[HN Gopher] 'Big Short' investor says white-collar jobs bubble i...
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'Big Short' investor says white-collar jobs bubble is 'bursting'
Author : type4
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-09-30 18:28 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seekingalpha.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (seekingalpha.com)
| mt_ wrote:
| If anyone has read "Bullshit Jobs", will know those jobs were
| created and why they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
| metadat wrote:
| Michael Burry has been claiming the sky is falling for more than
| a year now. In my eyes he is no longer credible. Broken clock and
| all that.
|
| At this point, the entire globe has fallen in uncharted economic
| territory. Anyone projecting certainty about what the future
| holds is a fool, liar, or both.
| cush wrote:
| That's what created all of the conflict in the movie. Wait till
| the end
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > At this point, the entire globe has fallen in uncharted
| economic territory.
|
| Howso? We're back in a more historically normal interest rate
| environment. The last 12 years of zero-interest rates were the
| "uncharted" territory IMO.
| theknocker wrote:
| boppo1 wrote:
| Well the Brits just implemented Yield Curve Control, so I'd say
| the sky is at least drooping.
| nemo44x wrote:
| And they're just ahead of the pack.
|
| Printer is coming, heh.
|
| We should come to terms with the fact that central banks
| simply can't raise us out of inflation in short order. It
| disrupts too much and will cascade. Not to mention
| politicians implementing policy that directly hinders their
| efforts.
| encoderer wrote:
| More than a decade.
| metadat wrote:
| Thanks for the correction; I only noticed his nonsense in my
| news feeds since the past year or so.
|
| He was right once a long time ago. Now he's just a charlatan
| continually desperately trying to capitalize on that one
| dusty old win.
| polski-g wrote:
| More than a year? And the stock market dropped 20% in the last
| year?
|
| Seems a bit credible.
| opportune wrote:
| Burry was right though? His prediction was that we were in an
| easy-money fueled asset bubble and we are indeed like 20% down
| off ATH in the total market, more in tech.
|
| The prediction is based on really simple macro too. Nothing is
| certain except death and timing a bubble pop/price correction
| is notoriously hard, especially when it's based on discrete
| decisions by the Fed to raise interest rates/stop expanding the
| balance sheet. But it's been clear for quite some time that the
| Fed would have to stop that eventually as stopping inflation
| became more important than stimulating the economy.
|
| I'd much sooner call the people who thought the loose monetary
| and fiscal policy of the 2010s (and especially during COVID)
| was a permanent fixture the fools.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| From his Wikipedia page:
|
| > Through his analysis of mortgage lending practices in 2003
| and 2004, he correctly predicted that the real estate bubble
| would collapse as early as 2007. His research on the values of
| residential real estate convinced him that subprime mortgages,
| especially those with "teaser" rates, and the bonds based on
| these mortgages, would begin losing value when the original
| rates were replaced by much higher rates, often in as little as
| two years after initiation. This conclusion led him to short
| the market by persuading Goldman Sachs and other investment
| firms to sell him credit default swaps against subprime deals
| he saw as vulnerable.[14][15][16]
|
| That's the challenge with predictions. If you're off by a day,
| you'd still be perceived as being right. If the predicted
| magnitude was 5% off you'd still be perceived as being right.
| There's no hard and fast rule as far as I can tell about how
| off you can be and still be considered "right".
| grey-area wrote:
| He's correct.
|
| The bubble caused by a decade of easy money started to burst
| last year.
|
| Go look at a stock chart from the last 1Y and you'll see that
| the sky has started to fall, and had been falling from just
| after 1Y and has a long long way to go.
|
| Until inflation is under control and fed tightening stops,
| housing, equities, and bonds will continue to fall in price.
| This week almost saw a catastrophic run on the pound and UK
| gilts and US bonds are flashing warning signs.
|
| The crash started last year and continues with mathematical
| certainty until the fed pivots.
| mancerayder wrote:
| > housing
|
| That one is a mixed bag. There are clearly areas where it is
| falling - SF, Austin, Boise, a few regions like W Florida...
| but there are regions where it simply is not (the northeast
| in particular).
|
| I'd love for that to fall. And let's not talk about rents.
| behaveEc0n00 wrote:
| Essentially the government is setting market values through
| mathematical indirection the general public cannot grasp.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33031466
|
| Basically, fu Main Street, got mine. I wonder if they believe
| the meta-awareness the internet has provided will just go
| away if they crash tech/social media? That's where all the
| progressive undesirables work, after all.
|
| Past pols convinced people "trickle down" was sincere
| economics, not a bawdy joke. That Reaganomic funneling of
| wealth to the top was for their own good, and the public now
| blames modern progressives. A pols dedication to double speak
| is commendable.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Supply side economics has taken more people out of poverty
| than any kind of ISI or other internally focused
| development programmes. (I'll also note I'm a far left
| person who believes there are many flaws with the global
| economic system but the raw facts don't lie. Also, I've
| been poor and destitute unlike the majority of HN posters
| and understand how desultory and ineffective the majority
| of social programmes truly are - and this isn't just an
| American perspective, as I've lived in nearly a dozen
| countries.)
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06/can-free-trade-
| bring-... https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/03/poverty-
| reduction-res... https://www.flexport.com/blog/does-trade-
| reduce-poverty-an-a...
| https://www.piie.com/bookstore/trade-policy-and-global-
| pover...
