The speculative bubbles in the US economy continue to collapse as the “news” is finally forced to say something about layoffs.

The speculative bubbles in the US economy continue to collapse as the “news” is finally forced to say something about layoffs.

A wave of layoffs is hitting the US economy. It’s been quietly building for months, but the “news” has barely spoken of it. During the 2020 recession, even large firms like IBM and Microsoft cut their head counts and did it piecemeal to avoid any loud negative publicity.

In Microsoft’s case, it even took advantage of the chaos to shut down their faltering Microsoft Stores, which had turned into an ongoing and pointless embarrassment for the company given the total and complete failure of Windows Phone, and the fact that it’s pointless to give demonstrations of Windows products in general, because it often just highlights that it cannot perform basic functions that should work as advertised.

Hell, when I went into a Microsoft store in Chicago in 2016, I wanted to try out Windows 10 with “MiraCast”, which is something Microsoft cooked up with Intel that promised that wireless screencasting would finally be done right.

Well, the demonstration unit synced up to the TV and sent one frame, and then Blue Screen of Deathed the entire display laptop. An employee at the store tried to reset it, but that’s what kept happening, and so I gave up on Windows doing anything right again.

That laptop had no HDMI port, so I limped by using a minidlna server on GNU/Linux and a Roku, which at least at that time, did support dlna.

The next time I bought a laptop, I got one with an HDMI port and a really long cable.

But as you can see, there was no need for a Microsoft Store. They’re not Apple. People despise Windows. It’s an experience to be endured, not enjoyed, if you have you, I guess. But they’re not good products.

The more recent trouble with the US economy is also mainly unfolding in the “tech” sectors, but the more recent bloodbath is things that are entirely speculative in nature, such as Bitcoins, Tesla, Uber, Real Estate tech companies, Carvana, and other shit that’s finally hitting the fan now that the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, however slightly.

While it is true that the Fed is tightening at the fastest clip in over 30 years (Jerome Powell said they might do ANOTHER 75 basis points next month, back-to-back), the truth is that rates are still pitifully low by historical standards, and the fact that the US economy cannot stand up to a 1% Fed Funds Rate shows how pervasive the rot really is..

I mean, 40-50 years ago, that rate could be 20% and it would be miserable, but the economy would mostly go on because most people still had decent jobs and they worked at places that really made things.

In the post-Baby Boomer era, the damage that they allowed to unfold under the trade deals spanning from Bush Sr. through Trump has finally started becoming apparent. The only way the economy ran for the last 10 years was with debt that was cheaper than dirt, and the crack cocaine is finally being taken away.

To make matters worse, consumer prices were already starting to rise under Donald Trump due to his insane tariffs, which were neither high enough to encourage jobs to be created domestically, nor low enough to allow lower and middle income workers to avoid noticing that they were there.

The Fed is desperately trying to stamp out inflation, but we also have to ask ourselves where the inflation came from?

The insanity of Keynesian Economics. The last bout of it has made the US economy terribly, terribly sick. Trump and Biden, and the Congressional Republican and Democratic Parties were all for it and promoted it as “stimulative”, but it was really all about pouring fake money into the economy, not backed by anything, diluting what was already there.

In Trump’s case, it mostly went to his criminal friends and rich Republicans that cheat the system and don’t pay their taxes, and in Mr. Biden’s case it mostly went to slush funds for states that haven’t been managing their own budgets correctly.

In red states, the slush funds are propping up tax cuts that go almost entirely to unproductive rich people who already hoard a lot of wealth even during recessions, and in blue states like Illinois, it gets spent on outright vote buying to people who are terminal welfare cases no matter how the economy is doing that year and who mostly produce unnecessary children who have no future to grow up into, and to public employee unions to push papers around and make you wait 4 months to get your car title from the DMV.

In any event, the money was wasted, in the worst ways, and now it’s floating around out there like toxic waste, forcing the Federal Reserve to do something, which damages the economy in other ways.

The Fed and the government have rather been like Godzilla and Mothra fighting each other and destroying the entire damned city in the process while the onlookers are like “Wow! They’re here to save us!”.

Aside from that, and aside from the DotCom Bubble 2.0, we’re facing an old age crisis, the generation that ruined the underpinnings of the economy over the past 40 years is retiring and after demanding not to pay what Social Security and Medicare cost, they all want “THEIR” money, which in reality means working their children to death while their kids get to have nothing except their cost of living go up 20% a year.

So this entire thing goes much deeper than several thousand layoffs, or people waking up with a post-Bitcoin hangover.

Everything has been ruined in ways that are more horrible than most people even dare to imagine.

The most offensive part of all of this, of course, is that while it plays out, the bipolar “news” media alternate between how bad everything is (without actually scratching the surface), and then pivoting to tell us how real wages are up (they’re not) and the jobs market is “tight” and people can do anything they want.

If that were true, nobody would drive around beating up their car making a dollar here and there with Doordash, and then running into people’s garage doors and fleeing because they have no insurance and can’t afford to settle with the homeowner for paying for the garage door.

Nobody would be doing such menial tasks and losing money for their trouble if the labor market was any good. Nobody.

They’d be yelling “Hey, you assholes! Go get your own damned McDonalds! I found a job that pays $20 an hour with health insurance and I’m not a 1099 contractor who has to pay Social Security twice!”.

My cousin is trying to sell a house. It was my grandmother’s house. It used to be a nice house. I have many fond memories of that house.

Unfortunately, it’s seen better days. My grandfather passed away in September of 1998, and nobody has done a damned thing to it since then, except tear the shit out of it, and incompetently turned the dining room into a makeshift bedroom so some extended family could move in and help share the bills.

Now she’s trying to get out of it and is even willing to take a loss. A loss!

It’s in a good neighborhood. You can’t tell the extent of the wear and tear from the outside at a glance, but it’s really really bad in there.

I said “Try to get out of it with something before the Fed jacks up mortgage rates past 10% and nobody wants a fixer upper.”.

Now, this is really the economy in a microcosm. Pervasive rot, decades of “deferred maintenance”, the warning lights are flashing, but the politicians and their pet media don’t want you to see it, so instead of fixing anything, they take out the bulbs from the warning lights, and the entire thing is about to collapse.

I’m not even really sure if it’s possible to save the United States at this point.

The politicians have spent so many years getting high on their own supply and detached from the issues that real Americans have to go through, and changing election laws and gerrymandering themselves into office so the voters can’t take their revenge out even if they ever do get smart enough to realize what’s going on, which is doubtful given the state of public education.

But even in theory, if someone got in that was smart enough to realize that you need to balance budgets and pay your debts, and take care of your own problems first, I don’t know that it would matter.

You can tell just how deranged the warmongers are with this entire Russia thing. We’re dumping unlimited billions into this mess. It’s still unclear if Ukraine could ever win. The energy crisis could, in fact, be the last straw, and it’s being done entirely by people who have been in Washington forever and think they need to keep sticking Russia in the eye and making them angrier and angrier at us. No matter what the eventual cost.

Then there was the insanity that it’s essentially been the policy of the government since about 30 years ago that real estate was a “guaranteed thing no matter what…..NO MATTER WHAT” despite 2008 or what is going to happen here in a few months.

I don’t know that I’m going anywhere with this other than to point out that America is fucked six ways to Sunday, and they have us bickering over whether it’s poor people getting free broadband or a bunch of hillbillies committing misdemeanors two years ago that did it.

Details!

If this sounds like a lifetime pasta pass of madness, it’s because it is.