"The surge in layoffs in 2025 is due to a mix of government downsizing, corporate restructuring and the growing effects of artificial intelligence. Public agencies, tech firms and retailers are leading the cuts."
That's dumb. You can't have serious product development or engineering based out of India. So many legacy companies that don't care about the tech offshore and then wonder why they can't build good tech.
My company has just started using India based teams for jobs that I would never have thought should be outsourced, and the early results are bearing that out. So many baffling errors. Not saying they won't ever improve or there aren't smart, capable people there who we'll eventually find, but the early returns are bad.
I think it’s more that the people who are cheap to outsource to aren’t the best India has to offer. Usually the most capable people have permanent positions or they can demand visas to come to US or Europe to live and work in person.
This is the fundamental truth; outsourcing to India or anywhere else is just choosing to hire people who are almost certainly less capable to do the job. It's a defensible choice, but anyone who believes hiring people with less competency for less money is possible has forgotten the time, cost, quality metric. It doesn't magically go away by hiring someone in another country.
The truth is in the middle. You can absolutely hire cheaper than in the US in India or elsewhere, but you want to be paying at least 60% of the US salary, treat the outsource people the way you would local employees and have their managers be in the US. I've seen this work well in multiple companies.
Cheaper yes. Obviously. Cheaper for the same quality? Maybe in individual cases, but as mentioned above, anyone with a quality education is going to be working on an H1B in the US anyways.
> anyone with a quality education is going to be working on an H1B in the US anyways.
Beyond not everybody wanting to emigrate to the US, even when they do, H1B is a lottery system, the chance of getting a visa each year was about 30%. Education is also not necessarily required to be a productive professional.
Do you really think everybody on the planet wants to live in the US? Europe is vastly superior, most high quality talent is not going to bother with US in current year.
> Cheaper for the same quality?
Yes. As someone who has worked with people all around the globe, you guys are vastly over estimating the quality and quantity of your work.
Outsourcing going badly is a management problem, not a people in Madagascar are too stupid to produce high quality work problem.
Not everyone is willing to abandon their entire family and their history in order to make more money.
And with outsourcing growing to be big business, the gap in quality of life between an outsourced engineer in India and an engineer in the US is smaller than it’s ever been.
Yeah ive this play out differently with my mom and dad. My moms company just goes for the cheapest bfs possible from india. Majority of the time it leads to crazy issues. And the few dudes that are actually competent/talented are only in that position because of some life circumstances. They might've not gone to a great school or they needed a job ASAP or something. the moment they get their feet wet, they're gone for greener pastures at a better company for better pay
My dad's company is the total opposite. they actually pay them a good income relative to where they live, and treat them normally. Their work is fantastic according to my dad with the only issue being communication usually because of the time gap.
this is it, right here. companies either ignore or fail to realize this... that in a global economy, labor can flow two ways and there's a reason that the labor is cheap. because all the skilled workers left for other opportunities in other countries willing to take them.
This has been on about a 10-year cycle for the last few decades. Management discovers employing people in India is crazy cheap, and they get stars in their eyes about skyrocketing profits.
So they give it a shot, it sucks, they give up on it, and swear to never do it again. Until the next time. They're idiots.
In my experience at different orgs, it's because they (management) have short-term incentive to do so (promotions, bonuses, can point to it for their next move elsewhere) vs long-term employees who, if they're lucky, get to watch it get set up and burn down every few years.
The place i work for offshored all our service desks and monitoring to India. We have somewhat important customers paying for 24 hour support. Customers like the national police, power generation, IRD, lots of core public services.
We don't have after hours support anymore. I still get on call allowance, the customers still pay for after hours support, but the outfit in India doesn't monitor anything or escalate anything. If there's an exchange issue, for example, and the police cannot send or receive email at night time I'll find out about it when I log on in the morning.
We've been trying for months to get the Indian company to do the job we are paying them for, but they just won't. We've had a huge NOC locally for decades that was amazing. When the company sacked all 200 people working there and offshored it I knew it was going to be crap. But no idea it would be this bad.
Our cybersecurity team is in India. It's a pain in the ass to work with them through the language, cultural, and temporal barriers. It literally takes weeks just to figure out what they are asking for. As a full stack dev + devops engineer I told them I was interested in moving into security team and they told me it's just going to be staffed by Indians from now on.
And what about the time difference? Trying to hook up with engineers with a 13 hour difference can be brutal when trying to develop anything. I've known U.S. engineers who have quit their jobs because they were tired of the hours necessary to manage an Indian team. Much of the failure when working with people from India is the time difference.
Low-cost Indian staffing firms tend to have terrible culture, but it's just pure racism to say India can't do product development. I've used software products that were wholly bootstrapped in India that work great. I've also had a lot of success with teams in South American and Eastern Europe. Americans aren't all that special.
You're not wrong. Most of these companies are usually not interested in using anything other than low-cost Indian staffing firms so that's all most people know in that context. Similar issue when it comes to Chinese manufacturing. None of these cheap off-shoring outfits are interested in paying what Apple pays for decent manufacturing or putting in the work to ensure QA. They just want cheap, good-enough garbage. Chinese companies are simply willing to give it to them for bottom-barrel pricing so China broadly gets the unfair association.
It's not these countries' fault this is what so many companies actively seek out.
It’s a corporate skill just like any other. Companies that have invested a lot of time and money into it get a lot of value.
On the other hand, if the company was already incapable of building a good team in the US, culture, language, and distance exacerbate the existing management issues.
Currently watching this right now with my company. We are babysitting a team in India that is working on the redesign for one of our sites. It has been constant call issues, weather outages, and issues. Not blaming the people, I have worked with incredibly talented people overseas, but it's just so impractical for a remote tech situation.
I mean, Amazon did try to have 1000 Affordable Indians watch security footage of Whole Foods so their customers could walk out of the store without checking out.
Same. But media not tech. But they even have tech leadership positions in India. Tech offshored to India, financial/admin work to Mexico. Cuts and replacements planned out into January.
All for that sweet cash flow (because the execs switched their bonus structure to that once they tanked the stock price).
Up until January I used to work for EY (Ernst & Young). Their big new shiny offshore hub is in Argentina. They’re sending hundreds of jobs there. Has nothing to do with AI. Just cheaper than paying Americans.
Remember the good old days when we offshored our tech to the Japanese, a people who approach paper folding and rice prep with the greatest of care, let alone microchips.
The Trump-GOP tax law enacted in December 2017 creates clear incentives for American-based corporations to move operations and jobs abroad, including a zero percent tax rate on many profits generated offshore.
That's going to be inevitable with the immigration crackdown and an aging country. If a company is desperate for labor and they can't get enough in the US, they will go to another market where there is enough labor.
It's gotten a lot worse now that people think Indians across the sea can do the same job with use of the internet/ai. I'm not saying some can't but my God some of them I work with are unbearable and useless. Terrible communication is the biggest issue.
That being said, it's two Indians for the price of one American and us Americans can be just as useless.
My company’s tech support is largely in India. It’s absolutely terrible. Part of the problem is time zone: they can’t help me if they’re awake and I’m asleep. A second problem is language: they speak perfect English, but I can’t understand them because of their heavy accents. A third problem is simple competence: they do not understand the software we are using, how it works (or doesn’t), and everything has to be escalated, causing us to lose productivity. Automation doesn’t work for this problem at all.
Companies that want to outsource just in order to save money are going to cut corners everywhere. Other countries’ companies who hire Americans like the experience a lot more because you can’t save money hiring an American, so only companies looking to invest in a talented employee end up hiring. This MBA corporate culture is horrible and corrupts everywhere.
I understand some jobs don't take a high level of communication. I don't know if it's the culture there or just a people by people basis but I've only connected with two separate "types". One is very headstrong, with poor communication and believes they are the God of the Earth despite little knowledge. The other is SUPER helpful, beyond a lot of my American colleagues and extremely intelligent. Probably just the industry and person to person but it's really never in between. Probably my bias. But yes pieces of paper do not make you capable of doing a job
I think it’s just people being people. Once you apply enough filters and hoops to jump through, you end up with people either enough of an asshole to force their way through or people proactively growth-oriented. A lot of other countries are hyper-competitive culturally compared to the US too, which adds to that split.
I think there could be cultural aspects that are being overlook too (any Indians feel free to hop in and critique). Vast generalizations ahead based on limited experience working there and with teams out of India:
From my American perspective, it seemed that the lower level grunts were expected to do as their told, whether that's follow scripts, whatever. There's no allowance for critical facility, deviation, or creativity in problem-solving.
If you're in some sort of supervisory role, you're more than allowed to be as much as an asshole as you want, even to a level of verbal abuse. You rule with a firm hand. Also, I can't think of a single female in a position of power, even in minor supervisor roles.
Working with Indian people outside of India has been vastly different, assuming due to education, background, etc.
Yea there aren't a lot of female supervisors in general but I just got out of a meeting where an Indian man was talking down to my lady supervisor with higher ups in the room. I can't believe she didn't go off on him, I was about to. Not only was he wrong, when he was right he was repeating what she said but in two hundred more words.
Sadly, see it too often still in the US as well. In full transparency, one of the few things I can point to myself as finally on the way to being an adult is learning to listen better, not interrupt, and not try and be a fixer (at least in my personal life). Has taken years though.
Still have coworkers that will run rampant over a female when she's talking.
It’s the same as the companies we have in America: the ones that keep their employees on a leash or script aren’t trying to keep top talent or do a creative, well-thought out job. The managers in these environments see themselves as having the job of whipping people into completing the instructions to some very simple KPIs. This reinforces itself in the culture of cheap outsourced labor then. The really good talent in other countries work for the best companies domestically, and have a quality of life comparable to the best workers here if not better due to the inequality.
I wish in my twenty years of working I could've worked for a company that had execs that thought for themselves, were long-term oriented, and not dependent on consultants or cargo-culting ideas from the pop business books.
Maybe the rest of the world is the same. I don't know.
I've definitely had some support engineers that are obviously not going to be stuck in support very long. They are easy to work with and will outgrow that role quickly. It's a bummer, because I know I won't be working with them again.
The Trump-GOP tax law enacted in December 2017 creates clear incentives for American-based corporations to move operations and jobs abroad, including a zero percent tax rate on many profits generated offshore.
The cost is more like 5 Indians for one American, and those outsourced jobs are high prestige in India, so there’s like 1000 applications for each position.
My firm pays our Indian counterpart 1/5 US, but the Indian counterparts live like kings. I spoke to one when they visited and they said that they can hire full time housekeeper, childcare, cook for a family of 5 for like a couple hundred USD a month.
My staff in India have way higher living standards than me, their US manager, when I make easily 10x their staff, 5x their managers.
Just found out yesterday that the company I work for is going to outsource several positions in our IT dept. They are currently training their replacements, who are based in India. It's seriously F'd up. It's at least 6 positions that I am aware of.
Where I work they encouraged all managers to hire remote in Mexico but don’t want American employees to work remote because they want to see them in the office….. when they fly in from the states they live in.
Essentially, govt downsizing to redistribute money towards the billionaires , minuscule amount, and probably will end up costing more anyways as the govt will have to hire more expensive contractures, corporate restructuring to compensate for the increase in tariffs, trying to maximize profits while saving money laying off people, also less business and investment therefore people are not needed either, and then there’s AI that is replacing programmers, writers, and other jobs people went to college for years.
The Trump-GOP tax law enacted in December 2017 creates clear incentives for American-based corporations to move operations and jobs abroad, including a zero percent tax rate on many profits generated offshore.
The term "late-stage capitalism" was coined by German economist Werner Sombart in the early 1900s. He used it to describe the stage of capitalism emerging at that time, characterized by the rise of large corporations and financial markets.
Apparently the late stage can last over 100 years.
Government downsizing, but the govt budget deficit went up a record even with 200+ billion tariff coming in. One has to wonder where the money has gone
It's pretty wild that layoffs have gone up so much since early 2020, over 62 thousand people lost their jobs in July alone, which is like nearly double what it was last year. I mean, how are we even handling this with AI taking over more roles? It's not just numbers, it's real people facing uncertainty, and the system needs to adapt before it's too late or we're going to see a whole lot of folks left behind with no safety net.
We are already passed the “folks left behind with no safety net” well beyond that point people are fucked and we have a pedophile president in charge leading it all
Yeah, WTF... Some of these articles are trash... I haven't seen mention that a lot of spending has stopped or is being reduced due to uncertainty of tariffs and increase in tariffs
The system has been partly dismantled, with that process ongoing, by an administration that doesn't see the point of helping anybody but oligarchs and themselves.
Don’t worry, we have a pres now who openly accepts bribes ai tech moguls and is committed to fighting unemployment by manipulating the reported numbers.
Logically and morally, if the robots take enough of the jobs, UBI should step in to take care of the people. But I don't think that'll happen until things get REALLY bad, and the threat of complete societal collapse is extremely obvious. Our government isn't great at seeing problems before they happen and mitigating them in advance.
They'll give you UBI, but in exchange they'll take away Medicaid and SNAP and everything else. So you will get $1,000 per month with which to decide whether you want to eat, get healthcare, or sleep in a moldy basement sublet.
