This article isn't worth the time spent reading it.
About the only thing they got right is the fact that large business has become delusional, and being delusional is not just a dick move.
Being delusional is synonymous with blind and evil at that level, but this is not some revolution, it is normal economics and it has predictable dynamics, that ultimately end in collapse, which is what we have been living through in a slow moving state of ruin, for quite some time but it is accelerating and it was caused by the central bankers and their comrades funded by preferential business loans, paid by your tax dollars through non-fractional banking.
We aren't that far off, and the talent brain drain that is happening is silent.
When you have malign parties cooperating to suppress wages, price gouge, cause shortage, impose higher costs on everyone, as well as keeping wages well below what is needed to secure financial safety for rearing children, and the employee can't find a job in their specialized profession despite being highly competent, those people leave for other options.
People stop having children, old with resources outcompetes young, and then there is a great dying.
People go where the jobs are, even if things normalize again later they don't just come back to that profession, they hang that hat up for good when its no longer viable.
No amount of money will bring them back to that profession. The golden time period for this seems to be about 1-2 years without being able to find work in their fields.
Once it happens, it becomes a closed road to them, and this psychology is sticky and is already happening. If you thought it was hard to find talent before, when you have large companies laying off 20% of their tech staff, they can't just rehire that 20% back because the competency isn't accounted for, you get the bottom of the barrel.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
You have a higher chance of losing the competent people forever than getting bare bones competency in a glut with no real way to validate competency.
Companies can be deceptive, but what that means is they lose credibility, and competent people discern, and when there is a silent vote of no confidence, where those intelligent people withdraw their support; ruin overtakes everything faster, and no amount of misinformation can hide this beyond a certain point.
If you are competent at your job, and there's a glut, you are better off going into another field despite being less proficient.
If companies are going to be malign, withdraw your support; stop giving them your mind. The time for talk came and went. Rise up, and take back the only thing you have of value that can't be taken from you without your consent; your mind.
Learn a productive trade, become a farmer, stop contributing support to systems that seek to destroy you. Prepare for the worst, because it is coming. The unprepared typically die, the prepared generally survive.
Its not the deception that's the problem, its the false advertising and fraud.
In the last two years (shortly after GPT) I've got a list of about 400 of these outfits. Indeed and LinkedIn don't remove them when reported. Many are the same entity with similar naming conventions.
Hint: Run your own web server with resources tied to a uniquely keyed access token per job application, have analytics on the site with various portfolio and other useful information.
You'll see the same companies, and IP blocks (even if they advertised under a false name) show up regularly.
If you can't detect them on the front-end because of bad actors, fingerprint them on the backend when they access the provided resource. (P.S. Ensure you are in a locality where its legal to do so, I am not a lawyer).
The economy is not fine. It is like a race car, insofar as the problem scope is one of lagging indicators and hysteresis, (i.e. speed and fuel), but not as you elaborate.
Starting in 2010, the FED started quantitative easing. This marked the abandonment of the sound dollar policy. The economic fallout we face today are the natural consequences of money printing and the economic dynamics that worsen it.
You fail to realize the scope of the issue. In 2020/2021 the Saudi's abandoned the petrodollar agreement. This dramatically reduced the demand for our printed currency which our country has used to fund its deficit spending, and export debt to the nations who had to hold it. With the abandonment, the entire pool of printed money that nations had to hold to purchase goods like Fuel shrunk dramatically. At the same time, we had the pandemic, where we printed even more money which caused inflation and had to raise our rates to slow that down (rates don't stop inflation, it just slows down or speeds up the mixing).
Today we are faced with high rates, and high inflation. They will need to cut rates to encourage growth, but inflation will become hyper-inflation when it does.
The chaotic warblings of the market have caused shortage in non-discretionary goods. If one has been paying attention, you'll have seen the warning signs like frozen foods being consistently out, eggs increasing to almost a dollar per egg, and fast food now costing double for a single serving. There are still shortages too despite this.
