Google CEO Pichai Tells Employees Not To 'Equate Fun With Money' in Heated All-Hands Meeting (cnbc.com) 208
As Google tries to navigate an unfamiliar environment of slowing growth, cost-cutting and employee dissent over cultural changes, CEO Sundar Pichai is finding himself on the defensive. From a report: At a companywide all-hands meeting this week, Pichai was faced with tough questions from employees related to cuts to travel and entertainment budgets, managing productivity, and potential layoffs, according to audio obtained by CNBC. Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google's internal Dory system, why the company is "nickel-and-diming employees" by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when "Google has record profits and huge cash reserves," as it did coming out of the Covid pandemic. "How do I say it?" Pichai began his measured response. "Look, I hope all of you are reading the news, externally. The fact that you know, we are being a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade, I think it's important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this."
Pull together and make sure the suits get paid... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have mod points and would like to use them on this comment but I don't know what half the words mean starting with "prole".
Not going to use Google Translate (or Google anything) on the last sentence.
Re:Pull together and make sure the suits get paid. (Score:5, Funny)
If you concentrate, you can go to a camp to learn all about it.
Re:Pull together and make sure the suits get paid. (Score:5, Informative)
Arbeit macht freil - Work sets you free. The Nazis put this above the entrace to camps where they worked people to death (or just gassed them).
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Thanks - what I what I wanted to know. Mine was a serious question.
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More importantly, if you've really never come across the word "prole" before then stop everything else and read 1984 instead.
"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles"
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Gee, with that low a user number, one would think you'd be more educated. Lemme guess, you are 15 yrs old and using Grandpa's account.
Re:Pull together and make sure the suits get paid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully, not *all* of us low-UID'ers are grandparents ...
But that's a terrifying thought. Thanks for that.
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So can doing butt-stuff.
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... and we don't like it when they get bolshy!
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True sentence, but not normally followed (Score:4, Insightful)
> I think it's important that as a company, we pull together to get through moments like this.
That is thing that should happen, but in reality it seems like it normally only goes only one way and companies do not take care of their employees.
Re:True sentence, but not normally followed (Score:5, Interesting)
This is Google, they have always been extremely unusual, and spending well above average on employees, letting them do their own thing 15% of the time (until the boss decides no and fires them, I know several fired googlers), and often acting like an extended college environment. Now tightening the belt allows them to experience how things work at every other company on the planet.
Doesn't matter how rich Google is, they are publically traded and are beholden to the board. This normally means don't waste money. Expenses must be justified, so things like travel tend to be the first things to be scrutinized - instead of sending a team of 8 out to a site they'll instead send just the 1 person who actually does the work and the managers all have to stay home.
So they have a lot of money now, but the economy doesn't look particularly rosy. So the smart thing to do (whether a business or an individual) is start being thrifty now instead of waiting until it's dire.
Shareholders (Score:4, Insightful)
Just come out and say it: "shareholders are more valuable than employees"
That's Google (Alphabet). That's every public company.
That's just how it is.
Fuck the people that make the money, because the people that want the money are more important.
Re: Shareholders (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes, when Google had its IPO, they got money from shareholders. Now the shareholders are merely buying and selling on the market. Their "ownership" is squat although it does make the C suite shareholders richer.
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Those IPO shares, the one's where you make a lot of money, are not available to the average person when they are offered.
Re: Shareholders (Score:4, Informative)
But they DO OWN the place...
And if they hadn't invested to buy and grow the company, these people wouldn't have jobs in the first place.
There is a risk/rewared to everything...and those that take the risk early and invest, taking a chance on the company, damned skippy they get paid first off the top.
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Well, no. Google would be doing perfectly well without the shareholders. The IPO is the only time any money actually goes into the company, unless the company sells more stock. And even then, it's only when the company sells stock. What the shareholders do is irrelevant. They can buy and sell at whatever value they like and it won't affect the company one jot. The shareholders can collectively burn all of their shares and it still wouldn't matter. The only thing that matters is what Google does.
Re: Shareholders (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, this is only partially true.
With the advent of non-voting and super-voting shares, the some owners matter far more than all other owners, even if the "other owners" own more than 50% of the company.