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Generally I agree that liberal-ish do-goodery
| interventions are basically hokum, but in the good old
| days when there was a real socialist project in the form
| of the Soviet Union, left economics also pulled huge
| numbers of people out of poverty. The Bolshevik program
| of "socialism in one country" turned the leftovers of the
| Tsarist empire, mainly a mass of peasants who had _in
| living memory_ been serfs, into an industrialized
| powerhouse with a quite high standard of living.
|
| I'm not a tankie or Stalin apologist but it shows what is
| possible within a planned economy.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| > and has a long long way to go.
|
| The stock market's price level is well above where it was
| pre-pandemic, it's trading at earnings multiples in-line with
| 30+ year averages [1] (what was the 10Y yield in 1990, might
| I ask?) because earnings have gone up.
|
| I know being doom and gloom makes you sound smart (to some),
| but don't fall into the trap of 'everything is shit now
| because inflation has been high for 20 months'
|
| [1]https://www.yardeni.com/pub/stockmktperatio.pdf
| bequanna wrote:
| > The stock market's price level is well above where it was
| pre-pandemic
|
| Nope. Only a few percent above and trending sharply
| downward:
|
| https://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=ES&p=w1
| mikeweiss wrote:
| Do you really believe these sky high earnings are going to
| continue?
|
| And what about all the companies that still have billion
| dollar market caps but have NEGATIVE earnings? (Atlassian,
| Snowflake, Uber, Crowdstrike, Shopify.... the list goes on)
|
| Folks we are in a tightening cycle in order to fight
| inflation. It's feels important to remind everyone that
| economic conditions like this have not happened in decades.
| This site (hackernews) has pretty much entirely existed in
| the era of cheap money and low interest rates.
|
| Keep your head in the sand at your own peril.
|
| Companies are tightening their belts and you should too.
| mancerayder wrote:
| > Keep your head in the sand at your own peril.
|
| Where do you propose to store wealth if it is all coming
| down?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Wealth? You want fixed rate debt right now if it's all
| collapsing and we have a decade of unstoppable inflation
| upon us.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| >And what about all the companies that still have billion
| dollar market caps but have NEGATIVE earnings?
| (Atlassian, Snowflake, Uber, Crowdstrike, Shopify.... the
| list goes on)
|
| I think they are an extremely small part of the $100tn
| global stock market that people here _love_ talking about
| because they work there.
|
| >Folks we are in a tightening cycle in order to fight
| inflation.
|
| My point was that we are at multiples in-line with 1990,
| ya know when we had 8% 10Y yields.
|
| Folks, call the end of the world at your own peril.
| metadat wrote:
| Spot on.
|
| Additionally, if the entire world stock market is $100tn,
| the US is sitting pretty, because at $49tn the US stock
| markets represent HALF of _the entire world stock
| market_.
| opportune wrote:
| Earnings and P/E in isolation are not good indicators. They
| should be at least discounted against the "risk-free" rate
| of return, which if you haven't noticed is high relative to
| the past two decades with further increases to come.
|
| What a needlessly condescending reply
| atdrummond wrote:
| I would imagine most HN posters have never done a DCF
| analysis in their lives but I know plenty of people who
| have which have never beat the market. Not sure I buy any
| model other than Graham-Dodd's these days.
| opportune wrote:
| Sure, that's probably a better model. I don't see
| anything wrong with it and it has more parameters.
|
| I just think P/E by itself is way too oversimplified and
| a pretty garbage metric when used in aggregate +
| historically due to things like interest rates,
| sector/business model skew, relative maturity of
| companies, etc also fluctuating over time. It's like
| Week1 of value investing 101, not an actual metric by
| which you'd want to engage in value investing or
| historical analysis.
| grey-area wrote:
| Yes, that's why it has far more to go to revert to the mean
| of earnings and price. Earnings are also artificially
| inflated, and will drift down, and stock prices with them,
| we're just seeing the beginning of that process.
|
| Here's someone else who called it over a year ago with some
| charts with counterpoint those you link:
|
| https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc220925/
|
| OR CAPE: https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
|
| Note he's in good company, with Jeremy Grantham for example
| also warning of the same thing:
|
| https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/grantham-this-is-a-
| bub...
|
| Just to be clear, the argument is not 'everything is shit
| now because inflation', it is that the era of easy money
| has ended, significant inflation and war means a regime
| change in central bank intervention, and central banks will
| now tighten till things break. They haven't even managed to
| unwind QE yet and stop buying their own debt, will they
| ever? If they do, watch out.
|
| This isn't doom and gloom, it's simple realism about the
| regime change in interest rates - the era of 0% money is
| gone, in its place we have a normalisation, which means a
| normalisation of frothy asset prices and a reversion to the
| mean of earnings and prices in many domains. Usually these
| things take a year or two to work out, it won't be a fast
| process.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| > Earnings are also artificially inflated, and will drift
| down
|
| Citation needed. Maybe we are enter a local minimum, but
| what, you think off-stock-market value is not going to be
| brought onto the stock market?
|
| I think you should try to raise a private capital fund
| and roll-up as many mom and pop retailers as you can,
| then.
| portlander52232 wrote:
| How are earnings artificially inflated?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| It's a common trope for people who don't like the fact
| that the stock market is trading at normal-ish P/E levels
| to say 'well the E is fake!!! Just wait until the E
| normalizes!'
|
| Usually, they cite things like artificially low input
| costs (hard to argue that today), unsustainable demand
| from customers due to 'cheap money' (haven't seen
| evidence of that yet, the opposite actually), and a
| general disdain for advertising and retail business
| models (despite their long-term durability).
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree with most of what you wrote, but I think it
| misses that, in an era of 0% money, growth matters more
| than current profits and so firms rationally trade off
| the latter in pursuit of the former.
|
| When that changes, I think you'll see earnings rise as
| chasing growth now carries a higher cost.
| metadat wrote:
| Is it a bubble or a crash when not accompanied by a huge wave
| of abrupt layoffs and / or market losses? From where I'm
| sitting, the current phenomena appear slow moving and
| unfolding over such a long period of time, it's easily
| observable and unsurprising.
|
| Maybe we just have a different definition of these terms?
| grey-area wrote:
| Layoffs have started and will accelerate.
|
| It starts as hiring freezes and funding drying up, it ends
| in mass layoffs.
|
| In a year or two the crash will be obvious, everyone will
| be certain investing is a terrible idea, and it'll be a
| great time to invest/start a company.
| CodeSgt wrote:
| Why would that be a great time to start a company?
| grey-area wrote:
| Because by the time you're ready for serious investment
| the cycle will have turned again. Many great companies
| are founded in downturns (possibly just because people
| are laid off, possibly because money stops being a
| motivating factor).
| yunwal wrote:
| Less competition for talent and market share if you have
| the funds. However, if you don't have the funds, it'll be
| nearly impossible to raise.
| metadat wrote:
| Thanks for elaborating.