And when everyone starts dying, and there's no one left to buy shit from Amazon, society collapses, and no one wins. The oligarchs don't even win in that situation. I imagine they could be persuaded to continue a fake version of capitalism where they're taxed at like 50% to support the citizenry, BUT at least people can keep buying stuff, and they can see Profits Go Up, which is all they wanted in the first place. Our only hope.
UBI in an AI-dominated world is more of a dystopia than people think. Basically, you'll have a technocratic oligarchy where the tech billionaires pull the strings of the government, which decides exactly how much money you get as UBI. UBI will be enough to survive, and probably buy some subscriptions to NetflixAI and the like, but not enough to thrive or develop.
UBI is a great concept when it just forms a baseline safety net and you can easily supplement it with as much extra income as you want. It develops into a bit of a horror story when it's assumed you only get as much as the government thinks you deserve (which translates to just barely enough to avoid civil disorder).
Depends what you think is scarier, I guess. Civil unrest and the chance at significant structural change (and the risk of just collapse), or quiet compliance and control?
no one has ever explained how ubi works with inflation
Inflation went crazy during covid and while some of that was lack of supply it was also because the government was printing checks and giving them to everyone. Newsflash: If markets know everyone is receiving some minimum amount of income, they will immediately raise prices in any areas they can to reflect that.
It's not even AI. Aside from maybe the tech space, the AI vendors are no where near a point where they can service large enterprise clients. AI is just an excuse to temporarily have employees do more with less, with the hope that eventually, AI will generate the productivity gains to cover that shortfall.
The jobs market is tough mainly because companies are scared. All the C-suite people are bracing for a big downturn in the economy and so they are trimming payroll or just not hiring. I've never seen so much market exuberance yet with so much of the big institutional leadership being terrified of what's to come.
This has happened a few times throughout history however we have always prevailed but it does take time and some adjusting. I don’t think we fully know what the answer is yet.
I’m one of these that lost their job last month. My role wasn’t replaced just dispersed amongst my former team. Manufacturing in the oil and gas industry.
You think our current administration is doing ANYTHING to offset the rampant offshoring and layoffs due to AI?
I don't think either political party would handle keeping up with AI's impact on business, but I know the current administration would do significantly worse than the alternatives.
Stepping back, unemployment is still below average. If it does climb up, the rates will go down and investments and hiring should jump back up.
The early 2020s isn’t a realistic benchmark, it was an era of free-flowing money, with unlimited printing and funding for both corporations and citizens.
WOW, I am genuinely surprised to see negative jobs data after Trump fired the BLS chief without cause and installed a loyalist. I truly assumed the next report we saw would just be a note scribbled in crayon: “Trump make many jobs. Best jobs ever.”
Nah, they’re great for the country! Haven’t you ever been to the great republican states of Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and North Dakota?
They’re centers of finance, technology, and quality of life!
Uh, ar you dum?? My favorit child rapist sed the econummy is doing the bestest in the intire univers, so its the bestestest. I cant beleeve yud lie like that, typicul librul idiut. I cant wate to vote fore him agin
I've been applying since May, and I have gotten 0 interviews to date. I've been working for 26 years, managed projects ranging from $1mn - $50mn.
Not even a single screening call. My RIF kicks in September 1st. I've probably sent out over 700 applications.
So when I read about how "great" the economy is, I just roll my eyes. Thank god I'm smart enough to have saved up a nest egg for 5+ years, because it looks like I'll burn through 1-2 years of that slush fund before I even get a chance to go back to work at the current rate.
Hiring has become an insanely stupid mess. Chances are several of the companies that ghosted/ignored you genuinely are trying to fill positions and likely would have given you an interview but their hiring systems are so broken you're not even getting into an applicant pool even when you do everything "right".
At my last job (MAANG adjacent large tech firm) the recruiter team was constantly churning. Hiring managers routinely punted and deferred responsibilities. Random arbitrary gates were put up to make it effectively impossible for anyone to get through, all while otherwise talking like they needed to fill positions and the headcount budget was cleared. Meanwhile, every team felt strained by task creep to where pretty much everyone was doing at least 1.5 roles worth of work. All while the company posted record profits and still held mass layoffs just the same. Really bleak and bizarre scene, just makes you stop and want to yell what are we even doing? what is any of this? how is this how things are?
I'm lucky to have my current job, I've been applying like crazy for months. Not just "linkedin easy apply", and I've had maybe a half dozen interviews, one where I got to the third round. If I'm the lucky one to at least get some responses, even if it doesn't pan out.... It's gunna get real fucking bad real fucking fast
And to so many smart hard-working talented people.
Where I live here south of france, a university opened 31 positions for American scientists kicked out by trump. The university received more than 3 hundred good files but only had money for 31, beginning of march the 31 were hired. The head of the university was devastated and said the words from the rejected scientists were "poignant".
When I see what's happening in the US, I find it exactly that : poignant. And the little time it took to change from a few months ago to now is astounding and terrifying.
I do hope you get hired fast. Stories like yours are heartbreaking.
As an American I hate to see the brain drain of scientists leaving the US for other countries. As a human I'm delighted that other countries are picking them up. I hope the groundbreaking work that was being done here can be continued elsewhere!
I don’t know a single person IRL that claims the economy is great, including Trump supporters. At least his first term had the benefit of lingering recovery during Obama, so you can give people the benefit of the doubt that it at least SEEMED like Trump was fixing the economy. At this point I’m sure his supporters are just holding their breath for things to get better while telling themselves the president can’t change the economy overnight
My contract position is ending in a couple weeks and I’ve been job hunting actively for about 6 months now. Over 300 applications at this point and just one screening call that amounted to nothing. 7+ years of production and project management with major companies. Lots of credentials. Tons of positive referrals. Hasn’t helped a lick.
I’ve never had to go past 200 applications and usually I’ve had multiple offers to pick between.
The last month or so it seems like companies haven’t even been posting new roles. I’m genuinely not sure what comes next once I’ve run out of savings in a year.
I feel you man. It’s been a miserable experience. Especially because it isn’t about qualifications anymore; it’s about who will take the lowest salary.
People are suffering. I talked a Vegas resident and tourism is indeed down. Ghost town. I am in finance. No one can afford a home unless have serious cash. It is about to get very bad.
Looking at American consumption over the last 25 years, it seems like the propertied class doesn't have much more left to extract.
Bust it down and start again. It's an American tradition dating all the way back to Alexander Hamilton. The revolution changed the flag, not the ledger.
Gotta wonder if the GENIUS/CLARITY acts are setting the stage. Throughout history when the social powder keg is set to blow, there's always a pivot to new markets with fresh assets and control built in.
>Let the French revolt, we've got guarantees from Hamilton and Morris that the US will pay us.
So the founding fathers, in order to get the deal done, issued the first banking charter. When the charter expired, we went to war again and there was a renewed need for creditors 🔂
Written less than a week ago: "In June of 2024, Las Vegas reported 3,490, 600 visitors. In June 2025, the total dropped to 3,094,800, a decline YoY of 11.3%. Year to date the decline was less severe, dropping from a robust 84.4% through June of 2024 to 82.0 for 2025 through June."
Definitely not a ghost town, but a 5-10% drop in tourism is devastating. And allegedly the people that are going are tipping less than in recent years, which is awful for the workers.
When the "bad" hotels like Planet Hollywood are charging $25 for 3 hours of parking and $17 for a Coors Light, I don't know why anyone would come. Vegas has followed suit with seemingly every city and industry these days:
Abandon the middle class, and cater to the whales. Businesses are in for a rude awakening when they realize that game only has a few winners.
Losing 11% of your sales in a year is catastrophic. This is just bookings as well. Doesn't include people who are still going but may spend less money while in the city.
A lot of people trying to underplay how bad this is. Imagine any industry suddenly losing 11% of all sales in a year. Many would struggle to survive unless the trend changes quickly.
It's the dm trend that's problematic, not the number. Casinos overall just posted the largest profit on history also. Nevada already leads the nation in unemployment, if this trend continues in slumping sales and declining tourism, you can see that unemployment number continue to increase.
Sure. But that's just the trend in general these days.
So many companies are hitting record profits. But you can only do that for so long. Mass layoffs, price gouging, it works for a short period. Eventually it all collapses though and they know it.
A lot of industries are already feeling it. I'm a Canadian and I go to Disney once a year with my kids. We aren't going this year. The amount of offers I have gotten and the discounts being offered is staggering. Sure, Disney's bottom line is fine right now. The parks are still busy. But they see the larger trend and see the warning lights.
I'm not saying your wrong, but this alarmism is the wrong comparison entirely. An 11% shift in sales is completely normal in many industries, if not most.
Sure. But it's usually due to legitimate reasoning.
Vegas' decline is largely in part to America's current attempted bullying of the rest of the world. That's not really something the casinos and city can fix.
When a large portion of visitors comes from Canada, Mexico and the EU, it's not exactly normal. They're literally losing a large percentage of their potential customer base just because.
> Vegas' decline is largely in part to America's current attempted bullying of the rest of the world.
Again, I don't disagree, but this:
> That's not really something the casinos and city can fix.
Is still super normal for a lot of businesses. A lot of businesses frequently have outside market, behavior, infrastructure, or even weather/climate changes that cause very dramatic shifts in their sales. They can't fix it, they just have to adapt as well as they can. This is just normal stuff businesses have to deal with that employees don't (as it should be), and often is very stressful for business owners or executives.
To be perfectly clear, I agree that Trump is bullying over countries, and that it is almost certainly bad in the long and short run. I agree that it's going to have knock-on effects like a decline in tourism and that has and will likely hit Vegas hard. I just don't think a -11% YoY number is an effective way to demonstrate it.
If we correlate it with broader tourism, it starts to be more meaningful. If we compare it with an increase in tourism for multiple non-US destinations, that also gets us somewhere because it highlights the theorized outcome much more specifically.
> A shift in sales would mean the money is going elsewhere. Where is it going?
That's not necessarily true. The main defining trait of a broad economic downturn is that there is less total money moving around.
Obviously dollars don't cease to exist, but they can cease to move. That can look, for example, like companies reducing headcount and compensation in favor of hoarding safer investments, resulting in fewer and poorer employees out spending money, resulting in fewer and poorer employees of the companies they would have been spending money with, and so on.
That's what I was getting at. I don't think there has been a shift in sales. I think it's more of a broader downturn in tourism overall, led by international tourists.
I read the previous commenter as meaning a "shift" just in the sense of an amount of deviation from average total, not in the sense of a redirection of that spending elsewhere.
Yes this is part of the question I just posed to DryProject. If we can highlight that tourism for some non-US alternatives went up at the same time Vegas went down, the 11% may be stronger evidence.
I suspect that won't be the case though - I think the uncertainty and trade war bullying caused people to cancel plans, not change them. Which doesn't mean the 11% isn't a concern, it just means we can't prove for sure that it is and that it relates directly / completely to the trade war bullying. Tourism in general could have dropped, or the repeatedly hotter summers every year could make a summer trip to Vegas unappealing, especially combined with financial uncertainty. Plus a lot of Vegas traffic comes from CA's upper middle and rich, which has seen a net out migration for a few years now.
Not so much money spent elsewhere, but I think a lot of people are starting to spend on other alternatives or saving in general.
I'll use my example. Not Vegas, but Orlando was our go to trip. We don't have a trip planned and we usually go yearly with two trips planned out. We instead are opting to put a larger chunk into our house this fall, keeping the dollars in country.
I think Vegas is an interesting one. Largely in part to a drop in international tourism, but I also think they've just been squeezing. Customers for far far too long. Suddenly it's not worth it. Although their profits may be up, a lot of that is because they're charging massive up charges for rooms and food. It's damn near 25 dollars a drink in Vegas now. Short term, you'll get people who will spend. But it's not sustainable in the long term.
A predicted decline of 11% is not a big deal. A decline that is not projected and not prepared for is fairly catastrophic. Jay Forrester in his monumental work on system dynamics, Industrial Dynamics, built a model showing that a 10% unforeseen decline in retail sales ripples through a typical supply chain and results in a more than 80% decline in factory production.
A decrease in demand unforeseen leads to a glut of supply, along with management concerns that demand will continue slipping. I have an extra 10% stock in the store room and only sold 90% of what i usually did in a month, so I monthly order 80% of what I usually do in the expectation that demand may not recover and my extra 10% can cover the gap because I don't have room in the stock room for an extra 20% should sales stay low.
The distribution center now has an extra 20% of what they would normally ship to me sitting in their facility taking up space, on top of whatever padded stock they usually hold. And it's not just my retail store doing this, but all of their customers. They are even more certain that sales will not improve by 20% in the next shipping period, and they already keep a surplus supply to avoid empty shelves (which equal lost sales), so they only order 50% of their usual order from the factory warehouse.
The factory warehouse is now shipping little more than half of what it did the month before, and space becomes a real concern. Even if sales recovered that 10% back in the following month, they can still guess that distribution centers are only going to order around that 50-60% in order for their back-stock to tick down. So they report inventory levels to the factory, and the decision is made to severely cut back on production lines.
Most supply chains are a lot longer than this fictional scenario.
Each step, each economic relationship, exacerbates the problem because you have to account for speed AND acceleration - that the shifts in revenue might be permanent, or might get worse, and that it's the worst time possible to be sitting on a surplus. Labor is another factor, because it is ruled by the same logic but requires training so is less fluid than goods.Take a large restaurant for example. When sales slip 10%, ownership has three choices:
Pay employees, assuming the slump will end.