Illiquidity in the debt market is all well and good in terms of velocity of money, but at the point where shortages occur and persist beyond 30 days, you've missed the mark dramatically.
You fundamentally misunderstand inflation and how interest rates affect it.
The national unemployment was 1.5% in August. The tech sector was %7.0?.
The tech sector has hiring freezes starting in late October thru to March.
August is the peak hiring, and the tech sector unemployment was 7%, 4.6x the national average, and keep in mind unemployment statistics only account for a rolling window of about 18 weeks give or take.
By March, that unemployment rate for tech will likely be well above 10% of the entire sector. This is unprecedented, and the downturn started in 2022 (outside that 18 week window), jobs have not increased in that time.
Subjective measures from insiders have quite a large number of tech workers describing the vast majority of their professional networks as being out of work, roughly 70% of my network is currently unemployed, and I've a few thousand people, having worked in IT for a decade in important roles.
Its wrong to claim something that is unupported/false when all external and objective signs show a serious problem. Doing this resorts to magical thinking, and delusion; definitionally.
If this were any other market, you might have a point but this is tech. The Tech sector is not correlated with changes in interest rates. It has a long history of not being correlated with interest rates (20+ years).
Do note that each one of your news outlets which you linked are members of the trusted news initiative, and effectively state run media (a cabal).
Please do your own diligence by looking at the actual data and stop pushing false rhetoric coming from an echo chamber. Accepting false information as true is by definition delusional.
It appears you have fallen for their propaganda, or otherwise have a vested interest in promoting such.
The US economy is not extremely healthy, it isn't healthy at all. By most metrics late 2022 showed growing warning signs of stagflation. The layoffs in 2023 solidified that, and layoffs continued unabated.
The abandonment of the petrodollar will guarantee inflation remains high despite high interest rates, and when they have to cut those interest rates because of deflation, hyper-inflation will surge. These distortions are the consequence of economic calculation problem in action (Mises).
BofA is on shaky ground, they will likely be the next large bank to fail. Shortages have been persistent in non-discretionary goods since August.
All of these signs are warning signs of economic collapse or as people have come to call it the hard landing. You can't print money indefinitely out of nothing and expect there won't be any consequence from that, the dire consequences we will be living through is what all those people warned about when the sound dollar policy for monetary policy was discarded.
A lot of data references models from economist's, but most economists have and continue to be wrong in their conclusions. Economies are limited visibility n-body systems, there are islands of regularity, and statistics isn't sufficiently developed to say anything about systems that have a mixture of regularity and chaos or correct for those.
> I believe the discussion of the "fix" for Healthcare as who has insurance and who doesn't is wrong ...
I agree. I'd go so far as to say its evil, and the banality of evil that results in discussions surrounding this topic seems to be fairly delusional, which is rather unfortunate.
Thomas Paine had quite a lot to say about "dead men ruling", and that applies to any system where those supporting it are treated no better than slaves.
The problem with healthcare is there is currently no market for it. The market that is claimed today is in fact no real market because it is supported wholesale by the government. For a market to exist, you must have competition, and that means you do not cooperate with your competitors. This necessarily requires there to be many competitors (not few) to the point where cooperation becomes impossible.
Any centralized system fails because of only a few archetypal failures. Mises covers these failures in his works on Socialism (1930s).
So long as there is no market, there can be no solution. It fails completely in 6 different common ways if its a modern central heirarchy, and if its one of any number of sub-niches it may fail in more ways than that.
The solution is dependent on incentives, and there can be no real incentive as long as there is free money on the table conjured up by the printing press in the form of preferential loans.
Money printing destroys markets slowly over time until they collapse to non-market socialism. This is seen as a sieving action of consolidation over time, its ruinous, and its been happening for well over 50 years now unmitigated. The final leg of the ponzi will occur when outflows>inflows or debt growth exceeds GDP.
