Item — HN Reader

The phrase "when US data becomes unreliable" is misleading in one sense: for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up.

Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries. Add military (often black budgets) spending without much oversight or accurate accounting.

The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses.

16 comments

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.

As a statist, I personally always found it as a fascinating way to look at the future. They are actively preparing for a collapse they themselves are ushering.

It's increasingly a pet theory of mine that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth into the hands of the richest, their subsequent existential ennui, and their disconnect from reality owing to media consolidation and algorithmic content feeds have basically created a world where the superrich are in a "post-game" mentality. There are no further material comforts to obtain. They just want to feel anything at all and the only way to do that is by bringing about the end of the world.

Exactly: The 0.01% Elite bleeding out the planet and their biggest worries are: 1. How do I keep my doomsday bunker servants in line? 2. Or is a ticket to Mars the better option?

>They are actively preparing for a collapse they themselves are ushering.

Practically that's the best kind of collapse to prepare for. At least you know it's coming - and you have the power to shape it's direction.

Working class prepers on the other hand are naive.

I recently saw “Mountainhead”. Apropos.

I've never heard the term "statist" as a self-identified label. I've only ever heard anarchists use it pejoratively. Can I ask what you've read or what influenced you to take up that identity?

> super rich have been in "prepper" mode for a long time now

For every prepper in the $100+ million class, I know a hundred who are not. They’re enjoying their lives or working to make more money.

I second this. Prepping is far more popular among the middle and lower class people I know than the upper classes. Some mainstream religions even encourage prepping.

The perception that rich people are preppers comes from the string of stories about a few rich people prepping in New Zealand a few years ago. You can tell who gets their worldview from headlines when rich people are described as “they” who all act in unison and do this one thing that was in news headlines recently.

You think you know a hundred who are not.

Why would they admit it? I imagine many of them have seen The Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter" (1961) or something like it.

They're trying to thread the needle of a collapse bad enough that they'll retreat to their bunkers, but not so bad that their bodyguards will turn on them for their gold. Let's see how it works out!

The very plot of rainbow 6, a 1998 Tom Clancy novel, except the preppers are actually helping the catastrophes along.

And, if I’m not misremembering, of Silo as well.

I don't understand this. That is, if you have $1B, I think you'd be a lunatic to not spend $20M in "insurance". Why wouldn't you "prep"?

I'm not rich, but I live in rural Canada. So I have the possibility of being cut off from power, and during intense storms days or even weeks. I have 6 months of canned food, the logic being that I may have company, or I may need to care for my neighbours during time of need. And if there's no power (heat), your daily intake of food can double or triple.

So I buy canned food on sale, save money, and also have insurance. It's saving me money by buying in bulk on sale.

Do I think I will be cut off for weeks? No, not really. But it can happen, and yet this costs me nothing except pondering what I should do. It's just sensible. Just like when one buys insurance, you don't plan to have your house destroyed, but you buy house insurance, because it can happen.

So I really see no evidence of "knowing something will happen" or even "expecting it to", when I see someone with millions of dollars in spare cash, buying insurance.

In fact, if you have $1B, and no 'escape plan', what the hell is the money even for?! I'd think ensuring your future would be a big part of it a good use case, right?

I really do wonder whether, should push come to shove, a Peter Thiel will really be better served in a small country like New Zealand that doesn't have many pushers & shovers at which to direct its ire, or back in the land of his first naturalization where they run the show.

As for Mark Zuckerberg escaping to his "virtual metaverse," well that's certainly in keeping with the overall seriousness of the Guardian.

> Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis?

Do you have evidence that the ultra wealthy are actually taking this into account? Over a human timeframe every ultra wealthy person has access to plenty of “climate change safe“ locations, no particular advance planning is needed.

Don't forget how violence is considered wrong no matter what. It's created a situation where the rich are protected by their money and exaggerated value of human life pushed by the rest of the population

I want to know more about the bunkers they are building. Apparently tens of trillions spent on them.

I'm not sure a billionaire building a bunker is much different from you or me buying fire insurance. It's not that I expect my house to burn down, and it certainly won't prevent me doing everything I can to prevent fires. Even with it, my house burning down would be really bad. But I can afford the insurance, so why not have what protection I can?

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.

I would argue the empire already collapsed, about a year ago when DOGE was tasked with killing every form of soft power that were put in place to present the country in the best possible light across the world.

Even with tons of talented and well-intentioned people and everyone fully aligned to re-build everything broken, it'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.

> It's just that the production base was sold off to foreign lands

It wasn't. You are conflating "production" with "manufacturing." They're not the same. The US, for better or worse, produces a lot of value.

> moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued

I'm not sure America was ever a "moral project," considering the many many dark parts of its history. Nevertheless, at the moment moment, it seems to be on a quest find the bottom of the pit of depravity.

> 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'.

> The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.'

How is this new? Is greed something discovered recently and especially in the US?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age

Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...

Kudos to this point.

For those not realizing that unemployment has several definitions - isn't it wonderful that all were published AND all are well-documented?

It's these points of reliability and trustworthiness that, complexity aside, we are losing from chaotic administration.

My biggest issue with "the" unemployment rate is that the one everyone hears all the time is around 4-5%. I think this is massively misleading because it lends itself to people thinking if you picked 100 random men from ages 25 to 54, you'd expect about 5 of them to be unemployed. The real number is actually around 20% are unemployed:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

If you can dismiss 15% of them because they're not actively looking, or being a full-time parent, or disabled, I think it's missing the bigger picture that I would guess almost all of them want to work and have income, but can't due to things that we can fix as a society. Instead we divert to a 5% number that feels like "don't look over here" strategy. It's also entirely not capturing underemployment, which I imagine is a huge issue too.

> Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:

The irony of the anti DEI crowd being even less meritocratic than the caricature that they’ve created of their opposition.

>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?

It is. Just fox news screams about the "true unemployment" U6 number when Democratics are in charge and then go back to reporting on U3 when a Republican is in office.

That said, measurement is not as easy today with so many gig workers. Government data is often driven by proxies because its too hard to measure directly and the number of people getting an llc for their uber/doordash/lyft/etc job is throwing off our math. Government currently uses number of new businesses as a proxy since generally people starting businesses are hiring people.

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).

It is tough, though, for me to fully buy labor statistics when it has become the norm recently for them to be revised down. This spans back into Biden's term as well so it isn't one party either.

With a valid measure I would expect a roughly even distribution over time between underestimates and overestimates. For a valid measure worth considering I'd also expect the stat to be released later when revisions are less likely because more actual data has been collected

I don't say stuff like this very often, but are you actually blaming a victim for dealing with the reality of government bsing its own stats instead of the government that allowed this bs to continue? BLS had only one thing going for it and it is mostly that it was used for long enough time that changing methodology would prevent us from being able to compare it prior time ranges. That is it. Otherwise, the methodology itself is seriously flawed ( and likely was from get go, but these days, it is absolutely the worst possible mix of options ).

Honestly, your comment made me mildly angry. That said, can you say why you believe parent's comment is misleading?

> 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.

Yes, it's the classic "both sides" myth. It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing.

> 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?

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

That’s a bold claim, do you have sources to back it up? If true, we’d all (I’d, at least) learn an important lesson.

It's worse - important metrics like inflation are distorted by "hedonic adjustment" - i.e. pretending cars are getting cheaper because, even though they're getting more expensive, you get "more car" (ABS, airbags, remote unlock, heated seats (if you pay the subscription), hidden GPS tracking..):

https://wolfstreet.com/2019/12/05/what-worries-me-about-hedo...

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

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

I think the real issue now is that it's 10x worse. The people controlling things are actively and shamelessly making things worse, for their own purposes (so there is less accountability, IMO). The problem is the new, unintended side effects of what they are doing. Because they aren't really that smart, they don't even understand this.

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

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

I say removing skewed data forces people to confront reality as it actually is.

Instead of "This economy sucks!" "Yeah, but look at the data, it's getting better..."

Now we just have "This economy sucks!" "Yeah"

Calculating unemployment seems like it is always going to be a challenge no matter how it is done. For example, the current system in the US does not track unemployed graduates, as they have not been laid off and are not filing for unemployment benefits.

That’s just not true. Most of the six unemployment numbers capture unemployed graduates but m3 the headline number certainly does.

mark_l_watson says"The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' "

(1)This is normal human behavior usually described as "capitalism". It has been well-studied & the literature awaits you, e.g., The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 by Scottish economist Adam Smith. Go ahead: if you read the entire tome you may be the first man to do so. Perhaps you could write a usefully shortened version or versions of it.

mark_l_watson says"Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses."

(2)the behavior isn't immoral, as you will find by merely educating yourself [see (1)].

(3)There was/is no [US]"empire". And certainly none in the sense of the Persian, Mongol, Roman, incan, Spanish, British, French, or even, God forbid, Belgian empire, all of which were true empires.

We’ve never doubted the BLS numbers before until this admin. Think about how that screws things.

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.

Now they just stop releasing. Thats a sizeable change. Even if you have a known bias, we can adjusy for that bias.

But if you just stop collecting data? No, these are not your father's red versus blue stats.

this admin is different

Oh yeah? Like when inflation numbers were very high under Biden?

Please give specifics. Otherwise this is just grouchiness.