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Leisher wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 11:12 am Household debt skyrocketing.

Gotta keep that economy going somehow.

Supply Chain nearly back to normal as consumer mix of goods and services also back to normalish.

TheCatt wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 9:58 pm Supply Chain nearly back to normal as consumer mix of goods and services also back to normalish.

New rail strike looming.

Leisher wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 3:03 pm Loads of groups asking the government to stop the upcoming rail strike.

They certainly need to.

I'm on the side of the workers, on this one. I know a couple railroad workers and the companies are fucking them over. The stories I hear, I almost wonder if the companies are trying to get some sort of bailout.

Biden has asked Congress to prevent the strike from happening by ordering the folks back to work if they vote to strike. This is a D president taking action against a union, so CNN is there to spin it.

In other news, the economy was stronger than expected in the 3rd quarter.

The 4 day work week pilot was a huge success.

I have been told by the train guys I work with that this is what's going to happen:
-Congress will stop the strike (they did today).
-The contract they'll be forced to use includes something about backdated pay. This is going to mean that all of these folks are going to get massive checks.
-Once those checks are gone, these folks are leaving. (They don't even get paid sick time...)
-Nobody will fill those jobs and the railroads won't bother looking, which is what they've been doing for a bit now.
-The railroads will then petition Congress to remove the safety rule that requires more than one engineer to run a train (get your mind out of the gutter), which is what the railroads have been after all along. Why? To increase their profits so they can show Wall St., of course. (Per the train guys, so I wish I was kidding, but here we are.)

Inflation continues to ease. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/01/key-inf ... cted-.html

Key rate up 0.2% month over month. Job market also slowing.

TheCatt wrote: ↑Thu Dec 01, 2022 12:01 pm Job market also slowing.

Yeah, I saw it's down to over 10M open jobs. (No typos there.)

I have no idea what the ideal is for that number.

I'm actually interviewing quality people and they are following through with follow up interviews, etc.

Reminder, for the last two years, I couldn't get anyone with any experience to respond to job listings. Those with experience worth talking to would never return phone calls or would disappear half way through the process.

Point is, I can feel the job market slowing since people are talking to me again.

I also don't get the "4 day work week was a success". My take away is, people have always been milking the clock and taking 5 days to do 4 days of work. The success here is finding the shitty workers who have been time stealing from the company! In 20 years, they will be doing a 3 day work week test and it will be a 'success'. Hell, you could probably do it in 6 months as people get used to the 4 day week and collectively slow down so that they are only doing 3 days of work in four days.

Revenue was up. . . could it be because we're dealing with 8% inflation? Everything is more expensive, so revenue is up? Maybe?

I haven't been following this story for long, but it stinks of the testers spinning the data so their hypothesis turns out to be correct.

Cakedaddy wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2022 10:36 am I also don't get the "4 day work week was a success".

It's 4 x 10, not 4 x 8. Point being, they're still putting in 40 hours.

That helps. I read something about "they aren't working faster, which isn't sustainable" so I figured that meant 4, 8 hour days.

Leisher wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2022 1:58 pm

Cakedaddy wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2022 10:36 am I also don't get the "4 day work week was a success".

It's 4 x 10, not 4 x 8. Point being, they're still putting in 40 hours.

Cakedaddy wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2022 4:55 pm That helps. I read something about "they aren't working faster, which isn't sustainable" so I figured that meant 4, 8 hour days.

Leisher didn't read the article he posted.

The main concern centered on whether a 20% cut to weekly working hours would lead to a drop in output, and cause clients to flee.

There needs to be an across-the-board rule. All industries, M-Th work week. No one is going to expect your offices to be open on the 3-day weekends, so there's no "fleeing" or confusion. You're not open on Fridays, but neither are you so cool. Workers will love it, the only people hating it are the C-suite and the peeps whose dividends will be 10% lower than usual.

We're at a point in our civilization where we don't need to be increasing productivity by double digits every year. On the contrary, it might actually be harmful. Imagine an overnight drop in 15% of our annual carbon output.

GORDON wrote: ↑Sat Dec 03, 2022 8:54 pm We're at a point in our civilization where we don't need to be increasing productivity by double digits every year

Good news! We don't. Probably never have.

I knew you'd be the one nitpicking. I should have called it.