In other words... subsidized?

https://www.forbes.com/advisor...

"What Is a Subsidized Loan?

As the name implies, direct subsidized loans are a type of federal student loan that come with a subsidy for borrowers, making them one of the cheapest loan options available. The âoedirectâ in their name comes from the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program, the U.S. Department of Education initiative that makes these loans available. You may also see direct loans referred to by their old name, Stafford loans.

As soon as you take out a subsidized loan, interest starts accruing, but the government pays it on your behalf. As is true for most federal student loans, you are not required to make any paymentsâ"on interest or principalâ"while in school or for six months after leaving school. That means that on a subsidized loan, there will be no interest to add to the principal when those six months are up, so youâ(TM)ll only repay the original amount you borrowed.

The government covers the interest on a subsidized loan during the following periods:

        While youâ(TM)re in school at least half-time
        During your six-month grace period, which occurs after you graduate, leave school or start attending less than half-time
        During periods of deferment, a type of payment-postponement period youâ(TM)re eligible for when youâ(TM)re unemployed, are undergoing cancer treatment, meet income guidelines qualifying you for economic hardship and in certain other circumstances
"

Yes, I realize not all student loans are subsidized, and in this case, the subsidy only is effective during certain conditions/time periods. But they do exist.

If you voluntary quit, they don't have to pay you severance or be on the hook for unemployment (at least here in the USA).

Wait... didn't Trump explicitly want to weaken the US dollar to make exports more competitive on the world market?

https://www.morningstar.com/ne...

" By picking J.D. Vance as his running mate, former President Donald Trump has sent an unmistakable signal that, should he return to the White House in January, weakening the U.S. dollar would be a policy priority.

Both men have expressed skepticism about the economic benefits of a strong dollar. Instead, they see it as an obstacle to a revival of U.S. manufacturing, which has become central to both of their political identities. "

Didn't we already have a brain drain from the US to the UK over the Bush W era bans relating to embryonic stem cell research?

https://www.science.org/conten...

"Stem Cell Expert Leaves U.S.
UCSF fertility researcher transfers to Britain, spurring fears of brain drain

17 Jul 2001
By Gretchen Vogel

A noted U.S. fertility researcher is relocating to England in a move that some researchers say underscores the uncertainty created by the current debate over government funding of research involving embryonic stem cells (Science, 13 July, p. 186). University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), researcher Roger Pedersen said yesterday that he has accepted a job at the University of Cambridge.

Pedersen has been working with human embryonic stem cells for several years with support from Geron Corp. He will maintain ties to his laboratory at UCSF, but the lab will not move with him. "I was faced with an irresistible career opportunity and the possibility of carrying out my research... with public support," Pedersen said in a statement.

UCSF also announced last week that Pedersen's work has been temporarily suspended until it can be moved to an off-campus building that houses no federally funded research. On 12 July, the National Institutes of Health issued a bulletin clarifying U.S. policy that derivation of embryonic stem cells, which NIH is not allowed to fund, cannot take place in a building that uses federal funds for maintenance or administration. A UCSF spokesperson said Pedersen's lab will resume its work in a new location on or before 1 August."

Ouch.

And at only 10% control.

It occurs to me that if all of the dedicated Southwest flyers all bought shares of the company, they might be able to form a block of comparable size. Apparently there are 599M shares outstanding, so an equal sized block would mean 59.9M people buying 10 shares each at $31 a share.

Supposedly there were 123M people who flew Southwest in 2021. If half of those people decided to join a group dedicated to ousting the vulture investor board picks...

If flashing them with OpenWRT removes the vulnerability (and makes the router perform better, or at least not worse)... then that seems like a market opportunity for someone to do some value-add for people who don't want to flash their own routers.

They're also ending their fuel hedging program:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news...

The fact that their finances are forcing them to do this is not good.

A100 GPUs use 48vdc in datacenters, apparently:

https://l4rz.net/running-nvidi...

And the GaN based buck converters are apparently much smaller in dimension than what we've been used to:

https://www.eenewseurope.com/e...

https://www.eetimes.com/how-ga...

So... yeah, I would like to see them update the standard to allow for 48v PSUs in consumer PCs.

As far as I know the 1 yen coin is still being minted as legal tender (and very annoying too when you get it as change, since no vending machines will take them.) Two cool facts though - #1, it will float on water if you carefully place it flat on the surface, owing to surface tension. #2, allowing for wear, it is supposed to weigh exactly 1 gram.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Supposedly you can get rid of them, up to 20 one yen coins at a time, when paying for bus fare in the automated fare box...

This CompTIA article from today updates their tech sector unemployment number from 2% to 2.9%. Lower than national average unemployment, but higher than in January. Still a big gap between 2.9% and the 5.7% in the WSJ article.

https://www.comptia.org/newsro...

