I’ve heard this called “technical deflation” and it works similarly to how economic deflation can play out, causing you to forego actions in the present because you think they’ll be easier in the future (or in this case, possibly not needed at all). Time will tell if this results in a “software deflationary spiral” or not.
One of those specific issues is that California electricity prices include what amounts to a redistributive tax, in the form of programs like CARE and FERA - probably about a third of households in the state are eligible for CARE which provides a 30% or more discount on normal prices. While there are low-income discount programs for other states none of them have nearly the reach of the CA programs.
I find it amazing that even with the redistribution subsidy, the resulting electricity is still more expensive than the national average unsubsidized rate. We are just so incredibly good at vaporizing money.
Something no one else mentioned so far is that, depending on your state, some IRA funds can be subject to judgments or non-exempt from bankruptcy, whereas 401k accounts are untouchable for anything except federal tax liens and divorce.
It seems like you've been referring to "Hospital Services", which was 31% of all healthcare spending in 2023, and "Physician and Clinical Services", which was 20% of all healthcare spending in 2023, according to the CMS spreadsheet. But this is made up of revenue to the hospital or doctor's office, not just compensation for the medical professionals. These numbers include all the administration/dealing with insurance that has to be done at the hospital or physician office, as well as rent, malpractice insurance, drugs provided at the hospital, imaging costs and almost everything else that pays for capital spend, etc. The fees at the point of service basically have to account for all the bloat in the system, which of course includes some overdelivery and bloat inside the hospitals and clinics. But I really don't think this builds a case (like you seem to be doing) that doctors and nurses need to be squeezed in order to reduce US health care costs, especially when total healthcare expenditure has grown much faster than clinician pay over the past decades.
I agree that the figure includes administration costs. CMS won't tell you that US physicians are paid 2x-3x more than they are in Europe, but OECD numbers will. CMS won't tell you about upcoding and overprescription, but the Dartmouth Atlas will. Meanwhile: the CMS picture will at least tell you that the majority of spending in our system is in on the provider side, and not in either prescription or insurance.
Again: I'm not out on a limb with these claims. I'm literally just remembering things Jonathan Gruber told Derek Thompson on a podcast, then looking up and bookmarking the numbers to confirm them. Many of the most popular message board narratives about healthcare disintegrate in the face of even these simple CMS numbers!
I once interviewed a very good candidate - good skills, interest in the business, a few years of experience, could definitely do the job I thought I was interviewing him for - only to find out after the fact that we actually only wanted an industry veteran with very specific, particular domain knowledge, and neither the recruiters nor me and my immediate manager had really caught up to that requirement.
This is false for H-1B - there is no "labor market test". Such a test is required for the PERM process in which an H-1B visa holder would seek a green card through their employer, although the definition of "prove" is up for debate [2].
H1-B applications must have a Labor Condition Application which requires a prevailing wage assessment and that hiring a foreign worker won't adversely affect US workers.
It is true that the LCA (and PERM!) processes are have grave flaws that leave them open to abuse.
I sincerely doubt the Namibian government is giving out thousands of dollars per household in solar subsidies, like the US does up until the end of this year. I doubt Pakistan does either, another country noted in the article where solar usage is expanding. If solar is a mature technology and an economic inevitability as contended in the article (I agree), there is a much weaker case for subsidizing it. In any case, most solar installation costs in the US seem to go to permits and expensive, inefficient contractors - endemic problems which affect all types of development and are probably only made worse by throwing free money at them.
The ADP payroll report is noise. It is based on the payroll data from ADP only. The assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy and that there is no regional, sector, or company stage bias to their customers. A firm with ADP laying employees off and 3 new firms with the same number of employees being founded and using a different payroll provider would be reported as a "loss" here. Maybe the private sector did lose jobs, but I wouldn't use this report to find out.
ADP say that they handle payroll for one in six of all companies in America. That is both a large sample size, and probably broadly representative of the economy. There will of course be some business segments that are over or underrepresented but that is different than disregarding the entire report as noise.
ADP reported a meager 29,000 increase in new jobs, but the BLS showed a much larger 139,000 gain. April also showed a similarly wide gap between the two reports.
Through the first five months of 2025, the difference between the two reports has averaged a whopping 63,000 a month.
BLS tracks both numbers, and the private still diverges quite a bit. We saw this again in July. ADP number was -33k private sector jobs, BLS showed growth of 74K for private sector, so massive 100k delta in just the private sector number.
That is quite the delta, but why is it assumed BLS is the more correct one?
From the BLS site on their methodology[0]:
> The Current Employment Statistics (CES) program, also known as the payroll survey or the establishment survey, is a monthly survey of approximately 121,000 businesses and government agencies representing approximately 631,000 worksites throughout the United States.
> All new samples are solicited by computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI), and data are collected for the first 5 months via this mode. After the initiation period, many sample units are transferred to one of several less costly reporting methods that are self-initiated by the respondent.
How is a survey from 121k businesses better than the actual payroll data from a company handling 460k companies[1]?
Isn’t the larger sample generally considered better? Isn’t source data generally considered better than a phone survey of self-reporting?
Looking at the two methodologies, it sounds like BLS data is noise, not ADP.
It doesn't matter how large your sample size is if your sampling method is biased. This could be measuring market share gain/loss in different segments of a steady employment environment.
> disregarding the entire report as noise
Studies with bad / non public sampling methods should be, at a minimum, treated with great skepticism. Why would that not apply here?
A factual number that has less statistical noise or political bias is extremely valuable. Yes, one needs to factor for the biases but that doesn't mean the number should be ignored.
The trend is useful, since one can fairly safely assume that most of the biases haven't radically changed.
ADP data does have a bias, but it is so much data it provides a valuable signal. The importance of understanding the source of your data and how it represents the largest population is something every scientist has been drilled on.
From what I can find they have 1.1m clients and over 900k are small businesses. The vast majority. This makes sense, as there aren’t that many massive companies.
Noise is the absence of a signal. A biased signal is fine, just account for the bias.
ADP is huge and covers a broad range of sectors. It would be a very interesting result (and a very extraordinary claim) if the employment data from non-ADP companies went in the opposite direction of ADP. I certainly see no evidence that firms underrepresented in ADP's data are hiring prodigiously.
> assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy
No such assumption is made except by an errant reading of the report. The ADP report [1] can be used to predict BLS numbers, but it’s also independently useful. The reason the headline is 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost is because 33,000 private-sector jobs were lost, ADP can directly count that.
There have been many instances of ADP and BLS job reports being out of step, which can be expected because of their differing methodologies. On the other hand, nobody with a brain can take BLS surveys at face value under these circumstances.
Can’t really speak to the business side of things - or if HP and WebOS really could’ve gained market share in mobile - but this reminded me I had a WebOS LG TV in 2015-2017, and in retrospect it was both very snappy and quite good-looking compared to the native interface of every TV I’ve had since.
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