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High-Speed Internet Boom Hits Low-Tech Snag: A Labor Shortage
- layer8 9mo agohttps://archive.ph/ljBD4 https://archive.ph/ljBD4
- toomuchtodo 9mo agoPay them more. There is no labor shortage, simply a shortage of workers unwilling to accept jobs at this compensation. The complaint put forth in the piece is "we cannot compress the wages of these folks because there is no labor surplus to leverage." This arrives eventually due to working age cohort demographic compression (citations below), we're still in early days though. The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-30/trump-immigration-crackdown-could-shrink-us-population-for-first-time https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-30/trump-imm... | https://archive.today/DranI https://archive.today/DranI - January 30th, 2026 Mapped: Every Country by Total Fertility Rate - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fertility-rate/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert... - December 22nd, 2025 The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments) HN Search: labor shortage - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=labor%20shortage&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (~4M Boomers retire a year, ~11k/day, ~2M people 55+ die every year, about half of which are in the labor force; that means ~13k-14k workers leave the labor force every day in the US, ~400k/month)