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Actually, this is only partially true. With the advent of non-voting and super-voting shares, the some owners matter far more than all other owners, even if the "other owners" own more than 50% of the company.
Yes. The best example is Mark Zuckerberg. He has special shares that give him 10 votes per share, meaning that he can never be out-voted on anything.
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With the advent of non-voting and super-voting shares, the some owners matter far more than all other owners, even if the "other owners" own more than 50% of the company.
To slightly mis-quote George Orwell, "some pigs are more equal than others".
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While you have a point, you make it so poorly I think it's by accident.
If the money weren't invested in Google/Alphabet, it would have needed to have been invested somewhere else, where it would also have been used to generate profits. If you try to just hold onto money, it looses value. The exception here is thinks like valuable resources. If you buy gold (not gold futures, or gold that someone else holds for you, but gold that's heavy) then it will increase in value, as gold per capita get scarcer. Bu
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Yes, yes, I know, you can strawman a "but they just inherited their money/they're rich/they didn't work for it", but ideally that's the answer.
Re:Shareholders (Score:5, Insightful)
Pichai is hopeless, I don't know why Google's shareholders are still bothering with him. Google has made no meaningful progress with new products for about 10 - 15 years now, the handful of successful products they have had in that time frame are things they bought in, rather than developed themselves.
Pretty clear that under Pichai, innovation and productivity at Google is well and truly dead. It's just coasting at that this point. As soon as someone disrupts its key profit areas like ads/search it's just going to become the next Yahoo, and until then it's not growing or protecting itself with diversification into other successful areas. Google Cloud it's only meaningful new profit centre in recent years is still so far behind AWS and Azure it's not even funny.
But this is what happens when you kill all new projects before they've even had time to mature and find adoption.
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Pichai is hopeless, I don't know why Google's shareholders are still bothering with him. Google has made no meaningful progress with new products for about 10 - 15 years now,
From the very beginning I've never been able to figure out how this incompetent doofus got the job. Seriously, WTF?
... nobody cares. I guess the fact that Google is enormously profitable in spite of him (instead of because of him) is good enough for the shareholders.
Now, years later, his incompetence is blatantly obvious and yet
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From the very beginning I've never been able to figure out how this incompetent doofus got the job. Seriously, WTF?
He treated corporate culture as though he was on a season of Survivor. Since the rest of the company didn't know how to play the game, he won.
Chromebooks (Score:2)
Google has made no meaningful progress with new products for about 10 - 15 years now, the handful of successful products they have had in that time frame are things they bought in, rather than developed themselves.
Chromebooks have taken over a huge chunk of the education market.
Slashing from the bottom up (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing upper management isn't flying in coach.
Re:Slashing from the bottom up (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing upper management isn't flying in coach.
Exactly this. What does the CEO take home? What does his travel-and-swag budget look like? What cuts has he (and the rest of the top management team) taken? Odd are, none. "Pull together" in management speak means "you sacrifice, while I take my bonus for cutting costs".
That said, because Google/Alphabet has been so successful, they have built up a huge mass of personnel. According to Pournelle's Iron Law, any organization collects cruft. An occasional housecleaning is necessary. The hard part is cleaning house in a way that the cruft goes away, while keeping your good people.
Re:Slashing from the bottom up (Score:5, Insightful)
You also have to be careful. A person who is cruft in one position may be insanely valuable in another. Then there's the Peter Principle - people are promoted to their level of incompetence. How often has this happened within Google, where valuable employees are made worthless through inept promotion strategies?
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At Google, the cruft is almost certainly all in management. The reason being that they have processes to get rid of underperforming individual contributors, while the management class protects its own. You have to be really bad to get fired as a manager at Google.
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No. Perhaps you mean instead "all the management is cruft", and that's probably also false, but much less certainly.
Now the fun starts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Now the fun starts (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone at Google is an investor in Google because equity is a huge part of the compensation model. 50% or more of your compensation is usually tied to stock.
*ALL* Googlers care a lot about the stock price.