|
| It's still a great time to found a company now, if you
| have the right idea and network ;)
| mikeweiss wrote:
| It'll be a good time to start a company when people no
| longer want to invest?
| ambicapter wrote:
| Not all companies need huge investment, and it's a good
| time to start a company when a lot of companies are dead
| or dying, and you can step into their market and buy
| their assets for cheap.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| sure, with what capital to hire/acquire? Investors will
| shut down as well
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Facebook is not the economy
|
| https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf
| impalallama wrote:
| I've been reading headlines like this for over a decade now. I
| wonder when it will finally happen.
|
| Also interesting use of the word bubble considering it involves
| an unprecedented change in how our economy has functioned for the
| past 3/4 of a century.
|
| "The car dependent American suburb bubble is bursting"
| burlesona wrote:
| Funny you say this because the car dependent American suburb is
| also showing signs of stress:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
| [deleted]
| seydor wrote:
| Isn't his job white-collar? It would be prudent for him to buy
| some cattle. Did he actually buy any?
| PKop wrote:
| "'The Big Short' Michael Burry Buys Farmland Hand Over Fist"
|
| https://seekingalpha.com/article/4537751-the-big-short-micha...
| seydor wrote:
| Good for him. But where's the cattle?
| xani_ wrote:
| That reads like "We wish to start paying our devs like our
| cleaning staff to get more profits"
| chinabot wrote:
| Based on the quality of most of the recent programs and apps I
| have seen the cleaners could probably do a better job.
| gabyar wrote:
| Burry is a hedge fund manager. The most important part of his job
| is to scare people away from the S&P and entice them to put money
| into his fund.
|
| It's generally a mistake to trust the financial advice of any
| hedge fund manager, and they usually provide advice that makes
| the S&P seem like a bad bet.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Scion Asset Management isn't open to clients.
| echelon wrote:
| The more widely his narrative is believed, the more money he
| makes. He's not behaving selflessly here.
| readme wrote:
| I think he only invests for himself now. According to wikipedia
| he closed scion capital in 08. What's his fund now?
| streetcat1 wrote:
| Not correct. Boomers are retiring and with them their experience.
|
| Gen Z are much smaller than Boomers. This is a structural issue
| that can be fixed only via immigration.
|
| What could have been automated probably was automated.
|
| Also, due to china failures, there is going to be boom of
| insourcing not outsourcing.
| tcbawo wrote:
| I'm not disagreeing with your premise about Boomers. The
| youngest Baby Boomers (birth year 1946-1964) are in their late
| 50s, although the oldest have been retirement age for 10 years.
| It's likely that many had postponed retirement, but health and
| economic issues have forced them into retirement. On a
| tangential note, everybody always forgets Gen X. Or, maybe
| 'Boomer' has become a term for 'someone older than a young
| adult'?
| mutt2016 wrote:
| Every single time I hear millennial I think avocado toast.
| And every time I hear boomer I think of strong perfume.
|
| The words meaning sure hadn't changed, but I imagine the
| longer its mainstream the more it will morph. Soon we won't
| be allowed to say it at all, lest we offend somebody with the
| slur.
| glouwbug wrote:
| It's a generational thing. Just like Gen-Z hates the
| boomers for exploiting real estate the children of Gen-Z
| will complain their UBI pays too little because millennials
| exploited massive tech salaries to automate away burger
| flipping joints and software development
| teeray wrote:
| > health and economic issues have forced them into retirement
|
| For many too, they held on because their job was _fun_. My
| neighbor was a shipping container captain... he was eligible
| for retirement for many years. What finally made him retire
| was all the rigamarole the pandemic introduced. It stopped
| being fun.
|
| The same thing happened with a local family-owned
| Agricultural store near me that's been around for 70-odd
| years. Dealing with everything in the past 2 years sucked all
| the joy out of running the store, so they decided to retire.
| madcadmium wrote:
| You're saying that we've reached peak automation?
| syntaxing wrote:
| Curious to what "Gen Z are much smaller than Boomers" is in
| reference to. Population size or literally physically? (Which
| neither is true from what I can tell?)
| aliqot wrote:
| There's no way it is physically. Boomers were born during the
| baby boom which was a time of scarcity after WW2. Gen Z is
| the physically largest generation of humans we've produced so
| far.
|
| There was a time Nigella Lawson was considered husky enough
| to elicit gasps from the baby boomer generation when she was
| on TV. I watched one of her old episodes recently and it all
| came back to me, and by today's standards she just likes like
| anybody else, even at her heaviest.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| The four most recent generations all have around 70m people
| currently (depending on exact years of cutoff). So this is
| simply false.
| encoderer wrote:
| There is a strange cast of right-once hangers-on from a decade
| ago like burry that people love to quote in headlines. Nate
| silver is another example.
|
| Why are these people so interesting to bloggers/journalists?
| pohl wrote:
| Not a Nate Silver fan, here, but I don't think the "right once"
| sentiment about him captures his record accurately. What really
| happened is that millions of people who have an underdeveloped
| understanding of what it means for a lower-probability event to
| happen in a single trial are telling on themselves whenever
| they refer to him as having been "wrong". I mean, if you play
| only one round of russian roulette -- but you lose -- it's not
| really a surprise, is it. There are only six chambers.
| bena wrote:
| Yeah, Silver simply tells us the odds. Someone did the
| analysis on it at one point and 538 was "right" at about the
| rate of their percentages.
|
| i.e. For all the times they called an event 65%, it happened
| about 65% of the time.
|
| So they weren't "wrong" the other 35% of the time, it's just
| those are the times the 35% chance bore out.
|
| People have a habit of assuming "is likely" is the same as
| "guaranteed". Or that that's what the caller believe will
| happen. And then using the event once passed to discredit the
| initial analysis.
| mabbo wrote:
| This is exactly why the 2016 election was interesting.
| Silver called it about 33% chance Trump would win. And then
| he did, and people said "AHA! You were WRONG!"
