Total Boomer cohort doesn't reach at least 65 until 2029-2030 per the US Census. One does not qualify for Medicare until 65. It matters because 55+ working age population cohort is load bearing in the US labor force at the moment.
> There are now 20 million more 55+ employed than there were in 2000, an equivalent of the entire workforce of Spain. This unprecedented demographic / employment transition is worth a closer look. As the second chart shows, some of this increase is due to the rising population of Americans over 55 years of age - an increase of 42 million. In 2000, 30% of those 55 and older were employed. Today, over 37% are employed - a significant increase in the percentage of 55+ people who are working. In 2000, only 17.6% of the 55 and older populace had a job. Now the percentage is 37.5% A 20% increase in the percentage of 55+ who are employed in a 20-year span is unprecedented. If the percentage of employed 55+ had stayed the same, there would only be 17 million 55+ workers today. Instead, there are over 37 million. This raises a question: why are so many older workers continuing to work longer than they did in 1990 and 2000?
(obviously, older workers are continuing to work because they cannot afford not to, although I'm sure there is some amount of folks who continue to work despite not financially needing to)
Even if you define Gen X birth years starting at 1965 (and not 1961 as some do), their oldest are already 61. So anybody between 55 and 61 is a Gen X, not a boomer. And for the 55+ group employment participation rate has been decreasing. Which does not mean that "boomers are retiring", it's Gen X's turn now.
>Those readings were the strongest since February 2020 (63.3%), signaling that more people were re-entering the workforce and helping to ease labor shortages in the wake of the pandemic.
Labor shortages. In the wake of the pandemic. That ended 4 years ago. Ssuuure.
>For workers 55 and older, demographic factors are key, with more individuals retiring, particularly since the pandemic.
Got it. "Retiring": giving up on finding a job because nobody hires 50+ yo (either in the trades or white collar)
>These findings reinforce a clear post pandemic trend: young men remain the most likely to be on the sidelines of the labor force. This underscores the need for policymakers and businesses alike to develop strategies to draw more of them back into the labor market—efforts that could help ease workforce shortages by expanding the overall supply of labor.
"Nobody wants to work"
>As labor force participation among young people declines, fewer teenagers are gaining access to those formative early work experiences, and the essential skills that come with them, which have lasting implications for both individual career trajectories and the broader economy.
Have 2 teenage sons, at 14, 15, and 16 (last 2 summers) they were looking for a summer job (US, suburbs), retail, fast food... Anything, really. I made them apply to as many places around us as possible. Nothing.
>It also aligns with widespread anecdotal reports that finding employment today is more difficult than it was a year or two ago.
Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years.
Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software, integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations, and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one example).
The focus not being the DB for 20 years is mostly true, with the exception that all of their applications are well-served by having a very scalable and very bulletproof database in-house.
They might drop it for end consumers but I doubt it.
It's such a small niche right now they do not even care if they're in their cloud. Enterprise users are the absolute majority of their user base revenue-wise.
However dropping the requirement might force them to change some things. Like in Azure-related stuff such as OneDrive where you have to design/build/test it behave differently if the user is not constantly logged into the Azure account. This means that they might decide to continue to force the Azure account and if they lose more of the end consumers so be it.
Unless they decide to separate Home and higher versions of Windows even more and drop the requirement for the home version users. But it might be more trouble than it's worth.
I very much would like to know how much of this presumably ordered (and backordered) hardware (RAM/SSD/.../wafers) is going to end up being released back to the market when the dust settles. I haven't seen any estimations but in order to put all this hardware to work the hyperscalers need to be building data centers at ludicrous speed. That should be appearing in construction data, jobs data, and many other places. Are we actually seeing any of that? Or is it all just based on the back-of-the-napkin math by Mr Altman and Co and they put all the money they got towards the future projects?
As much as 23.1GW of capacity is under construction globally, split across 831 sites. The Americas region hosts 17GW of this capacity, across 311 locations. Europe, Middle East and Africa or EMEA as well as the Asia Pacific (APAC) region trail significantly. APAC has marginally more ongoing construction, with 3.2GW across 283 sites versus EMEA’s 2.9GW across 258. The US alone hosts 15.9GW of ongoing construction.
I actually printed this one out to give it a thorough read, something I haven't done in a while :) I'll probably comment on the author's blog later.
My first reaction is that it's a bit of oversimplification, LLMs have been on the scene for what like 4 years now? I doubt the effects will be visible when you look at the data.
But on the topic of inequality as a result of changes how value add is distributed between business owners and the labor - there's a very relevant book by Thomas Pickety called "Capital in the 21st century" (I believe he used the title of a similar work by another economist in 18th century on the same topic). He collected as much data as he could on income and wealth of individuals and groups for Western nations (some going back to like 17th century) and did some analysis.
In a nutshell, the share of profits going towards the business owners (simplifying, inherited capital) in the West had been increasing in the 18th and the 19th century, likely due to Industrial Revolution. Which in the US culminated in extreme inequality personified in Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller and Co). It was followed by economic and financial collapse, mass unemployment, and arguably, 2 world wars. It also resulted in creating various mechanisms designed to prevent these things in the future, such as anti-trust regulations.
After WWII (especially in the US) the distribution of value add between the ownership/capital and the labor changed so that the labor started getting larger and larger share, to the point that the economists declared that the capitalism solved the issue of inequality. That trend reversed around 1970s/1980s, which coincided with the invention of complex electronic computing and communication devices (and therefore inventions of the new business models). From that point on the share of profits going towards the business owners started increasing again, and that speed has been actually accelerating since the 2000s.
imho at this point US is basically where we were in the end of 19th/early 20th century. The individuals' names are different, the issues (extreme monopolization/concentration of capital) are the same. LLMs and other GenAI stuff are simply part of that trend.
Hopefully people at the power learned something from what happened 100+ years ago. But I kinda sorta doubt it.
Some people strongly prefer to have an external battery that can be swapped (as in pull a tab, remove the battery, and plug in another, which is fully charged). Older Thinkpads (T480 and earlier) had a second, smaller, battery inside that would keep the laptop running while the main (external) battery is being replaced.
I've been using various Thinkpads for 10+ years and have yet to use this feature. But hey, to each his own :)
Yes, I also prefer the 2nd external battery on my T470.
But in today's market it's still one of the most simple to change batteries. And you know you can still purchase a genuine one, 4 years later for a reasonable price
T480 has 2 RAM slots and can support 64Gb (32+32). The reason it's "unofficial" is that when they designed it (and wrote PSREF) the 32Gb RAM wasn't a thing.
Youngest Gen X are 46, oldest are 65. Can we stop with this "retiring boomers" thing?
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