The fundamental fix isn't a supply side issue. Its a regulatory/corruption issue tamping down any potential market.
Also is it even right as a society to allow medical technology that enables one oldest generation to horde all the resources, and as a result out-compete the young with regards to those resources; to the point where the young cannot secure a future and stop having children? The old will age and die regardless.
The birth rate is now plummeting because the old have enacted systemic changes and refused to yield their political power to the next generation which should have happened in 2000. People die of old age, there is no escape.
Its morally wrong to impose wage slavery on the young by virtue that you spawned them, without representation or consent.
The problem itself will resolve in a few years when the great dying starts happening. The folly and banality of evil, of the boomer generation will be one for the history books.
How does the saying go, one bad generation is all it takes for society to fall to ruin and destruction? We're living through the proof of that saying.
Well some of the more discerning people have been waiting for the shoe to drop in sheltered asset classes since the major red flags during the pandemic started occurring.
A large number of structural changes were made that fundamentally make the entire monetary system unsound, and these were largely silent changes (Basel III modified, no longer fractional banking reserve/overunity).
I've still got my copies of Benjamin Graham's Intelligent Investor, and Security Analysis by Graham Dodd sitting on my shelf, but nearly everything in those two books is no longer relevant with these changes, I'll still keep them as historical reference though their utility is now gone.
Other changes include preferential treatment of assets/synthetic shares/contracts during clearing for certain parties in the market (paper printing via commodities contracts/options).
Banking in general is in a deflationary concentration super-cycle. New banks can't enter the market, and the liabilities exceed assets for GSIBs/SIFIs. As time progresses, each will collapse chaotically, and when that bubble bursts it takes the markets with it into full deflation.
The petrodollar agreement being abandoned by the Saudi's is what is driving this to occur more rapidly. All the money printed and held by countries abroad is now returning to compete for the same goods. The demand for that pool of currency is much lower now.
The dynamics/indicators are flip-flopping between hyper-inflation Weimar, and great depression (for a couple months now).
This potentially might be a new big debt crises archetype. It appears that inflationary and deflationary pressures are spiking chaotically, labor statistics are being constantly revised (horribly inaccurate), and since action is based on lagging indicators eventually hysteresis results in a misstep hard landing.
You have a chaotic and narrowing safe path that eventually ends, which some argue describes the economic calculation problem.
Ponzi's always exact an unreasonable price. If you are interested in these archetypes, Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Report on Big Debt Crises is useful, though in my opinion he neglects a basic fact that reserve currencies can collapse without a replacement being on-hand and so a beautiful deleveraging is a matter of chance.
The collapse can be slow though, and evidenced by the shrinking number of producers in the market (those not backed by preferential loans/printing press).
Adam Smith's requirement; producers must make a profit in purchasing power or they leave the market. No real market can exist when entities cooperate, and are sustained by a printing press.
I'm not OP, but I consider your response quite reasonable.
I found your reply informative and specific, though I took a more fundamental approach in my response to OP, focusing on components required for a "rule of law" compared to a "rule by law" (kafka/soviet style).
I've done a lot of historic reading, and any time those components fail, violence increases proportionally to the lack of agency for non-violent resolution available.
It may just be speculation on my part, but given the repeated cycle, and detailed accounts, it seems there are parallels in objective measures of these components compared with witnessed events, which are what citizens use as a signal to determine whether they take violent action.
The events seem to follow quite accurately along what's been written in social contract theory, and from Thomas Paine's time & writings.
Obviously these type of writings are from times that are dark and violent, and violence benefits few if any which is why there's good cause in trying to prevent that kind of degradation in existing systems, and the dynamics that cause it.
> the law must determine what is fair as society changes over time
This has been the ideal that has been put forth generally quite a bit, but it also almost always neglects the structural failings that must equally be addressed at the same time.
For example, at what point would you say that case law overrides the constitution?
