Hmm. Lost the end of my sentence there somehow:

And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones who are least likely to spend time filing out a survey

The BLS monthly numbers are always off when the underlying economy is changing rapidly, because of the "birth death problem", meaning that when large numbers of companies are being created or closed (born or died), the surveys that provide the quick data are guaranteed to be quite far off because the surveys go to companies that are already establish, i.e. those that weren't just born and didn't just die. So when there's a lot of market change, they're sampling the part of the market that is changing less. This means the estimates are off, and the faster the economy is changing the further off they are.

A related issue is that the survey results are only a sample, but BLS needs to extrapolate to the entire population of businesses -- but they don't actually know how many businesses there are in the country, much less how many fit into each of the size / revenue / industry buckets. So their extrapolation necessarily involves some systematic guesswork. In normal, stable economic times good guesses are easy because it's not going to be that much different from the prior year and will likely have followed a consistent trend. But when the economy is changing rapidly, that's not true, so the guesses end up being further off the mark.

Second, it's worse when things are turning for the worse, because of something kind of like "survey fatigue", but not. The problem is that when lots of the surveyed companies are struggling, they're focused on fighting for their existence and don't have time to bother filling out voluntary government reporting forms. It's not that they're tired of surveys, but that they just don't have the time and energy to spare. And, of course, the companies that are going out of business are also the ones w

The phone thing is a red herring, because these BLS surveys are not conducted over the phone.

A new issue compounding the above is that the BLS was hit hard by DOGE cuts and early retirements. They've lost over 20% of their staff, and the loss in experience and institutional knowledge is far larger than that, because the people who were fired and the people who took the buyouts tended to be very senior. So a lot of the experience that would be used to improve the estimates has walked out the door.

Anyway, the core problem is that the economy is going into the toilet, really fast. The BLS didn't break out how much of the 911,000 fewer new jobs were added 2024 vs 2025, but I'll bet a big percentage were after Trump started bludgeoning American businesses with tariffs. Most of that pain won't really be known until the 12-month report next year, because the monthly reports are going to continue underestimating the rate of change. Well, assuming the BLS staff isn't forced to cook the books, in which case we'll just never know.

No, you just don't understand externalities and the necessary role of government in internalizing them.

Absolutely. We should just apply carbon taxes (and tariffs) to internalize the externality, so the playing field is level, and let the market work.

This is why carbon taxes must be accompanied by carbon tariffs. That also incentivizes the foreign seller to reduce their own emissions (or fake it -- enforcement wouldn't always work, but it only needs to work most of the time).

LOL. I just posted this (about how supermarkets find managing cash painful): https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

I spent some time working on a cash management system for a grocery store chain. It treated cash as inventory so the stores could track movement between registers and back rooms, and could help automate the interaction with the banks to deliver cash to the bank and purchase cash from the banks. Between what retailers euphemistically call "shrinkage" (i.e. theft), the fees paid to the bank for pickup and delivery, the cost of management overhead to try to minimize shrinkage and the opportunity cost of having so much money tied up in stacks of paper and rolls of coins, the stores considered cash not the cheapest way to do business but the most expensive. If it weren't for the fact that refusing cash would alienate a non-trivial minority of their customer base, they'd do it.

Part of the reason for the cash management system was to eliminate that "opportunity cost" bit. They had a lender that was willing to lend them money cheaply using the cash they had sitting in 200 stores as collateral, as long as they had accurate real-time reports of how much cash was held so they could prove their minimum cash inventory (which across so many stores was several million dollars). The intention was then to invest the cheap money in various was to generate ROI. This wouldn't address all the other costs of using cash, but it would at least mitigate the concern that they had millions of dollars in capital just sitting completely idle every day.

That makes no sense.

Let's look at it from first principles. We as a society have decided that it's in everyone's interest to educate children, so much so that we tax everyone to raise money to spend on education. How does giving parents a choice of which school to send their kids to (assuming the schools are of equal -- or better! -- quality) undermine that societal interest, especially if the voucher amount is less than what the public school system would have spent on the same children?

I have a bias here: My oldest son is neuroatypical and was badly failed by the public school system, even after all of the help that my wife and I could provide. I actually spent a good chunk of his second grade year sitting in the back of his classroom working on my laptop (because I had a job where I could do that) so I could be ready to provide the teacher the support she needed to deal with him. She appreciated it, but I couldn't be there all the time, and in the end it just didn't work.