|
| But he gave Trump a higher probability of winning than just
| about anyone, other than Trump himself. One of Silver's
| detractors, Sam Wang, even said it was so impossible Trump
| would win that he'd eat a bug if he got more than 240
| electoral votes. (he chose a gourmet cricket
| https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/sam-wang-poll-
| expert-...)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > This is exactly why the 2016 election was interesting.
| Silver called it about 33% chance Trump would win. And
| then he did, and people said "AHA! You were WRONG!"
|
| What was funny about that one was he also got a bunch of
| "LOL no way you lunatic, he can't possibly have that
| large a chance and no-one else is saying so, so you're
| dumb, or maybe you're secretly a pro-Trump shill".
|
| Caught it going both ways.
| greesil wrote:
| Nate and team do modeling well. Fat tails, correlated
| populations, and they deal with the crap datasets they
| get from pollsters. I always tune into his podcast when
| an election rolls around.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| That "someone" includes 538 themselves. They're very
| transparent about their track record and methodology.
| mbesto wrote:
| Simple - they get clicks.
|
| Pop culture knows the movie 'Big Short', but they probably have
| never heard of a Nobel prized economist.
| dominotw wrote:
| > but they probably have never heard of a Nobel prized
| economist.
|
| I think paul krugman is an pop culture figure too.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Probably for all the wrong reasons. He was pretty widely
| mocked at LSE when I attended there a decade ago and that's
| an institution I'd expect him to still be well regarded at.
| He traded his academic bonafides years ago.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Milton Friedman had a television show on PBS in the 1980s.
| It's not as though economists don't sell well on television.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Paul Krugman writes a column in the New York Times.
| anm89 wrote:
| Paul Krugman is under qualified to write about economics
| for a hishschool newspaper.
| rchaud wrote:
| That was the 1980s and it was PBS, one of the biggest of
| the few major channels on American airwaves. It wouldn't
| work today because economists cannot boil down complex
| ideas into 15 second videos.
| [deleted]
| chasd00 wrote:
| people know the names (or movie name in this case) and clicking
| on a familiar name is probably more likely than a name no one
| has ever ever heard about.
| cmsj wrote:
| there's also something inherently compelling about the
| outsider who gets something more right than the experts.
| theknocker wrote:
| RC_ITR wrote:
| It's cover for the increasing editorialization of 'news.'
|
| Reporter wants to say something about 'I bet WFH will have
| negative impacts on white collar workers."
|
| Their options are:
|
| 1) Do data-driven research and come up with a dry, sort-of-
| compelling article about recent data releases that doesn't get
| traction
|
| 2) Use a 'famous for being right in a big way' celebrity to
| 'launder' their idea.
| trenning wrote:
| Does Nassim Nicholas Taleb qualify under this umbrella?
|
| I don't see talked about as much these days, curious what the
| sentiment is on him now?
|
| (I really enjoyed his books)
| mrwww wrote:
| There was a movie etc, and people know his name, and how hw
| knew about the crash, when nobody else did. So it attracts
| clicks because people want to know this time.
| Bloggers/journalists are interested in clicks.
| arbuge wrote:
| Burry was actually just right again, and in a major way.
|
| He predicted the market would crash this year, and liquidated
| most of his portfolio in the first half of the year to get out
| of harm's way. Most of the rest of us are now nursing massive
| losses.
|
| https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/big-short-mi...
| Sakos wrote:
| I don't really understand why people are so obsessed with Nate
| Silver (particularly negatively). I listen to the 538 podcast
| and I'm interested in what he has to say about polling (and the
| discussions are _always_ interesting, even if I don 't always
| agree with them), but that's about it. I also listen to dozens
| of other podcasts where they talk about other things they know
| a lot about. It's also not like Nate is the word of god on
| polling. He's just another source of information. You can take
| or leave it. It doesn't matter. But why complain about him?
| rchaud wrote:
| We may live in an irreligious society, but humanity's innate
| desire to anoint prophets to warn us of a coming reckoning
| continues unabated.
| weeksie wrote:
| Generally I agree with you, but Nate Silver has yet to perform
| poorly.
| grey-area wrote:
| How about right 4 times, is that enough for you?
|
| https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/grantham-this-is-a-bub...
| ac29 wrote:
| Grantham is a notorious perma-bear, and given that article
| was posted right before a 20% rise in the market, I'm
| inclined to say that's another wrong call for him.
| DeadMouseFive wrote:
| Really solid reasoning and we should listen to Burry.
|
| WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees as
| more efficient workflows evolve from the old "filing cabinets and
| typewriters" methods that some companies are still using to this
| day.
|
| Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the white
| collar workers who act as human CRUD apps.
|
| The ability to collate, search, and analyze data used to require
| labor power, it does not anymore.
|
| I watch my partner's experience in accounting and the difference
| are stark.
|
| There are many many bs steps in accounting with paper that
| disappear when digital tools are used.
|
| Having physical pieces of paper as a fungible business tool is
| still something used by a lot of firms but they are simply behind
| the times, there are relatively simple software solutions for
| most paperwork needs and this reduces labor power required.
|
| "We've always done it this way" is an excuse for firms that will
| fall behind other digitally empowered firms.
|
| What does this mean for investors? Don't invest in companies that
| insist on using filing cabinets.
| whatshisface wrote:
| There is a lot of room for further development in accounting
| that is not presently happening because so many people are
| required to file all the lunch receipts. Shortsighted business
| might fire their staff when they find out how to buy an OCR
| system but it would be wiser to explore what you can do with
| people who can collect and collate complex business data with
| great reliability.
| vsareto wrote:
| > white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps
|
| Nah, I've seen legacy code and how much maintenance it
| requires. Regular devs are safe.
| mc32 wrote:
| But then they counterbalance this with the introduction of
| efficiency sapping regulations and compliance which adds little
| benefit but lots of overhead/headcount. Let's look at
| University Administration... instead of automation REDUCING
| administrative headcount, it has gone UP!!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I work for an organization where all the accounting is digital,
| has been for decades. Yet every miscellaneous expense
| reimbursement requires a receipt. That physical receipt has to
| be submitted with an expense report. The physical receipt is
| then scanned when the expense report is processed, but it is
| also filed and has to be kept for 7 years, subject to audit.
|
| It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, so it must
| either be a legal requirement or maybe the organization had a
| really bad experience with expense fraud and is now paranoid.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| They probably find that they save money by making the process
| so onerous that more people don't bother to file expense
| reports.
| MandieD wrote:
| I see that you have also identified the central value
| proposition of Concur.