According to the law, it holds the constitution as supreme, and that no representative has the authority to exceed or violate that which is granted in the constitution, this pertains to the judiciary as well as the executive and legislative. It is up to the courts to enforce this as the last pillar of society (for non-violent conflict resolution).
In a general society with a rule of law, when there is a admitted constitutional violation, it must be immediately cured.
Issuing a decision that prevents a constitutional remedy while recognizing the violation is arbitrary, a direct contradiction, exceeds the authority granted, negates the constitution, shows a violation of a sworn oath to uphold the constitution, and causes the entire "rule of law" and its institutional credibility to be called into question.
If you allow exceptions to the constitution, the fundamental component, "equality under the law", fails, and that means we don't have a "rule of law".
The natural outcome of this being increasing violence, which no one wants because it benefits no one.
Bringing society as a whole from a "rule of law" to a "rule by law", which inevitably (over time) causes society to fail violently towards totalitarianism/tyranny, is stupid but may have short term benefits for the corrupt. The harms of such are systemic and grow exponentially.
It is not a matter of catching up to offenders, it is a matter of competency. This is a professional occupation where corruption is an ongoing structural issue, and actions must be reasonable to protect both society and the individual rights equally.
No true American would accept soviet-style kafka courts without any of the normal protections regardless of the crime, and that is the danger faced with the decision here.
Corruption of the state will always seek to use such types of systems to justify their existence often inducing, planting evidence, or causing such crimes to be committed. Some may be actual offenders, but others may not and no differentiation is made. It may even be done for political purposes such as with The Gulag Archipelago.
It is a slippery slope which cannot be walked back later as the damage will have already been done with the punishment being front-loaded.
If there is a question regarding a boundary of a policy or process, you get a legal opinion, and base your actions on that opinion. This is well established in many sectors, including but not limited to the Business Judgment Rule. This is what is needed for this to be done in "good faith".
Allowing a blanket good-faith exemption and exclusion for government to do anything not directly covered by existing case-law without repercussion is a dangerous precedent towards tyranny, especially when they had the probable cause at the start to do it the right way.
It seems like you neglect many of these important foundational subjects. The lack of accountability control encourages the police and related apparatus to violate the law, and thus violate the public trust when this is unenforced.
The main outcome in a society absent a "rule of law" is overwhelming violence.
This is what most people fail to realize, and many today embrace magical thinking and delusion.
Mass delusion has greatly overtaken this country and will soon destroy it if it is not stopped.
It is of critical importance to base our protective systems in objective measures which are external, and rational thinking and critical reasoning that logically follows without contradiction or circular reasoning.
To fail at rational thinking, is to embrace delusion and become schizophrenic, a common malady in the totalitarian state (Joost Meerloo). This is covered well in topics on the banality of evil, and the radical evil (WW2).
The crime accused is repugnant, but equality under the law, and constitutional protections are sacrosanct, and far more important than any single person.
> I do not find "the justice system treats them differently... circular appeal to authority.
You may not know it, but you are effectively referencing the difference between a "rule of law" and a "rule by law" in the important parts at least.
This goes back to and falls under social contract theory, and the "rule of law" in society is meant as the final protection for its members, and to provide non-violent conflict resolution impartially, justly, and fairly, equal under the law, and accessible.
The moment the required components cease to exist, is the momentous beginning of a trend towards the failure of society, as it will naturally mean increasing violence and reversion to the natural order, rule of violence.
There is a valid argument to be made that despite many people claiming we have the former, we are actually living in the latter.
The latter allows many miscarriages, such as the infamous soviet judiciary example of, "you show me the person, I'll show you the crime".
Possession laws historically are also particularly problematic in this regard because evidence can be planted, or in the case of digital systems, induced creation of evidence involuntary (given how systems work and how callbacks can be injected by pointing software to a third-party resource to download), regardless there are many potential situations where the viewing of such horrifying material is unrelated to the choice of a person accused.
