The actual bubble that needs to be popped is financialization. The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation only through financial valuation. At the same time, people are starving, infrastructure is falling apart, the birth rate is plummeting, and suicide is on the rise. It's time to stop taking "job creators" seriously and use all this fallow professional experience and skill to restart the material economy and forget this pretend crap that keeps plutocrats busy doing nothing of any value to anyone.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation
Yep, the market feels like it's in max-greed mode. There was a taste of fear when the tariffs were first announced, but wallst was quick to token TACO to justify just ignoring everything. My question for the last 9+ months has been, "how long can a market willingly ignore reality?"
I assume it will take until a critical mass of those speculators start needing to liquidate. I don't know what will trigger that, but at some point the profits come due.
My question for the last 9+ months has been, “how long can a market willingly ignore reality?”
How long did we kick the foundations out of the US dollar when we got rid of the gold standard, and just let it float on speculation and feelings? What, 60-70 years now?
How long has the stock market existed on the whims of people's feelings over cold hard statistics and long-term analysis?
Markets have been ignoring reality for many decades.
To be fair there's all the shit with dollar denominated oil, SWIFT, terrorist regime change on countries that don't want to play along, etc. It might not be based on any kind of fair exchange of value, but that's not quite the same as the USD's global reserve currency status being vibes-only.
Exactly. Since the end of the gold standard, the economy hasn’t been about production — it’s been about valuation.
70 years ago, companies were built to make things: cars, fridges, tools. Today, they’re built to inflate stock prices.
The real product isn’t goods. It’s debt, speculation, planned obsolescence.
And now, AI isn’t replacing workers to make things better. It’s replacing them to cut costs — while real needs go unmet.
This isn’t progress. It’s the slow collapse of a system that forgot its purpose.
It's the slow but inevitable achievement of end-state of a system designed to re-frame and re-centralize power in the hands of the elite following the liberalization of political power.
This is its purpose. It always has been.
There are two sides to that story.
There is not enough gold to match the increases in both population and productivity of the last 70 years, and you don't want just a handful of people holding gold that spikes in value through the roof.
Smart people invest in companies that pay dividends. Speculators invest in... whatever, tulip bulbs.
Take minimalism to the extreme. Boycott the economy as much as possible.
birth rate is the least of our problems, which is one our University staff at my old school were complaining why the enrollment was low asf. No job market, or very low job prospects for stems= low wage cant compete with HCOl areas, hence no children.
Im going to start physical mailings and cold emails. I'm over this job market, its AI/ATS nonsense, and the people who think its OK.
I hate ai
On the one hand, it's nice to be able to have the recruiter AI agent I made write applications for me because I hate that part. After that, I can do the interviews myself just fine and I'm all good.
On the other hand, it feels disgusting and lazy.
But it works much better than last time I was job hunting (last year) and did everything by hand.
It's showing me that (as far as I can tell) recruiters don't give a shit and barely read what you send them. They'll reach out as long as your LinkedIn is SEO optimised.
Depressing but true
What is SEO optimized?
It's a bit redundant since the O stands for "Optimization", but it means Search Engine Optimization. Basically structure your stuff so it shows up in more searches (use popular terms in your profile, make posts with key phrases, fill out all the fields).
There's a word for that but I can't remember. Like saying ATM machine.
Time to make some real connections in the real world.
Shit is getting scary.
Nah. When the power turns off, im taking my go bag and living in a library and will continue to ignore the awful world i was forced to live in.
With the maga crowd (and its copycats), I'm not sure a library is the safest place...
Someone I was interacting with for customer service was writing with AI and was offering me servcies that didn't exist. Backfired on them when they offered a replacement for a product which was a different model (my issue is that the original model didn't suit my needs) or a refund, so I asked if they could send me a replacement that fits my use-case. The human then comes on and just sends me the same thing again...
Can confirm
Same
Robots just hire themselves.
as if they wernt using something similar before the pandemic. they were already using software to screen out applicants by the dozens or hundreds, they are just mad because applicants are doing the same thing to write thier applications. biotech jobs love posting fake listings on the job sites
before you had to write your own resume, and change everytime for different jobs, now AI can presumbly do all of that sloppily.
I do freelance/consultation dev work and I'd say most of my clients are having this problem right now. But this is a problem of their own doing. Most got rid of their dev teams and instead leveraged AI and less than a handful of junior devs to essentially just be prompt monkeys. I eventually get called into these places to code review the slop that got churned out and the majority of the time the solution is to start from scratch without heavily utilizing LLM's that got them into this situation in the first place. The problem is though they now need to hire competent senior level devs again. But they can't.
They place ads on linkedin, indeed, etc and then get absolutely hammered with resumes written by AI. The vast majority of which are resumes from people that are either incredibly unqualified or are from like India. They again had to stop using AI to read them because naturally it's just pulling the bullshit from the pile of bullshit it's being fed. The ACTUAL devs that are applying get lost in the shuffle. Now they have to manually comb through all the resumes and verify that they're not AI crap before even attempting to read it.
So it wouldn't surprise me if places are just giving up and no one is getting hired. I can speak for myself and other consultants I personally know that we're having to turn down work because we're booked solid and don't have the time. I've run out of people to refer jobs to cause we're all in the same boat.
The industry axed a metric shit ton of people and now needs them back and they simply can't find them.
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