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> Calculation of unemployment […]

Define "unemployment". There are six (U-1 to -6) ways of classification in the US:

* https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm

* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-...

* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unemployment.asp

And the fact that they're different between the US and other countries, and between other countries and other-other countries is well recognized; "International unemployment rates: how comparable are they?":

* https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/06/art1full.pdf

And this isn't something new; from 1957, "International Comparison of Unemployment Rates":

* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/measurement-and-beha...

Just because they're different does not mean that they are "misleading" or 'manipulated'.

I agree. The super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time now

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...

> They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.

> for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up

This is a myth. But a self-fulfilling one, given we’re cutting budgets to those agencies because so many Americans believe it.

>Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries

Source? For unemployment, isn't the U-3 definition used for "headline unemployment" consistent to most other countries?

"for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up"

That's quite a claim. A "whopper" one might say.

The frustrating thing about the empire collapse is that it doesn't need to happen. There are still tons of highly energized and ostensibly disciplined and competitive people here. It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands and the aesthetic and moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued, for reasons unclear.

> Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries.

This is a big claim. What other countries? What are their methods and how do they differ?

Your comment is broadly misleading. In fact, I would say that "shadow stats" guys like you have enabled the destruction of the system by creating the space to cast doubt on the valid methods used by BLS. BLS unemployment metrics have a valid basis and where they differ from Eurostat those differences are minor and with rational basis (such as 16 vs. 15 year old starting age).

> our government could do a better job

It's no longer your government. It's run largely by Russia and Israel, using vast array of kompromats and bribes. Republicans and Democrats would rather burn the country to the ground that admit wrongdoing and do the time for it.

Sure, but thetes a sizeable diffetence when skewed data becomes no-data.

Context has power. Removing it is thining the herd of power.

Depending upon which party controls the White House, numbers seem to be released to support a predictable narrative, then adjusted later.

But that's probably just my lying' eyes.

You should see it from the inside!

The US is the best 400 mil population country in the world

I spent a fair bit of time in the former Soviet Union, what happened there is instructive for what comes next.

I think we will see, across the West broadly, to varying extents:

- peripheral states flipping (e.g., Baltics)

- widespread looting of public assets, a new oligarchal class minted

- total destruction of the middle class, particularly those with ties to government and NGOs (I'm in this camp and miserable for it)

- at least one civil war, lots of territorial disputes kicking off, separatism

- breakdown of law and order, local gangsters as local authorities

- mass ex-migration, ethnic cleansing

- weak governments, coups, demagogues, vassalage

- hyperinflation and scammy get rich quick scams (watch crypto)

the answer is reliable money. how much money would you pick up a verified 1 minute survey from the real u.s. government for? I'd do it for $5. (=$300 per hour) and hope for as many calls as possible.

For comparison purposes the U.S. budget is about $20,000 per person ($7t budget, a bit under 350m people), so the government could definitely pay you to answer their "spam" calls. (While mandating that first parties show that it is the real U.S. government and not a spammer.)

So it would be your actual first party telephone showing "Answer this real call from the U.S. government for $5 instantly, 1 minute average call time."

I think that would be a good way to get good data fast. What do you think? (At the same time, impersonating the U.S. government would remain illegal, and the first party would ensure the payment is real.)

>They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus

That was fake news:

In May 2020, Jones was terminated from her position managing the team that created Florida's ArcGIS COVID-19 dashboard after being repeatedly reprimanded for sharing the department's work online without authorization. Jones alleged instead that she was told to manipulate the dashboard's data and that her firing was retaliation for her refusal. The OIG exonerated state health officials, finding her allegations to be unsubstantiated and unfounded. Jones later posted on social media a forgery of the dismissal letter from the Florida Commission on Human Relations, such that it appeared that her complaint had been validated.

In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020. The execution of the warrant with armed police, widely referred to as a raid, was due to a 2016 battery charge against Jones by the Louisiana State University police. In 2023, Jones pled no-contest to a 2019 charge of cyberstalking a former Florida State University student. She was fired from both institutions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebekah_Jones

Citing Rebekah Jones in your argument is the opposite of convincing. She forged documents related to her firing to make her appear more sympathetic. She has been adjudicated guilty of cyberstalking and misuse of the state’s emergency notification system, and I haven’t seen a credible defense against those accusations. She’s a fraud, and many in the media uncritically boosted her claims because they shared her political aims. That people still cite her is proof of the old adage that a lie can travel across the world before the truth can lace its boots.

Can you tell us a bit more about the gag orders? I find it fascinating that all the discussion about climate change has largely disappeared after LLMs became mainstream, and the idea that state actors may be suppressing data is equally fascinating/terrifying.

> It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science.

When all they see is it being used to push narratives, they'd rather not have it at all.

Also, "There Are Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics" dates to the 1800s. This is nothing new.

“Never trust any data you haven’t manipulated yourself”.

Canada’s population has increased at an astonishing rate, I wonder if that affects the per capita numbers. If you have the same industry in 2011 and 2026 but population went from 35 million to 42 million, per capita the numbers look terrible

> The establishment folks are mostly sensible.