Layoff 10% of employees, assuming the slump is just the new baseline.
Layoff more than 10% of employees, assuming the slump is still accelerating.
If the slump is short-lived and recovery occurs: (1) is out lost capital in the form of wages, (2) saved wage capital and remains well-positioned, and (3) has limited their business and will need time/investment to recover. All three of these are acceptable, because at any point (2) and (3) can safely do the math on profitability and decide whether or not to exit the industry entirely while still in the green.
If the slump is the new baseline: (1) will burn through cash until they have to lay people off, (2) will continue in business as usual, and (3) can be running efficiently albeit below maximum profit potential. (1) risks destroying the value of the business, (2) is not at risk as long as they continue to maintain capacity that reflects the market, and (3) is sub-optimal but profitable. (2) and (3) are still in the best positions to control their financial destiny.
If the slump accelerates: (1) is without capital in a shifting landscape that they probably cannot weather, (2) is not mititigating the risk of uncertainty and waiting until after the market moves to make decisions, and (3) is business as usual. (3) is the only one well-positioned to survive, or close down, before owners are financially impacted.
Smart businesses will always choose to be (3), because it mitigates the most risk - and a slumping market is a risky market.
> Jay Forrester in his monumental work on system dynamics, Industrial Dynamics, built a model showing that a 10% unforeseen decline in retail sales ripples through a typical supply chain and results in a more than 80% decline in factory production.
Hm, that's a very interesting take on cascading effects. I haven't seen or really pondered anything like that. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm not informed enough to really judge and don't have time to dig right now.
> 2. Layoff 10% of employees, assuming the slump is just the new baseline.
> 3. Layoff more than 10% of employees, assuming the slump is still accelerating.
So I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but this sounds very much like something that an economist / statistician who has never actually had to do hiring and firing would say. Finding and training good employees is extremely expensive and time consuming. Laying off people's friends & coworkers hurts company-wide morale and spook employees not intended to be laid off. That's aside from the personal emotional / moral feelings about the decision, and the unemployment burdens placed on them by the state(s).
I can't imagine a sane business even considering this in response to an unexpected 10% sales drop that wasn't part of a trend. Maybe a business that had accidentally over-hired substantially, but even with such poor management decisions, they're going to consider these other effects carefully before jumping the gun.
My experience and education is all business management. Yes, layoffs have negative consequences and as such are considered a last resort action to prevent a catastrophic business failure. They are rare, in an ideal scenario. However, the scenario in Las Vegas right now is not ideal - it's economic trends being compounded by uncommon political impacts on tourism.
Hiring and firing employees is costly, but that doesn't mean businesses can afford to keep them through economic uncertainty. Does the sector turn around in six months? Or does it never? Or is it all Donald Trump policies, and eventually it will sort itself out a year or two after he leaves office?
It's true that layoffs don't happen after a bad month. But cost-cutting measures do. Hiring freezes. A sharper look at low-performing employees. Greater focus on loss prevention. Management avoids layoffs as much as possible, but eventually the math makes it unavoidable.
If you think it's knee-jerk, go talk to people who work in manufacturing, where production can be slowed or even shut down (and hours cut) in response to shifting market conditions. Several automakers have done it so far this year. Autos are an example of something that can sit outside in the desert just fine, but not every produced good is so lucky.
A supply chain can be disrupted in coming (e.g. material shortages) or going (distribution disruptions that lead to too many stored/idled goods). Either one has to be dealt with, and paying labor to not do profitable work is not a long-term option.
Right. Statistically it is down 11% year over year, but profits for most strip casinos have actually increased. Now taking 11% of the people off of overly crowded streets probably doesn't make that much of a difference to the naked eye, and the price increases have worked as far as anything corporations care about ($). I think they are going to try to run off Joe Cheap Buffet guy and get a higher income crowd, and as much as reddit and youtube hate it, so far it works.
> but profits for most strip casinos have actually increased.
Fascinating, do you have a link for that? The number I saw was about 2.5% higher unoccupancy rates. I'd love to know how they are making more money with fewer people staying in hotels and staying for a shorter time.
What is unmistakable is that tipping is down massively, which is the life blood of the actual service workers of Las Vegas.
Without seeing the data it isn't shocking, prices on the strip have exploded which makes it less enticing for regular folks. It's just yet another example of chasing the high income earners and forgetting about everyone else.
Thats awesome. I hope you had a great time. I will say I believe a client I built his portfolio for years more than a stranger. Vegas is suffering. A few buddies in tourism has also told me Q1/Q2 earnings are about to reach negative. The great depression has arrived.
"Vegas is suffering" is not synonymous with "is a ghost town." During COVID? Then the popular tourism destinations were ghost towns, where you could go outside and actually not see anyone. Having an 11% drop, which still translates to packed venues (just shorter lines), isn't "ghost town" territory.
During the summer it's not just California folks packing the city down on weekends at the popular clubs, the weeks are also busy with international tourists on extended stay.
So since World War 2 America basically tethered the rest of the world hostage to its economy our current President has untethered the rest of the world so as we sink to the bottom they're free now.
the rest of the world should thank Trump he is the best President for them maybe the worst President for the Americans
I’m not arguing that. What I’m saying is that Regan wasn’t systemically trying to destroy America. Trump is.
Now, the question of whether trump actually knows what he’s doing is legitimate. I’m not sure he actually does. He just sees his bank account keep growing and doesn’t care how. So at best it’s willful ignorance. I legitimately think he’s too stupid (or maybe it’s cognitive decline, or a combo of the two), to actually understand what he’s doing though. Then again that whole power thing is totally true for the massively narcissistic trump.
Reagan is absolutely on my top 10 worst people ever list, but I don’t think he would have allowed DOGE or the like to do what they did. Then again, he did appoint Kissinger to advisory roles even knowing what he had done in the past or places like Cambodia so….. I may have changed my mind. Fuck Reagan too.
It’s complicated but I think trump’s evil trumps Reagan’s.
I think the way to sum up the difference is Reaganites had a wildly different vision for America than you or I, but they still (to some degree) believed what they were doing was "for the good of the country" (while enriching their buddies, of course).
It's obvious that Trump's entire philosophy is to promote what is best for him. The country merely gets in the way.
Both evil, but at least Reagan could claim some measure of care about the country.
The work week needs to be reduced. 40 hours a week is simply too much, especially as ai automates things. So many jobs are just bullshit “pretending to do work” or pointless grinding/standing around.
It’s a relic of an era that no longer exists. Society doesn’t need everyone working 40 hours a week constantly anymore.
But instead of rational solutions, we’re gonna head straight to a boomer geriatric oligarchy where the only people well off are old rich stockholders.
> I'm genuinely fearful that in a couple of years AI layoffs will be higher than ever and this administration won't have a plan for those affected.
This is a certainty, what's there to be fearful about?
Oh, you're fearful of the consequences of that happening. Ah well, gonna suck. People will die. People will lead lives of hopelessness and desperation.
That’s why they’re deploying the national guard to cities and federalizing police right now. Eventually it will be comply or go work as a slave in the prison system. They aren’t going to try to help or fix anything.
Artificial intelligence my ass. So you had 10 people, now you have 5. You know what your competitors have? Also 10 people, now with AI help. It's the Red Queen race:
Unfortunately the economy people want to believe is "normal" is the one that has infinite, high-paying, throwaway jobs. Financed by debt no one could dream to pay back.
That's one way to surge inflation, and actually hurt a bunch of people. Good luck ever getting people to realize that their immediate marginal convenience, may not truly be the best in the long run.
Speaking of AI taking jobs, I wanted to float this idea on here. My co-worker and I were talking about the possibility of our finance jobs eventually being replaced by AI. Now I’m not huge believer in the “AI will replace just about every white collar job”, but I do think it’s going to replace a good chunk of entry level jobs here soon.
What I proposed is the idea that for every payroll job replaced, the controlling company has to pay an extra income/corporate tax. I’m not saying it would be the full amount through the SS, Medicare, etc a normal headcount would be, but close to maybe to 75-80% of that amount. AI jobs need to be considered or counted as an employee.
If AI is going to do what all these C-level executives dream about, we’re going to move closer to a demand of some sort of UBI, and a possible way to pay for it could/should be a tax burden placed on these outsourcing companies.
I assumed someone smarter than me had come up with something like that… but secretly hoped I was being a little creative lol.
I’m not going to lie, it’s taking an embarrassing amount of time for me to come around on the Bernie/AOC/Warren way of thinking, but consider me a vested follower of theirs.
My big concern for "AI" is that the migration to t is going to royally screw everything up because it's not actually real "AI." It's a massive "next word predictor" algorithm in its current form without any actual thought behind it. In my field, I have fuddled around with AI but it has frequently spit out blatant errors because it pulls incorrect, false, or outdated data/words to form its narrative. We are going to start introducing innumerable errors into every field and people will just blindly accept these results because it's the "AI" so it must be right.
Yup. Just last night I saw a movie in the park, Mamma Mia. I see a background actress that looks identical to Phoebe Waller-Bridge and so Google it, AI comes up first and says she wasn't in the first but was in the second as a character called Helena Shaw. A quick Wikipedia search shows that Helena Shaw is her Indiana Jones character and she wasn't in either.... Like this shit is easy to check, and it is just so fucking wrong but everyone's hooked on it and it's like... Fucking why?
AI is going to poison itself into a useless death spiral when not curated in closed/controlled boxes with the help of idiots who think they are God manifest and only produce truth.
Robert Reich was already talking about this years ago too, and corporations using AI as employees should be required to fund universal health care and universal basic income programs.
How do you actually track and define that, though? Companies expand and contract positions at will. Advertised positions might be real, or they might be phantom roles. A new hire might slot into an established pay line, or an entirely new role could be created because the company wants them but doesn't have a clean slot for them already.
And what of roles that aren't officially eliminated, but the employees can take on more duties than before due to use of AI tools?
And if roles do decrease, how do you delineate if that's due to "AI" (which most people mean LLMs) or some other process efficiency?
Basically, the myth of AI outright replacing full jobs is mostly just that, a myth. No real business is able to say "We had a pay line approved for another junior dev, but instead we'll just spin up another instance of ChatGPT agentic mode and Sr Developer Jim can manage it." Rather, AI will be a tool to enhance existing job productivity. You'll gradually find you need fewer junior developers not because you have a host of agentic AIs as "jr dev 1, 2, 3" but because seniors can more easily and quickly do the work of junior devs.
So how do you separate that from normal process improvements?
Only thing I can see is taxing folks on "tokens used" (again, assuming LLMs) which invites its own host of issues, but now you've made it a use tax rather than trying to shoehorn the idea of an agentic AI into the traditional "job" role.
All of these all valid points, and I wouldn’t put it past companies/corporations to get creative around that ideas of naming/numbering AI employees differently to effectively avoid tax responsibilities. I would “assume” that whom ever would implement a rule like this, would be smart enough to figure out ways to keep businesses from outright tax avoidance.
>Despite the scale of layoffs, unemployment remains in the low 4 percent range, suggesting that many displaced workers are having luck finding new roles.
I call bullshit on this. I don't think many are finding new roles, or new equivalent roles.
Fake news. Fire the statistician and insert one who'll lie. In the end, the GOP led welfare states will suffer the most. They've been subsidized by the federal government to keep local taxes low.
Why isn’t it considered a foreign act of war and insider act of treason to take multiple millions of jobs from a country at the expense of the local voting population? What if instead of jobs it was kidnapped people? Who voted for this? It happens left or right.
What if a country was taking millions of Americans and their intellectual property instead? How does this benefit the voter? Some outsourcing is fine.
Outsourcing everything? Hmmmm, I dunno. What happens when the local pop stops spending? I guess we’re counting on the remaining 10% which is 90% boomers to support the economy during their “retirement” (just working the same as usual and taking up space that could go to the next generation)
This is why initiatives like global minimum corporate tax or global human rights etc. Are noble for trying to address (though good luck getting entitled rich assholes to push those things through)
Highest layoffs since... May, or September of last year if you want pre-DOGE. In fact, Challenger layoffs in January, February, March, April, May, August, and September of 2024 were all higher. But doom and gloom now? Wonder what changed.
I am so ambivalent about all of this. I don't the economy to tank and for people (including me) to suffer needlessly. But goddamn I don't think anything short of economic catastrophe is going to wake up Trump supporters about how fucking awful he is, so bring it on I guess.
"Considering the past decade (2015-2025), last month’s announced cuts are still above the average of 60,398." (from Challenger, Gray & Christmas's website itself)
With most growth in healthcare and a few other lower wage sectors, all that's propping up the numbers is the AI bubble that will pop eventually. And with tariffs that will really hit hard by the holiday season, expensive debt, and a president hell bent on burning the economy down to fund billionaires, things are only going to get much, much worse and aren't likely to improve over the next few years.
Also, can we really trust the unemployment numbers coming from underfunded, under resourced, agencies that do their best to give an accurate picture but have been unable to capture what all of us see in our lives?
The overpromise of AI as a tool to replace labor is sure going to hurt like hell when the dust settles and we/our corporate overlords realize how badly it’s underdelivered.
Also, what are all these people supposed to do with no jobs? How do they pay for your product being manufactured by machines? How do we replace the remaining senior staff members when they retire and there’s no juniors beneath them?
