The Shape Of Things To Come

“This always happens, Oliver. Every time you open your mouth, somebody sticks a phone company in it.” – Green Acres

I think this cat might be chairman of the Fed®.

I heard a story once about an AT&T office, this was back in the 1970s or 1980s.  There was a particular employee who the day crew would always see finishing up at the end of his shift, putting tools up, and getting the work set up for the day crew.  They really appreciated him, since when they showed up, things were neat and ready to go.  They thought he stayed late to do this for them.

There was also a guy on day shift crew.  He’d show up early and prepare for work.  He impressed the night shift crew, because he came in early, and was getting his work ready to go well before the day shift showed up.

Eventually, after about a decade (or so the story went) the day shift manager told the night shift manager how much he appreciated how old Steve stayed late to get things ready for them.

“Steve?  He works day shift, and always comes in early, right?”

Ooops.  Steve finally got caught after working forever a little over an hour a day, showing up “early” for one shift, and leaving “late” from the other.

So, he worked about 200 hours a year.  For a decade.

I think he must have had a hobby.  Maybe fishing.

I think it was Alexander Graham Bell who first said, “How in the hell did you get this number?”

In the news recently, the layoffs have already started at “big tech”:

  • Amazon®: 18,000
  • Alphabet® (Google™): 12,000
  • Meta© (Facebook®): 11,000
  • Microsoft® (Microsoft™): 10,000
  • Salesforce©: 8,000
  • HP™: 6,000
  • Twitter®: 3,700

That’s like 71.56 miles (4,259,400,000 cubic centimeters, and yes, Ricky, you can check the math) of people.  It might be more cubic centimeters if they had a lot of carbs.

Some of these jobs are bogus, like the AT&T hour-a-day guy.  I’ve enjoyed watching the Tiktok® videos of the PowerPoint® making drones with no technical ability.  Typically, the drone shows up at work (if they’re not working remote) and has a free breakfast.  Then they goof for a bit, have a meeting, do a free lunch.  They indicate the lunch and breakfast are very tasty.  Then they have at least one more grueling meeting.

Photons never take luggage to an airport – they’re traveling light.

And that’s it.  From every one of the videos I’ve seen, the folks have no technical ability.  Some don’t even work at all – one person complaining about being fired hadn’t worked since May of 2021, since they were on medical leave because of PTSD.  What was the PTSD from?  Her managers were “mean” to her.

I’m not making this up.  She was shocked to be fired.

The other indicators are not good.  Paul “the Internet will be as important as the fax machine” Krugman put out a graph just recently on Twitter®:

What’s up with Paul Krugman?  Not his I.Q.

This is the single dumbest take I’ve seen since Custer said, “C’mon, man, how many Indians can there be?  We don’t need those cannons.”

Krugman has artfully taken out the things that people have to buy from his super-good news.

  • Food,
  • Energy,
  • Shelter, and
  • Used Cars

This is a fantastic analysis for people who don’t eat, are immune to freezing, live outside, and don’t need to go anywhere or buy gas to go anywhere.  It’s like asking Jackie, “Besides the car ride, how was your trip to Dallas?”

Why are prices of other stuff going down?  Because people aren’t buying them because they have to buy food, energy, shelter, and used cars.

Duh.

And he kneaded that!

Behaviors are changing.  Frivolous purchases are being limited.  The recession indicators are significant from things like yield curve inversion, Modified Mannarino Market Risk Indicator (LINK) and the banks closing down entire units.

But thankfully Paul Krugman says it’s all going to be spiffy.

And, it will be.  All of those cubic meters of people will end up doing something more important than making PowerPoints® and attending twenty-seven meetings about what shade of aqua and how many pixels to make the Google® doodle.  Let’s face it – about 70% of Google® employees could be axed tomorrow and nothing would change.  How do I know that?

That’s what Musk did with Twitter®.  Most of the folks Musk fired added no value, and the ones he kept were elated to finally be able to do something of value for the company.  The folks that were fired will certainly find jobs in the food service industry, become moms, or just sit on the couch at their Dad’s house curled up in a fetal ball of PTSD.  I for one am happy, because we need better waitresses.

From the Tiktok® videos, it certainly looks like they know how to serve food.

I searched “Lost Medieval Servant Boy” but got, “This Page cannot be found.”