That of course doesn't appear to be the case here given what's been written, but nonetheless it is important to have firm, objective, and rational requirements to protect citizens. The trade-off is some small number of bad guys may get to go free as a result, and that's a tradeoff anyone should be glad for when it comes to corruption and how it devolves into tyranny unchecked.
The law rarely differentiates mitigating circumstances, often leading to a guilty until proven innocent situation for most, when these types of structural flaws are allowed. For example, there are locksmith tools that are considered burglary tools, and mere possession in some places is grounds for arrest (a felony), these tools share in common the physical shapes for other legitimate item uses.
System's without appropriate procedures and process for punishing abuses almost always leads to totalitarianism when no feedback system is in place to prevent such abuses from getting out of hand, which is why any true American should be up in arms when abuses happen as a result of corruption. Corruption can occur for a number of reasons that do not benefit a person. For a full treating of corruption, Johnston wrote a book on it ("Syndromes of Corruption").
Unfortunately, many judges today view the constitution as only being binding on government itself (in isolation), and have long taken the literal or constructive ruling instead of going with the spirit of the law, lessening our protections over time gradually but surely. This will eventually lead us to societal collapse.
It is a sad state of affairs, but regardless of the nature of the crime, the ends do not justify the means absent direct survival threats (which cannot be soundly argued in this case). Ends justifying means is only valid against existential threats.
When those means are allowed to change arbitrarily, the very next time it will be you or someone close to you on the sacrificial altar as a matter of some corrupt officials convenience, maybe merely for engaging in your protected rights to free speech to limit corrupt behavior or expressing disagreement in retaliation; there will only be an indirect link.
These tools are then ready made to be used in retaliation arbitrarily.
That said,
In this case, at least from what I've read, it appears a fairly clear cut case of fruit of the poisoned tree.
Law Enforcement could easily have applied for a warrant based on the probable cause of the hash matches, but instead chose not to. There is also the question of methodology Google uses in how they manage and enter new hashes into their hash database (which went unanswered).
They would have needed a warrant to justify everything else that came later. That is classic fruit of the poisoned tree. Thus it is a constitutional violation.
Additionally, I'm sure it comes as no surprise to most HN readers who are programmers, but hashes are not unique they are loose fingerprints related to structure but not giving fine detail for a exact match.
At its core, it is a finite field, which means that there can potentially be an infinite number of paths/files out there that match a same given hash.
Using a hash to match results of file structure, are not fool proof, and as a result of this ambiguity, it can potentially impinge legitimate activities, or obscure a chain of evidence without recourse.
For example, say that initial hash was not correctly identified when it was added to that watch list because maybe their AI false positived on it? Or it was submitted without review as being related to some censorable activity (legitimate under 1st amendment), all you have is a hash you can't verify the content.
This is how censorship or social credit can easily happen under a color of law in private parties hands; this has been covered extensively related to EU discussions on Client-Side-Scanning (and why its unreasonable given the repercussions for false-positives).
When you match only hashes, you don't know what the underlying content is aside from a likelihood/probability that it may be the same as some other file, which is why you need to be able to verify it is the exact same.
When your job is to find such people/things you should be doing what's needed (within the law) to ensure the strongest case possible.
The technical details matter, and processes must follow objective measures and be rational, and follow the constitution. Law is procedural, these are professionals. They should have gotten a warrant at the hash match.
Hashing collisions have happened in the past, mathematically this is known and expected given the structure of cryptographic hashes.
The investigators should have gotten a warrant to confirm.
The Failure to get a warrant here was a procedural failure, and left the door open for challenge. From what I can see in the write-up, it should be dismissed.
Failure to do so, effectively sets a precedent such that anything not directly addressed by a previous court can be construed as done in good faith to deprive people of their constitutional rights, allowing contradiction and further paralysis in the courts moving forward, and also promotes the interpretations that case law and legislative law override constitution protections.
