Investing General Discussion

Fucker said:

I had a job doing a complete reorg of a pretty big company. I studied all the business units, all the jobs, all the RE holdings...basically everything. This company operated out of two huge main buildings and a large number of off-site essentially zombie real estate holdings. The company was so large it had an on-site motorpool and full time pilots. Different types of union jobs in departments that could do anything. It was more or less a small, self-contained city. The company even had its own track rigs and helicopters. Triple digit # of employees at its peak.

It was purchased by another company whose CEO wanted to make it larger. A new company came along with a fraction of employees and no legacy costs and murdered them.

The result? The old company is entirely GONE. The buildings are empty, and they even sold every inch of copper in that place. All those high paying union jobs are gone. Almost ALL the jobs are gone, and all that is left is a few people in a tiny strip office handling paperwork for outsourcing for the out of state main business. Further, most of those jobs weren't replaced with new outsourced jobs, they were replaced with nothing.

At one point, most of these people were useful to the organization. At the drop of a hat, they weren't. I used to live in a tech hub that had a similar story. Hundreds of giant empty buildings that were once full of well paid people. All those jobs now forever gone to China and India.

Hell, I grew up in a boom town. Once businesses started to unwind and downsize, they all did. Boom turned to permanent bust. All those jobs back into the ether from whence they came.

Click to expand...

Khane said:

Just don't even buy insurance. The best thing Trump did was remove that fucking ludicrous penalty for abstaining from all this. You even alluded to being able to negotiate on your own behalf without insurance.

That's actually the best way to fix all this shit. Maybe even the only way. Old school collective bargaining.

Click to expand...

Kirun said:

I've had almost the exact same conversation. I remember talking about "bullshit jobs" with a Sr. Director of Operations at Walmart 6 or so years ago, and the F/A-18 example hits perfectly. When your org is stacked with engineers, mathematicians, and systems people, you can at least imagine retooling the whole machine into something productive. Space exploration, defense R&D, infrastructure, whatever. It's a fringe case, but the talent is aligned with missions that actually build something.

But like you said… what do you do with the sectors where the bloat isn't technically skilled people? What's the productive redeployment path for healthcare billing administrators, university bureaucrats, DEI coordinators, HR armies, compliance layers, and the whole metastasized ecosystem of middlemen that exists because paperwork now has paperwork? You can't exactly pivot fifty thousand redundant hospital administrators into orbital mechanics.

And that's the core problem: HR-style roles multiply infinitely because they have no natural ceiling. There's always a new workflow to oversee, a new process to "own," a new form to manage, a new reporting structure to justify another layer of oversight. It's organizational mitosis. Cells just keep dividing because that's what they do.

It's pretty easy to imagine transforming a room full of aerospace engineers into a Mars program. It's a lot harder to imagine transforming a room full of university assistant-to-associate-deputy-vice-coordinators into anything that produces measurable output.

Ideally, we can find something more productive than infinite HR jobs. But the real issue is that we built whole sectors where the work exists purely because the system created the need for itself. Then there's the fact that technology simply eliminated the real "need" for millions of these types of jobs. And unwinding that without detonating the labor market is the part nobody wants to talk about. But that unwinding is coming in the form of "AI". And now what do you do with a labor market where you have 10+% unemployment and literally no jobs for those people to fill? Should be spicy.

Click to expand...