As of January, the U.S. government had 2.4 million civilian employees, excluding the postal service. That is a lot of people, though just 1.5% of total nonfarm jobs. So what will it mean for the economy if hundreds of thousands of those jobs go away?
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78 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker 24 Feb
Let me just say that, as an economist, I'm glad I'm not in the market right now.
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44 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 24 Feb
Ugh. I was hoping to look for another job this year, too.
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80 sats \ 1 reply \ @SimpleStacker 24 Feb
Have you heard much about economists losing their positions? If the CFPB gets axed, that's gonna be a lot of economists looking for work, but besides that I'm not sure how much the other agencies on the chopping block employ economists.
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47 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 24 Feb
I haven't heard of any of the statistical agencies being in the cross-hairs. I know economists who have lost USAID grants, but they aren't losing their employment at the moment. I imagine some of the USAID and IRS people are economists, though.
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25 sats \ 0 replies \ @fiatbad 24 Feb
You kinda already have a part-time job creating weekly "fun facts" for me.
I paid you 2% last week. I plan to quadruple your payout this week. :p
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15 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 24 Feb
There are going to be many more people voluntarily entering the labor market, in addition to the layoffs. They were scared out of taking the deferred resignation by dishonest union leadership, but they'll be looking for other employment as concerns grow over job security.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @denlillaapan 24 Feb
Productivity, mechanically, will go up; unemployment slightly; and then downward pressure of wages.
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0 sats \ 7 replies \ @justin_shocknet 24 Feb
The same people that were worried about deported migrants not being available to harvest their salads and re-shingle their roofs will now be free to harvest their own salads and shingle their own roofs
Mix in the DOGE UBI checks as hedge against a deflationary doom loop, and tariffs to crush foreign currencies, the prophecy is being fulfilled.
Death to every non-dollar fiat currency -> Global Bitcoinization
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0 sats \ 6 replies \ @fiatbad 24 Feb
Not if our community (and especially Bitcoin devs) don't start getting more serious about Medium-of-exchange capabilities on Bitcoin. We need to be ready when the masses come looking for a real alternative to fiat. And right now, Litecoin or something will probably win, regardless of all the reasons Bitcoin is better. Eventually MoE will be the most powerful driving force, above our current SoV arguments. Bitcoiners are right about Bitcoin-not-crypto. But they're also living in a time where it's possible to be complacent and arrogant. If we care about global Bitcoinization, then we need to start working on MoE more aggressively as a community.
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367 sats \ 5 replies \ @justin_shocknet 24 Feb
No one has worked on MoE more than I have, and even I will tell you that MoE doesn't matter in terms of Bitcoin becoming the world reserve currency, that's a shitcoiner hyperfixation based on technical cope and a lack of understanding wrt Numéraire
SoV is Act I, MoE is Act II... cart won't go before the horse under any circumstances.
The issue at hand now is that global debt is denominated in dollars, and until that debt is either destroyed or defaulted on, MoE isn't even a consideration... Exchanging something that is not seen as collateral can't move the needle and there's no bottleneck in Bitcoin as a debt settlement instrument much to shitcoiner dismay.
Before the world can Bitcoinize, it must dollarize... that's the collapse of every other fiat as we're seeing play out with debt monetization via stablecoin. The milestone is one pair, Bitcoin:Debt
View everything the US and the world is doing in the context of a currency war.
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10 sats \ 4 replies \ @fiatbad 24 Feb
Well said. And I do agree.
I still think there is a bit of complacency in the community around preparation for a Bitcoin-as-MoE world. We need to be more vigilant in my opinion. There's too much fiat-maxi brain in the Bitcoin community.
I think that we can all agree that what you said is 100% correct, but still hold a stronger anti-dollar stance. We don't have to be so friendly toward fiat. We can do both. We can still try a little harder to build circular Bitcoin economies in our local communities.
While it is true, I feel like "SoV is Act I, MoE is Act II" has become an excuse for Bitcoiners to only care about NGU.... to stop fighting against evil... it fosters a "if you can't beat em, join em" attitude.
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48 sats \ 2 replies \ @freetx 24 Feb
Imagine if you are living with nearly 100% of your money in BTC, but you pay for everything in dollars (ie. Strike model). Likewise whenever you receive USD, it is automatically swapped into BTC.
If USD is only used as a transactional coin, it sorta becomes like another L2 (I know its not a layer, but you get the analogy).
In this case, is Bitcoin acting as a MoE?....my point on this is I don't think the traditional definitions of MoE / SoV map really well to a totally digital money like Bitcoin.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 24 Feb
Indeed, even dollar MoE is really niche when you consider relative volume to Visa ACH Stablecoins etc.
We don't need Bitcoin to replace stablecoins and ACH, we need a functional unit of account.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @fiatbad 24 Feb
Good points.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 24 Feb
I reject the complacency framing, people that say this are usually not doing anything themselves and people that think like this have placed moral superiority over reality. It's a mind virus that goes in hand with other left-coded ideologies that project egalitarian fantasies onto Bitcoin as a strawman against it. It's like any other form of progressiveism, the egoistic urge to tell the world how much more sophisticated you are than the principles that got you here.
The only reason Bitcoin has any value at all is because it's the only digital doohickey that became resistant to social pressures for change.
I don't think anybody holding Bitcoin is actually rooting for the dollar against it, but you have to be really clueless not to understand the entangled role of the world reserve currency of today has in the Bitcoinization of tomorrow.
MoE simply doesn't matter in the big picture, it's a nice-to-have. Bitcoin will be transacted in as many different mediums as the dollar is because human organizations won't just simply cease to exist.
If anything, there are too many devs trying to change Bitcoin, and all but a few are wasting their time by trying to change Bitcoin instead of building a better shell around it. Unfortunately, building a good shell is hard to do when there's no user feedback or profit motive yet to guide you, a reality of MoE just not being all that important relatively speaking.
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