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| I don't really find this convincing. Companies have been
| transitioning from paper for 20 years, and most have superseded
| it. WFH is hardly a step change.
| bko wrote:
| I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation would
| result in fewer jobs.
|
| Imagine an economy where there were no ATMs. Any time you
| wanted cash, you would have to walk to the bank and wait in
| line to talk to a bank teller and cash a check. And every week
| you'd be paid by a check. Paper records were collected for
| everything and an army of employees had to reconcile the
| records. No spreadsheet software was available.
|
| In fact, the number of bank tellers (not even bank employees)
| actually doubled since the advent of ATMS:
|
| > The number of human bank tellers in the United States
| increased from approximately 300,000 in 1970 to approximately
| 600,000 in 2010. Counter-intuitively, a contributing factor may
| be the introduction of automated teller machines. ATMs let a
| branch operate with fewer tellers, making it cheaper for banks
| to open more branches. This likely resulted in more tellers
| being hired to handle non-automated tasks, but further
| automation and online banking may reverse this increase.
|
| But somehow today more people work at banks than in the past,
| even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD apps that
| make some stuff more efficient change this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_teller_machine
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Banks in the US are not a good example because they are
| several decades behind the rest of the world. I haven't
| stepped purposely into a bank except to open an account, in
| about twenty years.
|
| Fednow should alleviate some of this.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Fednow will be great for most domestic transfers but I
| still expect any international ones to require either a
| third party service (Wise, Xoom, etc) or a call/visit to
| the bank.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Will Fednow not interoperate with SWIFT?
| akiselev wrote:
| _> But somehow today more people work at banks than in the
| past, even accounting for population growth. Why would CRUD
| apps that make some stuff more efficient change this?_
|
| Population growth doesn't account for regulatory changes and
| it takes a while to automate anything that interfaces with
| the law because of the inherent risk in getting it wrong.
| Banks are acutely exposed to this because they're often the
| ones who are ultimately responsible - they're the default
| insurance policy against counterparty risk.
| bko wrote:
| Sure, that makes sense when talking about employee count in
| aggregate. But specifically the number of bank tellers has
| doubled. Surely bank tellers should have more tools at
| their disposal to be more efficient, and surely fewer
| people would use bank tellers with things like ATMs and
| online banking. But somehow we have more bank tellers.
| akiselev wrote:
| Tellers could have gotten twice as efficient and still
| double in size if the number of transactions requiring
| human intervention increased four-fold, especially if the
| move to online banking has driven an increase in fraud
| and user error. It's a number that scales with regulatory
| demands, transaction count, total volume, and so on - not
| number of active users.
|
| Edit: Tellers also tend to be general purpose account
| managers at smaller banks, so if you called up the bank
| you'd eventually get forwarded to someone on the floor at
| your local branch instead of a call center.
| [deleted]
| 60secs wrote:
| The only reason I have interacted with a bank teller for the
| past 2 decades is to get quarters.
|
| If I could get quarters form an ATM, there would be no reason
| ever for me to.
|
| What are people using tellers for?
| freedude wrote:
| For everything other than $100, $20, & $5 I use a teller.
| Translates to I use a teller every week or 2. Why? because
| in many parts of this world cash is still king. Get out of
| the city for a change. Bring Cash.
| maxerickson wrote:
| My credit union is located near the route I take home from
| work on not very busy. So I use tellers for everything
| other than withdrawing cash.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > What are people using tellers for?
|
| They need to look you in the eyes to see if you are pure of
| heart and deserve a mortage.
| atdrummond wrote:
| How do you do a wire transfer from an atm? Even with a
| private banker I still have to call someone to move money
| above X amount - I can't do everything through a web
| portal. Maybe my bank just sucks, though.
| pirate787 wrote:
| Large counter deposits, cashier's checks. And my parents go
| in the bank to socialize with the tellers
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Cashiers Checks!
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Automation does not remove jobs. It simplifies them, and
| makes them lower skill and thus lower wage jobs. A bank
| teller today is a terrible job making terrible wages. It has
| basically no career trajectory. There may be more of them,
| but they're not the same job at all.
|
| The number of tellers is expected to drop by 12% over the
| next decade while general jobs are expected to grow by 5%
| according to government forecasts btw.
|
| Being a cashier used to be a tougher job because you needed
| to know all the inventory. Now it's ok for a grocery store
| cashier to not know what parsley is.
|
| If automation makes it practical to do an embarrassingly
| small task in order to provide a value to someone richer,
| yeah, you can be hired into it. Maybe a lot of people will.
| But that's not prosperity that's capitalism holding you by
| the balls.
| sokoloff wrote:
| This reads to me that only being capable of doing an
| embarrassingly small task is the problem. If that's your
| ability, you'd prefer a world where that's possible to one
| where the minimum floor for ability is higher than your
| own.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The invention of things like saddles and carriages only made
| horses more and more valuable over the years, until
| automobiles became a more practical replacement.
|
| I think it is hubris to say that anything a human can do
| cannot eventually be replaced by a machine. When we will
| actually reach that point is the real question.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I've never been convinced that efficiency and automation
| would result in fewer jobs.
|
| It hasn't in 250 years of automation.
| ac29 wrote:
| > But somehow today more people work at banks than in the
| past, even accounting for population growth.
|
| Perhaps that's not quite the right comparison - even though
| the population hasnt doubled since 1970, the number of people
| employed has (80M->160M, approx [0]). Adjusting for that,
| Bank Teller employment level is basically unchanged.
|
| [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CE16OV
| hindsightbias wrote:
| That's because the banks took their 2008 bailouts and built a
| million branches.
|
| All those branches closed during covid. I have 6 within
| walking distance and there isn't a human anywhere.
| echelon wrote:
| And yet they're still building new branches left and right!
|
| I count half a dozen Chase branches that have gone up near
| me in the past few months. I don't get it.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Probably because they've ascertained that one of the key
| things customers look for in selecting a bank is whether
| there is a branch near them. Never mind if there is
| literally anything in there other than an ATM ...
