To: bull_dozer who wrote (183685 ) 2/8/2022 7:42:12 PM From: bull_dozer 2 RecommendationsRecommended By
Respond to Calling it Quits America's vanishing workforce, anti-social media and the looming molecule crisis...Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, saw his personal net worth plummet by $31 billion... roughly the GDP of Estonia. How does one man “lose” an entire country’s annual output in a single day? Where did it go? And what about Peloton? The company sells an exercise bike, with a computer screen mounted on the handlebars, for $2,000. It took a loss of almost half a billion dollars last year. And its stock – once the darling of the tech investors – dropped 85% since December 2020. What happened? And what made them so valuable in the first place? The business plan for almost the whole Silicon sector – including Google, Facebook and Peloton – was the same: capture someone’s ‘eyeballs’ and you’ll be able to sell him more stuff. At first, it worked beautifully. Unlike its rivals in the print media, the new companies didn’t have the expense of printing or delivering paper. Neither did they have to pay for ‘content;’ users provided the cat videos and mindless commentaries themselves. And finally, they could target their advertising much more precisely, allowing customers to choose only what they wanted to see and allowing them to tailor ads to the reader’s individual interests. That’s why ads seem to ‘follow you around’ as you cruise the worldwide web.Real things need to be coaxed out of the ground… heated and hammered… distilled and distributed… by real people. But what’s this? People are so busy on their cellphones, they don’t have time for real work. The government's jobs report released [in early January] tells us what has happened: well over 20 million people quit their jobs in the second half of 2021. Some are calling it the "big quit," others the "great resignation." Huh? Commodities vanishing. People leaving their jobs. Another report shows the “labor participation rate” back to where it was in the ‘70s… before women went to work, en masse. And today, one out of every eight working-age men is unemployed. bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com