Some of the destruction that comes from a recession is good.  It’s a reset, and it clears away silliness.  The danger, of course, is the destruction that comes from a runaway recession.  Small recessions clean.  Large recessions/depressions?  They can cleanse nations.  Look what happened in the 1920s and 1930s around the world – entire governments were replaced.

Thankfully, I hear AT&T® is hiring.  Night shift or day shift?

Both, please.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

36 thoughts on “The Shape Of Things To Come”

  1. A remake of Airport with the FAA’s brown diversity golems!
    The air traffic controllers say…welcome to Costco I love you over and over.
    How’s that for bad LSD trip potential.
    The first two Led Zeppelin albums cure bad trips.
    Prices are down at the Sack-N-Save just in time for the Big Brandon Layoffs but the No Fans Left league is going country strong for the Stupor Bowl.
    All comrades of the unity hive be not alarmed, Beijing Big Guy gets his cut no matter what.
    They tell tech workers to use names like John or Mike but you can’t hide the accent.
    Will the replacements be so nice when they are majority now that the borg has assigned altruistic traits to all races?
    I picked a good week to start sniffing glue.

  2. The thing about those tens of thousands of tech “workers” that were laid off is that none of them actually did any actual work but the bigger issue is that our job force nationally is full of people who don’t actually do any real work at all. Their jobs have no meaning and no purpose at all and yet they shuffle off to them (or stay at home in their jammies) and perform a series of meaningless tasks. The real question is why…

    1. One: bigger employee headcount means bigger budget and the manager over them becomes more important. What is being counted is not salable productive output, but rather looking busy, just like government.

      Two: if they weren’t having their work life wasted, they might do something economically disruptive, and then the managers would be in danger of getting obsoleted and displaced. This is why the industrial revolution didn’t start 2,000 years ago when the model steam engine en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile was demonstrated.

    2. In all fairness, sometimes it can be difficult for people to see the value in many jobs.
      I sell individual health insurance to seniors, along with Marketplace (new name for Obamacare). Now, to the outsider, my job would seem to be unnecessary – after all, a potential customer just has to go online and ‘click’ on their choices, right?
      Wrong. About 2/3 of my customers are seniors, and many are tech-illiterate. Others have visual or processing issues – not senile, just not all that capable of making decisions from unfamiliar material.
      They TRIED using Navigators (people who could move through the software for Obamacare, but had little to no knowledge of insurance). It was a HUGE failure. They would direct almost all of their clients to ‘zero premium’ choices, neglecting that there was a HUGE deductible before one penny would be paid out. Others found that their co-pays were actually co-insurance (which, unlike a set amount, was a percentage of the charges). VERY costly.
      Others found they couldn’t see their long-established doctors, or get their meds at an affordable price.
      And, the Navigators didn’t make it clear that they couldn’t just low-ball their income – if it didn’t match actual income, they could get hit with a hefty bill. If they didn’t pay, whoops! No insurance!
      I’m proud of the work I do. I spend at least 1-2 hours (often longer) on every client, and do my best to find them the best insurance they can afford. My job is essential, and really cannot be outsourced, not least because foreigners’ accents are difficult to understand by the hard-of-hearing, their limited vocabulary makes misunderstandings common, and, if a problem arises (quite common), they can’t talk to the original person, but have to go through the whole thing again.

  3. What I find most ironic is how you rarely speak to someone without a heavy foreign accent when you call for service. Tech workers probably thought the obscene amounts of profit would last forever, they could outsource to other countries all the tasks they didn’t want to perform, and the bean counters would never figure out the needed cuts would be workers that did nothing but draw a paycheck. It was a nice ride, but having it end in the middle of the desert sure makes things tough.

    1. The outsource economy wasn’t a mistake for these folks, it was a feature. Hollow out, all in the name of being efficient.

  4. As for cleansing nations, here’s my outlook. Having suffered through the horrid late 70s-early 80s stagflation, the resultant 1980s corporate merger bloodbath did clean out the Augean stables. Remember Chainsaw Al Dunbar? Just like Beeg Tech today, bloated management ranks, useless eaters, er, workers. Esso even eliminated a whole layer of employees back then.

    History does repeat.

    1. The Chainsaws will be back. I do remember him – his pattern worked until Wall Street figured it out. Then he retired.

      These cuts will be deeper.