Arguably, if the constitutional violation is found and admitted, there is no valid good faith exemption that can be applied to nullify the constitutional cure. The constitution supersedes everything else, including procedure, law, and case law.
The violation must be cured lest the entire constitution lose its power to non-enforcement (and the based system degrades towards tyranny), something that has been arguably happening as a result of long-standing corruption which goes unpunished.
Yes, the accused crimes may be heinous, but everyone is equal under the law. The moment this ceases to be true and happen with any regularity, is the day the rule of law has failed, and society then fails back to a natural law of violence. No one wants that.
It may not happen overnight, but it will happen regardless because history is full of examples where these dynamics cause those outcomes.
In many cases with very few exceptions today, judges who are older come to believe they are above the law, and fail to check their power, and in the end, they violate their sworn oaths. There is no punishment for them for this in most cases, and they never go back and correct mistakes they make (afaik, it is a rare exception if it happens at all).
Any true American should have a solid educational foundation in Social Contract Theory, and the basis for society. You are right to be concerned about the circular reasoning. In the absence of external objective measures, processes, and procedures, such circular reasoning inevitably devolves into delusion.
Sounds like what you have works for you, seems like it would be quite brittle to me though.
> Idk why bash scripting is a "lost art"
I suspect that has to do with the fact that writing or reading it is often an effort in futility, acting as an efficient rabbet hole time trap.
Bash scripting is supposed to act as glue, and it does so extremely poorly. It relies on program writers coding their interfaces correctly to maintain determinism (which many have done very poorly). It makes no guarantees, or warnings about such errors, it makes it quite easy to make these mistakes, and the respective maintainers of the various utilities it may depend on have said these bugs are working as intended, nofix.
Take a look at ldd sometime, I'm sure you'll notice the output has three different types of determinism problems which prevent passing the output to any automation (and having it work thereafter correctly), without first patching the software.
That particular bug was reported in 2016, it was partially fixed in 2018 by PaX, but the maintainers wouldn't pull the fix (from what I read), so PaX forked it. The bugs still exist there today afaik.
For glue to work, you have to be able to make certain guarantees and be able to correctly transform the output in various ways easily. Visibility in all processes is extremely important as well and changes made on one version should continue to work on later versions.
Unfortunately, by externalizing most of the basic functionality to various core utilities, you potentially get different behavior every time you update, and as mentioned it fails resiliency tests; instead becoming brittle. There is also very little visibility without having deep knowledge of the ecosystem.
Ironically, what was described in the Monad Manifesto got this better than anything else I've seen since.
Technically you shouldn't, but some people don't consider this a loss of credibility as a whole.
The moment Ubuntu started deceptively poisoning their repo with pre-packaged fixup scripts that would violate security policy by fixing/re-enable snap if it was disabled, and installed the related snap packages (without prompts) instead, was the moment I stopped using Ubuntu for anything professional or production grade.
The package manager is apt, visibility is through apt. If I wanted a snap package, I'd use snap to install it. If you use apt-get upgrade, you shouldn't have to worry about third-party idiocy violating security policy without disclosure or notice and automatically fixing disabled services, and then installing the snap packages.
We don't use snap for a reason, it is unnecessary and broad attack surface that is unneeded.
Recessions typically are pullbacks of the market sector for 1-2 years, but not necessarily slowdowns in growth, though there is no globally accepted definition for a recession.
Depressions typically have stagnant growth, starting in one sector, and expanding; with no prospects and a duration that can last years (plural). You can have a depression where everyone says they are hiring, but no hiring actually occurs.
Cost of living crises naturally occur during the latter crises given the chaotic nature of deflationary and inflationary forces (money-printing). They are not mutually exclusive.
Payroll data collection has problems with accuracy, people claiming unemployment also have data collection problems. Its not uncommon for the government to withhold unemployment benefit approval until some arbitrary bureacratic requirement is met with no means to contact someone to resolve it timely. I know several people who received their 18 month unemployment effectively as a lump sum and they spent days of labor trying to overcome those hurdles.