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| All these people theorizing the end of work have never
| actually worked in a large company, and don't understand the
| motivations of people making hiring decisions.
|
| The larger a company gets, the more careerists it attracts.
| For careerists, "number of people managed" is a key
| performance indicator (and a boardroom/resume bragging
| right).
|
| The human motivations of decision makers - to advance their
| own careers by being the manager that manages _more_ people -
| is completely misaligned with these future efficiency
| hypotheses
|
| As long as that remains true, we will continue to see bloat
| and companies hiring way more people than they need.
| throw868788 wrote:
| I see that in places I've worked. I've always resisted
| growing my team's headcount as I've seen it break
| efficiency first hand. However I'm well aware it makes our
| team less noticed, and less attractive when other companies
| ask what's my current reporting count as a metric of how
| senior you are.
| bushbaba wrote:
| To go from Sr. Manager to Director requires having
| experiencing managing managers who report to you. How do
| you get more middle managers? You hire more people.
|
| How do you go from Sr. Manager to Manager, you manage a
| large team, and create a need to have your org have
| multiple managers.
|
| So yes, lots of perverse incentives to grow your org so-as
| to grow your career.
| bko wrote:
| Right, so more efficiencies could free up resources to hire
| even more middle managers or administrative staff. It's
| only natural that well funded startups will have roles for
| "experience coordinator" or something. You think FAANG
| would have such a large headcount if they didn't have crazy
| margins?
|
| There are some other tides working in the favor of bloated
| salaries and payrolls. One is the focus of "stakeholder
| capitalism". Most of the large companies are held by ETFs.
| The large banks that run the ETFs are less concerned about
| individual efficiencies of any one company (they own them
| all anyway), but are more interested in other things (green
| initiatives, social causes, etc). So the decisions being
| made at these companies are less about profit and more
| about servicing "stakeholders", be it their employees, the
| community, the environment. That's all fine, but it's
| difficult to track and hold executives responsible. A
| bloated staff is fine because you don't want to lay off
| employees. Or various money losing departments are okay
| because they're servicing the community.
| [deleted]
| curiousllama wrote:
| I used to work in process automation. So you're aware, the
| reason human CRUD apps exist is to handle edge cases & changing
| context. Often, it takes more time/money to adequately describe
| the human process than it does to just do it.
|
| You can see this principle with ERP implementations - they can
| literally bankrupt an entire company if you get too ambitious
| with what can be automated.
|
| Edge cases & changing business context aren't going away.
| freedude wrote:
| Bingo! The business I work for specializes in and caters to
| edge cases. It is why we are profitable and we let the big
| boys do all of the big easy jobs that aren't as profitable.
| dangus wrote:
| I really disagree. The past 20 years have shown us that
| automation is the main driver of white collar job growth.
|
| There are very few industries that haven't already digitized,
| the ones you mentioned that have human CRUD apps are relatively
| rare. Accounting, law, healthcare...who else? Basically nobody.
|
| How many new companies exist now because of automation?
|
| Sure, there are some prestige managers out there, but I think
| their prevalence is overstated. Most managers I know in tech
| companies are overworked and have no time on their schedule.
| meltyness wrote:
| This is almost certainly the line of reasoning that lead to
| COBOL, and yet here we are with guilds and corporations that
| still need management to relate to the present and future of
| their trade's procedures and environment to the real world.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Automation is coming, and it is definitely coming for the
| white collar workers who act as human CRUD apps.
|
| I know some people who do this kind of work in various
| organizations.
|
| As far as I (and they) can tell it all should have been
| automated down to 1/10 or less the staff it takes now _decades_
| ago with computers, but their orgs keep getting basically
| scammed by vendors promising the moon and delivering a
| mimeograph of a smeared Xerox of a bad photo of the moon, so it
| never happens--there 's constant tool churn, but nothing ever
| gets faster or better. Anyone internal smart enough to automate
| any of it themselves either quietly does it some for them and
| their buddies so they can slack more, or does none at all and
| tells no-one what they're capable of because it'll just mean
| more work and management'll probably fuck it up anyway, if not
| be angry about it.
|
| It's a leadership failure and it seems to be more common than
| not. Maybe we'll reach a tipping point where such orgs simply
| die from that kind of thing, but it really seems like we ought
| to have by now considering how much "low hanging fruit" that
| couldn't been tackled in the 80s is still around.
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Hilarious example: our org decided to "optimise" travel
| expenses by mandating all our bookings through a centralised
| travel service. The service offers a corporate portal that
| allows orgs to specify their policy and ensure compliance
| while letting employees "self-serve" to book travel.
|
| Unfortunately the software is so bad and so complex that upon
| deployment, they realised they couldn't just roll this out
| for direct access to staff. It is full of travel-industry
| terminology nobody understands combined with corporate org
| policy terminology few understand.
|
| So they designated specific staff as "travel managers" who
| would be the ones to book travel for their group. These
| people then get special training etc. In practices however
| none of the managers have time for this so we are all
| delegating it to admin staff that already do other admin type
| work for our teams.
|
| And so the whole exercise has brought us full circle to where
| dedicated staff are effectively manually booking travel for
| us. And of course then COVID hit so nobody traveled for 2
| years after that and we all prefer remote / zoom as much as
| possible anyway.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| We have that and it is still cheaper to book outside of it
| sometimes by many hundreds of $$$
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _WFH will reduce middle management and "prestige" employees
| as more efficient workflows evolve_
|
| It also removes geographic limiters that drive up the cost of
| certain pools of labour.
| itake wrote:
| timezone and holiday differences are a huge cost at my job.
| Communication windows easily delay projects 1-14 days.
| ravedave5 wrote:
| Riiiiight..... just let me know when I can easily find good devs.
| ogogmad wrote:
| I think he's talking about administration type jobs, or
| something.