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Always demand cash for work, stock is generally undervalued and is given away as part of compensation because it's cheaper to the company than cash. Always invest your own money in retirement, don't be like those Enron employees who had their retirement tied up in a single stock. Any stock must be considered bonus only, not base compensation, but if you do have a significant chunk your own company's stock then sell it and diversify into something else.
Now what are the google employes actually complaining
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I'm guessing in someone's bag of holding.
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Depends on the kind of investor. Some investors don't care so much about stock price as a nice steady flow of dividends. Now the two are linked, obviously, but it's not a one-to-one correlation, though it does mean revenues have to stay healthy.
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Exactly. There are investors who are content to sit back and clip coupons and are happy with a company that just turns in a decent profit year in and year out and consistently pays the shareholders their cut. Those are not people who are investors in Google.
Cut your salary (Score:4, Insightful)
If one shouldn't equate fun with money, then he should lead by example and have his salary cut. Reduce or remove any bonuses and stock options as well.
If you expect others to sacrifice, you should be willing to lead by example. If not, expect your people to leave.
Re:Cut your salary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cut your salary (Score:5, Insightful)
If you expect others to sacrifice, you should be willing to lead by example. If not, expect your people to leave.
I wouldn't be surprised if getting people to leave is exactly what Pichai wanted. It is cheaper than doing layoffs.
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I wouldn't be surprised if getting people to leave is exactly what Pichai wanted. It is cheaper than doing layoffs.
It's cheaper in dollars, but it costs your top talent. They can most easily go somewhere else, and often don't even need a job any time soon.
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They can go elsewhere, but they will never get back the good old days of Google, because no one else ever splurged as much on employee perks as the old style Google.
Missing the point (Score:3)
If one shouldn't equate fun with money, then he should lead by example and have his salary cut.
He didn't say anything about salary cuts.
He's talking about cutbacks in the ridiculous niceties that Google offers at it's offices: swag, well-stocked snacks, etc. In his statement, the talked about the fun of the work itself, which he experienced in his startup life. His point is that the fun at the office comes from the projects you work on, not what you consume.
You want your best people to leave? (Score:5, Insightful)
People that consider themselves lucky to be working at Google because they'll never make that kind of money anywhere else will be the last to voluntarily leave
This sort of announcement is universally a sign that working at that company is going to suck for the foreseeable future. I understand it from the CEO's perspective. During economic turmoil, he'll need to have some good news to report to shareholders so he can prolong his tenure for as long as possible. But the real bottom line is that he's hollowing out the company culture and atmosphere to stay in the shareholder's favor for just one er two bonus and equity cycles longer.
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It's also how you get a union.
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Those who would be driven away because the entertainment budget was cut, are probably not focused on being the "best people."
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It's the *true* way to make money at Google. Grade A's leave, create their own company, sell it to Google for $$$. The B's and C's will be the last to leave.
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Does Google need many top people anymore?
If they don't employ them, someone else will. Google is not invulnerable. Everything they do could be done by someone else. I mean, how hard is it to announce and then soon after cancel projects anyway?
Aaw poor little Googlites (Score:3, Insightful)
The mothership doesn't pay cover their travel enterternments as much as it used to... I'm really really sad.
Try unemployment you pricks.
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Your jealousy is showing.
And that level of C-Executive speech (Score:5, Funny)
Is the reason he is paid the top dollar that he is.
Seriously the ability to generate a masterpiece of corporate gobbledegook disingenuity on the fly like that is worth a lot of money.
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He came in that meeting prepared on how to answer these questions ... that's not an on the fly answer. They got the mike away from Sergey in these meetings because he was not preparing properly and spoke his min, getting the company in trouble. I attended these meetings during the 2008 crisis, so no surprises here.
Translation (Score:2, Troll)
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I thought it was more like "I'm cutting your travel, swag and entertainment budgets so my bonus is even bigger this year..."
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"Travel and swag" are not benefits. They're perks. I guarantee you they aren't in the employment contract. How do you think a union is going to help?
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Trying to form a union is the fastest way to lose your most valuable and productive employees.
What Google is doing right now is the fastest way to lose your most valuable and productive employees. Preventing them from forming a union, however, is probably #2.