Is the us economy collapsing yet? Because I need this to fulfill my dystopian fantasy so my incessant anxiety and depression can feel justified despite living in the easiest time on earth in a first world country I’m literally shaking at everything because it oppresses me
As someone that works for Home Depot…. Sales are down, majority of stores aren’t hitting projections, foot traffic is down and you can tell people are trying to limit what they spend. Contractors tell me it’s rough out there, hard to find work or people willing and able to do projects on their house. It’s a bleak outlook that is just seemingly getting worse.
Oh, and the prices have been going up but that hasn’t completely started yet. The company had placed giant orders earlier in the year to stock the warehouses before tariffs hit to help stave off price increases but it’s only a matter of time.
So, yeah this sucks. On a personal level, student loans starting back up makes my household lose any buying power. I have no choice but to not spend money.
I know you're a conservative larping as a woke liberal, but.... eh, is it really though?
Birth rates are declining all over the world, people have a hard time meeting other people, religious groups are consumed by conspiracy theories. It's easy if you want to get food, harder if you want to do anything human outside of getting food.
I really don't understand this mentality, and it is never backed up by facts. I've only been alive since the mid 80's and I'd rather be living in no fewer than 10 other years I've already lived under than live right now. Probably closer to 20. Like 1993-2013. Multiple market crashes, 9/11, multiple wars, Katrina, the 2000 election, AIDS still going rampant at the beginning, and I'd still take that 20 year period over right now and not think twice about it.
If you want to talk about "easiest time on Earth for humans, ever, including prehistory", then we need to incorporate evolution and how humans evolved.
If birth rates are below 2 in most first world countries, then from a natural selection point of view, it cannot be the easiest time on Earth ever, because a declining population implies certain genes are being selected for over others.
If you want to limit it to modern times, then you have to admit the 1950s (in the US) and 1990s were much better times than the present.
> Certain genes are always being selected over others.
Not necessarily, you can have balancing selection where allele frequencies remain constant in a population.
With some societies having replacement rates below 1.0 (so the population halves every new generation), it's hard to imagine anything like balancing selection is happening in first world societies.
life quality in general is already on the decline with the peak of "easy time" being the 90s and early 2000s imho. or even the 50s, from an economic viewpoint, when a factory worker could afford a house and family with one salary. the anyway, the easiest time is behind us.
Look, it's cool and all that you're all good, congrats. But still doesnt change the fact that less and less young people are able to afford a home, more and more people are buying groceries using buy now-pay later, more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck and are one emergency away from being homeless, and a multitude of other indicators that the economy is indeed collapsing.
Again, I am elated that you're in a better position. But the point is that less and less people are
It is for those who live in rural areas, especially. For living in a first world country, many of them live a second world life, and it's getting worse.
But as long as Larry Ellison can own 95% of Molokai, it's all good.
Job posting on a lot of sites are mostly scams to get your ssn, birthday, etc. Make sure you research the company before blindly applying. We’re in the age of you’re fucked and you will get fucked harder if you’re down.
The economy is absolutely in the toilet right now and the white house is sweeping it under the rug. Every industry is facing layoffs or hiring freezes. They'll only be able to deny it for so long.
[OP] Ok_Seat5245 | 5 months ago
"The surge in layoffs in 2025 is due to a mix of government downsizing, corporate restructuring and the growing effects of artificial intelligence. Public agencies, tech firms and retailers are leading the cuts."
developheasant | 5 months ago
Missed the offshoring part.
iMpact980 | 5 months ago
Artificial Intelligence is just code for Affordable India.
My tech company has leadership, GTM, and support here in the US.
Our product development is almost entirely based in India. Our product is also broken 80% of the time so take that as you will.
Bodoblock | 5 months ago
That's dumb. You can't have serious product development or engineering based out of India. So many legacy companies that don't care about the tech offshore and then wonder why they can't build good tech.
Lemurians | 5 months ago
My company has just started using India based teams for jobs that I would never have thought should be outsourced, and the early results are bearing that out. So many baffling errors. Not saying they won't ever improve or there aren't smart, capable people there who we'll eventually find, but the early returns are bad.
Fearless-Edge714 | 5 months ago
I think it’s more that the people who are cheap to outsource to aren’t the best India has to offer. Usually the most capable people have permanent positions or they can demand visas to come to US or Europe to live and work in person.
awildstoryteller | 5 months ago
This is the fundamental truth; outsourcing to India or anywhere else is just choosing to hire people who are almost certainly less capable to do the job. It's a defensible choice, but anyone who believes hiring people with less competency for less money is possible has forgotten the time, cost, quality metric. It doesn't magically go away by hiring someone in another country.
perk11 | 5 months ago
The truth is in the middle. You can absolutely hire cheaper than in the US in India or elsewhere, but you want to be paying at least 60% of the US salary, treat the outsource people the way you would local employees and have their managers be in the US. I've seen this work well in multiple companies.
awildstoryteller | 5 months ago
Cheaper yes. Obviously. Cheaper for the same quality? Maybe in individual cases, but as mentioned above, anyone with a quality education is going to be working on an H1B in the US anyways.
perk11 | 5 months ago
> anyone with a quality education is going to be working on an H1B in the US anyways.
Beyond not everybody wanting to emigrate to the US, even when they do, H1B is a lottery system, the chance of getting a visa each year was about 30%. Education is also not necessarily required to be a productive professional.
That job market is much bigger than H1B.
VenBarom68 | 5 months ago
Do you really think everybody on the planet wants to live in the US? Europe is vastly superior, most high quality talent is not going to bother with US in current year.
> Cheaper for the same quality?
Yes. As someone who has worked with people all around the globe, you guys are vastly over estimating the quality and quantity of your work.
Outsourcing going badly is a management problem, not a people in Madagascar are too stupid to produce high quality work problem.
Slggyqo | 5 months ago
Not everyone is willing to abandon their entire family and their history in order to make more money.
And with outsourcing growing to be big business, the gap in quality of life between an outsourced engineer in India and an engineer in the US is smaller than it’s ever been.
Imaginary-Creme5071 | 5 months ago
Yeah ive this play out differently with my mom and dad. My moms company just goes for the cheapest bfs possible from india. Majority of the time it leads to crazy issues. And the few dudes that are actually competent/talented are only in that position because of some life circumstances. They might've not gone to a great school or they needed a job ASAP or something. the moment they get their feet wet, they're gone for greener pastures at a better company for better pay
My dad's company is the total opposite. they actually pay them a good income relative to where they live, and treat them normally. Their work is fantastic according to my dad with the only issue being communication usually because of the time gap.
greenroom628 | 5 months ago
this is it, right here. companies either ignore or fail to realize this... that in a global economy, labor can flow two ways and there's a reason that the labor is cheap. because all the skilled workers left for other opportunities in other countries willing to take them.
lahimatoa | 5 months ago
This has been on about a 10-year cycle for the last few decades. Management discovers employing people in India is crazy cheap, and they get stars in their eyes about skyrocketing profits.
So they give it a shot, it sucks, they give up on it, and swear to never do it again. Until the next time. They're idiots.
SouthernSoul22 | 5 months ago
Yep.
In my experience at different orgs, it's because they (management) have short-term incentive to do so (promotions, bonuses, can point to it for their next move elsewhere) vs long-term employees who, if they're lucky, get to watch it get set up and burn down every few years.
Prior_Coyote_4376 | 5 months ago
Companies that outsource to save money are also going to cut corners when finding talent overseas. You get what you pay for.
future_web_dev | 5 months ago
We got nothing but spaghetti code from them that would break constantly.
tehifimk2 | 5 months ago
The place i work for offshored all our service desks and monitoring to India. We have somewhat important customers paying for 24 hour support. Customers like the national police, power generation, IRD, lots of core public services.
We don't have after hours support anymore. I still get on call allowance, the customers still pay for after hours support, but the outfit in India doesn't monitor anything or escalate anything. If there's an exchange issue, for example, and the police cannot send or receive email at night time I'll find out about it when I log on in the morning.
We've been trying for months to get the Indian company to do the job we are paying them for, but they just won't. We've had a huge NOC locally for decades that was amazing. When the company sacked all 200 people working there and offshored it I knew it was going to be crap. But no idea it would be this bad.
poply | 5 months ago
Our cybersecurity team is in India. It's a pain in the ass to work with them through the language, cultural, and temporal barriers. It literally takes weeks just to figure out what they are asking for. As a full stack dev + devops engineer I told them I was interested in moving into security team and they told me it's just going to be staffed by Indians from now on.
RealisticForYou | 5 months ago
And what about the time difference? Trying to hook up with engineers with a 13 hour difference can be brutal when trying to develop anything. I've known U.S. engineers who have quit their jobs because they were tired of the hours necessary to manage an Indian team. Much of the failure when working with people from India is the time difference.
Prior_Coyote_4376 | 5 months ago
You can, but most companies looking to save money by outsourcing are also going to save money by cutting corners everywhere.
handsoapdispenser | 5 months ago
Low-cost Indian staffing firms tend to have terrible culture, but it's just pure racism to say India can't do product development. I've used software products that were wholly bootstrapped in India that work great. I've also had a lot of success with teams in South American and Eastern Europe. Americans aren't all that special.
Neuchacho | 5 months ago
You're not wrong. Most of these companies are usually not interested in using anything other than low-cost Indian staffing firms so that's all most people know in that context. Similar issue when it comes to Chinese manufacturing. None of these cheap off-shoring outfits are interested in paying what Apple pays for decent manufacturing or putting in the work to ensure QA. They just want cheap, good-enough garbage. Chinese companies are simply willing to give it to them for bottom-barrel pricing so China broadly gets the unfair association.
It's not these countries' fault this is what so many companies actively seek out.
Slggyqo | 5 months ago
You absolutely can, it’s just not easy.
It’s a corporate skill just like any other. Companies that have invested a lot of time and money into it get a lot of value.
On the other hand, if the company was already incapable of building a good team in the US, culture, language, and distance exacerbate the existing management issues.
kbarney345 | 5 months ago
Currently watching this right now with my company. We are babysitting a team in India that is working on the redesign for one of our sites. It has been constant call issues, weather outages, and issues. Not blaming the people, I have worked with incredibly talented people overseas, but it's just so impractical for a remote tech situation.
Dos-Commas | 5 months ago
I mean, Amazon did try to have 1000 Affordable Indians watch security footage of Whole Foods so their customers could walk out of the store without checking out.
SouthernSoul22 | 5 months ago
Same. But media not tech. But they even have tech leadership positions in India. Tech offshored to India, financial/admin work to Mexico. Cuts and replacements planned out into January.
All for that sweet cash flow (because the execs switched their bonus structure to that once they tanked the stock price).
AliveInCLE | 5 months ago
Up until January I used to work for EY (Ernst & Young). Their big new shiny offshore hub is in Argentina. They’re sending hundreds of jobs there. Has nothing to do with AI. Just cheaper than paying Americans.
HedonisticFrog | 5 months ago
Wasn't there a company that was advertised as AI but just turned out to be Indian workers?
Lostinthestarscape | 5 months ago
Many
Jaded-Ad262 | 5 months ago
Remember the good old days when we offshored our tech to the Japanese, a people who approach paper folding and rice prep with the greatest of care, let alone microchips.
[OP] Ok_Seat5245 | 5 months ago
100% - offshoring has been taking jobs for years
handsoapdispenser | 5 months ago
Unless it's sharply increased recently, then that's not what's driving the current market.
CQC_EXE | 5 months ago
I can only go by my own experience, but there is renewed interest in offshoring, as now these Indian teams have AI to assist them.
Conscious-Quarter423 | 5 months ago
The Trump-GOP tax law enacted in December 2017 creates clear incentives for American-based corporations to move operations and jobs abroad, including a zero percent tax rate on many profits generated offshore.
https://itep.org/trump-gop-tax-law-encourages-companies-to-move-jobs-offshore-and-new-tax-cuts-wont-change-that/
No_Reception_8907 | 5 months ago
and most companies stocks and profits have never been higher so... dont fix whats not broken eh
shapeofthings | 5 months ago
Kind of funny that remote work is taboo but offshoring is all the rage...
OrangeJr36 | 5 months ago
That's going to be inevitable with the immigration crackdown and an aging country. If a company is desperate for labor and they can't get enough in the US, they will go to another market where there is enough labor.
sirlorax | 5 months ago
It's gotten a lot worse now that people think Indians across the sea can do the same job with use of the internet/ai. I'm not saying some can't but my God some of them I work with are unbearable and useless. Terrible communication is the biggest issue.
That being said, it's two Indians for the price of one American and us Americans can be just as useless.
Common_Poetry3018 | 5 months ago
My company’s tech support is largely in India. It’s absolutely terrible. Part of the problem is time zone: they can’t help me if they’re awake and I’m asleep. A second problem is language: they speak perfect English, but I can’t understand them because of their heavy accents. A third problem is simple competence: they do not understand the software we are using, how it works (or doesn’t), and everything has to be escalated, causing us to lose productivity. Automation doesn’t work for this problem at all.