  5. LOL, your math looks good to me if you’re assuming a 50% / 50% ratio of male / female layoffs to get an average layoff height of 5 feet 6 inches. I don’t know how you could possibly account for laid-off workers that were “high”er than that in pot-legal States…

    ZH has had several good articles recently with facts on unemployment and inflation that are worth digging into the details.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/something-rigged-unexplained-record-27-million-jobs-gap-emerges-broken-payrolls-report

    https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/us-inflation-how-much-have-prices-increased-2022

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-01-24/i-sincerely-hope-youre-not-falling

    The key takeaway on inflation is that the recent drop in energy prices is because Biden sold 40% of the SPR to China.

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/daneberhart/2023/01/21/bidens-spr-drawdown-big-win-for-beijing/?sh=7657645f3677

    Now that we gotta (hopefully) refill the SPR before going to war over Taiwan, gas prices are going back up at the pump – around 50 cents per gallon recently in my neck of the woods.

    2. Too late. The “dot-not-feathers” H1B visa holder Indians have already taken those jobs, for less money than you would expect to get. When the company that I worked at for nearly 20 years was bought out, they laid off the most experienced and knowlegable people. I took a 30% pay cut to get hired at a different company.

    3. Learn to weld, underwater, if you can. There’s big bucks in welding oil platforms under Gulf waters! After all those years with Microsoft Office, I’m sure you can pick this up in no time.

      1. Know a nice young man who is doing just that. Graduated last year with a welding and a scuba cert and is following on that path in lieu of college.

        Great kid.

  7. Deep in the trenches of gen-u-wine high tech we are starved for competent, productive engineers and analysts. My employer, a DoD Big Three, has literally thousands of open reqs for engineers, mostly software. Despite lavish signing bonuses and lucrative starting salaries, those reqs go unfilled, year after year. Last I heard, they are offering us up to $25k referral bonuses to drag anyone we know with the proper qualifications into the fold. Learn to code, indeed.

    What we don’t have is any shortage of managers. The AA chick three pay grades above mine left for even greener pastures just two weeks ago (You go, grrrl!) and the business keeps humming along as if nothing had changed. So far as I know, they have not even opened up a req for her former position, as it is embarrassingly obvious that it was superfluous to begin with. All hail DEI.

    Curiously, we never miss posting a profit, quarter after quarter after quarter.

    1. Engineers know managers will not permit them to work and achieve at those companies.

      Salaries are not lucrative given that the cost of living has increased by a factor of five in the last 20 years. “Middle class” is defined to include a secure retirement. Who can afford to save for retirement given those salaries plus currency inflation plus low interest rates?

    2. It’s nice to have a customer that will never stop – .gov contracts work pretty well.

      Good, productive people are needed. And, let’s face it, 98% are guys. If they can’t get a date, why should they bust their butts?

  8. AT&T’s primary client is connecting cell phone towers nearby to cell phone towers far away.
    Which they never saw coming.
    They are the 8-track (or at the very least, the Amtrak) of industries.

    More proof of their large-scale obsolescence:

    Operator.
    Dial tone.
    Information.
    Long-distance.
    Phone book.
    Phone booth.

    And I say that despite mom having worked for Ma Bell for 30+ years.

    Tech companies are even worse, because they hire so many people who add no value in the first place.
    They’re going to continue to get their lunch eaten by companies that hire valuable employees, with expertise and competence.

    The trouble is finding those people. They’re the top 30% (maybe less, probably not much more), and they’re always in high demand.
    What’s left in the hiring pool are the leftovers from among the lumpenproletariat: human chum, with legs and a pulse, and nothing marketable beyond that. I definitely don’t want them for waitresses. Nor much of anything else.

    1. And these are the Rosie the riveter that are going to build and supply a thriving US Military machine.

      Don’t forget the to use their “Preferred Pronouns”.

      No wonder the USA is buying 155 mm shells from South Korea and lack the ability to build armored vehicles from US plants.

      Look up where we are buying rare earths that we use in every weapon system (aside from small arms) in our “Arsenal of Democracy”.

      I’ll save you time, CHINA.

      Raytheon outsourced our military for even MOAR Profits.

      1. We shifted to a wartime economy exactly once in our entire history. From 1940-1960.

        It’s never coming back again. That ship sailed 60 years ago.

