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I had to get out of pure renewables and move to general energy efficiency. At least rising electricity costs give us some leg up, but only as long as industry has any capital to invest in itself.
I'm worried about my wife getting laid off from her quasi-government job. We want to have another kid but we already spend $1000 a month on day care. We have a big cushion of savings but who knows how long it can last - I'm not willing to invest it when a crash could come any minute.
And then we get Buttigieg I guess?
Probably with something squeezed thru the House and Senate called Buttigieg's Bureaucratic Banality, because apparently every presidency from here on out is going to have a BBB piece of legislation.
Shipping volume is drying the fuck up.
Every drop-shipping business is going to be at death's door pretty soon thanks to tariffs.
Shelves are empty as fuck (this is like communism)
Morale at work is at an all-time low (logistics industry).
Mass layoffs are coming for everyone. There's just not enough economic activity to sustain the level of employment that we're at. And it's only going downhill from there. Spiking unemployment is just going to lower consumption even more, resulting in more unemployment.
But it's okay, we have anti-woke AI to guide us toward a post-woke future with big booba and no minorities.
The setup is so fucking bleak I haven't felt this pessimistic since 2009
And I was just a wee lad with only myself to worry about
It really sucks shit to see the collapse so clearly and be unable to do anything about it. Like I'm strapped to a table and a circular saw is moving towards me at 1cm per day. I just see death and destruction in the future and nobody will give a shit until their specific treat stops flowing.
I don't have the heart to tell my SO that I'm learning to garden in earnest because I'm worried about our long-term food security.
At least inflation was low in 2009, so if you kept your job somehow you could keep your head above water. I graduated in 2009 so I decided to do a PhD to upskill until the job market improved. I was making barely any money during that time on my stipend but I could survive, I have no idea how anybody is doing that now when the cost of living so high.
So the MAGA communists were right all along.
Warehouse and distribution center I do some side work for has legitimately considered closing its doors. It’s been around 50+ years with a fairly healthy cash flow. I guess that’s more abstractly indicative of a failing economy not a particular sector
Also inflation is also way way waaaay higher than reports ever indicate. Hedonic adjustment keeps adjusting for the quality of goods improving, when in reality most aren’t, and some are actively getting worse. Economists are so smart aren’t they
Funny how those numbers only ever go one way
These days I think e-commerce volume is the number one leading indicator of contraction
There were a couple of good economists, but they're all ignored by modern economists. Ignoring Marx in economics is like ignoring Newton in physics.
I was laid off in 2008, 2020, and now again in mid 2025 (I work in industrial equipment manufacturing). Anecdotally, the job search process is feeling somewhat worse than 2008. Part of that seems to just be the absolute degenate state of job boards, but I think it's mostly just the collapsing availability of real job openings.
I was employed for the first half of 2025, and so I got to be privvy to my company's Q1 and preliminary Q2 results. They were... really bad, like sales dropped almost in half from an already kind of weak 2024. But I think the kicker was that a lot of people ended up getting pulled into tariff-mitigation work because of parts availability issues, so it's not like we were even working on cost-reduction projects or anything.
I think we're seeing a relatively slow crash because the 2020 COVID shocks were not that long ago, and so everyone got some practice with handling sudden unexpected supply chain shocks. But as I've said before, a lot of companies simply don't have a plan for what to do if Trump doesn't TACO on tariffs.
Impact still hasn't been felt yet fully imo. I think Q1 saw a lot of panic ordering as folks sought to lock in capital spend before the tariff impact. I know in renewables we front loaded a lot of spend to try to secure safe harbor but that was taken away in BBB. Without that I think the Q1 numbers would have looked much worse.
Our entire development pipeline has been obliterated post 2028. Feels like AI is the only growth sector and maybe not the best ground to build a sound economic foundation on.
Read on 
that 7 firms accounted for 40% of s&p value and now are worth 20% of global equity lmao. WSJ with an interesting piece this morning about how we are basically pouring our entire productive capacity into building data centers
Most efficient system folks
Feels like AI is the only growth sector and maybe not the best ground to build a sound economic foundation on.
WSJ with an interesting piece this morning about how we are basically pouring our entire productive capacity into building data centers
In the handful of interviews I've had these past months, the hiring managers have very excitedly talked about how their products get used by AI data centers (even if tangentially). In one of them, I pointedly asked what their plan was if the bottom fell out of the AI market, and I got a very hem-haw answer.