The establishment has been replaced by MAGA and The Heritage Foundation extremists. The "data collection", surveys, remote-sensing etc are things they all want to get rid of and are doing so.

Here's one article from last year about climate datasets being disappeared,

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250422-usa-scientists-r...

This ratchet effect of partially righting the ship every four years followed by drunken sailors YOLOing further into a reef because the ‘responsible party’ didn’t fix things fast enough is unsustainable. No clue how it ends but it’s so much easier to destroy things than it is to build them, so the builders are always at a distinct disadvantage.

This is going to take a generation or two to fix. If we're lucky and work hard at it.

> just a matter of switching the admin, which we should be able to

I wish I shared your optimism. Being unable to change the admin has been the default state. The recent few centuries have been an exception. It's a big ship that we need to turn here. Might take longer than we think if we can manage it at all.

This is an downright evil take on the current situation. The supply chains are so complex that no single country is capable of replicating them entirely. It starts with the fact that the required natural resources are distributed around the globe in a way that no country has access to all of them. The production chains from resources to finished machines are downright byzantine. And this becomes recursive with the need for specialized tools and their own production chains along the way. You need trains amd trucks and ships to be able to build semiconductors, for example. Except for maybe China pr India, there is no country that has the manpower to cover all of this domestically. The supply of workers and training falls far too short.

Any Western strategy that sees this as both "us vs. them" and also pursues reduced international collaboration is bound to lose bitterly in the long run.

The result is either a silent collapse of that country's economy or the start of an ill-conceived war of conquest to gain by force what the country cannot supply itself.

You really do not understand how interdependent everyone is. The chip machines Taiwan uses come from Europe, for example.

The US kneecapped itself for no reason.

> They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.

42 European here.

I've heard my whole adult life that Europe is ten years behind USA.

That doesn't feel that bad though. Being bleeding edge comes with the thrill of the avant garde prestige. But it does also mean you take the downsides of navigating the unexplored unknown in your face with no one to help with turn key solution when it happens.

If it means 10 years buffer on big social seismic troubles, that doesn't sound too bad if there is indeed an efficient shelve. That's not necessarily the case on every matter though, like global climate change is going to impact everyone, no matter the political isolation, and if a direct military aggression happens, it can be hurtful no matter how prepared is the society.

> It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.

> Europe won't be able to catch that.

You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code? If Claude Code is the one reaping the majority of the benefits of "spit[ing] out a week's worth of business automation tasks", then it's not worth much to the business. If Claude Code isn't the one reaping the majority of those benefits, then...Europe can use Claude Code too and reap the benefits for their business as well.

I have been a nay sayer on LLMs/GPTs in general having tried many, but recently Ive been shepherding a fairly complex code build through the latest opus model and its quite impressive.

It still gets things wrong occasionally but the time its saved me has been substantial. Im starting to enjoy it.

>Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.

https://www.asml.com

I'm not a fan of this "us vs. them" framing.

Arguably the greatest threats to the US's future is ourselves. If we fundamentally corrupt who we are as a nation we've already lost before the competition with rivals has even begun.

Our significant tech advances could become tools of our own downfall if they violate our values or undermine the social mobility of the American dream.

Frankly I think the people pushing this competitive mindset (particularly against the EU) are trying to mislead otherwise intelligent builder-sorts to not pay attention to the looting & destruction of American values.

>>Europe won't be able to catch that. If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either.

My immediate thought is - why is it a race. Like holy shit imagine if we could actually work together instead of having this mentality of "if we work hard the other countries won't catch that". As someone who grew up in the golden age of globalization and rise of the information superhighway, the way countries are just siloing themselves and treating everything as a zero sum game is both sad and scary - that's exactly how you lead the world on a path to another world war - telling yourself that you don't need anyone else and in fact you need to beat them to the punch and everyone else is your opponent. If an alien race was looking at us right now they'd be shaking their heads.

> America [...] needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.

America, in the form of the Trump administration and a Trump-subservient Congress, just spent the last year completely destroying trust on these issues and it would take decades of sustained effort to rebuild it.

No, the bad, lazy, and outright incorrect takes are downvoted to oblivion. They just have a lot of child comments because HNers like nothing more than rebutting the dumbest opinions.

That’s 122,000 out of a labor force size of 170 million!!

Yes, month to month you have large absolute error bars vs. the monthly delta, but being an imperfect monthly barometer of labor force momentum is only the headline use of the establishment report.

This is the point #1 in the article, the need for better sampling methods. You do not get that easily.

That dating analogy would work better if America wasn’t messing up every relationship with lunatic behaviour.

Everyone swiped left long ago.

Please don't "both side" this. As much as there is corruption in any administration, R or D, the levels we are seeing now are completely unprecedent and blunt. EG: https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/13/politics/trump-fundraise-emai... (from earlier this morning on the HN frontpage)

Not accuse. Observed.

This is a lot of similar-sounding-but-different problems.

