The argument is obvious. They probably didn't think they had to write it out in crayon for you.

It's called golf.

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.

Could you hook the hardware up to a Linux system and then get that data to your applications some other way? Looks like Linux still has firewire support, and you can connect to pipewire with ffado.

That's typically disingenuous. Yawn, yawn, yawn.

There's no sobbing in vibe coding.

Just bullshit on top of more bullshit.

What was functionally worse about the XP fisher-price skin? It didn't change any behavior, only appearance.

Yes, airships make sense here, while airplanes do not.

All it takes is just one soft spot on an improvised runway to demolish a larger-and-therefore-more-expensive-than-ever-before cargo airplane either on takeoff or landing.

You actually believed that the world's largest cargo airplanes are going to land on an improvised runway? SMH.

No, you can't, because they would interfere with one another. Strictly speaking of course you can, but it would be a bad idea. You can put the big-bladed ones closer together than they do, but then they would interfere with one another too.

Because they are on the ground.

That's outright false.

Can you stack them high enough that they get into where the wind actually is? And if so, why not just put one windmill where the wind is?

So make them use more horizontal space?

Obsolete and dead?

VAWTs make sense only on the tops of lonely hills.

Oh no a single symbol before a variable or array which makes it clear what it is and how it's being used, how will you ever read that code? bububububu

I think Moses needed it more.

On one hand, sure, it is that. On the other, it's still cultural appropriation, and the fact that it's using "apache" to refer to something which is "patchy" isn't positive either.