by rhelz | 2025-08-02 13:25:31+00:00
Well, thanks for digging deep, at least this is a conversation and not an ad hom party.

W.R.T. #1: I put it to you that if the margin of error is two or three orders of magnitude greater than the value reported as being measured, its not really a measurement, or even an estimate. If I told my foreman, "yeah, I need either 3 more feet of lumber or 300 more feet of lumber to finish framing this house" have given him a measurement, or even an estimation?

It was her job to deliver a measurement (we'll come around to whether she was given enough resources, etc I promise!) But that was her job. Looking at the July numbers, the reported number is 73k jobs, and the error bars are between -63k to 209k. An order of magnitude larger than the reported number? Did she really do her job? Did she really give us any information at all?

W.R.T #2: Sure, people are not responding to polls so much. You could even make a case that this is partly because of Trump's policies: they probably don't want ICE busting into the workplace and chunking their new employees into a concentration camp--best just not to report hiring anybody at all.

But as times change, the means and methods must also change. If the polls are no longer accurate enough, a new method of measurement must be found. Why not, say, scrape social media to see how many people talk about getting a new job or getting laid off. Or just buy the data.

It's scary how much social media companies know about us. I'll bet Zuckerberg has a pretty durn accurate number of how many jobs were created in July.

W.R.T. #3: Yes, again, Trump's policies have made her job way harder. But tell me, is there any CEO or business owner who isn't faced with the problem of trying to do more with less? Intel just fired Pat Gelsinger (one of the few executives who is so talented that I would blindly follow him into the Gates of Hell), because he couldn't do enough more with less. Personally, I think the board was wrong, but there's no reason to think the board is corrupt or evil.

The whole history of humanity is being pressured to do more with less--which is another way of saying that we have continually challenged ourselves to become more and more productive so that we can have better and better lives.

Now, Trump is a very bad manager, and he very well have "misunderestimated" the amount of resources she needed. Please understand, I'm not saying that Trump's incompetence has nothing to do with why he fired her. Perhaps he did set her up to fail, but it could very well have been done because of incompetence and not malfeasence.

What I am saying is that comments like the one I originally replied to, which claim that this is transparently a case of government corruption, etc etc, are not necessarily so. Trump has spun this as a case of government corruption, certainly for the purposes of covering his own backside on this, but what I'm saying is perhaps we shouldn't just take Trump's word for it as to why this happened. He said what he said to get BOTH left AND right to jump to the conclusion he wanted us to.

We certainly shouldn't take the bait which Trump has offered us, to just further drive a wedge between us, get us to reflexively hate everything the other side does, immediately just assume the worst of each other, etc etc. As long as they can keep us divided, they can keep us conquered.