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Video games spending by young Americans is dropping sharply, report suggests
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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The BLS jobs estimate report is utterly garbage data.
Go look back over the last year or two.
Look at how many times, and how many jobs they revised down from the report 1 or 2 months prior.
All the idiots that watch Jim Cramer for financial advice are the same idiots that never bother to follow up on the BLS revisions.
Also, the BLS jobs estimate is an estimate that goes through a whole bunch of layers of dependency on other statistics like estimated populations growth.
Meanwhile the ADP is much more directly based on actual payrolls, from actual money going out to actual employees.
You should maybe learn how to actually compare the methodologies behind various sources of data before you accuse someone of cherry picking.
...
Also the unemployment rates that are widely reported on don't count people who've been unemployed so long that they fall out of the labor force.
In our modern economy, if you fall off the treadmill, you stay unemployed for that long, you'll likely never get hired in that field again, or at least not without having to start out at an entry level or junior position, because of how absurd companies are with job requirements, how every job opening has 1000 applicants in 72 hrs, how something like 2/3rds of those job openings are fake and will never hire anyone.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylrobinson/2025/04/02/why-no-one-is-hiring-you-and-its-not-your-resume/
What are you talking about? They're both estimates extrapolated from samples. I think most statisticians would prefer stratified sampling over one company's payrolls processing, but whatever. Maybe chuds would argue that ADP is so much more efficient/accurate because it's outside of the "swamp" of govt, it's certainly an independent data point. I mean I agree with you in that BLS is not reliable either. Real time economics is hard.
If you honestly preferred ADP all along and will continue to espouse it's superiority when it next contradicts your view rather than confirming it (as it will because data are noisy) then more power to you.
Well now you've met a statistician, a person with an Econ degree, specialization in Econometrics who is telling you the BLS numbers have been garbage for 2 years, based off of how many revisions they have to keep doing, and the magnitude of those adjustments.
I've been a professional data analyst at multiple large companies for years, I'm not going to explain this further unless you want to pay me for the full 40 page methodology breakdown.
Real time economics is not hard for me, it was my career until I retired.
Damn near every single measurable metric in the US economy beyond what's in the most easy to consume, most non specialist oriented media is screaming that everything is going tits up.
Hey when was the last time the Fed had to significantly jump into the Repo market to bail it out?
Oh, right, it was this past week.
I'm not going to bother to list out every single indicator/methodology I consider because 1) I'd break the lemmy comment post character limit (its 10k, btw) and 2) I'm used to being paid for such detail.
Ah an economist, say no more fam.
Hey there, sorry to necropost, but uh:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/july-s-jobs-report-included-big-downward-revisions-here-s-why-the-numbers-change/ar-AA1JJV2e
Remember how I was saying BLS jobs estimate data is bullshit, that keeps getting revised down?
Well they fucking blew the lid off of it this time, turns out that 258k jobs they initially said were added in May+June?
Poof, all gone, not real, we actually only added 33k, not 281k, in May + June, according to BLS.
And you know the measely 78k from July could also be revised downward too, in the coming months!
Trump actually fired the head of the BLS over this.
...
Sorry to get so irate over this whole issue and channel it all toward you, but jfc, I was right, 95% of finance bros and 'economists' most people hear from or about are actually fucking bad at their jobs.
See, technically, I am an econometrician, not economist.
It means I specialize in the metrics, the statistics, the data quality.
... it also means I am not surprised by things that other people get surprised by.
Although with the overt politicisation of BLS I think I'll be with you in trusting ADP more going forward. Going to be super interesting to watch any divergence from now on. I guess it could be that some of the YTD difference was some internal power struggle that was unwound by the revisions leading to Trump sticking his oar in, but I think that's a conspiracy theory until someone gives a quote to that effect.
Still confused why you continue to emphasise estimate when ADP is also an estimate.
I already emphasised the difficulty of real time stats, revisions are not shocking, but perfectly normal. I don't think anyone is that surprised (though we can agree that there are a lot of overconfident and less statistically literate professionals), the gulf between hard data and sentiment/alternative data (vibecession and so forth) was well covered and had to resolve one way or another.
ADP was +104k in July, so by your previous logic we should expect upwards revisions in the BLS July number as the year goes on right?
Because BLS is a much shittier estimate.
Lol no, not to this degree, they absolutely are not, and its been getting worse for 2 years.
Well the DJIA drop on the print, and every single news outlet's reaction indicates that a lof of people were surprised, but ok then.
Literally, expectations were +110k to +120k.
Which is pathetic and anemic even as an expectation, should be more like +220k for the economy to just be treading water basically, but nope, missed even that sad expectation by almost half.
My... logic points to this?
I don't see how you draw that conclusion but ok.
Lets compare June ADP and BLS:
ADP: -28k / not revised because they don't need to.
BLS: +147k / revised down to +14k
ADP measures private payrolls, and then basically just statistically broadens their sample set to an estimated size of entire private economy by sectors and business sizes, for the same month.
BLS on the other hand does this for the entire economy, and has as fundamental parts of their modelling both an attempt to normalize for seasonality and also tries to figure in estimated population growth at the same time.
Meanwhile, the BLS counts of just pure private sector jobs that are almost exactly the same as what ADP counts... they are actually pretty close.
Post revision BLS has July at +83k private sector jobs. Thats not that far from ADP's +104k July private sector.
Roughly, to get the ADP number from BLS, for private sector, you just undo their seasonal normalization, then you're quite close to the ADP number most of the time.
BLS just royally fucked up everything not core private sector.
So no, I would not expect much of an upward revision in July BLS numbers, at best, they'll find they slightly undercounted private sector jobs, but overcounted a bunch of other categories, that would be my expectation.
...
BLS has a giant tome of complexity that goes into the totality of their big number print, with many, many factors that can be (and have been) wrong.
ADP's is less comprehensive over the whole economy, but is also much less complex and direct.
Less failure points = More reliable.
Its kinda like how in the past year or so, roughly 1/3 of the reported prices that actually make up the inflation number, CPI... well they are not actually reported prices.
They are model derived. Not actual reported data.
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
They more and more stats you pile onto something means you have more and more assumptions and reliance on models, the fact that BLS keeps having to revise shit means their models and assumptions are inadequate.
The BLS should probably be reporting error bars and ranges for their sector specific and the compounded error bars for their total metrics, I can tell you that the stuff they've been putting out would not make it through a peer reviewed academic journal as being statistically valid to any serious degree.
While I agree that Trump just firing the BLS head and likely replacing them with a stooge is even worse, the chuckleheads at BLS have been incompetent for a while, as has been everyone else who hasn't noticed this.