latest edition was A.I, prediction markets, GLP-1s -- all indicative of a "Casino" economy where you know the odds are against you but you gamble anyway so you might become one of the few winners
the US is caught up in a weird middle - where its lacking labor capacity for essential manufacturing & other positive contributions while also lacking job making capacity
because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
Edit: clearer word choice
Or finance. There was a pretty brutal takedown published recently: The Finance Industry Is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way. (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/capitalism-indust...).
Basically the finance industry is pivoting away from actually investing in real businesses to more and more elaborate paper pushing schemes (that make them money, but actually weaken the economy):
> Unlike Dawes’s Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, a modern investment bank mostly earns its money in a way that not even the bravest lyricist would set to music: providing advisory services, executing complex financial engineering schemes, trading stocks and bonds, managing other people’s money, issuing credit cards and so on. Assets get bought and sold, divided and packaged, and the bank collects fees at each step.
> David Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, could not sing to young Michael about the many productive uses to which he might put the tuppence because Goldman Sachs rarely invests in anything at all. Fostering economic progress appears to be beside the point.
> Less than 10 percent of Goldman’s work in 2024, measured by revenue, was helping businesses raise capital. Loans of Goldman’s own funds to operating businesses accounted for less than 2 percent of its assets. At JPMorgan Chase the figures were 4 and 5 percent; at Morgan Stanley, 7 and 2 percent. Even the efforts at helping to raise capital are misleading, because less than a tenth of it goes toward building anything new. The rest funds debt refinancing, balance sheet restructuring and mergers and acquisitions.
> These are symptoms of financialization. That’s the term for making financial markets and transactions ends unto themselves, disconnected from — and often at the expense of — the societal benefits that support human flourishing and are capitalism’s proper purpose. Chief among those benefits are good jobs that support families, and products and services that improve people’s lives.
If debt refinancing became illegal or widely impractical due to an interest rate spike, you’d quickly see how much of the productive economy it’s fueling!
You're missing the point. Read the article.
And no one is saying "don't refinance debt." The passage you're reacting to was making the point "less than a tenth of [the capital banks raise] goes toward building anything new."
> Why do you think large companies refinance debt? So they can invest in productive areas of the business.
The article is talking about banks and the finance industry, not non-financial companies.
Also, if you think they were restructuring debt to invest in productive areas of their businesses, don't you think more than 10% of the capital banks raise would be going to building something new? If you read the article, it spends a lot of time talking about how much money goes into "mergers and acquisitions" and how it's a waste.
What’s pleasant to see is that the take-down and opinion piece is coming from the conservative side.
There's a potentially civilization-ending disasters looming over us (the climate crisis, increasing escalation between the major powers, rising risk of insurrection due to mismanagement and inequality) and what are the smartest people of our time doing?
Making sure you click that damn ad or create technology that lets you create slop ads more easily.
I hate ads with passion for past 20 years and (very) actively avoid them at all costs, but I'd take those over what world llms seem to be bringing in soon.
Regulations on micro-targeting, data privacy, algorithm transparency, legal liability for content, etc.. all push back against the externalities of ads/social media.
Regulations on energy and land use can make eg data center build outs more expensive, pressuring back against speculative AI trash.
Taxing big tech companies, subsidizing manufacturing education, and judicious import tariffs.. would all create incentives for investing money and labor in hard capabilities
If you allocated capital to other stuff, the jobs go there with it?
I have a feeling most folks here will disagree though.
Noam Chomsky is one of the loudest doomsayers and "critics" of the system (war, climate, politics) and yet simultaneously was good buddies with post-conviction Epstein. That ought to stimulate a reassessment of what you've believed about how (American) politics and society works.
Especially in humanities where you don't have hard data, contradiction is the only way to advance, and he forgot that. He became too full of himself and too confident.
For that to be true, there would have to be a ridiculous amount of money at a massive scale for those, which would imply that consumers are being gouged for it. That's really true of almost any bubble. This is still a negative situation.
GLP, not sure.
We don’t need ads for it, we should hand it out over the counter to anyone who wants or needs it, but I digress.
Its all a mental problem (and here in Switzerland this is general consensus among doctors and I have one for wife), and an attempt to solve it anywhere else down the decision line apart from the head is just (temporarily, in case of glp) fixing the consequences.
