Agreed: The first one is a policy based on real economic reality. The second one is an unsupported conspiracy theory which ignores the reality that US companies that do the exact same thing.

You are 100% correct.

For human interactions, the LLM seems random not only because most interfaces set the temperature to a nonzero value, but also because seemingly irrelevant changes such as spacing or punctuation will change the LLM output.

allo literally defined it in the post:

No, it won't. The numbers ultimately published are massaged by agencies run by political appointees. Formulae are tailored to fit narratives and ultimately what we get is propaganda.

Your scheme, for instance: Who will be participating, and who will be eligible for a reward? These calls will be made by political forces.

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.

That number is not credible. The prompts I write for "personal" purposes are literally indistinguishable from what a worker might make: for all ChatGPT knows I'm an auto mechanic. Location isn't a valid metric either, given WFH, mobile devices, etc. They can't possibly distinguish between work and personal to a one digit of precision. Obviously they can see whether prompts are coming from commercial accounts, paid personal accounts or free tier, but even that gets fuzzy at the low end.

There are few wells of propaganda deeper than those of "inflation numbers."

That, right there.

Just as one minute example of many: did you notice or care that BLS disappeared ~1.7 million US jobs in less than 12 months? "Corrections."

You have no "evidence." What you have is your preferred propaganda. Failure to dutifully inculcate propaganda as "evidence" is the exact opposite of servile.

If you could get a commie (or whatever you'd prefer) elected with the temerity to "just do stuff," you'd follow he/she/it off any number of cliffs as well. Pretend otherwise and show me your perfidity.

The framers put a lot of power in the Executive. The fact that whatever your side might be is incapable of producing actual leaders that can set aside the establishment group-think and leverage this is both a symptom of your sclerotic nature and also a shame. I'm not the simple minded knuckle dragger you presume.

If they did or didn't wouldn't matter to Trump in any meaningful way. Trump doesn't listen to technocrats until they make the mistake of opposing him. Trump also doesn't given a damn what other nations do or don't.

That's leadership. You may hate him for it, but you can't deny it.

I can't recall any business moguls jumping up and down about this. On the other hand, I haven't heard anyone screaming from the hills about the high costs of such a change either, and business never, ever fail to bitch about regulatory costs. So I have to discount your supposed concern.

That I can recall. Yes he did. He mentioned it on occasion in speeches, so this no surprise to me. Obviously it's not a big vote-getter of an issue, so he didn't walk around in a big red "MAKE CORPORATE REPORTING GREAT AGAIN" hat, but it was a point in the campaign.

We've all seen the "WTF Happened in 1970/1/2?" meme. Now, no one can credibly claim that whatever that stuff means had anything at all to do with the inception of quarterly reporting around the same time. I can claim, however, that somehow, some way, the US economy did, in fact, function pretty well before Nixon's SEC mandated quarterly reporting. So, perhaps Trump's change isn't actually the end of the world and the dawn of the Forth Reich.

If it helps overcome your knee-jerk Airbus vs. Boeing hang-ups, 737 MAX has a known failure mode that will rapidly gas the cockpit with vaporized oil. Equipped with this necessary whataboutery affordance, you should feel safe in at least allowing for the possibility that Airbus is also not flawless in all things.

Cockpits and cabins have been getting filled with various gasses since the inception of pressurization ~80 years ago. To Boeing's credit, the 787 has set a legitimate engineering precedent in aircraft design and eliminated at least some of the major sources of air contamination. Eventually, when Airbus copies it, you'll be able to safely ignore this. So no worries.