It's frightening how much the commanders of capital are betting the farm on AI being as transformational as the hype artists are claiming it's going to be. This is getting way beyond the territory of even the late 90s tech boom.
7 firms accounted for 40% of s&p value
Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla for others reading
It rules that fucking Tesla is now too big to fail just absolute idiocy
A price to earnings ratio of 160 is totally normal and fine
the absolute degenate state of job boards
What the fuck is with this, nobody fucking answers anything
I haven't heard a good explanation. People keep saying that all the ghost listings are "data gathering", but I'm not sure what kind of a data would be gathered or why it would be valuable. I also can't quite figure out what the point is of spamming job listings with applications that are fake or very obviously not suited for that job. It's not like they're going to get hired, so there's no payday for the recruiter even with high volumes. It seems like job seeking and hiring for are just fundamentally broken right now.
Multiple tech people I know are unemployed. For combined years at this point.
i've got a friend who has a few months til they might be affected by layoffs in tech..
yeah tech is fucked, Covid just delayed it. And it sounds shocking because AI is the new hotness and the only thing keeping the economy afloat, and it really exposes that it's smoke and mirrors that doesn't produce real jobs or products.
Everything is great!
Now if you excuse me I have to login to 50 casino websites 
Praying for you to become our first goblin president 🙏
Too late for that.
UK job market is truly, immensely fucked. Very few jobs around, impossible to get into anything for young people. Older people with established careers also feeling the bite to some degree but largely able to take a step down into the positions that less experienced people would usually be able to take. Absolutely no government acknowledgement of this issue or any plan to fix it, instead forcing more people into the market by cutting the public sector and raising tax on employment (that latter thing is minor but still does have an impact on hiring practices). Rent and commodity prices (especially electricity) higher than ever and strangling smaller businesses, including many that survived previous crises. Fewer people have the money to spend on luxuries or on the high street, which is causing trouble even for sectors that were on a hiring spree post-pandemic, like hospitality. Death spiral which will probably end in war with Russia.
Death spiral which will probably end in war with Russia.
You think so? How do you see such a thing coming to be? As much as the UK state is frothing with hatred for Russia, it takes two to tango and Russia has no interest in or designs on the UK (despite what Western war mongers would have you believe about Voldomort-Putler drooling in anticipation to conquer all of Europe). The UK fighting a hot war with Russia, such as by entering the Ukraine conflict as a full on combatant state, would mean the whole of NATO would be dragged into fighting a hot war with Russia which in turn means nothing short of WWIII with a high chance of nukes flying. The US (de facto supreme leader of NATO) won't allow that.
Putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine once the Ukrainian state truly begins to disintegrate and there's a need for a backstop force to be deployed. I reckon the capacity of both sides to avoid direct strikes on one another's territory would hold up, as it has so far even with western missiles and tanks being deployed inside Kursk. I'm thinking UK troops present in a "strictly defensive" or "advisory" capacity such as being stationed along the Belarusian border or along inactive sections of the front, while the Russians continue to avoid strikes outside of Ukraine because as you say there's no interest there in actually hitting the rest of Europe. There's no reason that NATO would involve itself if Ukraine wasn't a NATO state (no legal basis for it), and US unwillingness to back such a move would give enough diplomatic leeway for both sides to say that no fundamental red lines had been crossed.
Of course it would still only be a prelude to a greater escalation, but that seems inevitable anyway if and when Ukraine collapses, and I think there could be a few years of European states putting troops on the ground inside Ukraine to some degree to forestall the next phase of conflict. If Ukraine does just collapse then you can be sure that there will be conscription and a much larger deployment to NATO's eastern border anyway.
Canada is in a lot of trouble with job market as well and being the liberals, they are following Labour in UK with gutting public services and they are also working on a destructive bill (C-2) that expands mass surveillence without warrants and opening more doors to US surveillence agencies as it would make changes to support US CLOUD act (which I don't know a whole lot about but can't think it's for any good) to name few examples. https://openmedia.org/press/item/over-300-organizations-unite-to-demand-complete-withdrawal-of-bill-c-2
Good number of my friends have been struggling to find work (including me) with some not being able to find anything since 2024.
Everything is well right? 