If we're appealing to authority, my mother, my father, and my sister are all highly accomplished doctors, and they believe GLP-1s will become part of a standard drug package to older adults like Statins because it's far more achievable than education we don't have and wouldn't work in the food system that exists in the US.
How are they a “gamble?” For patients, their efficacy rates are stunning. If you meant from an investing perspective, Eli Lilly and novo nordisk have very down to earth valuations when compared with AI companies.
But these are powerful medications that affect very highly conserved areas of tetrapod biology. We discovered GLPs in the mouths of gila monsters, after all. So you then can infer that that the mechanism is at least 300 million years old (our last common ancestor with lizards).
Actually, I tried looking this up, and glucagon is likely 5-600 million years old, back to all chordates, the Cambrian explosion essentially, though likely even before that. So, incredibly conserved. Like, if you are a multicellular animal, odds are you have some glucagon-like thing for digestion regulation.[0]
We're strongly messing with a system that is just tremendously old. Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
Like, clearly, other countries do not have these issues with weight. Yes, they are developing them, I know. But even the US didn't have these issues near as bad just two generations ago, a blink in biological terms. You and I both know that the solution is not a pill, but the root cause of the obesity epidemic itself. These injections and pill are just band-aids for a much deeper and more pernicious problem.
But then again, you and I both know that we're not going to get at the root cause anytime soon either.
[0] This is biology so you'll find exceptions everywhere though
As long as you have descendants, biology and evolution don't care, once that's done it's game over for them.
> That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.
It's been tested for over 20 years, the weight loss bit is the recent one.
> other countries do not have these issues with weight.
Yes they do, some are much worse than the US (https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/), there are a lot of countries above 30% obesity rate.
> both know that the solution is not a pill
It's part of the solution, is how you help existing people with the issue.
Doing a restrictive diet is not easy (I know, I've been dieting since october, lost 15 pounds, but I can go on autopilot for this, which is not the case for others), it requires a lot of discipline that most people don't have, and our bodies are optimized to store calories, as well as being very efficient in consuming them, because for most of history famines were common, last ~100 years being the exception to the rule for most of the world population.
Future generations can be helped by better food culture and education, and that's the other part of the solution, long term.
Executives won't build on-shore capacity when they'll just get undercut by off-shore shops. It's less risky to just outsource.
1. Tariffs are frequently not targeted/precise enough, so come with lots of side effects.
2. Other countries retaliate, leading to trade wars and economic disruptions in both places.
3. Lower prices are usually better for local consumers - it leaves them with more money to buy other stuff. And tariffs do the opposite, as they are rarely 100% absorbed by the manufacturer.
How are AI and GLP medications in the same category as Kalshi or sports betting? One is (economically at any rate) a tool to produce code and the other is a weight loss drug that actually works. Neither are a “casino” in any meaningful sense.
Please don't comment on pharmacodynamics without a solid understanding of the underlying mechanisms.
> because all the money has gone into casino economy not capacity building
What you're describing is referenced to as Fictitious Capital in Marxist thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital
Most modern capitalist views do not subscribe to labor theory of value or "earned" value. Though views on landlordism do originate more with Smith than with Marx, it's not wrong to also attribute many of those thoughts to Marx.
But I suppose change needs both strategies.
The AI companies really did spend every last cent (and more) of this capital.
Job numbers need to be considered in the context of a lot of other numbers, including population growth. As the other top thread yesterday highlighted, the US is experiencing slowing population growth, which may also have been exacerbated by the recent upheavals in immigration.
I may be butchering the theory here, but the point is that the economy is a dynamic, inter-connected system, and a smaller population requires fewer jobs. (As a silly example, you need many more car mechanics for a town with a population of 1000 as opposed to a population of 100.) That actually has implications for GDP growth as well.
That's not to say the overall economy is doing great, just that these job numbers should not be taken as a complete indicator of it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-17/nintendo-... [0]
They produced a record number...your observation should be the expected result (they are aiming to produce 25% more than are expected to sell).
It still sold out and was a little difficult to get on release, but consoles came out at a pretty quick pace and resellers basically could not unload their stock for a profit. It became a bit of a joke about the resellers not being able to unload their stock because stores were getting replenishment stocks so often and Nintendo was constantly sending out emails to players saying they had been selected to buy directly from Nintendo.