Conscious-Quarter423 | 5 months ago
India's team have a morning and evening shift
Prior_Coyote_4376 | 5 months ago
Companies that want to outsource just in order to save money are going to cut corners everywhere. Other countries’ companies who hire Americans like the experience a lot more because you can’t save money hiring an American, so only companies looking to invest in a talented employee end up hiring. This MBA corporate culture is horrible and corrupts everywhere.
sirlorax | 5 months ago
I understand some jobs don't take a high level of communication. I don't know if it's the culture there or just a people by people basis but I've only connected with two separate "types". One is very headstrong, with poor communication and believes they are the God of the Earth despite little knowledge. The other is SUPER helpful, beyond a lot of my American colleagues and extremely intelligent. Probably just the industry and person to person but it's really never in between. Probably my bias. But yes pieces of paper do not make you capable of doing a job
Prior_Coyote_4376 | 5 months ago
I think it’s just people being people. Once you apply enough filters and hoops to jump through, you end up with people either enough of an asshole to force their way through or people proactively growth-oriented. A lot of other countries are hyper-competitive culturally compared to the US too, which adds to that split.
SouthernSoul22 | 5 months ago
I think there could be cultural aspects that are being overlook too (any Indians feel free to hop in and critique). Vast generalizations ahead based on limited experience working there and with teams out of India:
From my American perspective, it seemed that the lower level grunts were expected to do as their told, whether that's follow scripts, whatever. There's no allowance for critical facility, deviation, or creativity in problem-solving.
If you're in some sort of supervisory role, you're more than allowed to be as much as an asshole as you want, even to a level of verbal abuse. You rule with a firm hand. Also, I can't think of a single female in a position of power, even in minor supervisor roles.
Working with Indian people outside of India has been vastly different, assuming due to education, background, etc.
Cross-cultural work is very interesting.
sirlorax | 5 months ago
Yea there aren't a lot of female supervisors in general but I just got out of a meeting where an Indian man was talking down to my lady supervisor with higher ups in the room. I can't believe she didn't go off on him, I was about to. Not only was he wrong, when he was right he was repeating what she said but in two hundred more words.
SouthernSoul22 | 5 months ago
That sucks.
Sadly, see it too often still in the US as well. In full transparency, one of the few things I can point to myself as finally on the way to being an adult is learning to listen better, not interrupt, and not try and be a fixer (at least in my personal life). Has taken years though.
Still have coworkers that will run rampant over a female when she's talking.
Prior_Coyote_4376 | 5 months ago
It’s the same as the companies we have in America: the ones that keep their employees on a leash or script aren’t trying to keep top talent or do a creative, well-thought out job. The managers in these environments see themselves as having the job of whipping people into completing the instructions to some very simple KPIs. This reinforces itself in the culture of cheap outsourced labor then. The really good talent in other countries work for the best companies domestically, and have a quality of life comparable to the best workers here if not better due to the inequality.
SouthernSoul22 | 5 months ago
True.
I wish in my twenty years of working I could've worked for a company that had execs that thought for themselves, were long-term oriented, and not dependent on consultants or cargo-culting ideas from the pop business books.
Maybe the rest of the world is the same. I don't know.
johnjohnjohn87 | 5 months ago
I've definitely had some support engineers that are obviously not going to be stuck in support very long. They are easy to work with and will outgrow that role quickly. It's a bummer, because I know I won't be working with them again.
Conscious-Quarter423 | 5 months ago
The Trump-GOP tax law enacted in December 2017 creates clear incentives for American-based corporations to move operations and jobs abroad, including a zero percent tax rate on many profits generated offshore.
https://itep.org/trump-gop-tax-law-encourages-companies-to-move-jobs-offshore-and-new-tax-cuts-wont-change-that/
MakeMoneyNotWar | 5 months ago
The cost is more like 5 Indians for one American, and those outsourced jobs are high prestige in India, so there’s like 1000 applications for each position.
My firm pays our Indian counterpart 1/5 US, but the Indian counterparts live like kings. I spoke to one when they visited and they said that they can hire full time housekeeper, childcare, cook for a family of 5 for like a couple hundred USD a month.
My staff in India have way higher living standards than me, their US manager, when I make easily 10x their staff, 5x their managers.
Baseballnuub | 5 months ago
> If a company is desperate for labor and they can't get enough in the US
No such thing. Not wanting to pay people more doesn't equal there not being enough labor. That's bullshit.
Toasted_Waffle99 | 5 months ago
AI = Actually India
TurbulentRadish8113 | 5 months ago
Has that rapidly increased in 2026?
Is there data on this?
Thanks!
AccordingShower369 | 5 months ago
They always miss it somehow.
TheRealTexasGovernor | 5 months ago
Don't forget the increased costs in imports which neccearily lead to job loss.
Possible-Nectarine80 | 5 months ago
Just found out yesterday that the company I work for is going to outsource several positions in our IT dept. They are currently training their replacements, who are based in India. It's seriously F'd up. It's at least 6 positions that I am aware of.
SurinamPam | 5 months ago
And the automation.
Pygmy_Nuthatch | 5 months ago
Can you point to a metric that shows a rising rate of offshoring?
Dodger_Blue17 | 5 months ago
Where I work they encouraged all managers to hire remote in Mexico but don’t want American employees to work remote because they want to see them in the office….. when they fly in from the states they live in.
ArcticSilver2k | 5 months ago
Essentially, govt downsizing to redistribute money towards the billionaires , minuscule amount, and probably will end up costing more anyways as the govt will have to hire more expensive contractures, corporate restructuring to compensate for the increase in tariffs, trying to maximize profits while saving money laying off people, also less business and investment therefore people are not needed either, and then there’s AI that is replacing programmers, writers, and other jobs people went to college for years.
Kael_Durandel | 5 months ago
Extractive institutions gonna extract
HandakinSkyjerker | 5 months ago
post-extraction economy when?
Kael_Durandel | 5 months ago
Unfortunately we haven’t overcome the iron law of oligarchy so who knows
HandakinSkyjerker | 5 months ago
Next Floor!
neon415 | 5 months ago
I see what you did there. Pretty sure they are already circling around waiting for carcasses to bite off.
RadiantHC | 5 months ago
No mention of offshoring
Conscious-Quarter423 | 5 months ago
The Trump-GOP tax law enacted in December 2017 creates clear incentives for American-based corporations to move operations and jobs abroad, including a zero percent tax rate on many profits generated offshore.
https://itep.org/trump-gop-tax-law-encourages-companies-to-move-jobs-offshore-and-new-tax-cuts-wont-change-that/
findingmike | 5 months ago
Forgot the tariffs and Trump's policies of economic uncertainty too.
techaaron | 5 months ago
Just say Tarriffs.
lahimatoa | 5 months ago
That's a big part of it, but it's not that simple. Things usually aren't.
themonkeysbuild | 5 months ago
Nothing ever is but if I can highlight tariffs as a reason I totally will.
techaaron | 5 months ago
*gestures vaguely* "Late stage capitalism?"
thats the best i can offer lol
lahimatoa | 5 months ago
The term "late-stage capitalism" was coined by German economist Werner Sombart in the early 1900s. He used it to describe the stage of capitalism emerging at that time, characterized by the rise of large corporations and financial markets.
Apparently the late stage can last over 100 years.
techaaron | 5 months ago
lahimatoa | 5 months ago
Mainsplaining is the misandrist way of saying "condescensing". Anyone can be condescending, pretending this is a special thing only men do is sexist.
And yes, I'm being condescending here.
techaaron | 5 months ago
> "Well actually..."
😆
hidraulik-2 | 5 months ago
Man can’t handle so much of wining. Money is pouring in from all the sides.
CruisinThruLife2 | 5 months ago
And tariffs. And the orange taco's ignorance. And now...they are just going to try to hide the unempolyment figures. SMH.
teabaggins76 | 5 months ago
Nope, the NEW NUMBERS are out, and everything is great. Better than ever. Bidens fault anyway
Xollector | 5 months ago
Government downsizing, but the govt budget deficit went up a record even with 200+ billion tariff coming in. One has to wonder where the money has gone
ugh_this_sucks__ | 5 months ago
> the growing effects of artificial intelligence
Yeah, gonna need to see some data on that. Not saying it's not true, but is it AI replacing jobs or execs firing people and using AI as an excuse?
CheesyCheckers3713 | 5 months ago
In other words, literally everything else but #MAGA.
coke_and_coffee | 5 months ago
So far, it’s not clear that AI has displaced even a single worker.
avid-learner-bot | 5 months ago
It's pretty wild that layoffs have gone up so much since early 2020, over 62 thousand people lost their jobs in July alone, which is like nearly double what it was last year. I mean, how are we even handling this with AI taking over more roles? It's not just numbers, it's real people facing uncertainty, and the system needs to adapt before it's too late or we're going to see a whole lot of folks left behind with no safety net.
Voeno | 5 months ago
We are already passed the “folks left behind with no safety net” well beyond that point people are fucked and we have a pedophile president in charge leading it all
the_red_scimitar | 5 months ago
Don't forget convicted sex offender who shouldn't be near children. Oh, and 34 felony convictions.
BrownBear5090 | 5 months ago
Yeah we are closing in on a million homeless people in the country. Many many people already left behind
knotatumah | 5 months ago
Top that off with crushing absolutely every industry with tariffs inside & out and we're just determined to see this economy implode.
ryanstephendavis | 5 months ago
Yeah, WTF... Some of these articles are trash... I haven't seen mention that a lot of spending has stopped or is being reduced due to uncertainty of tariffs and increase in tariffs
LaoBa | 5 months ago
Can't risk to anger the Orange, I guess.
d0mini0nicco | 5 months ago
Jobs reports going forward should accurately reflect these numbers. /s
the_red_scimitar | 5 months ago
The system has been partly dismantled, with that process ongoing, by an administration that doesn't see the point of helping anybody but oligarchs and themselves.
Cappyc00l | 5 months ago
Don’t worry, we have a pres now who openly accepts bribes ai tech moguls and is committed to fighting unemployment by manipulating the reported numbers.
Rosatos_Hotel | 5 months ago
Time to try Universal Basic Income?
lahimatoa | 5 months ago
Logically and morally, if the robots take enough of the jobs, UBI should step in to take care of the people. But I don't think that'll happen until things get REALLY bad, and the threat of complete societal collapse is extremely obvious. Our government isn't great at seeing problems before they happen and mitigating them in advance.
badluckbrians | 5 months ago
They'll give you UBI, but in exchange they'll take away Medicaid and SNAP and everything else. So you will get $1,000 per month with which to decide whether you want to eat, get healthcare, or sleep in a moldy basement sublet.
lahimatoa | 5 months ago
And when everyone starts dying, and there's no one left to buy shit from Amazon, society collapses, and no one wins. The oligarchs don't even win in that situation. I imagine they could be persuaded to continue a fake version of capitalism where they're taxed at like 50% to support the citizenry, BUT at least people can keep buying stuff, and they can see Profits Go Up, which is all they wanted in the first place. Our only hope.
dyslexda | 5 months ago
UBI in an AI-dominated world is more of a dystopia than people think. Basically, you'll have a technocratic oligarchy where the tech billionaires pull the strings of the government, which decides exactly how much money you get as UBI. UBI will be enough to survive, and probably buy some subscriptions to NetflixAI and the like, but not enough to thrive or develop.
UBI is a great concept when it just forms a baseline safety net and you can easily supplement it with as much extra income as you want. It develops into a bit of a horror story when it's assumed you only get as much as the government thinks you deserve (which translates to just barely enough to avoid civil disorder).
TrexPushupBra | 5 months ago
Still not as bad as the nightmare we have coming which is an ai dominated world with no income support and mass arrests of people for being homeless
dyslexda | 5 months ago
Depends what you think is scarier, I guess. Civil unrest and the chance at significant structural change (and the risk of just collapse), or quiet compliance and control?
Pretend-Marsupial258 | 5 months ago
Lol, lmao. Our UBI will be dumpster diving, if the cops don't catch us first. Though I guess they (usually) feed you in jail?
TrexPushupBra | 5 months ago
Sorry, that money is going to goons so they can fuck up even more industries by deporting people.
Downtown_Isopod_9287 | 5 months ago
no one has ever explained how ubi works with inflation
Inflation went crazy during covid and while some of that was lack of supply it was also because the government was printing checks and giving them to everyone. Newsflash: If markets know everyone is receiving some minimum amount of income, they will immediately raise prices in any areas they can to reflect that.
Flying_Birdy | 5 months ago
It's not even AI. Aside from maybe the tech space, the AI vendors are no where near a point where they can service large enterprise clients. AI is just an excuse to temporarily have employees do more with less, with the hope that eventually, AI will generate the productivity gains to cover that shortfall.
The jobs market is tough mainly because companies are scared. All the C-suite people are bracing for a big downturn in the economy and so they are trimming payroll or just not hiring. I've never seen so much market exuberance yet with so much of the big institutional leadership being terrified of what's to come.
-113points | 5 months ago
Yes. AI is not yet reliable to make any sort of decisions whatsoever.
It only can do very repetitive jobs with nearly no responsibility.
BitteredFed | 5 months ago
This is a sensible answer. Thank you
iphonesoccer420 | 5 months ago
This has happened a few times throughout history however we have always prevailed but it does take time and some adjusting. I don’t think we fully know what the answer is yet.
Petrichordates | 5 months ago
There is no answer until we figure out a way to fix americans' broken brains.
iphonesoccer420 | 5 months ago
What about fixing the people’s brains who thinks people’s brains need to be fixed?
Vickster86 | 5 months ago
I have been laid off 3 times since the beginning of Covid including in January of this year. I hate it here.