        1. Congrats Aesop, you’ve taken your first step into the real world.

          I was wondering when you’d realize We ARE Running out of stored Ammo and cannot build armored vehicles in America in meaningful amounts.

          The Arsenal of Democracy isn’t America anymore..

          I’m just praying the jackasses in DC don’t get us all an extra sunrise. Putin doesn’t bluff and if we truly threaten Russia’s existence, he will vaporize us.

          None of that Hopum I hear of a “Single Nuke” in Kiev but a full-on like Donkey Kong multi salvo strikes, EMP and nuclear tsunamis for the east and west coast as well as our Lap Poodle England.

          If Russia’s going down just like Israel Sampson response EVERYBODY’s going down.

          AND as far as your wishcasting (nice word you invented Aesop) about Putin getting a bullet in the brains Remember Putin’s the MODERATE that is keeping the Angry Russian High Command from Already Nuking us into the stone age. You know the folks your always saying are “Threatening to use Nukes on US”.

          You should pray Putin lives and rules Russia well and that our District of Criminals doesn’t force Putin into Nuking us.

          2. Wish casting isn’t magic, it’s self-delusion.

            Even if vaguely true just how many maypops in the megaton range need to go BOOM to ruin your day?

            It is the only hope we have given the Marxist crazies running the Meat Puppet known as Biden.

            I suspect that your wish casting is the new vote us out of communism meme.

            But aside from that how did you enjoy the play Ms. Lincon?

          3. We’ve been “running out” of stored ammo since 1946. That has Jack and Sh*t to do with what we’re sending to Ukraine. It’s been a budgeting issue for 75 years. If you don’t buy it, you don’t have it.

            As for “cannot build” that’s another budget choice, not a capacity choice. The Lima Army Tank Plant made 800 M-1s/yr in its heyday.

            Meanwhile, our military budget is higher than the next 9 countries worldwide, combined, with a military that’s 1/8th the size of what it was during WW 2. That’s because we won’t be fighting another world war with armies on three continents and 5 oceans. In an existential struggle like WW 2, we’ll lob in nukes and erase the enemy. You don’t need 20,000 B-17s doing daily missions for six months when you can make a city go away with one warhead.

            Meanwhile, your claims regarding Putin have been overtaken by reality. Putin’s bluffed nuke use 27 times since last March, and then done nothing, because he knows the slightest twitch towards MAD gets him the official Kremlin Makarov Retirement Party™, starring his brains on the wall beside him. The only wishcasting going on is trying to paint the rest of his toadies as the hardliners. Cute, but fraudulent. His generals want to GTFO of Ukraine with all dispatch, and see it for the unwinnable megablunder it is. Reality is harsh like that.

            Putin can solve his problems in either of two ways:
            1) Pull out of Ukraine, salvage the fraction of his national military power and dignity while there’s anything left of either one, return Crimea, apologize, make reparations to Ukraine, stay the f**k out of their politics, accept they’re not a Russian puppet state, and return to the status quo ante that existed from 1990 to 2013 before he started the first of four invasions; or
            2)Kill himself, and save his underlings the trouble.

            (Technically, he could do both in series, but if we’re going to wish for that level of magic, might as well throw in a request for the winning Powerball ticket, and the cell phone number of the Playmate of the Year).

            Heads Ukraine wins, tails Vlad loses.

            Either way, the world is safer and more stable.

            Right now, he’s the guy who broke into a house, got caught butt-raping the owner’s teenage daughter, and is now screaming when caught “This is all your fault! Don’t make me kill you!”

            It’s not a good look, but his divisions leaving a trail of lollipopped T-62s and T-72 with dead body frosting all around from their invasion’s highwater mark to the Russian border is hilarious.

            “When you’re in a hole…stop digging.” – Will Rogers

    2. Well, if they were waitresses, at least they’d be somewhat useful.

      I read once that 5% of coders had 10x the productivity of the average (numbers aren’t right, but close enough). The best really are the best. And they’re worth it. BTW, I stole “prop tart” for our podcast.

    1. “very funny, thanks, we love to laugh”

      Hear, Here!

      The ‘Power’ dun moved ta “Hecho en Chine” Loooong ago.

      Tricky Dick, made the ‘Official’ announcement…”To establish diplomatic relations with…”

      With pat b. in tow.

      And stuff was wonky since…

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