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Where will they go that offers the pay and benefits that Google does?
Google is cutting their compensation, and corporations never stop cutting compensation at the "free" food, which isn't free... it's part of the compensation. QED, they can go somewhere else and get at worst the same treatment.
The era of free/cheap money is now over.
Google's profits are up, but they are cutting employee compensation, this has nothing to do with free money. It has to do with employee compensation, which is literally the opposite of free money. It's opposite day in your mind every day, isn't it?
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Trying to form a union is the fastest way to lose your most valuable and productive employees.
Alright, I'll bite on your nebulous and completely unsupported statement. Why the hell would that be?
I'll brace myself for the anti union rhetoric.
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I don't dislike unions. I in fact believe that they are vital in many industries in order to protect some kinds of workers. I myself have no desire to be in one. My background is in high demand and I have never felt an employer had some kind of power or sway over me. I want to negotiate my salary personally. I want the risks that come with that.
A union would probably help a lot of IT industries, but it would drive my total compensation and bring costs that I would not want to bear. If my employer was unioni
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I'll brace myself for the anti union rhetoric.
Never worked in a union shop I see. Funny how those that promote unions in software never have. Also, not to point out the obvious or anything but what do you think the stock price would do if Google employees unionized? They mostly have options remember.
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It's amazing the points you can make when you just make shit up!
I worked at Costco for a while and that is a union shop. It was better then any of the other part time jobs I had in college and high school none of which were union. As far as I understand my experience at Costco wasnt unique either. Everything i've heard is that if you're going to work at that level of employment it's a great place to work just as I experienced.
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The most likely accurate answer would be because the most valuable and productive employees wouldn't be allowed to join the union. The second most likely answer would be, because the membership of the union wouldn't value their jobs appropriately, and so wouldn't support them. Both things can happen. And there are circumstances where both do (though for different groups of "most valuable and productive").
People in jobs requiring a non-trivial doctorate usually feel they can do better on their own than wh
Wrong answer (Score:2, Informative)
During economic rough patches it is the well-heeled profligate spenders who help the economy weather the storm.
"I got mine... (Score:2)
People care little about their employers.. (Score:3)
People have wanted to work at Google because of it's reputation as a nice place to work and well paid. No one inherently cares about the mission of Google.
So if you make it a soul-crushing place to work, no don't expect people to 'pull together for the sake of the company', expect them to be as mercenary to you as you are to them.
It would be one thing if Google actually was under demonstrable financial crisis, or if they were some noble institution like a non-corrupt charity. But they are an ad company flush with cash with no imminent need to crack down deciding to crack down and being shocked their employees aren't just super loyal to the mission of advertising.
It's well within their rights to try to become a more efficient business, but they have to expect morale and retention to take a hit in the process.
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No one inherently cares about the mission of Google.
I used to, when the mission was "organize the world's information," and they went around doing massive projects with low potential for reward (like Google books).
Now their mission seems to be "maximize profits" and if you want me to care about that, you better pay me accordingly.
Benefits and perks are part of your compensation. (Score:5, Insightful)
The bottom line is that any and every thing your employer gives you in exchange for your work... be it salary, medical & dental, PTO, stock, "free" lunch, gym memberships, activities, snacks & drinks, or whatever else... is part of the compensation package for said work. Taking away any of that, without a corresponding increase in salary so the employee can replace it with an equivalent from an another source, is a pay cut. If it's not classified as a "pay cut" under accounting rules, so what? Reducing compensation of any sort is still a pay cut in every way that matters.
So, yeah... if benefits are being cut without salaries being adjusted upwards so that they can be replaced independently, employees have every right to be PO'd.
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When I apply for jobs, I do take those things into consideration. For example, "free lunch" is worth roughly $10 a day (more or less, depending on if you bring a lunch).
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You're not wrong, but those who focus on perks are focused on the wrong thing, IMO.
Throughout my career, I've never considered bonuses and snacks to be part of my employment package. I focus on the bottom line, what is the base pay. Bonuses and perks always come and go, but it's a lot harder for a company to cut the actual salary.