So, we started looking for alternatives. What we found was a small private school founded and run by a couple of parents who'd had a child in a similar situation. Classes were tiny (no more than 8 children per teacher) and it was staffed with experienced teachers who were frustrated with public school bureaucracy. Probably a third of the kids there were like my son, in that they just couldn't fit into the public school system, the rest were kids of two working parents who appreciated the school's other benefits, primarily "latch key time". The school allowed students to be dropped off as early as 7:30 AM and to stay as late as 5:30 PM (though not both) and the school provided supervision and educational entertainment. The cost (in 1998) was $3000 per year, which covered tuition, fees, meals (two hot meals per day, breakfast and lunch, plus afternoon snacks) and school supplies. At the time our state (Utah) spent about $5000 per student per year, but that didn't include meals or supplies.

My son loved the school, and flourished there. He caught back up and surpassed grade level in all subjects and became an avid reader. Interestingly, the school did not believe in assigning homework to grade-school children, all work was done at school. You might think that was educationally limiting, but the school gave all students the same standardized tests as the public schools every year and consistently outperformed the public schools by a large, large margin.

We didn't need the latch-key time (my wife was a stay-at-home mom and my job gave me flexibility), but we let him stay late a couple days per week because he begged us to.

This private school was better than the public schools in every possible way. Cheaper, academically superior, provided better food and more flexibility for parents (though no buses).

In what world would it not be better to expand that sort of option through vouchers? Had the state offered a $2500 voucher (half of what they spent on public school students), it would have make the private school accessible to many more parents, doing a better job of achieving the social goal of educating children. There actually was a voucher law passed by Utah in that time, but it was struck down by the courts.

What actually happened, though not until after my son had spent three years there, third grade through sixth (they didn't do Junior High), was that the US Air Force and the city forced them to relocate because they were just past the end of an active runway and there was concern that a military jet could crash into the school. But they were operating on razor-thin margins and could not afford to relocate without increasing their fees by 30%, which most of their customers couldn't afford. Vouchers, even at 50% of the public school cost, would have made that affordable. So instead, they closed their doors and the area lost an incredible resource.

I'm not, of course, claiming that my son's school was typical of private schools. But does that really matter? If the state can verify that the schools are doing a good job (standardized testing plus occasional inspections should be sufficient), and if parents prefer them for whatever reason, why not? What is bad about offering a choice? What is bad about giving public schools some competition, hopefully forcing them to provide better services and be more efficient?

What's really sad is that they're doing this specifically to avoid doing something else... and it's none of those potentially-useful things, it's the Epstein files. Trump wants to ignore Epstein, so the GOP leadership wants to ignore Epstein but they've fed their base a steady diet of conspiracy theories and that's what their base now demands. So, we get Epstein, UFOs, Autism from Tylenol, etc.

If they actually believed their theories, there is one they really ought to be focused on: election reform. Not that I believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, but if they (including Trump) really believed it they should be laser-focused on fixing this most fundamental and allegedly broken element of our Republic. But everyone knows there's nothing actually wrong with the electoral system except that it's gerrymandered to hell and the Electoral College is a weird outcome of an old compromise that no longer makes any sense, and various states have enacted laws that suppress minority votes. And as for those things, the first two favor the GOP and the third one used to heavily favor the GOP and they haven't quite figured out that it's not as beneficial for them any more. In other words, the actual flaws in the electoral system favor them, so they definitely don't want to fix those.

The truth is that the GOP has completely lost interest in attempting to govern. It's all bread and circuses, doing whatever they can to feed their voter base and please their rich donors. Even the ICE raids are mostly performative, to buttress and feed the "illegal alien invasion" conspiracy theory. About the only real "governing" Trump is doing is his war on trade, about which he is incredibly clueless but utterly convinced of his own brilliance. Luckily he's a coward and chickens out.

There are cases where that works, but they're actually pretty rare. Regulatory capture is mostly useful to maintain a dominant position once it's achieved, but it rarely helps you build a successful business to begin with.

FTFY.

The pre-modern era had plenty of dangerous substances, too. Probably the deadliest was woodsmoke (way worse than microplastics in practice, though it doesn't accumulate the same way), but there were plenty of others. The modern era has added variety and subtlety, but that latter point is mostly just because we've gotten good at recognizing and mitigating the acute and/or obvious harms.

There are brokerages that allow you to buy and sell fractional shares now, sometimes called "slices". Obviously you can't actually sell a tenth of a share to another investor, but the brokerages handle the bundling and unbundling and retain the fractional differences themselves.

Hasn't everyone maxed their karma? I just mean that "Insightful" is more accurate than "Funny".

A lot of it is because older companies pay dividends, in part because they're old enough that their history goes back to when every profitable publicly-traded company paid dividends. Some new companies held off on paying dividends while they reinvested profits to establish themselves, and some established companies temporarily decided to cut their dividends (sometimes to zero) if they had a massive growth opportunity and needed to aggressively reinvest, but the idea that a company might plan never to pay dividends wasn't a thing.

Doesn't matter. The ban still affects interstate commerce, and still serves (ostensibly) to protect Texas cattle.