EDIT:

For those not realizing that China has a long history of less-trustworthy stats, along with Iran and some other governments, here is some reading you can consider

[0] https://sites.pitt.edu/~tgrawski/papers/2001%20What%27s%20Ha...

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29349/w293...

[2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...

[3] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/245398/1/cesifo1_wp9...

[4] https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/350051528721174623-0050...

[5] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf

[6] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5140733

[7] https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/22/4620

[8] https://www.imf.org/en/publications/wp/issues/2022/06/03/mea...

[9] https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10630.pdf

[10] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23323/w233...

[11] https://www.jstor.org/stable/26372649

[12] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15199/w151...

[13] https://www.economic-policy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/S...

[14] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1273505

[15] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2...

[16] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10439...

There is a valid both sides argument to a lot of these issues IMO, but where the discussion ought to be is at how extreme “one” side has taken it.

Whether it’s executive orders, corruption, pardons, appointments, obstruction, gerrymandering. pedophilia, lying, etc. I don’t think there’s a valid defence of just how far one particular side has gone (and proactively I might add).

Why is there always a both sides-er in these discussions?

FWIW, one party generally deferred to nonpartisan commissions to draw boundaries to avoid gerrymandering. So one “side” did far more than propose a solution, they did the right thing even when the other side wasn’t.

Gerrymandering is the worst example to pick when you’re pushing both-sides-bad.

> yet neither "side" makes any proposal for an apolitical fair approach for redistricting...

Last week there was mention here of a proposal to fix the apportionment of House seats so that they are not capped at 435.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332108

This proposal would make gerrymandering much harder.

1900 to 2024 for the US.

For Iran, China, USSR, for example, you had to back in estimates from observable benchmark information uncontaminated by dictatorships. You didn't have to do that with tbe US.

its a measurement process of a large and complicated system. some of the things you cite are actually signs that the system was actually kind of working. CPI is a basket of indicators, there is no way that's ever going to capture the whole picture.

the best we can ask for is apolitical appointees whose goal is to improve the process and transparency about how the data was collected, publication of the raw numbers, and publication of the methodology used to synthesize it.

my understanding that the appointment process has been corrupted, but do we know to what degree transparency has?

I don't know why I'd trust TikToks when I also shop at multiple grocery stores every week.

Maybe there are a few outliers, but food inflation is definitely nowhere near 75=100+% YoY. The official price inflation numbers are much closer to what I've personally observed irl than what you see in viral TikToks.

TikToks get attention for being outlandish/exceptional, not for being an accurate representation of the norm.

The issue is that this isn't really supply constrained inflation. This is price discovery and discrimination by major retailers. The amount of coupons, conditional sale prices, and member savings has skyrocketed. I have paid rather intense attention to the price of groceries since 2015 when I started purchasing for my business kitchen as we started providing prepared meals. In general, prices are very close to 2015 levels for the important goods.

I have some basic guidelines for an acceptable range that are from when I started in 2015.

Milk: $2.50 / g Frozen Fruit $2/ lb Cheese $3 / lb Wheat $3 / 5lb Oats $3 / 40 40 oz Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast $2 / lb

These are all prices that I am still able to routinely meet or exceed in 2026.

I track my grocery spend and even with three growing kids it's gone up 18% the last 6 years. It's not scientific but I don't see how your statement can be true unless by "many items" you're not talking about the bulk of what my family spends

I regularly buy whole chickens (locally raised free range) for $1/lb. With individual cuts comparably cheap (and often BOGO). I live in an above-average, CoL area too.

Any many items don't.

If you select the biggest changes then sure.

My grocery spending is up about 45% since 2016. CPI in the UK is up 38% in the same time, but then my kids are teenagers and eating more.

I remember seeing a lot of social media posts during the Biden admin about grocery prices... Turns out a lot of folks were just comparing the same cart, not taking into account discontinued items that were being auto-replaced with more expensive goods, or things like that. It wasn't always an accurate representation.

The economy can get better while life gets worse for most people. After all, an economy where 95% of the work was done by enslaved people might produce amazing profits and a very high GDP....

It may be unreliable to you. I see the life of most people around me getting better. Even people that are somewhat poor (not dirt poor, but free lunch poor) have homes, three squares and snacks, PS5, mobile phones with cellular data, and cable tv. The biggest life issues I see are usually strongly related to substance abuse and mental health.

Transplanting to even just the 80s would be a culture shock for most people.

A subjective sample of yourself isn’t representative of the overall economy or the way an economy should be run.

I’m curious how you would respond to the arguments in this video.

https://youtu.be/9KJTWmRrneo?si=I9mvSPfDnhkckb9n

I honestly think that the idea that this is what’s happening is almost entirely propaganda.

I think people have an overly rosy view of the past and an overly negative view of the present. What has changed more than anything is we all have the 24/7 instantaneous news cycle, and algorithmic propaganda delivery.

Every election year zillion of dollars get spent convincing you the country went to hell in a handbasket because of the other party.

Which is not to say there are not issues, or even some new ones, but I don’t think the present is significantly worse than the past in many ways, and it is significantly better in several