This is just an over-educated attempt to sneak something in that most people won’t know what it means to make himself look clever while dunking on his enemies. Well I’m smarter than he is by far and here’s why it’s bunk.
RPC is based on the Producer Price Index, which is a measure of the price of what firms sell. The worker & family actually experiences inflation as the Consumer Price Index (or at least far closer to), which is rent, food, healthcare and all those essentials of living. So, check this out: if the price of making things rises faster than the CPI, real product compensation will make the worker look much better off even if their actual cost of living isn’t improving much at all.
In other words, as usual this econ is attempting to con you. After all, it’s right in the name of the profession. It’s what most of them are paid to do.
There’s about five other things wrong with this RPC way of measure this but I just don’t have time to write about them all. A clownish asinine dipshit is all this dude is. Should’ve gotten a real education somewhere, but probably doesn’t have the brain to handle it.
Grim
I suspect the majority of the reaction against AI is akin to when factory workers were first substantially replaced by machines followed not long after by most of the remaining jobs being shipped off to Mexico and China. It feels the same. It’s just the first time knowledge workers and “creatives” have been hit in a really large way.
And they’re not reacting well. I understand, though. I just wish they’d had more sympathy when their “inferiors1” had their livelihoods eviscerated years ago.
They cared little and did nothing. Now the reaper is coming for them too.
Decline and Fall
For the first time in history, I keep seeing computer science and engineering degrees referred to as “useless.”
That’s a sign and harbinger of something. Something not good at all.
BIFO
The people paid the most are often the best, at least at the individual contributor level. The MBAs doing the layoffs sort the to-be-canned spreadsheet by highest salary at the top and toss those people out first. They don’t care about skill or knowledge even a little bit.
That’s all it is.
AI Ayo
MIT report: AI can already replace nearly 12% of the U.S. workforce.
I agree with that assessment. No matter what you’ve read — particularly if you’re on the left and predisposed to hate tech and any form of knowledge advancement that doesn’t relate to a new, innovative gender — the newest AI models are quite good at many things. Certainly they could replace most of the juniors in my own field that I’ve worked with over the years and many of the mid-level folks too.
No one is reckoning with how quickly this fact is being weaponized by the MBA class or that it’s already demonstrably occurring. Predictably, economists are and will be in denial about this at least a decade after it is already happening.
Camping
The job market is going to look drastically, radically different in five years. We are about to see the largest job loss since most manufacturing decamped for China and Mexico.
Get ready.
Big Lunch
You know the inflation numbers are a lie when it’s right at $50 for two people to eat lunch at a lunch counter type place (not even a real sit-down restaurant). And yeah, sure, it’s California. But I go to a lot of other states and places and it’s nearly the same in all the others too.
Prices are mostly irrelevant to me, but damn that seems like a lot.
Cry Harder
The H-1B visa program should be ended entirely. Its major purpose is to drive down wages of (mostly) tech workers and has nothing to do with talent. If this were not true, why would companies only post job ads in newspapers no one reads, or on the doors of offices of their campuses (rather than the internet)1?
It’s a scam, a fraud, and should not exist. I agree with Amanda Goodall, though — ending it will just mean more jobs sent overseas. To complement the elimination of the H-1B scam, any American company that sends a job overseas (or is doing work on American account overseas) should pay a 500% yearly tax on that job.
That would pretty much end that.
Anti-reality
Economists are really committed to gaslighting us about housing affordability:
Why, I wonder? I guess it support the status quo, which is their main (and sometimes, only) remit.
Meanwhile, in reality:
A Serv
American Airlines Cuts Management Jobs – 5,000 Employees – Jobs sent to India!
I said there was an outsourcing issue at $AAL since July 3rd.
👇👇👇
And in September — reports went out to my clients on upcoming layoffs – also stated that here on X: https://t.co/OJlHpUOtTU https://t.co/OHNCXxqDHV pic.twitter.com/0s1DySHz69— Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) November 4, 2025
It’s better when it’s just said what’s happening. Service will get worse, of course.
The 10
The top 10% of American households own 87% of all stocks, nearly 85% of all private businesses and 44% of Real Estate
Another way of looking at this: The bottom 90% increasingly don’t matter in official economic data pic.twitter.com/h9Rie6uKDd
— Amy Nixon (@texasrunnerDFW) October 26, 2025
It’s impossible to have a healthy economy where this is true.
Frigidaire
The economy is breaking. And no one’s ready.
806,000+ layoffs in 2025 so far.
48% of consumer credit applications denied over the past year.
Refinance rejection rate: 41.8%… the highest in 12+ years.
U3 Unemployment forecast: 4.5–5.0% by year-end, according to Apollo,…
— Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) August 27, 2025
The unemployment numbers are already pure fiction and it’s just going to get worse from here. We’re sliding into recession and then depression inevitably. If all the Capex from the AI bubble hadn’t occurred, we’d already be there.
Commercial Logic
It’s because commercial loans do not work like private mortgages. They refinance more frequently (every 5–10 years), and the value and loan terms are set by the property’s Net Operating Income (NOI) as well as the quality and length of leases. Loan covenants are also a factor. Many lenders require consent for below-market rents or very short terms.
As implied above, however, the overriding reason that commercial spaces sit empty is that locking in a low rent on a long lease can knock millions off the property value and jeopardize the next refinance. And since refis can be as frequent as every five years in CRE, this is not a trivial concern.
Inflations
It’s not that there are no competent people overseas in the countries that typically receive offshored jobs. Of course there are. In fact, many of the best end up here as immigrants in the US.
But the competence level is certainly vastly different. In my experience the average Indian in India is about 1/4 to 1/8 as competent as the average American. At least in tech, though I’ve heard it’s similar in other fields. The average Filipino is maybe half as competent. And the average LATAM hire is maybe 60% as competent as an American.
That’s not great! Part of it is worse education, tons of credential inflation and concomitant lack of experience. Screening is also not nearly as competent or thorough when done overseas. That all leads to offshore teams fucking things up left and right while the few remaining onshore people spend long, long hours fixing it all. All to usually not even save money in the end.
But sure, tell me again how efficient business is.