Reminds me of my high school (Score:2)
The textbooks and building were literally falling apart, but they still managed to find room in the budget to make sure the gymnasium was kept immaculate, and the boys sports teams had top rate equipment. And before you say, "well maybe that was paid for by boosters" the administration decided to kick the special ed kids out of their little hovel at the far end of the building because it happened to have AC. They then spent who knows how much constructing a posh new office for the principal. And again, the
I hate BS answers like that! (Score:2)
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In most places I've observed closely enough to have a valid opinion about, cutting the benefits to the management would have a much greater effect than cutting travel benefits to the employees. (Swag wasn't available to either, or at least not obviously so.)
E.g. a polished walnut wastebasket is considerably more expensive than a metal one. And takes more maintenance. A quick search for one that looked similar returned a price of about $500, but I believe I was told that they actually paid $1000, and that
Do the employees own stock in Google? (Score:2)
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Do the employees own stock in Google?
by RobinH ( 124750 ) on 09-23-22 9:37 (#62908069)
If the employees asking those questions owned Google stock, they might understand why it's important to keep costs under control when your revenue is expected to plummet.
If you were one tenth as smart as you think you are you would have googled that question instead of typing it into the subject line on Slashdot, which you apparently mistook for your browser's address bar, or a search engine's search term input field. Then you would have known that most Google employees get stock options when they are hired, and also that Google stock vests sooner than most of their rivals, and you wouldn't have had to post this ignorant horse shit.
Google is sitting on fat stacks of actual
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Your kind of logic is why unions get formed. If you claim employees have no power and start abusing them because of it, then the employees will form a union and flex their power.
It's really, really better to just treat your employees well, not like animals.
Sorry, no can do. (Score:4, Funny)
We have a contract. You pay money, I work. You stop paying money, I stop working
Yes, it's that simple.
We don't have a relationship, we're doing business here. If that was a relationship, I'd get half the company when you decide to divorce me, and I doubt the severance package is that great.
Ignore the question, assume it's true. (Score:2)
Yep, I can see why they became CEO. And why people in power control all conversations (pick and choose questions, and decide when they're done answering), especially public ones.
Oh good grief... (Score:2)
Unions (Score:2)
If Google keeps heading in this direction, they will be one of the first software companies to unionize.
Talk stupid, sound stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with wokeness. This has to do with a corporation collecting record profits cutting compensation for its employees. It's the opposite of wokeness.
if the company starts losing money, and its value declines, I am not happy
Then you should be unhappy that Google is unwilling to recognize that its value comes from its employees' labor, and if they reduce their compensation, then the best ones will leave.
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I didn't see anything about Google cutting employee compensation unless you consider a department's "entertainment budget" to be compensation. It's not.
Employee compensation definition is any money or benefits paid to an employee in exchange for work. That most definitely includes anything you're accustomed to getting as part of your employment. The events coming out of the entertainment budget are for employees only, so they are obviously and clearly part of the employee compensation.
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If its not in your employment contract it isn't compensation.
Is it actionable? Nope. That's part of why the company gives it instead of more pay. Is it going to be taken into account? Duh.
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Not to sound harsh.. But you're delusional if you think Google in any way, shape or form is "losing money"..
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What are you trying to say, that you're bad at investing? When you bought Google stock, you got no real voting power. Your stock purchase doesn't matter to the company.
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When you buy stock in Google the company gets none of that money.
No, but if you buy it at above the market average, it does raise the stock price, which at least ostensibly means that the company can raise more money by divesting itself of some of the shares it has previously bought back, should it need to raise operating capital.
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Yeah actually it's surprising (and refreshing) how little the inflation and interest rate hikes have actually hurt the economy.
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It's fucking nonsense. As long as the number of homeless Americans continues to grow [npr.org], claiming the unemployment rate is falling is a total lie. And the actual number is much higher than what is reported [npr.org], just as the unemployment rate deliberately undercounts the unemployed. Literally every official measurement we have does this, but the U-2 rate (which is what's reported by the media) is especially false.
The fact that stocks are trading well today tells us nothing about the actual state of the American econ
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Stock options can often be better at a "no name" company.