" Tech employment off to a strong start as hiring momentum continues, CompTIA reports

Feb 7, 2025

Three of four key employment metrics were positive for the month

DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. â" Technology companies and employers throughout the economy added tech workers in January, while also increasing job listings for future hiring, CompTIA, the leading global provider of vendor-neutral information technology (IT) training and certification products, reported today.

Analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) #JobsReport data reveals employment by tech sector companies increased by a net 6,787 positions in January.[1] Robust hiring of personnel in IT services and software development occupations (+13,700) offset reductions in telecommunication jobs (-7,900).

Across all sectors of the economy tech occupations grew by estimated 228,000 for the month.[2] The tech unemployment rate increased to 2.9%, compared to the national rate of 4% for January."

Uh... that's weird. According to the WSJ, tech sector unemployment has hit 5.7%.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i...

"The unemployment rate in the information technology sector rose from 3.9% in December to 5.7% in January, well above last monthâ(TM)s overall jobless rate of 4%, in the latest sign of how automation and the increasing use of artificial intelligence are having a negative impact on the tech labor market.

The number of unemployed IT workers rose from 98,000 in December to 152,000 last month, according to a report from consulting firm Janco Associates based on data from the U.S. Department of Labor.

The department on Friday said the economy added 143,000 jobs, as the job market continued to chug along, though at a slower pace than in the prior two months.

Job losses in tech can be attributed in part to the influence of AI, according to Victor Janulaitis, chief executive of Janco Associates. The emergence of generative AI has produced massive amounts of spending by tech giants on AI infrastructure, but not necessarily new jobs in IT."

Now I'm really curious as to why there's such a huge discrepancy in the numbers reported between last month (in the article reference you gave from Jan 10) and this month (in the article I'm referencing from today.). Does anyone have more information to share?

I think pretty much everyone understands that recent RTO initiatives are designed to induce attrition. Regardless of benefit in getting people in to the office, the main objective is to get people to quit so they don't have to go to the trouble of filing a WARN notice, and paying severance and unemployment. Otherwise why have people show up to offices without enough space to hold them?

Yahoo and IBM used the same tactics previously prior to covid in order to force out senior employees who were costing too much.

The next step, if not enough people have decided to quit is to offer buyouts to those near retirement age. After that... layoffs. Notice that many companies already have hiring freezes.

"Leading Companies Announcing Layoffs And Hiring Freezes in 2024-25

        February 4, 2025 Layoff/Downsizing

The following is a list of major layoffs, job cuts, and hiring freezes announced by leading companies in 2024. Subscribe to Intellizence to get complete data on layoffs, downsizing, job cuts, and hiring freezes curated from news sources and WARN filings.

Since January 1st, 2024, 5700+ companies have announced mass layoffs.[Last update: December 31, 2024]

Since January 1st, 2025, 190+ companies have announced mass layoffs.[Last update: January 21, 2025]"

https://intellizence.com/insig...

Admitting that you need layoffs is an admission that your cash/competitive position is weak. It's also bad for morale because layoffs are seemingly random, and once they start, you don't know when they'll stop. Hence the slow-roll squid game of RTO instead.

Those of us who've worked for a while have seen these cycles happen before. Things can get worse.

Drop-in general purpose human replacing AI hasn't arrived yet. But just the mere threat of it has many businesses acting to reduce risk and conserve cash. Easiest way to swap in AI is to treat it like an outsourcer. You still need people to manage to doublecheck the work generated. If so, then the next logical step is to take the intermediate step of replacing US staff with outsourced staff. It'll make any future layoffs super easy, since nobody in the US is going to care about a bunch of Costa Ricans losing their jobs. And we've got just plain old layoffs without trying to replace people with outsourced replacements, which isn't great either.

The problem is everybody is doing this at the same time (we've had layoffs going on over the last 2 years) so the domestic market is unable to absorb the deluge of people being dislocated from a number of sectors (tech, entertainment, gaming). This ironically has the effect of making the domestic economy even riskier (potential for recession due to decreased consumption), which means that businesses have even more incentive to accelerate the pace of layoffs in order to reduce risk and conserve cash for a recession instead of just an AI nuclear winter.

Welcome to the next great labor dislocation.

I just realized, if this was meant as a ban on all Chinese developed/produced intellectual property, this would include any Japanese anime that subcontracts to a studio in China. Any software that uses algorithms or data licensed from a Chinese firm. And probably any research papers published out of China.

Anker products would suddenly be persona non grata. As would anything from DJI. TikTok for sure would not survive unless they threw away all of their existing source code. Forget the 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. You bring one into the USA, you're going to jail.

Text of the bill I am referring to as of 5:30pm Pacific time, Feb 3rd:

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/...