The job market, inflation and tariffs

Yeah, definitely not going to overcome inflation as a rate cut tends to cause more inflation. That's its main trade off.

 

Yeah, maybe. But consumers will still be able to buy more things with tariffs + lower interest rates than they would have with tariffs and no change to interest rates. So, I still think the rate cut will be like blowing into smoldering embers if we look at this purely from the inflation angle. But job market is more important than inflation concerns, IMO.

 

Even better: Buy a bidet. The long term savings on toilet paper is great.

 

Quite of few highly knowledgeable AI pros are far more bearish than the likes of Altman and other CEOs. They understand the fundamentalsl challenges that never get mentioned.

Hallucinations are a big, big problem. And not as easy to fix as some would believe.

And, AI cannot be scaled for commercial applications using LLMs for various reasons. Altman never mentions this but the likes of Hinton and LeCunn discuss this often.

Ultimately, AGI will be beneficial for personal use very quickly and already is.

Commercial and business application will take far longer because it's not not reliable enough. Something that is 95% reliable is not enough for most business application, especially if the expectation is human capital replacement. The marketplace will never tolerate that high of a margin for error.

 

I dunno. I'd argue it can be beneficial to businesses even if its not 100% reliable. This isn't a question of whether businesses still need people, its about if people are more efficient with AI why would businesses need as many people?

 

Depends on level of accuracy. The more employees it replaced, the higher the need becomes for near perfect reliability. There is a direct relationship between the two.

 

In my experience, as we automated our brewery, the same amount of employees were needed to babysit the machines and troubleshoot, but we were able to greatly increase the amount of beer we could get out the door, AFTER the learning curve of operating the new equipment had leveled out.

So basically, I see AI ruining the entry-level job market. And then we’ll have this huge gap between those with experience and those with degrees but little-to-no experience.

 

Ruh roh

May be time to stash some bitcoins under your virtual mattresses.

Since the late 1990s, a prolonged reversal in wage growth trends for job "switchers" versus "stayers" has only happened in periods around the Great Recession and the dot-com bust in the early 2000s, the Atlanta Fed data shows.

The last time a drawn-out reversal occurred was in and immediately following the Great Recession, during an 18-month period from February 2009 to July 2010, according to the data.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/08/22/wage-growth-2025-job-switcher-job-stayer.html

 

Wouldn't that have already happened by now? Highest spending by retirees tends to be early in retirement (the "go-go" years) before Social Security kicks in to supplement their IRA withdrawals.

I'm more concerned about baby boomers draining Social Security. People are living longer and longer, and an increasing percentage of retirees are waiting until the age of 70 to collect SS (meaning the gov't has to dish out up to 32% more and for longer).

 

So, this cook "firing" could prove significant and disastrous.

If Miran gets through his approval hearing, and the Cook firing holds (debatable) it will give Trump a 4-3 advantage on the board. Not good.

 

Even our AI muckety mucks are calling for UBI.

"In the near-term, I worry a lot about AI disrupting opportunities for people who desperately want work, but I think it's simultaneously true that humanity should eventually remove the obligation to work for a living and that doing so is one of the strongest arguments for building AI and AGI in the first place," Brundage wrote.

Brundage said our current systems aren't prepared to address that reality right now.

"That is not something we're prepared for politically, culturally, or otherwise, and needs to be part of the policy conversation. A naive shift toward a post-work world risks civilizational stagnation (see: WALL-E), and much more thought and debate about this is needed," he said.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-openai-miles-brundage-ubi-ai-jobs-market-2025-8

 

I was thinking of this guy who most famously blocked a field goal attempt in Super Bowl VII. I'm old.

https://commanderswire.usatoday.com...e-redskins-legend-charley-taylor/79941318007/

 

Garo "I Keek, No Throw" Yepremian for the yoots out there.

Dang - some dudes like Garo looked like they were 62 yrs old BITD..

 

This is the heart of the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals. These guys are all in their mid to late 20s, a couple in their early 30s. The guy in the middle is player-manager Frankie Frisch. 36 years old.



I'm 64. I would not stand out in that photo, whereas if you put me in a group of contemporary MLB players, I most definitely would, even if it was a black-and-white photo like the above.