I had my personal Switch 2 from the store within about a month of casual checking around and got one for a Christmas gift directly from Nintendo the next week.
The Switch has been out since 2017 and has probably reached market saturation at this point. Keep in mind that consoles are pretty durable and lots of people buy used. The Switch 2 isn't selling well yet since it has the PS3 disease (no games).
Anyways, the economy is probably bad but I don't think Nintendo Switch sales are much of an indicator for that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/04/nintendo...
Don't you expect demand to taper off as more people get their hands on it? It also doesn't help that the switch 2 is basically "the switch, but better".
Nintendo is notorious for under producing their consoles vs demand in recent years - the worst example was the mini NES or whatever they called it, they could not keep it on shelves for that one either.
Months of waiting for target to open sounds insane and is so far from my experience that I think this is actually a case of you were holding it wrong.
Well, I remember the same thing happening with the Wii for a long time, and then eventually it was easily available.
But now I can't find a Wii at a Target anywhere, so the economy must be booming?
Either people are waking up that Nintendo is selling nostalgia or the economy is not doing well.
I hope the former, there is something that feels sick to think Nintendo force fed corporate mascots to me when I was under the age of 1. To this day, I religiously buy Zelda games, even though I haven't enjoyed them since N64. FOMO mind control.
There's no chance for survival just by glancing over the headlines.
> One bright spot was last month, when hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists.
But that's 2026 hiring, and the article's about the 2025 revisions. (And the January number, as they all do, may get revised in a few months.)
It would be quite hard in the long run to make faked BLS numbers line up with other independent data points, like ADP's payroll reports and the IRS's revenues.
Cheap publishing that reaches across the world has created a race to the bottom.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bls-jobs-report-revision-trump-...
Both directions are common.
https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/02/11/january-2026-jobs-repor...
Almost no jobs were added net and the few that were, were all in health care, 131K i think the article said.
what i find interesting is that unemployment percent still looks low. is it accurate? even if it's wrong, shouldn't it be correct on a relative basis? why isn't this number climbing?
You might want to look at the 'not in labor force' numbers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05026642
and also labor participation rate, but for 25-54 Yrs, so you exclude the effect of demographic changes https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
It’s been creeping up for sure, but still historically low. And I’d attest that the headline rate is still the “real” rate.
Underemployment is already reported and is distinctly different so I don't think it's fair to say that not counting someone at Burger King who has a Master's degree as unemployed is a "flaw."
"Marginally attached" and "discouraged workers" are already tracked and reported in U4, U5, and U6, so this is a strange hypothetical.
The current definition makes sense because it's linked to an overt action that can be objectively determined. "Not looking for a job but theoretically would like a job" gets into all sorts of issues like "I want a job as a king if it landed on my lap...".
Just because U3 is the measure typically quoted doesn’t mean the others don’t exist.
Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they surveyed. Every month for a year they called me, once a month, to ask what my employment status last week was, if I was actively looking, etc. (It was all synchronized around one week a month, but I don't remember which one it was they cared about.)
The idea that the BLS lacks detailed labor market data is just internet conspiracy slop.
So the unemployment rate is staying low, but the absolute number of workers is flat or declining.
I wonder what those folks in health care are doing, because (once again) after dealing with the US healthcare system, it seems like it's about 1% doctors, 10% other staff and 90% useless billing/scheduling/collections, designed to extract the maximum possible amount of money from a patient and provide the minimum amount of care.
More jobs being added in health care seems to be an indicator for it getting even worse.
The anemic employment market calls for lower rates, but inflation still persistently being 50% higher than it should be calls for rate hikes.
My prediction: this inflation isn't going away without viciously painful rate hikes. It'll probably get worse.
The future picture on inflation also looks bleak[2]:
> Taken individually, lagged tariff pass‑through, tightening labor supply, looser fiscal policy, and accommodative financial conditions would each push inflation modestly higher. Taken together—and interacting with increasingly fragile household inflation expectations—they create a macro environment in which inflation rising above 4 percent by the end of 2026 is not only plausible but arguably the most likely scenario.
It's common knowledge that the spending in the current economy is very K-shaped: the top 10% are the only ones staying above water.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-...
[2] https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/risk-high...