Thin-Image2363 | 5 months ago
We just need to cut taxes again to the rich and it’ll trickle down, baby!
tapwater86 | 5 months ago
Wow ok. No concern for record corporate profits I see! /s
tengallonvisor | 5 months ago
I’m one of these that lost their job last month. My role wasn’t replaced just dispersed amongst my former team. Manufacturing in the oil and gas industry.
coke_and_coffee | 5 months ago
So far, it’s not clear that AI has displaced even a single worker.
Zadiuz | 5 months ago
You think our current administration is doing ANYTHING to offset the rampant offshoring and layoffs due to AI?
I don't think either political party would handle keeping up with AI's impact on business, but I know the current administration would do significantly worse than the alternatives.
ohh-welp | 5 months ago
Stepping back, unemployment is still below average. If it does climb up, the rates will go down and investments and hiring should jump back up.
The early 2020s isn’t a realistic benchmark, it was an era of free-flowing money, with unlimited printing and funding for both corporations and citizens.
uglypatty | 5 months ago
WOW, I am genuinely surprised to see negative jobs data after Trump fired the BLS chief without cause and installed a loyalist. I truly assumed the next report we saw would just be a note scribbled in crayon: “Trump make many jobs. Best jobs ever.”
BostonPanda | 5 months ago
Give it a quarter
Cosmic_Gumbo | 5 months ago
Calls on Sharpie
TrexPushupBra | 5 months ago
That assumes they bother releasing a monthly report.
Ogthugbonee | 5 months ago
The source is not BLS data, but a private companies own analysis
GoldStacked | 5 months ago
It’s ok, all those laid off people can just get factory work because manufacturing is going to boom. Right?
Republicans are always shit for the country. ALWAYS!
ProfessionalOil2014 | 5 months ago
Nah, they’re great for the country! Haven’t you ever been to the great republican states of Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and North Dakota?
They’re centers of finance, technology, and quality of life!
Thin-Image2363 | 5 months ago
I’ve had maga tell me that Mississippi supports states like California.
These people live in another reality.
that_cat_on_the_wall | 5 months ago
Ah yes the dream of grinding every day in a factory. The children yearn.
Conscious-Quarter423 | 5 months ago
Republicans always trash the economy, and Democrats are the ones that clean up the mess
Mammoth-Play3797 | 5 months ago
Uh, ar you dum?? My favorit child rapist sed the econummy is doing the bestest in the intire univers, so its the bestestest. I cant beleeve yud lie like that, typicul librul idiut. I cant wate to vote fore him agin
n0debtbigmuney | 5 months ago
Highest stock market in HISTORY. record breaking profits AND liberals pouting. Talking about a WIN WIN!!!
CyberSmith31337 | 5 months ago
I've been applying since May, and I have gotten 0 interviews to date. I've been working for 26 years, managed projects ranging from $1mn - $50mn.
Not even a single screening call. My RIF kicks in September 1st. I've probably sent out over 700 applications.
So when I read about how "great" the economy is, I just roll my eyes. Thank god I'm smart enough to have saved up a nest egg for 5+ years, because it looks like I'll burn through 1-2 years of that slush fund before I even get a chance to go back to work at the current rate.
ckglle3lle | 5 months ago
Hiring has become an insanely stupid mess. Chances are several of the companies that ghosted/ignored you genuinely are trying to fill positions and likely would have given you an interview but their hiring systems are so broken you're not even getting into an applicant pool even when you do everything "right".
At my last job (MAANG adjacent large tech firm) the recruiter team was constantly churning. Hiring managers routinely punted and deferred responsibilities. Random arbitrary gates were put up to make it effectively impossible for anyone to get through, all while otherwise talking like they needed to fill positions and the headcount budget was cleared. Meanwhile, every team felt strained by task creep to where pretty much everyone was doing at least 1.5 roles worth of work. All while the company posted record profits and still held mass layoffs just the same. Really bleak and bizarre scene, just makes you stop and want to yell what are we even doing? what is any of this? how is this how things are?
DaBiChef | 5 months ago
I'm lucky to have my current job, I've been applying like crazy for months. Not just "linkedin easy apply", and I've had maybe a half dozen interviews, one where I got to the third round. If I'm the lucky one to at least get some responses, even if it doesn't pan out.... It's gunna get real fucking bad real fucking fast
MirabelleApricot | 5 months ago
I'm very sorry for what's happening to you.
And to so many smart hard-working talented people.
Where I live here south of france, a university opened 31 positions for American scientists kicked out by trump. The university received more than 3 hundred good files but only had money for 31, beginning of march the 31 were hired. The head of the university was devastated and said the words from the rejected scientists were "poignant".
When I see what's happening in the US, I find it exactly that : poignant. And the little time it took to change from a few months ago to now is astounding and terrifying.
I do hope you get hired fast. Stories like yours are heartbreaking.
Shot_on_location | 5 months ago
As an American I hate to see the brain drain of scientists leaving the US for other countries. As a human I'm delighted that other countries are picking them up. I hope the groundbreaking work that was being done here can be continued elsewhere!
UgandanPeter | 5 months ago
I don’t know a single person IRL that claims the economy is great, including Trump supporters. At least his first term had the benefit of lingering recovery during Obama, so you can give people the benefit of the doubt that it at least SEEMED like Trump was fixing the economy. At this point I’m sure his supporters are just holding their breath for things to get better while telling themselves the president can’t change the economy overnight
SinisterTitan | 5 months ago
My contract position is ending in a couple weeks and I’ve been job hunting actively for about 6 months now. Over 300 applications at this point and just one screening call that amounted to nothing. 7+ years of production and project management with major companies. Lots of credentials. Tons of positive referrals. Hasn’t helped a lick.
I’ve never had to go past 200 applications and usually I’ve had multiple offers to pick between.
The last month or so it seems like companies haven’t even been posting new roles. I’m genuinely not sure what comes next once I’ve run out of savings in a year.
lahimatoa | 5 months ago
I was laid off last September and have received zero job offers after applying to over 1,000 jobs. It's really bad out there.
TrexPushupBra | 5 months ago
February with 19 years experience.
I can count the interviews on one hand
CyberSmith31337 | 5 months ago
I feel you man. It’s been a miserable experience. Especially because it isn’t about qualifications anymore; it’s about who will take the lowest salary.
DescriptionNo4222 | 5 months ago
People are suffering. I talked a Vegas resident and tourism is indeed down. Ghost town. I am in finance. No one can afford a home unless have serious cash. It is about to get very bad.
benergiser | 5 months ago
if you’re a billionaire.. it’s really dumb to crush everyone beneath you.. because then who will give you money?
super recession officially starts in october.. biggest collapse since the great depression in february..
plan accordingly
Pretend-Marsupial258 | 5 months ago
You can buy up their assets for cheap and rent it back to them. If 5 families are piled into the same house, who cares as long as they pay the rent?
Worse case: it's illegal to be homeless and it IS legal to use prisoners for slave labor.
benergiser | 5 months ago
> Worse case: it's illegal to be homeless and it IS legal to use prisoners for slave labor.
this is the NOW case..
Pretend-Marsupial258 | 5 months ago
Yep, and companies make billions of dollars from prisoner labor.
benergiser | 5 months ago
let’s go back to taxing billionaires a minimum of 70% like we did from 1945-1980 (you know.. back when america was great)
LINK
Treytreytrey333 | 5 months ago
Looking at American consumption over the last 25 years, it seems like the propertied class doesn't have much more left to extract.
Bust it down and start again. It's an American tradition dating all the way back to Alexander Hamilton. The revolution changed the flag, not the ledger.
Gotta wonder if the GENIUS/CLARITY acts are setting the stage. Throughout history when the social powder keg is set to blow, there's always a pivot to new markets with fresh assets and control built in.
>Let the French revolt, we've got guarantees from Hamilton and Morris that the US will pay us.
So the founding fathers, in order to get the deal done, issued the first banking charter. When the charter expired, we went to war again and there was a renewed need for creditors 🔂
Efficient_Ant_4715 | 5 months ago
I was just in Vegas this weekend and it was packed everywhere I went. Lines wrapped around buildings to get into clubs and busy tables til 5am
the_red_scimitar | 5 months ago
Written less than a week ago: "In June of 2024, Las Vegas reported 3,490, 600 visitors. In June 2025, the total dropped to 3,094,800, a decline YoY of 11.3%. Year to date the decline was less severe, dropping from a robust 84.4% through June of 2024 to 82.0 for 2025 through June."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2025/08/08/las-vegas-still-good-to-go-despite-down-visitation-numbers/
echomanagement | 5 months ago
"Ghost town" is hyperbole, but you went during two of the biggest tech conferences of the year (BlackHat/DefCon). The week before, it was very quiet.
jokull1234 | 5 months ago
Definitely not a ghost town, but a 5-10% drop in tourism is devastating. And allegedly the people that are going are tipping less than in recent years, which is awful for the workers.
Saephon | 5 months ago
When the "bad" hotels like Planet Hollywood are charging $25 for 3 hours of parking and $17 for a Coors Light, I don't know why anyone would come. Vegas has followed suit with seemingly every city and industry these days:
Abandon the middle class, and cater to the whales. Businesses are in for a rude awakening when they realize that game only has a few winners.
pulkwheesle | 5 months ago
And yet the data shows that tourism in Vegas (and other places) is indeed down.
Efficient_Ant_4715 | 5 months ago
Down 11%. Which isn’t nothing but certainly not a ghost town
DryProject1840 | 5 months ago
Losing 11% of your sales in a year is catastrophic. This is just bookings as well. Doesn't include people who are still going but may spend less money while in the city.
A lot of people trying to underplay how bad this is. Imagine any industry suddenly losing 11% of all sales in a year. Many would struggle to survive unless the trend changes quickly.
Superb_Advisor7885 | 5 months ago
It's the dm trend that's problematic, not the number. Casinos overall just posted the largest profit on history also. Nevada already leads the nation in unemployment, if this trend continues in slumping sales and declining tourism, you can see that unemployment number continue to increase.
DryProject1840 | 5 months ago
Sure. But that's just the trend in general these days.
So many companies are hitting record profits. But you can only do that for so long. Mass layoffs, price gouging, it works for a short period. Eventually it all collapses though and they know it.
A lot of industries are already feeling it. I'm a Canadian and I go to Disney once a year with my kids. We aren't going this year. The amount of offers I have gotten and the discounts being offered is staggering. Sure, Disney's bottom line is fine right now. The parks are still busy. But they see the larger trend and see the warning lights.
Vegas is the same.
Superb_Advisor7885 | 5 months ago
Like I said, it's the trend that's problematic
BlazeBulker8765 | 5 months ago
I'm not saying your wrong, but this alarmism is the wrong comparison entirely. An 11% shift in sales is completely normal in many industries, if not most.
DryProject1840 | 5 months ago
Sure. But it's usually due to legitimate reasoning.
Vegas' decline is largely in part to America's current attempted bullying of the rest of the world. That's not really something the casinos and city can fix.
When a large portion of visitors comes from Canada, Mexico and the EU, it's not exactly normal. They're literally losing a large percentage of their potential customer base just because.
TrexPushupBra | 5 months ago
Why visit Vegas when ICE is detaining people for looking Hispanic and shopping people to CECOT without any process?
BlazeBulker8765 | 5 months ago
> Vegas' decline is largely in part to America's current attempted bullying of the rest of the world.
Again, I don't disagree, but this:
> That's not really something the casinos and city can fix.
Is still super normal for a lot of businesses. A lot of businesses frequently have outside market, behavior, infrastructure, or even weather/climate changes that cause very dramatic shifts in their sales. They can't fix it, they just have to adapt as well as they can. This is just normal stuff businesses have to deal with that employees don't (as it should be), and often is very stressful for business owners or executives.
To be perfectly clear, I agree that Trump is bullying over countries, and that it is almost certainly bad in the long and short run. I agree that it's going to have knock-on effects like a decline in tourism and that has and will likely hit Vegas hard. I just don't think a -11% YoY number is an effective way to demonstrate it.
If we correlate it with broader tourism, it starts to be more meaningful. If we compare it with an increase in tourism for multiple non-US destinations, that also gets us somewhere because it highlights the theorized outcome much more specifically.
Zealousideal_Oil4571 | 5 months ago
A shift in sales would mean the money is going elsewhere. Where is it going? Is tourism up by a similar amount elsewhere in the US?
onan | 5 months ago
> A shift in sales would mean the money is going elsewhere. Where is it going?
That's not necessarily true. The main defining trait of a broad economic downturn is that there is less total money moving around.
Obviously dollars don't cease to exist, but they can cease to move. That can look, for example, like companies reducing headcount and compensation in favor of hoarding safer investments, resulting in fewer and poorer employees out spending money, resulting in fewer and poorer employees of the companies they would have been spending money with, and so on.
Zealousideal_Oil4571 | 5 months ago
That's what I was getting at. I don't think there has been a shift in sales. I think it's more of a broader downturn in tourism overall, led by international tourists.
onan | 5 months ago
Ah, got it.
I read the previous commenter as meaning a "shift" just in the sense of an amount of deviation from average total, not in the sense of a redirection of that spending elsewhere.
BlazeBulker8765 | 5 months ago
Yes this is part of the question I just posed to DryProject. If we can highlight that tourism for some non-US alternatives went up at the same time Vegas went down, the 11% may be stronger evidence.