| feoren wrote:
| > just let me know when I can easily find good devs
|
| As a good dev looking for a job, I can tell you with 95%
| certainty that the good devs are not applying to your job
| because your company is a boring knockoff doing boring things
| and your job sounds like a boring dead-end where developers
| will be cordoned off into a little box with nary enough room to
| turn around while they implement mandates handed down from
| above by a product owner who never uses the actual product with
| no opportunity for actually discussing whether this new silly
| feature will make the product worse or not (it will) while
| technical debt and cruft accumulates and any attempt to invest
| in the long-term health of your product will result in a
| reprimand.
|
| After months of looking at job postings, hiring managers
| complaining about not finding good devs just sounds like incels
| complaining about not being able to date hot women. Look
| inward. Lots of good devs are out there looking. They're just
| not looking at _you_.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| What could I say to convince people that this is not the
| case? Like I have a small team trying to revolutionize
| nuclear power deployment performance with a highly customized
| PLM app but on paper it just seems to sound boring.
| ambicapter wrote:
| How in the blazes do you manage to make nuclear power sound
| boring?
| feoren wrote:
| Obviously I don't know your specific case, but I can offer
| a few ideas:
|
| > trying to revolutionize
|
| There are a lot of aspirational companies out there. I'd
| rather work at an aspirational company than one with no
| vision at all, but you still need to convince me that
| there's an actual chance you can deliver on this vision. If
| you told me you were going to revolutionize the world's
| energy sector with a perpetual motion machine, I'm
| obviously passing. Treat me like an investor -- convince me
| your company has a future. Because, of course, I am an
| investor; I'm considering investing a large percentage of
| my professional life in your company.
|
| > nuclear power deployment performance
|
| Nuclear power is interesting but highly regulated. If I
| come up with new and interesting ideas that contribute to
| this space, is it too tightly constrained by regulation to
| have any chance those ideas could get applied? Will I be in
| a position where anyone will actually listen to my ideas,
| or have you already made up your mind about how everything
| is going to work? Am I going to get to talk about the
| product development, or is this going to be handed down to
| me with people taking offense if I try to explain why that
| latest change doesn't make sense with the rest of the
| application?
|
| And what is "deployment performance" -- trying to cut the
| costs involved in building and deploying new nuclear power
| plants? If it is, just _say that_. Don 't make me guess
| what your company actually does, because I'm going to guess
| using my priors, and as you probably guessed from my other
| comment, my priors are very negative.
|
| > a highly customized PLM app
|
| Two red flags here: "highly customized" -- I'm a software
| developer. I write code (among many other things, of
| course). What does "customized" mean? Are you building this
| in some other inner platform? "Customized" sounds much
| weaker than just plain new code. Will I find Apex code
| built on SharePoint or something awful like that?
| "Customized" is a huge red-flag word for me because it's
| almost exclusively used by people who are afraid of
| programming and don't understand the software development
| lifecycle.
|
| The other red flag: "app". You're trying to "revolutionize
| nuclear power deployment performance" with an ... app?
| Look, I get that "app" is just short for "application" and
| therefore could mean anything, including an advanced
| industry-centric analysis tool. But it doesn't, does it?
| You wouldn't use the word "app" for that. So you're trying
| to revolutionize nuclear power with a $2 app in the Apple
| Store or something? That's what it sounds like to me.
|
| Again, think of me as an investor. If that's your elevator
| pitch, I've come away with the message "big ideas with
| absolutely no idea how to deliver on them".
| kamranjon wrote:
| With an attitude like that it's no surprise you are still
| looking. Let's be honest, the good devs, with good
| communication and people skills, they already have jobs and
| their companies will do whatever they can to keep them.
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| His was a valid retort to an annoying gripe from highly
| entitled managers. I've worked with plenty of top level
| devs. In SVish companies with boatloads of money this may
| be true for the top 1% of devs (some startups seem to have
| this culture), but that's just a piece of the tech world.
|
| The reality is that for a massive number of devs working
| for traditional businesses, there isn't all that much on
| the table. You can try to move up into the management caste
| and get big bumps, but you're only going to get incremental
| advancements.
|
| I actually wonder if any companies have considered massive
| salaries to be a liability in litigation, because it could
| be pointed to as an example of unfair wages.
|
| Anyway, you're getting a fancy management job, or some
| super elite dev job.
| feoren wrote:
| > they already have jobs and their companies will do
| whatever they can to keep them.
|
| I truly wish I lived in the world you imagine. I've been in
| the job I'm leaving for 13 years, received top-tier
| performance reviews every year, constant improvement, very
| good software, technical lead of one of the most profitable
| teams in the entire (huge) company. Everyone who has ever
| worked with me directly has great things to say. Meanwhile
| the vice presidents of such-and-such that play musical
| chairs with their titles every 2 years _do not care_. I
| have made it very clear what they need to do to keep me
| (and it 's not onerous, in fact it's mutually beneficial
| for everyone and completely in line with the CEO's vision),
| and they _do not care_. I 'm not sitting in the right seat;
| I'm not already buddies with the right VP; so fuck me. I
| can go get fucked.
|
| It honestly sounds like you either have no real-world
| experience or you've gotten _extremely_ lucky with the
| company you found. If it 's the latter, do whatever you can
| to stay there as long as it doesn't turn to shit (and it
| can, at any point).
| mcluck wrote:
| To be fair, I wouldn't consider someone who has been in
| the same company for 13 years an expert on the quality
| and quantity of devs on the market. Your experience
| within your one company is not a good indicator of the
| rest of the market. Most people I know jump jobs every
| 2-5 years going on to more and more interesting
| opportunities. Even at these more interesting places, the
| message is the same: we cannot find enough people.
| betaby wrote:
| Job hoppers with 2 years stints can't have any deep
| domain knowledge. Neither can judge even their own code
| quality/robustness/usefulness - that way too short period
| of time.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Define "domain". You can have tons of experience in a
| single domain across many jobs. In fact, I would wager
| that working in the same domain with differing groups of
| people, toward differing requirements, gives you a richer
| understanding of some domains compared to spending 10
| years at a single employer.
|
| Yeah, they aren't going to be the best with a specific
| company's stack, but they'll likely have a better
| perspective on how it can be improved.
