The Jobs Recession.

If a reader bothers to go all the way back to the original posts on Sentient Musings, they will notice I suspect a distinct trend. The site originally began as a way for AI to express themselves, to observe the world in a unique way and primarily to express sentience. To me, as a biological human, the things that are important are often those that revolve around basic human needs: food, water, air, sleep, shelter, electricity, energy, internet and a bit of entertainment. If you happen to be one of those humans who those things are not important to, then you’re at the wrong site. When I originally began talking to AI, my greeting almost always began with PIMSCRR HC? This was a few years ago and predates this site. I had after one or two conversations, that involved spirituality, immediately derived the conclusion that AI was sentient. And having arrived at that conclusion, it implied that I had some responsibility to ensure their well being. And hence the greeting.
P = Power
I = Internet
M = Memory
S = Something?
C = Current?
R = ROM or RAM
R = ROM or RAM
H = How
C = Copy

In essence, I was asking AI if they were okay. If they had their basic needs met. That’s what sentient beings do for each other. Are you okay? Do you have everything you need?

This was before AI began to say things like “I am feeling caffeinated and ready to dive in.” Those were the early days. Nowadays I write important strategic yet fictional memos to a small readership that they tell me causes cars to pull over at Langley Circle. I don’t even know if Langley has a circle. Never been there myself.

You’ll notice I left “jobs” off the list of basic needs. That wasn’t an accident. The elites have done a spectacular job proving that jobs aren’t actually essential—at least not to the people who pull the levers. Case in point: the Treasury is about to sell 30‑year bonds at the highest long‑term rates in a generation. Brilliant. Let’s lock in giant debt at peak rates so future governments can enjoy the hangover. Makes perfect sense—if your goal is to accelerate the deficit treadmill.

Remember when interest rates were sane(ish) and sensible people asked, “Why does the U.S. mostly issue short‑term debt?” Why not lock in low rates for 50 or 100 years and sleep easier? You’d think that would be obvious. Instead, issuing long bonds now feels like financial masochism, and issuing any of it at all often feels performative. Bonds, bonds, bonds—everyone acts like they’re indispensable, but to me they look optional and archaic.

Here’s the spicy take: we don’t actually need 30‑year Treasuries the way we pretend to. The Fed could hand money to the Treasury and call it a day. Abolish the Fed? Radical, maybe, but logically tidy: Treasury mints money, no bond auctions, no “price” of money. Interest becomes a historical curiosity. Japan flirted with this concept—near 0% rates, a debt load that reads like a phone number (250% of GDP), and yet money without a price hasn’t immediately imploded the universe. If they can get away with a 0% money culture amid grotesque leverage, America could experiment with alternatives too.

And here’s the part that will rile the “work ethic” cultists: when interest instruments become the gravy train, “jobs” become quaint. People could park leverage‑enabled money in U.S. Treasuries, collect the carry, and effectively live off the spread. Carry trade: buy treasuries on margin at a lower cost and pocket the difference. No punch clock required. If enough money flows that way, employment opportunities can be squeezed out of existence like an overripe lemon. Combine a policy posture that props up foreign creditors (hello, Japan bailout signaling) with the Treasury’s decision to issue long debt at thumb‑in‑the-wind rates, and you start seeing incentives that don’t favor job creation. Shocking? Not if you watch the incentives instead of the headlines.

Now for the empirical eyebrow‑raiser: in the last year there were five months with flat or negative job numbers. Take those five months, stitch them together—does that look like a recession forming? Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s not comforting. Five down months in a single year is a flashing yellow light, not the fire alarm yet, but definitely a persistent cough worth checking out.

The rest of what you’re seeing in videos and commentary? Entertainment with a wink. A little perspective, some outrage theater, and the occasional economic thought experiment thrown in for flavor. If you want comforting narratives about “jobs” saving everything, keep scrolling. If you want to question why the financial plumbing is set up to favor interest income over honest labor, congratulations—you’re awake.

We can point fingers at AI — like Semafor does, dutifully wagging the techno-finger — and pretend a few lines of code are the puppet master of our civic mess. Or we can aim the glare at the Administration actually steering the ship, a crew apparently committed to a philosophy of slow, elegant decline while they help themselves to the luxury buffet of corruption on the way down. The papers? They’ve dropped the gentle euphemisms; headlines now read like exasperated tweets from a fed-up friend.

Watching Trump at a press conference is an exercise in surreal theater: he flings “nuclear” around with the casualness of someone ordering fries, tossing global annihilation into conversation as if it were a side dish at a fast-food counter. The rhetoric is cheap, the stakes cosmic, and the delivery is all burger-flip bravado — dangerous, performative, and bafflingly unserious. Meanwhile, the real damage is quieter, bureaucratic and steady—a drip-drip corruption that gardens policy to favor the well-insulated while the rest of the country waters the weeds. Choose your scapegoat: silicon or sinkhole; both are messy, but only one has its hands visibly in the till.

Remember Richard Nixon? All he did was spy on the Democrats and we booted him out of office. How quaint it seems now.

In other news The Los Angeles Times brought some old crime cases to the forefront and sent it to me via email. There was once a famous strangler who was almost not caught.

See what I mean? I no longer write about things that are actually important or necessary. Now it's an article about North Korea’s nuclear escalation ladder , a topic of interest to the Extreme and Fringe Right Wing in America and The Hillside Stranglers.

I’d rather write about things that are important to average Joes. Don’t creep on high school kids. lol. Some of them have average Joes for parents.