I suspect that won't be the case though - I think the uncertainty and trade war bullying caused people to cancel plans, not change them. Which doesn't mean the 11% isn't a concern, it just means we can't prove for sure that it is and that it relates directly / completely to the trade war bullying. Tourism in general could have dropped, or the repeatedly hotter summers every year could make a summer trip to Vegas unappealing, especially combined with financial uncertainty. Plus a lot of Vegas traffic comes from CA's upper middle and rich, which has seen a net out migration for a few years now.
There's a lot of potential causes.
DryProject1840 | 5 months ago
Not so much money spent elsewhere, but I think a lot of people are starting to spend on other alternatives or saving in general.
I'll use my example. Not Vegas, but Orlando was our go to trip. We don't have a trip planned and we usually go yearly with two trips planned out. We instead are opting to put a larger chunk into our house this fall, keeping the dollars in country.
I think Vegas is an interesting one. Largely in part to a drop in international tourism, but I also think they've just been squeezing. Customers for far far too long. Suddenly it's not worth it. Although their profits may be up, a lot of that is because they're charging massive up charges for rooms and food. It's damn near 25 dollars a drink in Vegas now. Short term, you'll get people who will spend. But it's not sustainable in the long term.
Enelson4275 | 5 months ago
A predicted decline of 11% is not a big deal. A decline that is not projected and not prepared for is fairly catastrophic. Jay Forrester in his monumental work on system dynamics, Industrial Dynamics, built a model showing that a 10% unforeseen decline in retail sales ripples through a typical supply chain and results in a more than 80% decline in factory production.
A decrease in demand unforeseen leads to a glut of supply, along with management concerns that demand will continue slipping. I have an extra 10% stock in the store room and only sold 90% of what i usually did in a month, so I monthly order 80% of what I usually do in the expectation that demand may not recover and my extra 10% can cover the gap because I don't have room in the stock room for an extra 20% should sales stay low.
The distribution center now has an extra 20% of what they would normally ship to me sitting in their facility taking up space, on top of whatever padded stock they usually hold. And it's not just my retail store doing this, but all of their customers. They are even more certain that sales will not improve by 20% in the next shipping period, and they already keep a surplus supply to avoid empty shelves (which equal lost sales), so they only order 50% of their usual order from the factory warehouse.
The factory warehouse is now shipping little more than half of what it did the month before, and space becomes a real concern. Even if sales recovered that 10% back in the following month, they can still guess that distribution centers are only going to order around that 50-60% in order for their back-stock to tick down. So they report inventory levels to the factory, and the decision is made to severely cut back on production lines.
Most supply chains are a lot longer than this fictional scenario.
Each step, each economic relationship, exacerbates the problem because you have to account for speed AND acceleration - that the shifts in revenue might be permanent, or might get worse, and that it's the worst time possible to be sitting on a surplus. Labor is another factor, because it is ruled by the same logic but requires training so is less fluid than goods.Take a large restaurant for example. When sales slip 10%, ownership has three choices:
If the slump is short-lived and recovery occurs: (1) is out lost capital in the form of wages, (2) saved wage capital and remains well-positioned, and (3) has limited their business and will need time/investment to recover. All three of these are acceptable, because at any point (2) and (3) can safely do the math on profitability and decide whether or not to exit the industry entirely while still in the green.
If the slump is the new baseline: (1) will burn through cash until they have to lay people off, (2) will continue in business as usual, and (3) can be running efficiently albeit below maximum profit potential. (1) risks destroying the value of the business, (2) is not at risk as long as they continue to maintain capacity that reflects the market, and (3) is sub-optimal but profitable. (2) and (3) are still in the best positions to control their financial destiny.
If the slump accelerates: (1) is without capital in a shifting landscape that they probably cannot weather, (2) is not mititigating the risk of uncertainty and waiting until after the market moves to make decisions, and (3) is business as usual. (3) is the only one well-positioned to survive, or close down, before owners are financially impacted.
Smart businesses will always choose to be (3), because it mitigates the most risk - and a slumping market is a risky market.
BlazeBulker8765 | 5 months ago
> Jay Forrester in his monumental work on system dynamics, Industrial Dynamics, built a model showing that a 10% unforeseen decline in retail sales ripples through a typical supply chain and results in a more than 80% decline in factory production.
Hm, that's a very interesting take on cascading effects. I haven't seen or really pondered anything like that. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm not informed enough to really judge and don't have time to dig right now.
> 2. Layoff 10% of employees, assuming the slump is just the new baseline. > 3. Layoff more than 10% of employees, assuming the slump is still accelerating.
So I'm not trying to be rude or anything, but this sounds very much like something that an economist / statistician who has never actually had to do hiring and firing would say. Finding and training good employees is extremely expensive and time consuming. Laying off people's friends & coworkers hurts company-wide morale and spook employees not intended to be laid off. That's aside from the personal emotional / moral feelings about the decision, and the unemployment burdens placed on them by the state(s).
I can't imagine a sane business even considering this in response to an unexpected 10% sales drop that wasn't part of a trend. Maybe a business that had accidentally over-hired substantially, but even with such poor management decisions, they're going to consider these other effects carefully before jumping the gun.
Enelson4275 | 5 months ago
My experience and education is all business management. Yes, layoffs have negative consequences and as such are considered a last resort action to prevent a catastrophic business failure. They are rare, in an ideal scenario. However, the scenario in Las Vegas right now is not ideal - it's economic trends being compounded by uncommon political impacts on tourism.
Hiring and firing employees is costly, but that doesn't mean businesses can afford to keep them through economic uncertainty. Does the sector turn around in six months? Or does it never? Or is it all Donald Trump policies, and eventually it will sort itself out a year or two after he leaves office?
It's true that layoffs don't happen after a bad month. But cost-cutting measures do. Hiring freezes. A sharper look at low-performing employees. Greater focus on loss prevention. Management avoids layoffs as much as possible, but eventually the math makes it unavoidable.
If you think it's knee-jerk, go talk to people who work in manufacturing, where production can be slowed or even shut down (and hours cut) in response to shifting market conditions. Several automakers have done it so far this year. Autos are an example of something that can sit outside in the desert just fine, but not every produced good is so lucky.
A supply chain can be disrupted in coming (e.g. material shortages) or going (distribution disruptions that lead to too many stored/idled goods). Either one has to be dealt with, and paying labor to not do profitable work is not a long-term option.
Efficient_Ant_4715 | 5 months ago
It was an 11% loss in foot traffic not sales
Odd-Influence7116 | 5 months ago
Right. Statistically it is down 11% year over year, but profits for most strip casinos have actually increased. Now taking 11% of the people off of overly crowded streets probably doesn't make that much of a difference to the naked eye, and the price increases have worked as far as anything corporations care about ($). I think they are going to try to run off Joe Cheap Buffet guy and get a higher income crowd, and as much as reddit and youtube hate it, so far it works.
Barnyard_Rich | 5 months ago
> but profits for most strip casinos have actually increased.
Fascinating, do you have a link for that? The number I saw was about 2.5% higher unoccupancy rates. I'd love to know how they are making more money with fewer people staying in hotels and staying for a shorter time.
What is unmistakable is that tipping is down massively, which is the life blood of the actual service workers of Las Vegas.
Odd-Influence7116 | 5 months ago
https://youtu.be/jldyx_CCCi4?t=183
koopa00 | 5 months ago
Without seeing the data it isn't shocking, prices on the strip have exploded which makes it less enticing for regular folks. It's just yet another example of chasing the high income earners and forgetting about everyone else.
DescriptionNo4222 | 5 months ago
Thats awesome. I hope you had a great time. I will say I believe a client I built his portfolio for years more than a stranger. Vegas is suffering. A few buddies in tourism has also told me Q1/Q2 earnings are about to reach negative. The great depression has arrived.
Petrichordates | 5 months ago
Vegas is suffering, it's just a blatant lie to call it a ghost town.
dyslexda | 5 months ago
"Vegas is suffering" is not synonymous with "is a ghost town." During COVID? Then the popular tourism destinations were ghost towns, where you could go outside and actually not see anyone. Having an 11% drop, which still translates to packed venues (just shorter lines), isn't "ghost town" territory.
1-Dollar-Doge-Coins | 5 months ago
> The great depression has arrived.
Because the casinos are only 80% packed instead of 100%?
Euler007 | 5 months ago
During the summer it's not just California folks packing the city down on weekends at the popular clubs, the weeks are also busy with international tourists on extended stay.
TheLonelySnail | 5 months ago
We live in SoCal and have Disneyland passes. This whole summer has been dead. Lines for rides at 15 minutes long, 20 minutes long.
Dead like ‘it’s a rainy Tuesday in February’ dead.
Worrisome because A LOT of folks in OC and the IE depend on tourism.
UgandanPeter | 5 months ago
Idk why there’s so many reporting around Vegas specifically, who tf cares? Let that town die
Feisty-Hope4640 | 5 months ago
So since World War 2 America basically tethered the rest of the world hostage to its economy our current President has untethered the rest of the world so as we sink to the bottom they're free now.
the rest of the world should thank Trump he is the best President for them maybe the worst President for the Americans
Material-Angle9689 | 5 months ago
There is no maybe about it. He is by far the worst president ever for the damage he has done to this country. And we are only 7 months in.
Saephon | 5 months ago
There are a couple Constitutional remedies for tyranny. Congress seems to have abdicated the one that belongs to them.
InertPistachio | 5 months ago
It's gonna get sooooo much worse
Petrichordates | 5 months ago
Maybe? He was already ranked the worst president in US history before any of this.
Feisty-Hope4640 | 5 months ago
I would argue that Ronald Reagan his impact on our daily lives right now so far was way worse than what Trump's done but he's getting there
Hippopotasaurus-Rex | 5 months ago
Reagan paved the way for trump. No doubt there.
However, I’m not sure Reagan’s policies were intended to destroy America. Destruction of America is absolutely the goal of trumps policies.
Feisty-Hope4640 | 5 months ago
The goal back then was to reduce taxes on the rich and undermine social safety nets.
They accomplished that goal, which was the problem IMO.
BiggestMuncher | 5 months ago
Ok but that’s not even in the same ballpark as what Trump has done.
Hippopotasaurus-Rex | 5 months ago
I’m not arguing that. What I’m saying is that Regan wasn’t systemically trying to destroy America. Trump is.
Now, the question of whether trump actually knows what he’s doing is legitimate. I’m not sure he actually does. He just sees his bank account keep growing and doesn’t care how. So at best it’s willful ignorance. I legitimately think he’s too stupid (or maybe it’s cognitive decline, or a combo of the two), to actually understand what he’s doing though. Then again that whole power thing is totally true for the massively narcissistic trump.
Reagan is absolutely on my top 10 worst people ever list, but I don’t think he would have allowed DOGE or the like to do what they did. Then again, he did appoint Kissinger to advisory roles even knowing what he had done in the past or places like Cambodia so….. I may have changed my mind. Fuck Reagan too.
It’s complicated but I think trump’s evil trumps Reagan’s.
Fuck trump.
Fuck Reagan.
dyslexda | 5 months ago
I think the way to sum up the difference is Reaganites had a wildly different vision for America than you or I, but they still (to some degree) believed what they were doing was "for the good of the country" (while enriching their buddies, of course).
It's obvious that Trump's entire philosophy is to promote what is best for him. The country merely gets in the way.
Both evil, but at least Reagan could claim some measure of care about the country.
Hippopotasaurus-Rex | 5 months ago
Totally agree. You worded it far more eloquently than I.
BostonPanda | 5 months ago
Sure but he also opened up our economy in good ways.
Feisty-Hope4640 | 5 months ago
Good through our current lens is debatable, but when viewed from that century it might have been good.
azurite-- | 5 months ago
I'm genuinely fearful that in a couple of years AI layoffs will be higher than ever and this administration won't have a plan for those affected.
Mass unemployment is coming and the data of it will likely be tampered with so we will be told everything is fine.
vintagemap | 5 months ago
This administration doesn’t give a shit about anyone who would be affected.
Enelson4275 | 5 months ago
> data of it will likely be tampered with
41 States collect income tax, and can report jobs data. Even if some are dishonest, it's not something that can be hidden.
that_cat_on_the_wall | 5 months ago
The work week needs to be reduced. 40 hours a week is simply too much, especially as ai automates things. So many jobs are just bullshit “pretending to do work” or pointless grinding/standing around.
It’s a relic of an era that no longer exists. Society doesn’t need everyone working 40 hours a week constantly anymore.
But instead of rational solutions, we’re gonna head straight to a boomer geriatric oligarchy where the only people well off are old rich stockholders.
hippydipster | 5 months ago
> I'm genuinely fearful that in a couple of years AI layoffs will be higher than ever and this administration won't have a plan for those affected.
This is a certainty, what's there to be fearful about?
Oh, you're fearful of the consequences of that happening. Ah well, gonna suck. People will die. People will lead lives of hopelessness and desperation.
SwedishFresh | 5 months ago
That’s why they’re deploying the national guard to cities and federalizing police right now. Eventually it will be comply or go work as a slave in the prison system. They aren’t going to try to help or fix anything.
TrexPushupBra | 5 months ago
Oh they have a plan.
Arresting you for the crime of being homeless and selling your labor to businesses.
sixxtynoine | 5 months ago
Don’t worry. They’ll have concepts of plans ready to go.
