Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
The Phillipines beat out India on out-sourced phone customer service jobs because Filipinos could speak English with an accent more understandable to Americans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXm5yZct-ts
Korea’s labor laws make firing employees very difficult. These strict laws drew out of the horrible working conditions during Korea’s economic rise under a dictatorship. Making it that hard to fire employees leads to: bad employees lowering companies’ efficiency, companies hiring fewer employees, companies keeping workers as contract employees or independent contractors and the employees therefore not getting basic benefits, brain drain as good employees can more easily move up the ranks and make more money in other countries, and discourages foreign companies from investing in Korea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjjhrwVYPE8
“”In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.””
https://reason.com/2025/12/19/was-there-a-woke-war-on-white-millennial-men/
“In 2022, Seattle became one of the first cities in America to pass a minimum wage law for food delivery drivers. The law went into effect in 2024, and the results were nothing short of calamitous. Food orders plunged to unprecedented lows, delivery costs exploded, and driver earnings appeared to crater.
Now, new research on Seattle’s delivery driver minimum wage ordinance shows that the law had no long-term effect on driver wages. And yet, Seattle’s city council shows no signs of changing course, even with higher consumer costs and zero growth in driver pay.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/20/seattles-delivery-minimum-wage-failed-drivers-and-raised-costs/
“”Flexibility at work has the power to drive fertility decisions,” according to researchers running a survey in the U.S. and 38 other countries.
…
People who worked from home at least one day per week “had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in the future, compared to observationally similar persons who do not” work from home, according to the August 2025 working paper, “Work from Home and Fertility.”
…
Researchers say working from home may make it easier to balance work and family, but note that “it’s also plausible that parents with young children at home may select” work-from-home arrangements more often.
Self-selection seems less of a confounding factor when it comes to future fertility intentions. In both the U.S. and multicountry samples, and for both men and women, working from home at least one day per week increased their preferred number of kids. For women, having a partner who occasionally worked from home was also associated with a desire for more children.
…
A study out of Norway published in the December 2025 edition of Labour Economics found the country saw “a significant and persistent” 10 percent increase in births beginning nine months after the first COVID-19 lockdowns started. These “fertility increases were concentrated among women in ‘greedy jobs’ with lower flexibility prior to lockdown,” according to the paper. “The overall birth response was driven by women who retained their job during the lockdown period, consistent with changes in the nature of work (flexibility) being a key mechanism,” rather than increased time due to job loss.
…
It also calls into question the wisdom of a professedly pronatalist presidential administration ordering all federal employees to return to the office, as President Donald Trump did in early 2025. Simplifying remote work for both public and private sector employees could be a quicker, cheaper path to more children.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/28/work-from-home-have-more-kids/
Ghost job posting is when companies post fake jobs for information, fraudulently posting a non-existent job where people who need work waste time applying for a fake job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OPU6byF8e4
“The unemployment rate rose to 4.6 percent in November, its highest level in more than four years, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The economy gained 64,000 jobs that month after losing 105,000 in October, mostly the result of federal government workers taking buyouts.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/16/jobs-report-trump-employment-economy-00692500
“The fee will affect workers in fields far beyond tech. Health care providers, religious groups, and educators are among those suing the Trump administration over the fee, “saying it would harm hospitals, churches, schools and industries that rely on the visa,” reports the Associated Press. The fee could exacerbate teacher and physician shortages, especially in rural areas that struggle to attract American workers. “About a third of H-1B workers are nurses, teachers, physicians, scholars, priests and pastors, according to the lawsuit,” according to the Associated Press.
Though the Trump administration argues that its visa fee will address the “large-scale replacement of American workers,” it might not lead to companies hiring American workers instead of foreign workers after all. “Firms respond to restrictions on H-1B immigration by increasing foreign affiliate employment,” found a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. “For every visa rejection,” the average multinational corporation hires 0.4 employees overseas, while the most globalized firms “hire 0.9 employees abroad for every visa rejection.” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond economist Nicolas Morales observed that “tighter immigration rules don’t just limit U.S. hiring, but they can also accelerate relocating jobs to other countries.”
Other countries are trying to attract foreign talent that might be deterred by U.S. visa policies, Roll Call reported in October. Germany’s ambassador to India and Bhutan compared the country’s immigration policy to a German car: “It’s reliable, it’s modern and it is predictable….We do not change our rules fundamentally overnight.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney argued that “not as many people are going to get visas to the United States,” which represents “an opportunity for Canada.”
The H-1B program is imperfect. Many supporters of high-skilled immigration suggest fundamentally changing the visa or scrapping it altogether, arguing that it limits foreign workers’ mobility and long-term prospects and doesn’t prioritize the highest-skilled workers for the U.S. economy. But a $100,000 fee won’t fix those issues.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/07/what-would-a-100000-h-1b-fee-do/
“”On April 1, 2024, California raised its minimum wage from $16 to $20 per hour for fast-food workers employed at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide,” Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, and Jonathan Meer write in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that was first addressed by Reason’s Peter Suderman in the November print issue. “Our median estimate suggests that California lost about 18,000 jobs that could have been retained if AB 1228 had not been passed.””
https://reason.com/2025/11/10/californias-fast-food-minimum-wage-hike-is-killing-jobs/?itm_source=parsely-api
Steve Rattner: The job market is clearly getting rough right now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs0TTfacwCY