This causes a delay of action, and bursts in time (temporally) which cannot be compared except as an average. Revisions are subject to problems too.
Unemployment calculations from data recorded during that time have since changed. The same unemployment numbers are not the same mathematical objects being compared.
At this point, we can never know the true scope of unemployment to make any comparison definitively, because the measurements no longer accurately collect the necessary information for such a comparison.
You don't see engineers turn sampling data into an average rate of change, and then use it for safety-critical applications that require instantaneous rates of change.
In my previous response, I said unemployment today isn't counted after 18 weeks, so you should be aware that these objects are not the same.
Just because you have no visibility on a problem doesn't mean there isn't a problem especially when objective measures indicate there is a problem.
No definitive comparison can be made objectively, claiming its not even close would involve delusion when no external objective comparison can be made, definitionally.
Yes, but the problems start in severe economic crises. Specifically, when those several months turn into years.
Many filters during the hiring process, prior to interview will discard those candidates who have gaps since last employment regardless of circumstance. They may use AI as a third-party company to review and obscure the fact that they aren't hiring anyone over 40, female, or otherwise protected classes but that is what is happening regularly, along with other elements such as degrees being weighted higher than experience algorithmically.
> I do understand ...
I can tell you from personal experience, this opinion of yours isn't reflective of the whole. I've been in Tech for a decade, I was unlucky and was laid off before the major lay offs (2022) as I was involved in workforce reduction for a buyout merger. I've been looking ever since, and I've had to find work elsewhere in the interim once my reserves were expended.
I was extremely frugal, cooking everything myself, nothing luxurious. Inflation destroyed my reserves, the lack of jobs forced me to look wider than my given profession since there are no jobs, and I had more saved than most (>50k in liquid reserves at the start).
This isn't some recession like before. This is a great depression, potentially a big debt crises like Germany pre-WW2.
70% of my professional network in IT/Tech right now, across the board, is out of work. I'll let that sink in. 70%.
We are at peak hiring for seasonal hiring and unemployment is 7.0% in August? Hiring freezes guarantee this will be double digits by the annual count. National unemployment is 1.5%. That's a 4.6x national distortion between the national average unemployment and one sector that impacts everything else as a labor multiplier, and that measurement only counts those currently getting unemployment, any long-term displacement outside 18 weeks isn't counted.
Its looking more like we're in the middle of an economic collapse, which makes sense if you know about ponzi's, economics of boom-bust cycles, and how we are entering a bust cycle related to the petrodollar agreement abandonment (by the Saudi's); all those dollars printed for abroad use are now flowing back to compete with the same goods despite high interest rates.
BRICS largely isn't about attacking the US economically, its about sheltering from the global economic fallout of fiat money printing, for more than half a century. The bankers are and have been doing this to us since before we were born, and this happens every time large fractions of global assets get concentrated into few hands. Its cyclical. Large market-share companies are funded by preferential loans made by those same bankers. This is how you sieve wealth and marketshare, then drive prices up, and eventually end in deflation or hyper-inflationary collapse, because unlike normal systems economics is both sticky psychologically, and mathematically chaotic (3-body-problem).
There is no beautiful deleveraging, the bill always comes due. If this worsens, and I don't see how it cannot, this will be known by the survivors as the folly of one big generation.
I disagree with your conclusion, you have several flawed premises.
The market has been slowly shrinking into fewer and fewer hands over time, which is why it has become more competitive over time. This has also led to cooperative behavior among the large marketshare companies in the sectors to disadvantage competitors, and employees.
Companies do not bid up to the max they can, because the executives take their cut first. The companies bids can only ever be the max of what is left after that, and varies by the greed of those people.
Interest rates would be the shock you described, but Tech unemployment as far as I can tell has until now been bulletproof, and uncorrelated with interest rate rises or falls. Its not rational to assume this market shock is a result of interest rates, AI is the only competitive alternative.