ThrowinRopes | 5 months ago
The perfect opportunity for the world’s first trillionaire class to swoop in and fill the void left by collapsing governments.
techaaron | 5 months ago
What are you planning to do?
milkshakeconspiracy | 5 months ago
My strategy is to live off grid, grow my own food, harvest my own rainwater, invest in my local community, and minimize my cash flow requirements.
big-papito | 5 months ago
Artificial intelligence my ass. So you had 10 people, now you have 5. You know what your competitors have? Also 10 people, now with AI help. It's the Red Queen race:
https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/
Super_Mario_Luigi | 5 months ago
Unfortunately the economy people want to believe is "normal" is the one that has infinite, high-paying, throwaway jobs. Financed by debt no one could dream to pay back.
That's one way to surge inflation, and actually hurt a bunch of people. Good luck ever getting people to realize that their immediate marginal convenience, may not truly be the best in the long run.
fonger81 | 5 months ago
Speaking of AI taking jobs, I wanted to float this idea on here. My co-worker and I were talking about the possibility of our finance jobs eventually being replaced by AI. Now I’m not huge believer in the “AI will replace just about every white collar job”, but I do think it’s going to replace a good chunk of entry level jobs here soon.
What I proposed is the idea that for every payroll job replaced, the controlling company has to pay an extra income/corporate tax. I’m not saying it would be the full amount through the SS, Medicare, etc a normal headcount would be, but close to maybe to 75-80% of that amount. AI jobs need to be considered or counted as an employee.
If AI is going to do what all these C-level executives dream about, we’re going to move closer to a demand of some sort of UBI, and a possible way to pay for it could/should be a tax burden placed on these outsourcing companies.
ya-reddit-acct | 5 months ago
Bernie Sanders and Bill Gates already proposed that, two years ago, attempting to address a larger spectrum of robotics, automation and AI.
fonger81 | 5 months ago
I assumed someone smarter than me had come up with something like that… but secretly hoped I was being a little creative lol.
I’m not going to lie, it’s taking an embarrassing amount of time for me to come around on the Bernie/AOC/Warren way of thinking, but consider me a vested follower of theirs.
HappySlappyMan | 5 months ago
My big concern for "AI" is that the migration to t is going to royally screw everything up because it's not actually real "AI." It's a massive "next word predictor" algorithm in its current form without any actual thought behind it. In my field, I have fuddled around with AI but it has frequently spit out blatant errors because it pulls incorrect, false, or outdated data/words to form its narrative. We are going to start introducing innumerable errors into every field and people will just blindly accept these results because it's the "AI" so it must be right.
DaBiChef | 5 months ago
Yup. Just last night I saw a movie in the park, Mamma Mia. I see a background actress that looks identical to Phoebe Waller-Bridge and so Google it, AI comes up first and says she wasn't in the first but was in the second as a character called Helena Shaw. A quick Wikipedia search shows that Helena Shaw is her Indiana Jones character and she wasn't in either.... Like this shit is easy to check, and it is just so fucking wrong but everyone's hooked on it and it's like... Fucking why?
Lostinthestarscape | 5 months ago
AI is going to poison itself into a useless death spiral when not curated in closed/controlled boxes with the help of idiots who think they are God manifest and only produce truth.
artisanrox | 5 months ago
Robert Reich was already talking about this years ago too, and corporations using AI as employees should be required to fund universal health care and universal basic income programs.
dyslexda | 5 months ago
How do you actually track and define that, though? Companies expand and contract positions at will. Advertised positions might be real, or they might be phantom roles. A new hire might slot into an established pay line, or an entirely new role could be created because the company wants them but doesn't have a clean slot for them already.
And what of roles that aren't officially eliminated, but the employees can take on more duties than before due to use of AI tools?
And if roles do decrease, how do you delineate if that's due to "AI" (which most people mean LLMs) or some other process efficiency?
Basically, the myth of AI outright replacing full jobs is mostly just that, a myth. No real business is able to say "We had a pay line approved for another junior dev, but instead we'll just spin up another instance of ChatGPT agentic mode and Sr Developer Jim can manage it." Rather, AI will be a tool to enhance existing job productivity. You'll gradually find you need fewer junior developers not because you have a host of agentic AIs as "jr dev 1, 2, 3" but because seniors can more easily and quickly do the work of junior devs.
So how do you separate that from normal process improvements?
Only thing I can see is taxing folks on "tokens used" (again, assuming LLMs) which invites its own host of issues, but now you've made it a use tax rather than trying to shoehorn the idea of an agentic AI into the traditional "job" role.
fonger81 | 5 months ago
All of these all valid points, and I wouldn’t put it past companies/corporations to get creative around that ideas of naming/numbering AI employees differently to effectively avoid tax responsibilities. I would “assume” that whom ever would implement a rule like this, would be smart enough to figure out ways to keep businesses from outright tax avoidance.
Due_Teaching_6974 | 5 months ago
Yeah but companies like usual will simply evade taxes
slagwa | 5 months ago
>Despite the scale of layoffs, unemployment remains in the low 4 percent range, suggesting that many displaced workers are having luck finding new roles.
I call bullshit on this. I don't think many are finding new roles, or new equivalent roles.
ballmermurland | 5 months ago
A lot of people lost six figure tech jobs and are now working jobs at $50k a year instead because there aren't as many good jobs left.
thebetterpolitician | 5 months ago
Not only that but gig jobs are considered jobs. You may be only making $50 a day and burning your car but that’s money to the billionaires
no-chance-cuz | 5 months ago
Fake news. Fire the statistician and insert one who'll lie. In the end, the GOP led welfare states will suffer the most. They've been subsidized by the federal government to keep local taxes low.
mkwtfman | 5 months ago
We really are in trouble. Every year automation will diminish jobs. Literally with rising costs and falling jobs what are people supposed to do?
Zachincool | 5 months ago
Buy NVDA
Khuros | 5 months ago
Why isn’t it considered a foreign act of war and insider act of treason to take multiple millions of jobs from a country at the expense of the local voting population? What if instead of jobs it was kidnapped people? Who voted for this? It happens left or right.
What if a country was taking millions of Americans and their intellectual property instead? How does this benefit the voter? Some outsourcing is fine.
Outsourcing everything? Hmmmm, I dunno. What happens when the local pop stops spending? I guess we’re counting on the remaining 10% which is 90% boomers to support the economy during their “retirement” (just working the same as usual and taking up space that could go to the next generation)
FGOGudako | 5 months ago
companies don't have national loyalites so they can't commite treason thanks to Ford Vs Dodge the only loyality companies have is to the stock holder
Lostinthestarscape | 5 months ago
This is why initiatives like global minimum corporate tax or global human rights etc. Are noble for trying to address (though good luck getting entitled rich assholes to push those things through)
Ander673 | 5 months ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS1000LDL#
Are the layoffs in the room with us right now?
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/challenger-job-cuts
Highest layoffs since... May, or September of last year if you want pre-DOGE. In fact, Challenger layoffs in January, February, March, April, May, August, and September of 2024 were all higher. But doom and gloom now? Wonder what changed.
InertPistachio | 5 months ago
I am so ambivalent about all of this. I don't the economy to tank and for people (including me) to suffer needlessly. But goddamn I don't think anything short of economic catastrophe is going to wake up Trump supporters about how fucking awful he is, so bring it on I guess.
sirbissel | 5 months ago
"Considering the past decade (2015-2025), last month’s announced cuts are still above the average of 60,398." (from Challenger, Gray & Christmas's website itself)
chunk555my666 | 5 months ago
With most growth in healthcare and a few other lower wage sectors, all that's propping up the numbers is the AI bubble that will pop eventually. And with tariffs that will really hit hard by the holiday season, expensive debt, and a president hell bent on burning the economy down to fund billionaires, things are only going to get much, much worse and aren't likely to improve over the next few years.
Also, can we really trust the unemployment numbers coming from underfunded, under resourced, agencies that do their best to give an accurate picture but have been unable to capture what all of us see in our lives?
Postsnobills | 5 months ago
The overpromise of AI as a tool to replace labor is sure going to hurt like hell when the dust settles and we/our corporate overlords realize how badly it’s underdelivered.
Also, what are all these people supposed to do with no jobs? How do they pay for your product being manufactured by machines? How do we replace the remaining senior staff members when they retire and there’s no juniors beneath them?
This is going to be a fucking disaster.
Eledridan | 5 months ago
Hey, know who’s hiring for 100k, 50k sign on bonus, loan forgiveness, and other perks while requiring little to no experience?
Shouldn’t the large tech companies be concerned about this? There’s a risk they lose their talent and their managers/execs.
UgandanPeter | 5 months ago
Idk why you’re downvoted. ICE is offering great salaries for new recruits and it’s all by design. Massive waste of taxpayer funds.
Ok-SpaceForceGuy | 5 months ago
sounds like the military offers that..if youre stationed in California
Exact-Hawk-6116 | 5 months ago
Is the us economy collapsing yet? Because I need this to fulfill my dystopian fantasy so my incessant anxiety and depression can feel justified despite living in the easiest time on earth in a first world country I’m literally shaking at everything because it oppresses me
BienThinks | 5 months ago
As someone that works for Home Depot…. Sales are down, majority of stores aren’t hitting projections, foot traffic is down and you can tell people are trying to limit what they spend. Contractors tell me it’s rough out there, hard to find work or people willing and able to do projects on their house. It’s a bleak outlook that is just seemingly getting worse.
Oh, and the prices have been going up but that hasn’t completely started yet. The company had placed giant orders earlier in the year to stock the warehouses before tariffs hit to help stave off price increases but it’s only a matter of time.
So, yeah this sucks. On a personal level, student loans starting back up makes my household lose any buying power. I have no choice but to not spend money.
Necessary_Context_29 | 5 months ago
That limp wrist is a low tier rage bait poster. A true candidate for svicide.
Petrichordates | 5 months ago
You can write suicide here.
Spare-Dingo-531 | 5 months ago
> living in the easiest time on earth
I know you're a conservative larping as a woke liberal, but.... eh, is it really though?
Birth rates are declining all over the world, people have a hard time meeting other people, religious groups are consumed by conspiracy theories. It's easy if you want to get food, harder if you want to do anything human outside of getting food.
luigiamarcella | 5 months ago
In the history of the world, this is the easiest time on earth if you live in a first world country.
That poster is still kinda a dick though. There are real concerns about the economy and future.
Barnyard_Rich | 5 months ago
I really don't understand this mentality, and it is never backed up by facts. I've only been alive since the mid 80's and I'd rather be living in no fewer than 10 other years I've already lived under than live right now. Probably closer to 20. Like 1993-2013. Multiple market crashes, 9/11, multiple wars, Katrina, the 2000 election, AIDS still going rampant at the beginning, and I'd still take that 20 year period over right now and not think twice about it.
Spare-Dingo-531 | 5 months ago
If you want to talk about "easiest time on Earth for humans, ever, including prehistory", then we need to incorporate evolution and how humans evolved.
If birth rates are below 2 in most first world countries, then from a natural selection point of view, it cannot be the easiest time on Earth ever, because a declining population implies certain genes are being selected for over others.
If you want to limit it to modern times, then you have to admit the 1950s (in the US) and 1990s were much better times than the present.
slimwillendorf | 5 months ago
1990s was awesome.
Petrichordates | 5 months ago
Certain genes are always being selected over others.
If you genuinely think the 1950s were a better time with easier life than you don't know anything about life in the 50s.
Spare-Dingo-531 | 5 months ago
> Certain genes are always being selected over others.
Not necessarily, you can have balancing selection where allele frequencies remain constant in a population.
With some societies having replacement rates below 1.0 (so the population halves every new generation), it's hard to imagine anything like balancing selection is happening in first world societies.
HealthIndustryGoon | 5 months ago
life quality in general is already on the decline with the peak of "easy time" being the 90s and early 2000s imho. or even the 50s, from an economic viewpoint, when a factory worker could afford a house and family with one salary. the anyway, the easiest time is behind us.
motorik | 5 months ago
In the United States we're getting pretty close to "grandma broke her hip, she had to be put to sleep".
fsuapplicant0273 | 5 months ago
Look, it's cool and all that you're all good, congrats. But still doesnt change the fact that less and less young people are able to afford a home, more and more people are buying groceries using buy now-pay later, more and more people are living paycheck to paycheck and are one emergency away from being homeless, and a multitude of other indicators that the economy is indeed collapsing.
Again, I am elated that you're in a better position. But the point is that less and less people are
iphonesoccer420 | 5 months ago
Can you just put my fries in the bag please
anti-torque | 5 months ago
Yes.
It is for those who live in rural areas, especially. For living in a first world country, many of them live a second world life, and it's getting worse.
But as long as Larry Ellison can own 95% of Molokai, it's all good.
techaaron | 5 months ago
Which US economy? Because it matters.
Tall-Wealth9549 | 5 months ago
Job posting on a lot of sites are mostly scams to get your ssn, birthday, etc. Make sure you research the company before blindly applying. We’re in the age of you’re fucked and you will get fucked harder if you’re down.
Samvega_California | 5 months ago
The economy is absolutely in the toilet right now and the white house is sweeping it under the rug. Every industry is facing layoffs or hiring freezes. They'll only be able to deny it for so long.