- Jack Handey
Is anyone looking at this and the CBO figures and not just realising the government is straight lying about the figures?
Gonna believe Powell and Waller on this one.
The fake economy is now about AI, gambling and cryptocurrencies. It does not help that the current administration contains several Epstein disciples when Epstein was into these tech fantasies as well.
The misallocation of capital claims to grow the pie, but it dilutes the pie with fake growth so people that own the fake parts have more money to buy up the good parts.
I disagree. While some AI related stuff is promising, much of it is consumerist or data harvesting. Many people are basically gambling on any sort of stock related to AI (vs diversifying). Education is likely declining as adoption allows students to avoid critical thought or applying concepts.
"It's frankly a miracle, and it keeps making more leaps and bounds every time the peanut gallery starts going on about it having hit a wall it can never improve from."
Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle. It's just an expanse on neural nets and the other predecessors from 30 years ago. In my experience, it has trouble following basic directions such as keeping a summary to a single page.
I highly doubt this will be the case. This common viewpoint is almost certainly no more than another iteration of Plato decrying the invention of books.
> Explainable by engineering isn't a miracle.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/miracle
2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment. "The bridge is a miracle of engineering."I don't consider AI to be outstanding. Maybe that bridge they're talking about was. Seems that this comes down to opinion.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2025/11/10/openai-spe...
As far as I can tell, the math isn’t getting any better. The financial costs of running an AI service are enormous and it’s not clear where sufficient revenue is going to magically come from once the aggressive loss-leading ends.
> America’s economy added 130,000 jobs in January, almost double the number that analysts had been expecting, indicating that the labour market might have picked up after months of apparent stagnation. Unemployment also fell to 4.3%, a slight dip from the previous month. The figures may put off the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates as quickly as Donald Trump would like.
The ADP is only reporting 22k for January. Which lines up very closely with the monthly pace of job creation for 2025 (~15k, on average).
The downward revisions on the BLS numbers for 2025 are the largest on record. There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
Jobs data (which comes from a survey of employers) is always subject to revisions, and the revisions have gotten worse. But it's not necessarily political. Back when Trump unprecedentedly fired Erika McEntarfer (former head of the BLS) I looked into this and tried to understand where the data comes from, how it works.
Basically, the BLS surveys 50k out of the several million companies in the US. But response rates have dropped rather strongly since the Pandemic in particular. If you give them 3 months, it gets up to 90%, but after 1 month it is only 50%. This would be okay, except that the response rates turn out to be skewed: large companies almost always respond quickly, small companies respond more slowly. And small companies tend to be much more responsive to the state of the overall economy than large companies- for good and for bad. And even the response times of the small companies turn out to be sensitive to economic trends, for good and for bad: the companies that respond more slowly to surveys, it turns out, tend to be the most sensitive to the broader economy, the first to fire in a recession, but also the first to hire when the economy is getting better.
The final thing is that these companies can be highly correlated with each other and the broader economy. So there are always corrections, but in placid economic weather the corrections cancel out- some of the extrapolations are high, some are low, it ends up being close to 0. And the financial markets understand how to read these corrections. They understand that when the economy is shifting you will get all of the misses in the same direction- either high or low- and to pay attention these corrections data.
All of these misses low in 2025 are a very bad sign for the economy overall, not necessarily a sign of political pressure. That would probably show up in large, sustained differences to the ADP numbers or other privately reported numbers, rather than revisions announced by the BLS itself.
Both Trump I's appointee to head the BLS, William Beach (who served from 2019-2023) and Biden's appointee Erika McEntarfer (whom Trump fired in 2025) wanted to modernize the survey system, make it easier for companies to respond, and get better and faster data collection. But, because this system is so incredibly important to the markets, they wanted a larger budget to run the new system and the old system together for a significant portion of time (several years) so that everyone would be comfortable understanding the intricacies of the system, what revisions would mean, etc. And since they didn't get that budget (in fact it got cut) they decided to prioritize the old system rather than throw it away and experiment with something different.
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/why-firing-bls-commissioner...
"Dr. Oz Says Americans Starting Work 'Right Out Of High School' Or Retiring One Year Later Would 'More Than Remove' The National Debt"
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dr-oz-says-americans-starting...
I thought much of a slow population growth is due to lower immigration, not declining birth rates?