Canada's unemployment in major cities is so high. Toronto is at 9.7%
jfc
my job is being outsourced piece by piece to cheaper labor sources in other countries, and what isn't being outsourced is being replaced by (very shitty) AI. everyone expects that in a month or so there won't be any reason to keep us around anymore and they'll drop the layoffs on us. the job market around here is so dry that I honestly expect I won't find anything, so I'll have to live on what I've saved for as long as I can and then just die, I guess?
it's extremely fuckin grim out here y'all
This is also my current experience. My manager just confided to me that an entire department was laid off, and they're being replaced by a smaller number of outsourced employees in a different country with much lower labor costs. They're also really pushing for AI in the customer service department so they can lay off people at the call center too.
not american but i can visibly see the worriness/stress from acquaintances that work in corporate US. One has been working more than a decade in a certain multinational, a bonafide loyal employee, with a, i think, high managerial position and has told me they feel they're getting laid off anytime because sales are grim, they sell luxury goods so its kind of a tell when luxury goods sales are down it means people do not have the extra cash for these things. Tho tbf it could also mean their products have gotten terrible, which it could very well be the case.
Also these last 4-5 years, this city ive frequented throughout all my life is now filled with homeless, which it was not the case 10 years ago. This is not one of the big cities btw.
Does anyone know where to find accurate numbers? Like, summaries made for economists and investors, that sort of thing
It's all gonna be propagandized but BLS is the go-to source for data on stuff. The feds (bank branches not cops) have data and reports on stuff too.
The private banks put out memos as well but you won't get a hold of those without being an institutional investor. Everything is on a lag though. Hence the thread, this is basically for grapevine reporting since we all see it in real time
Michael Roberts is also pretty good about getting into these stats on his blog.
I've been seeing several posts online from young IT professionals complaining about how hard it is to get a job. I haven't seen that before.
what happens if everyone is placed into a tight little false reality bubble and told everything is great? and every job loss, layoff, price spike, etc is just a personal failing or a personalized "dynamic price scheme"
the whole economy could collapse and everyone could just be tricked into thinking it's their own fault and they should just curl up in a ditch.
like legitimately we can't be more then a year or two from this being easy to pull off. forced "deaths of despair" but done en masse and weaponized, yet another tool in the exterminationists kit.
but yeah we have been in emergency mode for some time now. only spending on absolute necessities. prepping in various ways. only doing work on the house that will keep our home insurance from dropping us, so just exterior work cash only with a recommended handyman. interior remodel is low priority. our former guest room is just plastic shelves with shelf stable food, MREs, rice, beans, etc.
my sector (retail grocery) is still humming along, doing record sales, but we are being told no more OT and no work orders. my partner is in trucking and still making money but they are the top driver at their small co. (super safe and efficient) and get the best runs. so shit feels weird, waiting for the hammer to drop
been wondering how much longer power grid stability will last in the States.
Food prices have gone up so much I can only cry-laugh at this point. My job is okay for now, but there was a very close call earlier this summer. Doesn't look good for next year rn though.
The giants of my industry are doing layoffs of thousands of people
It's grim
Anecdata 
I can’t give you any hot shot market data, but I can say:
I’m a person who, generally, likes to spend my money. I like ‘things’. It’s a part of who I am. But, I’ve noticed over the past 10 months, that my spending has gonna down to only buying the things I absolutely need. And even still, I’m finding myself with barely enough to reach the next pay day, if that.
We don't take kindly to thing-likers here.
lmfao Funnily enough, back on my .ee account, I actually made a post (I think in Chapo) asking about whether or not my Hot Wheels/collectible hobbies is antithetical to the communist in me.
I wonder if I could find it or if it even still exists since that server got nuked.
And even if you did wanna spend money on things, what would there be to buy? Everything is the same as it was five or even ten years ago.
I’ll admit, the ‘things’ I like to spend my money on are largely collectibles or things of that nature. Hot Wheels, for instance. So there’s pretty much always “new” stuff out there, but I just have flat out not been buying anything like that.
But I do get what you mean. I have a computer that’s 8 years old and it can do pretty much whatever I need it to.
Honestly no idea what to do. My skills are limited. No college. Early in transition, red state. I have a part time job right now but no idea how I'll be able get a full time job or get enough money to move out.
my wife has done loan servicing on some part of the pipeline for her whole life basically.
this week she starts down an entirely new career path doing admin for my friend who owns a mental health practice
its a microcosm of america