| masterof0 wrote:
| This is not true, and just taking a dab on a fellow
| engineer looking for a job is not cool or funny. With that
| out of the way, most boring (insurance, e-shops,
| healthcare, logistic, etc...) don't care about keeping
| anyone(tech) around, so the "if you are good enough,
| companies will try to keep you" is a lie, at least in the
| US. Anyone can pickup their tech stack fairly quick. The
| technique I have seen some "boring" companies use, is to
| hire very junior folks , convince them they are making
| progress in their careers , promoting them to SDE1, 2,
| Senior SDE, Team Lead, etc... (and raising their
| compensation to a 3-5% each time, and making it a big deal)
| which means very little if your company doesn't have real
| infra. Many people settle for a familiar
| environment(sometimes the only they know) that pays them
| just enough. In big tech is a bit different(in my
| experience from Amazon, Msft and Google) , they do have
| "Dive & Save" money, to keep you from going to the
| competition.
| sage76 wrote:
| Define good. What specific skills do you want? How much
| experience in each of those skills?
|
| I have noticed that too many times employers want literal gods
| to come in and fix their entire tech stack, their product, and
| by extension their company.
|
| Of course, they are frequently only paying average salaries.
| dangus wrote:
| This dude and this article are really not making a great case
| here.
|
| The last sentence of the tweet is a dead giveaway of the archaic
| thinking. Why is WFH going to be blamed again? It feels like it's
| yet another manager's plea for employees to come back to the
| office and get micromanaged.
|
| The article tries to answer my question:
|
| > Work from home. The work from home trend is threatening office
| jobs because it reduces the need for many traditional office
| roles like secretaries and receptionists.
|
| In what world are secretaries and receptionists a prevalent job
| title in the first place? Is the author of this article retired
| or something? The first wave of computing already shifted those
| roles. Executive assistants to the SLT are not just answering
| phones and twiddling thumbs. On top of that, in the modern world
| receptionists are one of the most minimally staffed parts of a
| company already. My last 1,000 employee in-person company had no
| more than two or three receptionists and they were contracted out
| to a vendor.
|
| You know what is expanding post-pandemic? Co-working spaces. [1]
| Technology and the pandemic aren't eliminating offices, they're
| changing them. Many employees want a separate space to work, or a
| place to collaborate in person, but they don't want to be forced
| to go in daily. Companies don't want to have to make long-term
| lease commitments and dedicate one seat per employee.
|
| Guess who has receptionists? Coworking spaces. But again they
| aren't sitting there twiddling their thumbs. WeWork and the rest
| of the modern coworking spaces are highly automated. You can't
| just ask the reception desk to fix something or make a change to
| your office, you have to put in a ticket. These receptionists
| wear many hats: they're salespeople, they set up events, they
| communicate with tenants, they do light cleaning. Their tasks are
| too varied to be replaced by an automation, and their salaries
| aren't that expensive.
|
| > In contrast, the increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise
| software, data analytics, and machine learnings are increasingly
| rendering office jobs moot as much of the traditional number
| crunching, document processing, and repetitive analysis performed
| by office professionals is now being performed by software.
|
| Automation is driving new business ventures for precisely the
| reasons the article brings up. Thousands of businesses exist
| today that couldn't possibly exist because computing wasn't
| powerful enough. As soon as you automate an enterprise task it
| opens up more opportunity to provide more complex business
| products and invite new ventures into the mix making products
| that didn't exist in the past.
|
| Being able to do more things with less money is basically always
| a net positive.
|
| > Furthermore, while restaurant, retail, and even factory workers
| are all expected to be ultimately replaced by robots that tech
| companies like Tesla (TSLA) are producing, this technology is
| even further away from being widely deployed, with some
| predicting these machines to not be meaningfully impactful until
| the end of this decade.
|
| Not 100% related to my argument, but this quote above is one of
| the dumbest things this article claims. Anyone who thinks that
| retail and hospitality workers are going to straight up be
| replaced by robots is delusional, especially with the timeframe
| of "the end of this decade."
|
| It costs something like $20/hour to hire a line cook, less in low
| cost of living areas. Certainly, the future of hospitality has
| fewer workers per customer, but that's just normal labor
| optimization. There won't be a fully automated McDonald's, but
| McDonald's employees work with a lot of automated devices. The
| dexterity and intelligence of a human is very difficult to
| replace entirely. Robots aren't going to be talking to customers
| at the Apple Store, the whole reason people are there is to talk
| to a person, and retail salaries are already quite low.
|
| And why is Tesla in this discussion? Tesla doesn't produce
| factory automation robots. They purchase plain jane factory
| robotics that have been part of the auto industry for decades.
| It's like the article just wanted to bring up Tesla for no
| reason.
|
| > As a third strike against the safety of white collar jobs at
| the moment, most companies have already more than fully recovered
| their number of white collar jobs from before the COVID-19
| outbreak.
|
| The article from this point on is basically talking about the
| normal boom/bust cycle of business, even though the beginning of
| the article and Burry's tweet are talking about permanent
| decline.
|
| I'd say that this part of the article unintentionally makes the
| opposite argument it's trying to make. It is directly stating
| that blue collar job demand is worse, and white collar jobs
| recovered almost immediately.
|
| What is the actual structural reason why companies won't hire
| more white collar workers? You can't just spew out "automation"
| because the past 20 years or so has shown us the opposite trend
| in relation to automation. White collar workers are the
| foundation of automation companies.
|
| [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/technology/coworking-
| spac...
| banach wrote:
| The Bullshit Jobs bubble is bursting.
| orsenthil wrote:
| What is a white-collar job?
| djmips wrote:
| Love the lack of science with regard to the throwaway line about
| WFH causing lower productivity.
| xwdv wrote:
| Maybe we should start referring to WFH jobs as virtual collar
| jobs or something.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Legacy jobs.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Sweatpants jobs.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| You wear pants?
| incogitomode wrote:
| Email jobs!
| fny wrote:
| I'm not afraid to say Burry is wrong.
|
| White-collar jobs will boom, but they'll be outsourced. Work from
| home changes nothing about labor needs only labor location. If
| anything, work-from-home is a net productivity negative for
| large, bureaucratic organizations because slacking becomes even
| easier.
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