The issue is not that you're getting fired. Its that you can no longer get base goods needed for survival arbitrarily and without notice, and without capital reserves which are finite you are living on the street.
When the entire market as an entirety is contracting, there are no new jobs to move to in other fields.
Worse, the concentrated market is naturally incentivized to impose high costs on any job seekers to interfere in labor relations to create barriers to entry for competitors while suppressing wages for prospective workers.
This natural progression occurs when anti-trust fails, and money printing makes it worse potentially leading to either deflation (a collapse to non-market socialism) or hyper-inflation (a collapse to non-market socialism). Debt issued as preferential loans from a money-printer makes a company state-dependent/controlled apparatus even if its claim is that it is held privately.
The economy today is worse than 2008, much worse then the dotcom bust, and if you plot the trend with good data going back and starting around the 1970s, the trend shows progressive ruin as time passes, with seiving and consolidation occurring regularly. That is the force driving this problem, and it doesn't enable tech salaries.
> There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn.
There is a limit to what government can provide, it takes awhile to get to those limits (we're in a super-cycle going back to the 1920s) but we'll be there in the next 5-10 years thanks in large part to deficit spending and the FED picking winners and losers.
The main issues with academia also applies to government. They are structurally the same. Education today is not about learning skills, that is always secondary to instilling the qualities a loyal unthinking worker. That is what the entire prussian-model of schooling is about (which is what we have in this country).
These structures for training follow the same structure as guild socialism, and the same intractable failures (ref Mises for related details).
It inevitably ends up being a cult of qualification, where you are automatically considered unqualified without a piece of paper even if you have the actual skills to do the job. Once a target market size is identified and reached, new candidates are put on an endless escalator of suffering with arbitrary filters/requirements where the claimed outcome is nothing but an unobtainable pipe dream.
About the only thing they got right is the fact that large business has become delusional, and being delusional is not just a dick move.
Being delusional is synonymous with blind and evil at that level, but this is not some revolution, it is normal economics and it has predictable dynamics, that ultimately end in collapse, which is what we have been living through in a slow moving state of ruin, for quite some time but it is accelerating and it was caused by the central bankers and their comrades funded by preferential business loans, paid by your tax dollars through non-fractional banking.
We aren't that far off, and the talent brain drain that is happening is silent.
When you have malign parties cooperating to suppress wages, price gouge, cause shortage, impose higher costs on everyone, as well as keeping wages well below what is needed to secure financial safety for rearing children, and the employee can't find a job in their specialized profession despite being highly competent, those people leave for other options.
People stop having children, old with resources outcompetes young, and then there is a great dying.
People go where the jobs are, even if things normalize again later they don't just come back to that profession, they hang that hat up for good when its no longer viable.
No amount of money will bring them back to that profession. The golden time period for this seems to be about 1-2 years without being able to find work in their fields.
Once it happens, it becomes a closed road to them, and this psychology is sticky and is already happening. If you thought it was hard to find talent before, when you have large companies laying off 20% of their tech staff, they can't just rehire that 20% back because the competency isn't accounted for, you get the bottom of the barrel.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
You have a higher chance of losing the competent people forever than getting bare bones competency in a glut with no real way to validate competency.
Companies can be deceptive, but what that means is they lose credibility, and competent people discern, and when there is a silent vote of no confidence, where those intelligent people withdraw their support; ruin overtakes everything faster, and no amount of misinformation can hide this beyond a certain point.
If you are competent at your job, and there's a glut, you are better off going into another field despite being less proficient.
If companies are going to be malign, withdraw your support; stop giving them your mind. The time for talk came and went. Rise up, and take back the only thing you have of value that can't be taken from you without your consent; your mind.
Learn a productive trade, become a farmer, stop contributing support to systems that seek to destroy you. Prepare for the worst, because it is coming. The unprepared typically die, the prepared generally survive.