Great, Trump is leading us into another recession. Now how about them Epstein files?
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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recession warning signs
It's helpful to remember that a Recession is classically described as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP. It might also be helpful to note that 9% of our GDP is bound up in the Tech Sector and five Big Tech companies make up almost all of that share.
We've been flooding the tech sector with money since COVID and steadily, often rapidly, inflating a debt bubble under all of these big firms. The P/E ratios on these companies - particularly Tesla - are incredibly bad.
This, after a long stretch of promising "automation" and "AI will take all your jobs", then watching the tech sector itself hemorage hundreds of thousands of jobs since the start of the year.
To say we're seeing "warning signs" is an understatement. For Silicon Valley, the only thing keeping a textbook recession at bay is the flood of federal money for security spending. And since that's all going to companies that think they can do their jobs without an actual labor force...
The post-2001 Bush Economy was often called the "Jobless Recovery" because so much of our growth was in financial speculation rather than real economic activity.
I'm not looking forward to what the Trump Era Tech Sector repeat will end up like.
This, after a long stretch of promising “automation” and “AI will take all your jobs”, then watching the tech sector itself hemorage hundreds of thousands of jobs since the start of the year.
As someone in the tech sector, I have a feeling a lot of those jobs never existed at all. It's purely an economy of bullshit. And I'm not even talking about Google employing "the best and the brightest" to slightly change the Youtube UI every quarter or rewrite something in a new framework with zero improvement. I'm talking of completely pointless busywork with no actual result.
I think monopolies are what led to this, Wall Street and Big Tech stifled innovation since nobody could make their own Google anymore, the best to hope for was to be acquired by Google. The only way to make a tech company is through VC funding, since otherwise you'll get beaten by competition that doesn't have to show profits for decades, but also if you're on VC money you have to show irrealistic user growth. If you don't want to participate in the cycle of enshittification, your idea will not get made, people can't work on it.
So you end up with 5 companies employing everyone while doing less and less, and AI can "automate" so much because in a lot of these jobs nobody would notice if it didn't get done. Also why a lot of managers wanted RTO, if nobody did busywork, a lot of people would have any work at all. The even bigger problem is CEOs are also stupid, and AI is not actually that much of a breakthrough at automation. So when CEOs downsize and fire people because they have to because AI, they do so pretty much randomly. So you end up with unemployed people and struggling companies.
This is going to be one for the history books.
As someone in the tech sector, I have a feeling a lot of those jobs never existed at all.
They probably did in creating new products. Once interest rates went up, a lot of product lines got cancelled if they weren't profitable. Since a lot of the tech sector was employed in creating new software or services, they got fired when it suddenly became not worth it to fund that much development.
Efficiency meant improving and extracting value from existing product lines. If you aren't doing that well, you got let go.
I guess I mean that since you can't turn your product idea into a company anymore, because everything is sold by five companies. Those five companies don't really need new products to make money, so they can cut all those jobs easily.
All the while, you could have a lot of smaller companies going through hardship, some of them failing, some of them innovating under duress, some of them getting created to cater to the vacuum left by failed companies with a different product. But since it's five companies, they will never go bankrupt, they will not need to innovate, and new companies won't compete.
Wall Street seems to have implemented a plan economy by design or mistake, and now that plan economy is failing like it did from the 70s to the 90s in the Warsaw Pact. People doing bullshit jobs because we don't know how to give them work was one of the big symptoms there as well.
I guess I mean that since you can't turn your product idea into a company anymore
You can, it is just that we are obviously on the right side of the S-curve for computer technology adoption. There may be improvements, but they are going to be far more minor to the overall experience and cost a lot more to make. So, it isn't worth it either for the big five or for the tons of startup companies.
I mean look at LLMs. It's the one tech that seems like it holds enough promise that it could still be made. And all the companies that made LLMs in the US have been promptly acquired by the same five companies.
We may be on the right side of one S-curve, but are on the left side of some other S-curves, yet those companies don't get started and funded either. Biotech jobs are few and far between despite just having figured out how to do cheap unlimited gene editing.
How are chatbots more important technology than the cure to Alzheimer's?
LLM's are really the only thing tech has left, while there were several different kinds of computer technology with investing in decades ago.
How are chatbots more important technology than the cure to Alzheimer's?
Silicon Valley's focus isn't biotech. I wouldn't expect Meta to release a drug requiring FDA approval.
Silicon Valley’s focus isn’t biotech. I wouldn’t expect Meta to release a drug requiring FDA approval.
But that's exactly my point! Where is the money funding innovation outside Silicon Valley and Big Tech?
BTW some of biotech's biggest recent breakthroughs were made by Google, which is perverse in itself. The only way to pay for those breakthroughs were through Big Tech, and they only exist at the good graces of Google. If Google decided not to spend money on it, they wouldn't have happened.
What I'm saying is that if you have a prospective cure to Alzheimers and want to get it funded by VC money, they won't fund it because it's not AI. If you manage to get it funded and it's a breakthrough however, a megacorp will find you first with an acquisition offer, then if you refuse, a VC funded alternative that can afford to run you out of business.
This is stifling innovation and keeping smart people underemployed.
All of the AI taking jobs stuff is meaningless in the tech industry. All they're doing is laying people off and making the remaining already-overworked employees pick up the slack. They've done this repeatedly and are nearing the breaking point. Tech workers are exhausted, miserable, and stressed out, and just trying to hang onto their jobs long enough that the hiring market improves and they can quit for, hopefully, something less bad. All the stuff about ping pong tables and bean bag chairs or whatever was always primarily marketing by the companies, and in any event largely disappeared long ago.
But big tech companies never want to go through an employee market like 2021–2022 H1 again, so I believe they're quietly and continually laying off workers in order to manipulate the hiring market while also hoarding a bigger share of revenue as profit.
In 1984, when Orwell wrote, "the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears," he didn't mean the Party should also do that for itself. That would be unbelievably stupid, and yet here we are...
It's almost like Trump asked for a list of the most influential quotes in writings about authoritarianism, then took them all literally and did a half-ass job applying them.
But that's what the party does. The party's apparatus is to control itself just as much as everyone else
Were the Epstein files stapled to the end?
Mass firing of federal workers is not a sign for good economics
OH come this fall when the Fed gets put in Trumpstien's hands we are going to be really fucked.
Of course, yes, BUT the numbers will prove that we are all exaggerating the problem.
See? This is why you don't want Mainstream Math in our kids minds, otherwise they don't understand how numbers work! (/s because I am being cautious amongst my fellows)
Quick let’s raise prices! That will solve it!
/s